Worthy to Lead

For once, I'm not the host – I'm the guest. My friend and fellow coach Laurie Hall flips the script and interviews me about my own path: small-town Minnesota roots, unglamorous first jobs, and getting thrown into leadership with zero training. My early stumbles led me to coaching – the moment that changed how I lead for good – and into 23 years of building teams and inventing new roles for myself...

Andy Vitale has been building with AI since 2015, across healthcare, banking, mortgage, marketing, and now tax software, long before it became a leadership talking point. He was auto-suggesting medical codes at 3M before most people knew what machine learning was. He helped increase loan volume at Rocket Companies by billions of dollars through conversational AI. And now, as VP and Head of Product...

Erin Coupe spent over 17 years inside high-performance corporate environments: Goldman Sachs, CBRE, Fortune 140 companies. She was commuting 10 to 12 hours a week, working 60-plus hours, and building a career that looked impressive from the outside. Then her body started breaking down. Fainting in elevators. Stress rashes treated with steroids. A quiet but persistent sense that something was deepl...

Laurie Hall spent years working on space exploration and the International Space Station. She was a chemical engineer at NASA and Lockheed Martin, doing exactly what she had dreamed about since she was a kid growing up in Kansas. And then, around year ten, a nagging question started to emerge: Is this still what I’m meant to be doing? What followed wasn't a clean pivot. It was a five-year transiti...

Powerful leadership skills go beyond your strategy and experience. One of the most untapped sources of potential is your team’s creativity and curiosity. Here’s why that matters: Van Lai-DuMone has spent over a decade proving that creativity isn't just an art class activity. It's a thinking tool, a problem-solving tool, and one of the most underused levers in leadership today. She's brought it int...

What do you do when the identity you built your entire career around disappears overnight? For Greg Bro, losing his job after 20+ years as a UX design leader wasn't just a professional setback. It was a complete identity crisis. The question "what do you do?" suddenly had no answer, and that forced a much deeper one: who do I actually want to be? Instead of looking for a similar role, Greg wrote a...

Anya Cheng didn’t build her career by waiting to feel ready. She built it by acting in moments when nothing felt certain. After immigrating from Taiwan and graduating into the 2008 financial crisis, she couldn’t get a single interview. So she created her own access, waiting outside buildings in Chicago winters, knocking on doors, and cold-calling publishers until someone said yes. What looks like...

How do you stay grounded as a leader when everything around you is falling apart? Craig Nishizaki has answered that question more than once. Early in his career, a manager told him he'd only keep him on to avoid a discrimination lawsuit. Later, he went seven months without a paycheck while his wife was pregnant. He was passed over for promotions. And at every single turning point, he made the same...

What if you started looking at chaos as a transition to a new operating system?  Governments are shifting, layoffs are spreading, AI is rewriting entire industries, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, leaders are expected to show up steady while privately managing fear, uncertainty, and the quiet question of whether everything they've built is going to hold. In this episode, I'm sharing...

You think things are fine. Your team seems okay. But your best people are quietly checking out, and the reason might be something you can't see about yourself. In this episode, I break down what a leadership ceiling actually is, why the most dangerous blind spots are the ones you're most confident you don't have, and how to build a simple feedback system that tells you the truth before your team s...

You know you need to sell. Your business depends on it. But every time you think about reaching out to someone, you feel like you're about to do something sleazy. In this conversation with Catherine Brown, we talk about why so many of us are carrying around baggage about sales, and what it actually takes to sell in a way that feels honest, useful, and like yourself. In this episode, we get into: W...

You're smart. You're experienced. You're ambitious. So why does it feel like you can't find time to think strategically? Most senior leaders aren't lacking intelligence or drive. They're lacking what I call “white space.” Their calendars are crammed, their days are fully stacked, and their strategic thinking is forced between the cracks of back-to-back meetings. In this episode, I'm getting person...

You've done the work. You know what the answer should be. But when you walk into that meeting with senior leaders, everything falls apart. The conversation goes sideways, people argue about things that don't matter, and you leave without the decision you came for. In this conversation with strategy consultant Marja Fox, we talk about what it actually takes to influence upward, facilitate difficult...

As the year comes to a close, Kristiana Corona is joined by Operations Manager and Coach Catalina Velez-Watson for an honest reflection on what it really took to build Worthy to Lead from the ground up. In this end-of-year recap, they go behind the scenes of the past year—leaving corporate careers, navigating burnout and uncertainty, learning how to work together in real time, and the seamless col...

Leaders are doing everything they can to support their teams, but many don’t realize they might also be training their people to rely on them for every decision. That pattern has a name: learned helplessness . And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. In this conversation with executive coach and host of The STaR Coach Show , Meg Rentschler , we talk about why so many well-intentioned leaders end u...

Leaders are being asked to “figure out AI” while juggling shrinking teams, constant change, and heavier expectations. Many are overwhelmed not because AI is too technical, but because they’re trying to navigate this shift without support. In this episode, I sit down with Blessing Richardson , small business AI & tech strategist and founder of Sayla. Blessing has 15 years of experience building...

For years, I thought leadership meant working harder, showing up stronger, and keeping it all together. What I didn’t realize was how lonely that can feel. In this episode, I talk about the moment that completely changed my approach to leadership and the day I realized I didn’t need to have all the answers. I share how coaching skills helped me lead with more ease, how community reshaped my growth...

After more than two decades in corporate leadership, I decided to start something new. Leaving behind a steady career was exciting and terrifying at the same time. In this episode, I share seven lessons I’ve learned since becoming an entrepreneur. In this episode, I cover: What it takes to build a financial runway How to simplify technology so it doesn’t overwhelm you Why community has become such...

What does it really take to break through to the executive level, and lead with influence, not just authority? In this episode, Kristiana Corona sits down with Caleb Schmidt, Senior Vice President of Experience Design at U.S. Bank, to unpack what it really takes to cross that threshold. Caleb shares candid insights on how creative leaders can evolve from managing the work to leading at scale, comm...

What happens when you feel stuck in your career, sending out endless applications with no results? Brian Collins, a veteran design leader who has worked at Google, Amazon, and more, shares how the Core Leadership Lab helped him shift from rejection and self-doubt to confidence, clarity, and recruiter calls. In this conversation, Brian unpacks: The “black box” frustration of today’s job search How...

What does martial arts have to do with business leadership? For Lisa W. Rogers, the two are inseparable. In this episode of Worthy to Lead , Lisa shares how her journey from white belt to master instructor in Taekwondo shaped her leadership style as a technology executive. Along the way, she unpacks powerful lessons about confidence, perseverance, respect, and passion. You will learn why confidenc...

Most leaders avoid conflict because they think it will damage relationships. But what if conflict could actually make your team stronger ? In this episode of Worthy to Lead , conflict resolution expert Mills Vautrot shares a proven 7-step Be the Leader framework for turning friction into connection. Drawing from decades of experience and remarkable stories from the field, Mills shows why conflict...

Most leaders don’t think of podcasting as a leadership tool. But after 21 episodes, I’ve learned it can change the way you connect, build trust, and grow your influence. In this episode, I share the biggest lessons from my own podcasting journey: Why it’s not about sounding polished, but about showing up for a listener who needs your voice How sharing consistently builds credibility and shapes you...

You don’t need a title to lead. And you definitely don’t need permission to drive results that matter. In this episode of Worthy to Lead , I share three real stories from my time at Amazon where individual contributors stepped up, took ownership, and delivered high-impact results without any formal authority. We’ll unpack what it looks like to lead like a founder, how to influence across teams, an...

What does it really take to make a 10x leap, in business and life? In this episode, you’ll learn the answer to that question from a friend and mentor who’s done it multiple times.  This is the second part of my conversation with 5-time founder-turned-business coach Bob Hoeffner , about our experiences applying the principles from one of my all-time favorite books: “10x Is Easier Than 2x” by D...