Do you feel like you're doing everything right in your career but still not seen, promoted or energized?
Welcome back to Speak Up, the podcast for high-performing introverts, including you, social introverts where we reveal the charisma and communication secrets of A-listers so that you get the recognition and the opportunities you have earned.
I am your host, Laura Camacho, your magical executive presence coach, pod mother and strategist, and by the end of today's episode, you will know how to spot the silent symptoms of being professionally stuck and what to do next, why moments of authority like walking to the whiteboard can instantly shift your career trajectory, and how unusual partnerships and behaving famously can skyrocket visibility, even for us high-performing introverts and introverts.
So, guys, I bring you the best.
And today is the level is just even higher with Heather Kernaghan, who was one of the top innovators in San Francisco.
I'm just so excited.
I'm fangirling.
I'm almost drooling, but I'll try not to look too bad.
Oh, my gosh.
So she has this book about getting unstuck, okay?
And I am reading it, and there's one little part about...
I don't know if I'm using the right terminology because I don't have it in front of me, but something about unusual partnerships.
Yes.
Or unusual.
Is that right?
Unusual partnerships?
Yes.
And last week, just last week, a few days ago, I was in New Orleans giving a talk to this person.
Pernod Ricard.
They own liquor brands and one of the brands they gave me a t-shirt that had absolute Tabasco and that was like mind-blowing to me yes, yes and.
And then, like on the plane on the way home, I read about unusual partnerships.
So I'm like this conversation was meant to be.
So we will get into that in a minute.
But first of all, tell us, what are the symptoms that would indicate that we're stuck?
Well, I'd say most people are stuck every day at some point, including myself.
Oh, yeah.
I think if you are going through a time of being deeply stuck, It's a feeling of lethargy, cycling thoughts, feeling like you're just kind of in workiness and trying, wading through the muck of your life and just not motivated, or feeling excited about possibilities and moving forward.
You're just kind of in the mud.
That's how I think about it.
Okay.
That's definitely not a place you want to spend much time.
I think we all have been there maybe just for an hour or so or maybe longer, right?
Exactly.
So what was the impetus that you said, no, I'm going to write a book about this?
Couple of stories around that.
It was 2020 and I was running a global public relations agency at the time as global CEO.
And I was talking through, it was one week in particular with quite a few of our CEO clients.
And I think out of five conversations, three of them told me they were writing books which blew my mind, Laura.
It's a pandemic.
It's a crisis.
How are you focusing on a project like this?
And they all told me some combination of it was a long term goal that they had and they weren't going to sacrifice a long term goal for the short term crisis we were in.
That was a real awakening to me because.
I regularly sacrifice long-term goals for short-term crisis, right?
I had to rewrite for myself, how am I planning out my life?
They all happened to be men as well, who were writing the books.
We had clients at the time coming to us saying, we want speakers for our virtual stages.
We'd like to have authors of new books.
Our team was out looking for who the new authors were, and they were mostly men of business books.
It kind of got to me.
I was like, where are all the women writing business books?
I want to be able to put them forward because there is an authority of authorship that emerges that gets you onto stages, onto media, allows you into rooms that maybe you can't get into otherwise.
So as I was bouncing around my house complaining about this as a problem, my husband said I think you need to write a book so that you can show other people how to get it done.
Other women in business.
And I, of course, was outraged.
I'm running a business.
I'm not trying to write a book.
But then I calmed down and I thought, I'm going to go through the process of this.
And I don't like to do new things alone.
So what I did was wrote an email that basically said, I'd like to write a book about business.
I don't know how to do it.
If you would also like to write a business book or figure out how, please join me.
So I sent it out to like very widely in my network to executive women.
And nine women came back and said, I want to do it too.
So we formed a group called the 10th.
We met almost every Sunday through the pandemic met with publishers authors, all kinds of people in the book industry.
And together as a team, we each had our own book idea.
We worked on getting our business books out.
So two books have come out of the group.
And of course, Unstockable, which, you know, I've got my earmarked version of right here.
Would you?
Yes.
Yes.
And those are, by the way, my brand colors, the red, gold and black.
It was a media kismet then with us.
Yes.
Yes, it definitely was.
Oh and, by the way, listeners.
So those of you who are in Canada Heather's originally from Canada to shout out.
Shout out to our Canadian listeners.
You are very much valued and seen today in particular.
And, you know, glad to have you here.
So I'm going to go right into mindset because you had to change your mindset.
I mean, to be fair, COVID was like, out of nowhere for most of us.
Like, what is a pandemic?
This is not 1917.
What are the things, the traps that we fall into that keep us stuck or just keep us not moving forward, not being our best, not moving forward in our careers and feeling like we can't or we're not smart enough, and all that silly stuff?
Yeah, I did grow up in Canada.
I lived in Canada until I was in my early 30s.
And I'd say I'm quite typically Canadian in that I grew up in An immigrant family.
That was the message in my house was you put your head down, you work hard and you don't ever brag or talk about what your accomplishments are.
You know, you just keep working really hard.
So that's how I entered my professional life, with that mindset of be behind the scenes and be a supporter and helper.
But I did get into the technology industry as my first job quite by accident in Toronto.
And I started to see that how the technology industry operated was bolder than how I thought about my career and my own life and how to speak up for myself.
And it's when I moved from Toronto to the Bay Area San Francisco I really learned how the technology industry operates.
The tech industry never gets stuck as an industry.
And it was that lesson, like what happens in this industry, to ensure that we keep moving forward and almost every day there's a new advancement.
And that was the foundation of the book.
I took all of these lessons from the technology industry I had learned and put it into my unstuck model for people.
But the very first thing I recommend people do who are feeling stuck is to do a values assessment, because I think you really need to know what's important to you and where you're going with your life to be able to help move yourself, move forward.
And if you don't know what's important and you don't have any direction, then it's almost impossible, I think, to keep yourself systemically unstuck.
You might be able to have a good day or two, but if you don't really know your direction, you're not sure.
So in the book I do have a values exercise as the first exercise I recommend readers go through to help them clarify what is important.
Because once you know what's important, you can start to filter and make decisions about what to do next.
Just to take that theme and narrow down a little bit more to our audience.
The people listening here, you know, super smart, of course, highly attractive also.
Yes.
It's a great combination.
But they mostly were great in school, right?
Yes.
And it's that do what the teacher tells you, get an A, repeat five million times.
And that's even what got a lot of us our first jobs is that we had that summa cum laude or magna cum laude and this and that.
I think it's really hard to break out of that without some kind of outside sledgehammer coming at you, because you've been rewarded.
Your brain has been rewarded for turning in.
Quality work for so long.
For that kind of person it's hard even to think that you should have values, because you've just trained yourself and been rewarded for delivering.
That was me, Laurie.
You know I would always in meeting rooms any kind of meeting room I was in I would always sit at the back of the room and I kind of joke that, say like I would be most comfortable sitting just outside the door of the meeting room.
You know, I never wanted to have a presence of voice.
I wanted to be like absorbing what was going on and not really contributing.
But I did reach a point in my career where my I knew I wanted more out of my career.
I was more ambitious than where I was.
Yes.
And I got some pretty harsh feedback from people you know saying why don't you ever speak up in the room?
And.
If you're going to want to get to the next level, you're going to have to challenge the ideas that are presented.
They gave me some specific feedback and I had to have a real reckoning with myself.
Was I going to accept that and work on those scary things?
Or did I want to stay where I was at in my career and keep operating the way that felt very comfortable for me?
That is even more difficult than pitching a new idea, because you can pitch a solution, which I recommend all the time.
I think everybody should be pitching their solution.
But then to really challenge what everybody else is saying, to push back, that takes a lot of guts.
So how should we think about that?
You know you don't want to speak up just to be disagreeable, but rather to come to a better solution.
I mean, that's the end game, right?
Absolutely yes.
It makes me think about one of my most hated phrases in business, which is when somebody says oh well, I'll play devil's advocate.
Oh my gosh.
I never allowed anybody on my team to say those words.
They could be an angel's advocate, because that's a solution oriented role to play in a room, never devil's advocate.
But when I was coached around challenging the flow of discussion or challenging a viewpoint, the way i made it relevant for me because i know my values, i was never going to show up as a juror.
I wasn't going to challenge, just a challenge.
What i started to think through was is there one or two other solutions to whatever the topic area is that we're working on?
So someone's proposing a direction, but are there one or two other areas we should explore?
Now how you present that.
You can present it in a very confrontational manner to say like I don't agree with you.
And here's what I'm thinking instead.
But my style was and this is when I was working in the States, too.
So I was trying to rationalize what I felt was like the directness of communication in the America boardrooms that I was in versus my Canadian upbringing.
So the way I would frame it for people is I've got two other ideas.
Does the room mind if I explore these for a minute?
Oh, wow.
Who's going to say no?
My knees would be shaking under the table as I said it.
I would probably be bright red, because I always turned bright red and would get sweaty, which was a terrible thing for me and my confidence.
But I would say if I can explore these for a few minutes and you know what I've made myself do?
Get up and go to a whiteboard, because the actual movement of my body helped me work through the sweatiness and red face challenge.
Yes.
Even if it was something simple, I'd write you know one on the board and I'd say you know option one.
And I might put three bullets and I'd say, option two, three bullets.
Can anyone improve these?
Or is there another one that we should consider before we get to a final decision?
And I'd say that I just want to talk about all options before we get to final decision.
And I would just practice that over and over until the point where people are like Heather's going to come in with two other things and we're going to have to think about something else, you know, and I kind of swim down for it.
All right.
So that brings me to being calm under pressure.
Okay.
I think we can take away like moving to a whiteboard so that first of all, you're standing up.
Your body is going to feel more grounded if you're standing.
You're using your hands.
I think, yeah, the act of writing the words down, even if it's just option one.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Like you've got something to do.
Those are all great for mitigating that pressure.
What else do you have to say about that topic?
Well, I will say about standing up, it's a move of authority.
Even if you don't feel confident, someone's like, whoa, she stood up.
She went to the whiteboard.
What's she doing?
The room kind of turns to you in that moment.
And I like to coach people on creating a moment of authority in a room.
And there's lots of techniques to do that.
But also if my face was red and I was sweating, it allowed me a moment to turn away from the room and write a few things down and kind of mentally gather myself.
So when I turned back, I was, you know, I've kind of centered myself. myself again.
Right.
No, that is absolutely brilliant.
So guys listening, what am I going to say?
You're welcome.
I told you, I bring you amazing insight and that moment of authority walking to the whiteboard.
So simple.
Yes.
And yet.
It just works on so many levels, especially for an introvert or an ambivert.
Okay, so what is this moment of authority?
Like, how would you define that?
Oh, it is an unexpected action in a room that builds trust and confidence in you, because you've had the courage to take it.
Connect the dots for me.
I mean, and let me just chime in something that I know is that.
Yes.
The unexpected is like dark chocolate for your brain.
It remembers it.
It's a reward.
It makes you memorable.
But of course, you don't want to be unexpected like.
For something silly, like forgetting to brush your teeth or something.
Yes, or disruptive or any negativity.
No.
Well, here's another example of a tool that I've used quite a bit over the years.
That is, it creates an unexpected moment.
Moments of anger or intense emotion in a boardroom also falls into this category.
For me, creating authority moments.
And the way I have used it.
There would be meetings that I was in where I would internally be having emotion, like really angry about something, or feeling tension or something in my body.
And I would always clamp it down, you know, to be professional, straight face, whatever.
I got feedback early in my career, like you show too many emotions on your face.
It's not good.
I learned how to tame that.
But as I wanted to move into more leadership positions, I found that being able to use my emotion was a power move and an authority play, because I could lean in.
Let's just say I'm talking to an executive team member and they are brushing away an idea.
I would say listen the customers at the end of this decision.
Do not have time for us to pull out 18 different ways.
This could go wrong.
We have to go now.
And I would use what I was really feeling to convey anger, intensity, whatever it would be.
And the person on the other side feels that.
They know I'm invested.
They know I feel urgent about it.
They know I've got a customer point of view in mind, whatever that is.
So I would use that. to progress conversations and to build trust in the room.
And I know, because I feel this way when I meet people like this, like if that person feels that strongly about it, I'm behind them.
Let's go.
Right.
But I think introverts in particular and I would say most executives that I've worked with over time feel very reluctant to use any kind of emotion in a boardroom because it may disrupt the professional delivery.
Or being afraid that you're going to lose control.
That's what I would be afraid of.
So let's go back to unusual partnerships.
You know, I'm just obsessed with that.
Let's say you're vice president of finance or CMO or CTO.
Like you're in charge of a vertical in a business.
You're not in the, you know, sexy branding partnerships business.
How can somebody else apply that?
You know, I think it's so powerful.
It is so powerful.
And the brand unusual partnerships are the ones that stick in our mind.
Of course, the big one that I really enjoyed was, I think it was Taco Bell.
They did a whole hotel in Palm Springs.
One time they took over a hotel and they made it the Taco Bell hotel.
And I was like, the partnership between the hotel brand and Taco Bell and oh my gosh, it's so good.
And so once I started looking for these, they're everywhere in the consumer world.
I like ideas that you can scale to your world, whatever that might be.
So if you're, you know, if you're a head of like say a CTO or a CIO in an organization and, Maybe one of the things you're working on is you want to start having a voice in the industry and doing a little bit of thought leadership yourself about innovations within your organization.
One thing to do is look within your tech stack that you've got in your business.
And if you've got a trusted technology partner, go to them and say, could we do three episode podcast together or have you got a user conference coming up?
Like.
I've got an idea for a presentation that we could give together at your user conference to showcase the work that we've done together.
You can generate some ideas around that.
And that's squarely in your world.
You're forming a partnership with someone that maybe you haven't partnered with before in a different way.
And it's taking one step to try something new and innovative.
And I find, every time you do that, five different opportunities show up for you that you could never imagine.
Absolutely.
Now, this is just mind blowing.
So I'm going to extend that.
In the book, there are lots of ways, like brainstorming.
Yes, techniques.
Techniques that she uses, explains and how to do it.
So you could.
You could do that, but is there any rule of thumb or starting point?
Or just go with associative thinking like, let's say, somebody's listening, they're driving to work and they're like I want an unusual partnership to elevate my visibility and frankly, just to have a good time and to tickle my innovation.
Yeah, I would do some free form brainstorming that I would start to like just get a piece of paper.
This is how I always do it.
What I recommend is, if that was your idea, came in finance, but i want to raise my visibility a little bit.
I'm not sure how to do it.
Then i'd start with who do i think has good visibility and what do they do?
Is there a leader you admire, even a celebrity you admire?
Who do you read, watch or listen to and just go take a look at?
Okay well, what do they do?
Okay, they go to events.
They post on social media, they're on threads, you know.
Just list everything that they do and okay well, in which spaces would i want to have some visibility?
So start to list all the places where you would want to show up and why you'd want to show up there, and then start to make some connections then between people you admire and where you want to be, and see if you could form three ideas based on those connections that you're making, And then probably go to someone trusted and get some feedback to say OK, I have these three ideas.
Do you think any of these could actually happen or could you help me build on these ideas?
Right, right, right.
Just kind of doing that brainstorming, looking around at other people that you admire and you're inspired by and start to build lists.
I love this.
Everybody listening, for me, this is the year, 2026 is the year of the sticky notes.
So I'm like, whoa, look at those everywhere.
So I'm sticky noting away because I'm always writing notes and then I throw them away.
So now at least I have an intermediary stage.
I write the notes, stick them on the wall.
Love it.
These are fabulous ideas.
Okay, there's one more term that's associated with you that we have to go into.
It's called behave famously.
Oh, yes.
So what does that mean?
Well, the origination of it, quick story, is I was going through some sales coaching years and years ago and my sales coach was very frustrated with me because I
I'm Canadian and the idea of networking was not something that I wanted to do.
I was like, I'm not going to network.
I don't want to do that.
It's icky, all these things.
And he's like Heather if you're going to build a consulting business, you have to get out there and build your lead pipeline.
And then he was like, look, You just have to behave famously.
And I said, what does that mean?
He goes, what do famous people do?
And he made me write a list.
Famous people do all these things.
And we came up with about 20 things that famous people do.
They went to events.
They were interviewed in the media.
They spoke on stage.
They wrote on social media, like all, you know, the whole list.
And then we went through and we picked 10 that I felt I could do, 10 activities that were authentic to me.
And then I put it in a tracker and every week I would show up and I'd have to fill in the tracker with my sales coach.
These are the behaving famously activities that I did this week.
And I have structured the list Laura, from introvert activities to extrovert activities, because I was very shy during this period of my life and didn't have confidence in my professional capabilities to the level that I needed to.
So I would focus in the early days more on introvert behaving famously activities.
And those would be things like ask people to go to coffee, I'd ask for referrals.
I would post on social media, things that I didn't have to have a lot of interaction on.
And so I've just formed that into this concept of behaving famously, which I used as a coaching tool for the consulting business that we were running at the time to help people understand each of us can behave famously in a way that is authentic to us and helps us progress towards the goals that we have professionally.
I love that the behaving famously list.
That is awesome.
Yes.
What do you suggest we do to acknowledge the risk?
Yes.
That you really could end up looking silly for a few minutes and people might see you, but you know.
Well, I will say that I always go back to where I started in the book, which is to understand your values and your goal.
Because I think it is very hard to put yourself out into the world if you don't know why you're doing it.
When you're not sure what the payoff is, right?
Like in many phases of my career, my goal was I want to get promoted to the next level of leadership.
If that's my goal, I knew how I needed to operate differently to be able to get to that promotion.
And so that would make it easier for me, when I was standing at the side of a stage about to go on and sweating and red and angry at myself for making a commitment, to make myself this visible.
Like, why am I doing this?
And I say like, You're trying to get promoted to president, Heather.
And if you want to be president, these are the types of things presidents do.
Correct.
And that's and that made it so much easier.
And honestly, Laura, it still does for me now to be able to look at, say, what are my values?
What am I trying to achieve here?
And is this activity making progress on those two things?
Yes.
Heather, you're just going to have to feel uncomfortable for a minute and you'll get through it.
Yeah.
Exactly.
This has been so fun, Heather.
Thank you so much.
I'm going to link your book, of course, in the show notes.
It's an easy read, folks.
Really highly recommended.
I'll let you have that last word.
Was there anything else?
I'm sure I should have asked you to help our audience not only get unstuck, but to catapult themselves forward.
They're all so smart to get their next professional goal.
Yes.
I think you're really striving for what's next in your career.
You are going to feel discomfort.
You are going to feel unsure and uncertain.
Everybody does.
Every single person I've ever met who's striving for more feels this way.
It's OK.
And you can comfort yourself with saying I'm uncomfortable and I'm going to do it anyway, because there's something that I'm aiming for and I'm going to go get it.
I know there's a community of people out there.
If anyone wants to connect with me on LinkedIn, I'm happy to give you a little pep talk.
If there's something big you're trying to do and you want some extra encouragement.
I think we all have to encourage each other.
Yes, absolutely.
You can do it.
All right, everybody.
Those are your marching orders.
Get out there and do it and tell us about it.
Yes.
Have a fantastic day.
Thank you, Heather.
This has been glorious.
I really appreciate your coming on.
Thank you.
I loved Heather Kernaghan.
She to me was extremely interesting.
I love the idea of moments of authority.
And I'll remind you of that definition.
It's an unexpected action in a room that builds trust and confidence in you, because you've had the courage to take it.
And if you've listened to this podcast for a while, you should know now that that unexpected twist, unexpected example, unexpected word, unexpected analogy, unexpected tie, like all of those things whenever the things are unexpected in a positive way, that is a hit for the audience's brain, that makes you and what you say much more memorable, builds trust and confidence in you.
If you would like to dive in a little bit and know how your executive presence really lines up in the different contexts, I have the executive presence scorecard, which you can access through the link in the show notes.
I hope you enjoyed Heather Kernaghan as I did.
Have a super duper day and I will catch you on the next episode.
