Leading Yourself

The relationship paradox: the happier you are alone, the better your relationships become

You’ve felt it: a meeting shifts underneath you, nobody says why, and you have half a second to decide whether to push forward or hold back. Nobody ever taught you how to read that moment. You just learned it the hard way. This week on the podcast we are breaking down the two skills that quietly decide whether good ideas actually land: reading the room in the moment, and understanding the politica...

“Consistency isn’t exciting, but it’s how ordinary people get extraordinary results.”

You’ve watched it happen: someone with less context, less experience, maybe even a weaker idea, makes the call, and yours gets quietly set aside. Not because you were wrong. Because you weren’t the one with the title to decide. This week on Leading Yourself, Carolina gets practical: four specific ways to shape decisions, lead projects, and get heard in rooms where the org chart says you shouldn’t...

Stop measuring your beginning against someone else’s decade of work.

Most of us were taught that influence looks like the big moment: the promotion, the title, the seat at the table. It doesn't. Real influence is quieter than that, and you're already building it, in rooms you're already in, whether you've noticed or not. This week kicks off a new month on Leading Yourself: four weeks on influence and leadership, built around the reality of Q4, when...

You can be grateful for your life and still want more for yourself. Appreciation and ambition were never meant to be enemies.

This is the last episode of the September series, and I wanted to close it differently. Instead of teaching the framework one more time, I'm answering the nine questions I get asked most, about the Career Squad, about the book, about my own life. Some are practical: where do you even start if most of these nine relationships are missing? Isn't this just networking with a new name? What do...

“No one glows more than someone who didn’t get what they thought they wanted, healed, and realized something better was on the way.”

Since 2023 I have talked about the Career Squad Framework with hundreds of people. Two gaps come up more than any other, every single time. The Sponsor is the most common gap people have. The Critic is the rarest relationship most people have ever actually built. That's not a coincidence, and today I'm going deep on both. Not just what these two relationships are, why they're so hard t...

“Your next level might have less to do with working harder and more to do with you finally believing you’re allowed to have a life you actually enjoy.”

What if the most important infrastructure of your career has nothing to do with your skills, your credentials, or your hard work, and everything to do with the people you have intentionally built around you? In this special episode of Leading Yourself, I am sharing the full recording of my live book launch event for Build Your Career Squad: The 9 People You Need in Your Career Squad , the book I h...

This week, I'm doing something different. Instead of talking about the book, I'm reading it to you, straight from the opening chapter. It starts in Honduras, at a wire harness plant, where I was twenty-two years old and had just been handed the wheel of something I'd never driven, HR Manager for a manufacturing facility of 4,200 employees. I had no business being in that role. I didn&#...

“The right people won't just celebrate your success. They'll care about who you're becoming along the way.”

On September 5th something that's lived privately in my head, my laptop, and stolen early mornings for two years becomes a real, my book The 9 People you Need in your Career Squad is launching. In this episode, I'm telling you the truth about launch week that nobody puts in the highlight reel: the pride, the discomfort, and why promoting something you believe in isn't the same as bragg...

“Your dream life isn't just about what you accomplish. It's about how you feel when you wake up every morning.”

One question to close out the month. It sounds simple, and it is not. What are you transitioning from, and what are you transitioning to? Most of us cannot answer that, not because we do not know, but because we have never stopped long enough to ask. So in this series close, we stop and ask it together. Part one is a coaching session: why transition starts with putting something down rather than p...

“You don't need everyone to understand your decisions. You need to understand why you're making them.”

This is the most personal episode of the series. I share the two years I spent in the middle with this book: writing, deleting, scrapping whole sections, and the quiet stretch where I thought I might not finish. I also share something I am not proud of, that I broke my own pattern and never announced it, because I was afraid I would fail. And I talk about the moment it stopped being a question abo...

“When you can't win by being better, you can win by being different.”

Think about the last time you started something new at work. What did you do in those first few days? If you are like most high performers, you got moving fast, head down, proving you belonged. And you ran right past the one moment that mattered: the quiet window at the very beginning, before anyone had decided who you are here, when you could have asked a different question. Not how do I prove my...

“Your relationship with yourself sets the standard for every relationship you allow into your life.”

Have you ever caught yourself describing who you are with a label that is not quite true anymore? Not a job title , a label. The strong one. The reliable one. The one who always says yes. The words come out the way they always have, and somewhere in the middle a small part of you notices: that is not really me anymore. That moment is what an identity shift feels like from the inside. And it is whe...

"Your comfort zone is your most expensive habit."

I almost did not record this episode. Not because I did not have something to say, but because I was not sure it fit. I just got back from six weeks traveling, three of which I spent in Spain. And somewhere between the long lunches that nobody was rushing, the evenings that wound down slowly, and the walks that were not workouts, something shifted. Not in a dramatic way. In the quiet, clarifying w...