You're in a leadership role and something's shifted. The people you used to talk things through with? That's complicated now. Your team can't be your sounding board because you're their boss. Your own boss has their own agenda. And the networking advice you see everywhere feels exhausting when what you actually need is someone you can be real with.

This episode of Career Espresso is about finding people who actually get what you're dealing with. Not networking contacts or professional visibility. Actual people who understand leadership from the inside.

* Why isolation isn't just uncomfortable - it makes you make worse decisions and lose perspective on how you're doing

* The three criteria that define your actual people (not just professional contacts)

* Where to look for peer relationships that work, including the people you're probably overlooking

* How to start these connections without it feeling awkward

* What keeps leadership relationships alive when you're overwhelmed

Perfect for women leaders who need people they can be honest with, not just a professional network.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're exhausted. You're managing a thousand things at once. At the end of every day, you look back at everything that went wrong, everything you didn't get to, everything that's still not quite right. What you're not noticing? Your team is functioning. Work is getting done. Things are moving forward. You're the one making that happen but it doesn't feel like enough.

This episode of Career Espresso is about recognising what's actually working, even when it doesn't feel like anything is.

• Why your attention naturally goes to problems and how that creates a skewed picture of reality
• The research on why women attribute success to luck but blame themselves entirely for failure
• The exhausting pattern of constantly preparing for the next crisis instead of noticing what's going well
• How to see the full picture instead of just the problem-shaped bits

Perfect for women leaders who are doing better than they think but can't quite believe it.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You schedule a career conversation and both of you immediately feel that slight dread. You ask where they see themselves in five years. They give a polished answer that means nothing. You both tick the box and move on. Nothing actually changes. This episode of Career Espresso is about having career conversations that actually help people—not as a performance review exercise or a tick-box requirement, but as a genuine conversation about what's possible and what you can do to support them.

• Why career conversations feel awkward or surface-level for most leaders
• What people actually need from these conversations (it's not "where do you see yourself in five years?")
• How to ask questions that open up real conversation instead of extracting rehearsed answers
• What to do when someone doesn't know what they want
• How to support growth without making promises you can't keep

Perfect for women leaders who want these conversations to feel useful instead of awkward.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.