How to Build Influence and Confidence in Your Career with Ash Seddeek

In this episode of Career Coaching Secrets, our guest is Ash Seddeek, a leadership communication expert, executive coach, and founder of The Executive Greatness Institute. Ash shares his insights on building confidence, communicating with impact, and unlocking your leadership potential to accelerate your career. From empowering professionals to lead with clarity to developing influence across teams, his advice is packed with actionable wisdom for anyone aiming to elevate their personal brand and career success.

You can find him on:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashseddeek/ 

ash@executivegreatness.com

Book available here: https://www.amazon.com/Strategic-Leader-Bluebook-Effective-Leadership-ebook/dp/B0D35XR3LV?ref_=ast_author_mpb

Transcript

Ash Seddeek: 0:00

And sometimes we would have some hard conversations. I was just having a call with a client where she was definitely having a tough time with a career transition. We were basically talking about how this happens to all of us. At some point, we are at a point where we're shifting from an IC to a people leader or changing from a people leader to a director. And each one of these transitions does require some tough decisions that we have to make personally.

Davis Nguyen: 0:24

Welcome to Career Coaching Secrets, the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is Davis Wynne, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, and even $100,000 weeks. Before Purple Circle, I've grown several seven and eight figure career coaching businesses myself and have been a consultant at two career coaching businesses that are doing over $100 million each. Whether you're an established coach or building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business.

Kevin Yee: 0:56

Welcome to Career Coaching Secrets the Podcast. I'm Kevin, and today we are joined by Ash Sadiq. He's been a coach for 10 plus years. He is the CEO of Executive Greatness Institute. As we talked pre-podcast, he told me to ask you, Ash, what is this all about? So let's start with that. What is this all about?

Ash Seddeek: 1:15

Absolutely. Yeah. As the founder of the Executive Greatness Institute, I always tell people that I'm the chief excitement officer because and I pick the idea of excitement as a core component in my coaching. Because I think with any coaching client, if you can actually help them kick it up a notch, whether it's their energy, whether it's their focus, whether it's their outreach to key relationships they have at work or even their team members. Like I'm realizing now a lot of leaders they don't even have time for one-on-one meetings. They don't have time for all hands with their staff members. And of course, I mean the reasons are many. It could be very organically, there's just too much to do that they don't have time for doing those things. So we have, as coaches are listening to us, I think we have a responsibility to remind the leaders that we coach that the people that we lead expect a lot from us. And one of their main expectations is giving them a good reason why we should be working on the stuff that we're working on. And that's really what excitement is such a key ingredient for leaders to keep essentially tapping into, whether it's their own excitement or the excitement of people on the team. It's fascinating how much happens when you've got one person who's a little bit more motivated to do the work that you want them to do. You've seen it, I've seen it, right? In life.

Kevin Yee: 2:31

Yeah, yeah. Wait, I'm so curious, Ash. How did you get into this work, by the way?

Ash Seddeek: 2:35

I got into this definitely as a result of working at Cisco Systems. I worked on the annual sales kickoff meeting that brought together more than 20,000 people from around the world. Usually in Las Vegas and other cities, we would bring this whole big, huge community together. And of course, one of the main goals of bringing them together is not just to talk to them about Cisco strategy and what the company wants to do, but the best thing that you can hope for is they actually leave energized about Cisco and about the prospects of working for this company and helping its customers. And that emotion and that excitement is essentially what you want people to walk away with. So that's really was the battleground where, as I'm working with the top 20 executives at Cisco, the main goal was are these people going to be able to get on the stage and fire people up in that direction? And that's really what excitement became such a big component and focus for me.

Kevin Yee: 3:30

I can sense it. Like even from the pre-podcast, you were like really excited. You have this very unique energy for yourself as well. And so I'm also really, really curious like, who are the people coming to you for coaching? Like, what kind of what's your situation like? What are some of the challenges that they're going through?

Ash Seddeek: 3:49

Interestingly enough, a lot of the people that I'm coaching are either at Cisco or at Google or at Uber. These are my main clients right now where I continue to expand within those clients. And a lot of the time they're coming because, specifically, the issue that we're talking about, they have so much happening. There's so much of an AI mandate in a lot of these companies where everybody's trying to catch up. And in so doing, they also want to make sure that they are communicating clearly, that clarity of communications can be almost their strategic competitive advantage that can help them get the ball rolling a lot much faster. Because a lot of the time we see that communication, of course, is the channel with which we get our ideas across. So a lot of the time that's really what they're coming for is helping them communicate with their teams and also helping some of their team members and other leaders build momentum within their teams by making use of strategic storytelling in the business as well. That's really tied to where we are today, where do we need to be, and how we can energize everybody towards a more exciting vision of the future.

Kevin Yee: 4:51

Let's take the one of the things that Charlie Munger used to always say was like to invert. So we see the benefits of excitement, but like let's take the opposite of that. Like if you don't have excitement, what that happens to an organization.

Ash Seddeek: 5:04

I think definitely you see a lot of people just dragging their feet more or less. It feels not that fun anymore. It feels more as a transaction. I'm just there because I want to make sure I pay my rent or my mortgage. But we've seen a lot of organizations conducting pulse surveys and other types of surveys, and then finding that their team members are straining under the stress of the amount of work. And leaders have this responsibility of sensing what the health is within the team, not just from physical health perspective, but mental health. And I think during the pandemic, people paid a lot more attention to this idea of how are people doing mentally, how are they doing psychologically? How are they handling all the pressures that are taking place? And that's really where leaders had to come in and say, Oh, let's get together on a WebEx, let's get together on a Zoom. And they basically said, Is anybody celebrating a birthday party or is anybody having some fun? And they tried to connect more with the human being at work. And I think with the introduction of AI, I think this is gonna become even more important for us to realize we need to connect with those human beings because of the law of diminishing returns. If we invest so much in AI and then people start to get laid off, guess what? We're not gonna have people being able to go to the grocery store anymore. And you can think of that amazing flywheel effect that would happen in the overall economy. So I think I think people are gonna have to start thinking very, very carefully about well, how much do we automate? Because, of course, yeah, maybe in the beginning, efficiency is exciting, we're gonna be able to save some money, but as they say, trade wisely.

Kevin Yee: 6:36

That's so interesting, yeah. Because right now it does seem like everything's really, really exciting, AI and all that. But I think there's some things that we'll have to discover as a society about the things that we don't want to automate. Very, very curious too. Like you mentioned Cisco and Google employees and some of kind of like the people that are finding you. How are they finding you though? Are they finding you through social media, through referrals? Kind of curious on that end as well.

Ash Seddeek: 7:01

And that's a great question because to be honest, of course, as a lot of other coaches listening to us, I have struggled with how do you actually get clients. And what ended up becoming very obvious to me is the mindset that I had since working at Deloitte and Touche, which was definitely a unique part of my career experience, is I did work for about a year and a half at Deloitte Consulting in San Francisco. A life-changing experience because at least maybe I paid attention to how at Deloitte they pay so much attention to this idea of long-term relationships. So a lot of the time I am getting business by people that I used to work with at Cisco who are now at Google or at now at Uber. So I am actually getting a lot of my business through referrals and through connections that it essentially have been moving because of their career moves, they would go from one company to another. And because of my initial thought about long-term relationships, I had essentially built those relationships. When successful, I've nurtured some of them, and those relationships have paid off. And then as I get new clients, and then these clients become referral opportunities. Like there's a gentleman at Google, God bless him, he keeps basically saying, Hey, I talked with Kevin about you, I talked with Priti about you. And that's how it's starting to happen. Now, I am also conscious about asking people to give me testimonials. Because, for example, at Cisco, we're doing a program on executive presence and business storytelling. It's been very successful. We do six sessions on WebEx, we bring a group of 15 together, we go through a program on executive presence and business storytelling. And at the very last session, we actually ask them how would things change now that you've gone through this program, how would you approach communications? How would you approach trying to talk in front of stakeholders? And they talk about a before and after. So that's been really helpful in terms of getting some very valuable testimonials that I can then hopefully use to reach out to new clients. But definitely the word of mouth has been the key catalyst. And now I consciously go to some people and say, hey, you've gone through this program. Is there someone in your network that you think you can let them know about the work that we've done together? And I think that's again a much better route to take versus let's say me trying to get somebody's attention on LinkedIn and basically starting from scratch with that individual.

Kevin Yee: 9:16

Oh, that's so interesting. I love the whole focus on long-term relationships.

Ash Seddeek: 9:21

It was a game changer. It was definitely a game changer that I noticed that at Deloitte, but they had actually a book on the shelf. So I grabbed the book because I'm always curious, and I opened it, and oh my goodness, this was like the good old day LinkedIn in one book. Everybody that worked at Deloitte was in that book. So if they leave Deloitte and go to Walls Fargo or Bank of America, and you're still working at Deloitte and you need to reach out to somebody at Walls Fargo. Guess what? There's one of our past friends is there. You just call him up. Oh my goodness. Doesn't that make life a whole lot easier? So if you go knocking at that door, you've got Kevin, your friend from Deloitte over there, and you're coming and saying, Hey, it's just like saying, Yeah, we went to Harvard and you're knocking at that door and you're leveraging that network. So I think these companies, for a long time, they paid attention to the value of relationships. And now I'm actually working with a group of people who are building a software product that's all about how we can look at the relationships we have at work in helping us drive a whole lot more value from the communications that happen among the five, six people that we work with on an ongoing basis. So there is a lot more benefit to leveraging the relationship and focusing on how do you make that relationship better so that when you're talking in front of them, you have some level of relationship capital that you're building on that you're not starting from scratch.

Kevin Yee: 10:38

Now it's really interesting because like I'm seeing how these long-term relationships are playing into your business. Seems like there's a trickle-down effect. But like, okay, so people are raising their hands or wanting to work with you. When people are actually working with you, what does a coaching and engagement kind of look like? Is it mostly like one-on-one coaching, kind of group coaching? Like, what are the different methodologies that you're using right now?

Ash Seddeek: 11:02

I love that. So definitely, yes, over the years I've developed a number of frameworks that I use in my engagements. But most engagements on average are six month long, bi-weekly sessions, one hour each. And I have been schooled in the school of Marshall Goldsmith, which is focuses on this idea of stakeholder-centered coaching. So we do a number of interviews on the front end of that engagement. We go talk to the people that work with Kevin, we ask them, Kevin communicates with you. How would you like Kevin to communicate with you in a way that's much better than what he's doing today? So I gather some intelligence from key stakeholders, including the HR business partner. I partner with HR business partners a lot on these engagements. I also talk with their manager and then I talk with a few key stakeholders. And once we conduct the 360, as well as of course talking with the leader that I would be coaching and understand from them what their aspirations are. So now we have a body of knowledge on what the engagement should focus on. And then we get together on a bi-weekly basis. In those sessions, I am sharing some frameworks and mindset shifts that might help them achieve much faster progress on some of the issues that they're working on. And sometimes we would have some hard conversations. I was just having a call with a client where she was definitely having a tough time with a career transition. We were basically talking about how this happens to all of us. At some point, we are at a point where we're shifting from an IC to a people leader or changing from a people leader to a director. And each one of these transitions does require some tough decisions that we have to make personally. If for a long time I've been loving driving my Mustang and now I have to give it up, it's a hard decision. Because a lot of the time, if we build expertise in a specific area and we are now going to become a manager, I'm gonna have to slowly but surely take my hands out of making the pie and delegate to Kevin how he can make the pie. So this idea of learning how to slowly but surely become a leader as coach. Because once you lead others, now you have five or six people whose career and their own career progression so much depends on you as someone who is working with them and helping them find out what their strength areas are, what their weaknesses are, and you're very much like a sports coach. You're looking at them and you're thinking, Oh my god, I can see Kevin going up that mountain. But Kevin doesn't see it now. But I want to talk to Kevin because I think I can help him make that journey. And that's really where people remember working with a leader and say, Oh my god, I loved how when I was working with Kevin as my leader, he saw that I can do something that I myself did not even see. But he was able to tell me on one-on-one meetings that there is more that I can give to this job and this company, there's more that I can accomplish as a professional. And with those ideas and that support, I was able to actually chart a much better path. So that's really where companies, if they are investing in a management layer or a director level layer or a VP layer, they are hoping that these people are going to focus on strategic agendas. One of which is this idea of talent development, where it's no longer about Kevin, but it's about John that he's managing or Sandy. And that shift, that's why I was talking about the Mustang. That shift is literally you're handing over the keys. Can you imagine? You know, just you've got this amazing car, and you're just gonna basically hand somebody else the keys. And you're like, man, I spent so much money on these hopcaps, on these tires, the boom box inside. I paid so much money, and that is a metaphor for all the experience we've built over the years as ICs. And once you become a manager, you're more or less slowly but surely you're going to give all of that away. And that's tough for a lot of people. Sometimes they never make the transition mentally. They still keep their hands and making the pie, they still want to drive that Mustang. And what happens is they essentially alienate their team members because they feel like, oh, every time Kevin gives me something to do, guess what? Kevin turns around, he does it himself.

Kevin Yee: 14:56

You know what's really interesting as you're explaining your process. Sounds like what you're doing is pretty intimate. It's a lot of work. You're going behind the scenes, trying to like interview others and just be like, hey, how would you like to be communicated and all that? How do you think about managing your client capacity? Do you have other coaches working for you? Do you hire others? Do you set hard limits on how many clients you can take? How do you think about your client capacity?

Ash Seddeek: 15:21

Yeah, I think right now you're totally right. I'm actually hitting a point where I'm going to have to scale and look at opportunities where, against, you know, the preaching that I was just doing a minute ago, I have to do that myself. Where I have to start to bring other coaches along. Or sometimes we're facilitating a program and I need to, again, based on what we're talking, it's this idea of trusting that I can let somebody else drive that Mustang on my behalf, that they're not gonna break it, they're not gonna hit the wall, all those different things. So that's really where we are at the point where we need to scale our ability to facilitate some of the training programs because now they are becoming a good feeder into the coaching. Because the way we do it is we say 15 go through the program, but only six get the coaching. And that way we want to facilitate more programs because it opens up opportunities for coaching. And a lot of coaches are listening because I have found that coaching is not one of those easy things to sell. Sometimes, because it has that wrapper, it has that packaging, it's basically coming in as coaching. Sometimes it's hard to sell under that guise, and you may want to choose different packaging. Maybe you want to package it sometimes as consulting services, maybe you want to package it sometimes as facilitation and training and professional development. So you have to keep trying different ways of approaching the client because sometimes even the budget line item is pegged to particular services. And maybe coaching is not one of the services, but if you say training, you might be able to get the funding. And that's been an interesting finding for me, where I found people saying yes and also saying yes to higher dollar numbers than they would otherwise say when you say coaching. If you're a super duper coach, maybe you're saying 75, you might say 100k for a six-month engagement. But an average coach may say 25 or 30. But if you talk about training and we're talking about 15 people, if they go out to the American Management Association where I used to work as a facilitator and they charge $2,000 per person, if you have 15 people going through a program times two, you've got $30,000 right there for something that can be approved in a much easier way than they would approve a coaching engagement. And I realize that a lot of people listening to us, they may not have built up the stamina or the experience yet to be facilitators. But of course, a lot of the time we are driven to be multifaceted in how we go out and hustle up, essentially.

Kevin Yee: 17:45

That's really interesting about the whole bidding process and stuff. It's like super, super interesting, is like that nuance that I feel like a lot of people are missing sometimes.

Ash Seddeek: 17:54

Without a doubt, yeah, you gotta find out how do they buy, what is it that they buy, what do they call it, and maybe there is a way for us to phrase things using their language. Because a lot of the time when we say coaching, well, maybe they don't buy that. What do they buy? And I like the Trojan horse metaphor where you can basically find maybe there's another vendor that's selling something, and you can actually go inside that horse and get inside the company. And once once you are inside, maybe you can say, by the way, I also do coaching. And that's another thing where find the vendors that are already selling into those companies and see if you can have an incremental progression plan where in the beginning I'm gonna go in, maybe I'm going to work as a consultant with this company, and slowly but surely I will get into the coaching. So I think a lot of people listening to us, they may need to have several approaches and test them. Maybe something works, something doesn't work, but at least you have different ideas that you can you can try.

Kevin Yee: 18:48

Great tips. Now, now something I'm also very, very curious about for yourself is like your future goals. So I don't know, you've been at this like you said 10 years already, right? So I guess where do you want this coaching business to take you in the next few years? Do you have like you mentioned potentially scaling, maybe hiring others, letting people drive the Mustang analogy that you're not getting secret games that no one knows about?

Ash Seddeek: 19:11

I think right now one of the ideas that's coming up is this idea of sort of building a franchise where right now we built about three training programs that can feed into the coaching business. And I think we can productize those programs in a way that will help us create a business that functions with or without me in the picture. And that's an exciting phase because again, if companies are willing to spend money on those programs, because especially the area that I focus on is focused on communications, it's one area where there is quite a bit of demand. And we discovered that it's fascinating to actually look at the business more as a mathematical equation. When we drive better clarity for clients, and this clarity drives better understanding, the most amazing thing that happens is their ability to achieve more progress in their business is at a much higher level. And we actually sometimes look at one email that can send people spinning for a week because they can't understand the message that Ash sent them and they keep asking, Ash, what's this? Can you explain this a bit more? You know, Monday goes by, Tuesday goes by, Wednesday goes by, it's Thursday already. Oh my god, it's freaking Friday, and we're still trying to get the point across. Contrast that to another situation where we get the point across Monday morning before 10 a.m. The message I sent to Kevin, he's able to get the point, he's able to actually take action on it. Kevin sends a message to Mike, Mike is able to take action on it. Mike sends a message to Sandy, Sandy's able to take action on it. 400% ROI simply by the power of increased clarity. Quite unbelievable.

Kevin Yee: 20:50

How you did that too, because a lot of times communication gets a bad rap because it's very hard to like quantify the ROI. But what you did right there, you pegged it to a core like KPI or something like that, where people can be like, Oh yeah, that makes sense. We can get an ROI on this. Seems like you have quite a bit of experience selling this quite.

Ash Seddeek: 21:08

You learn a lot along the way because you're totally right. I think people need to understand what's the ROI. And if my business is telling stories, I better get better at it. And it was interesting because to be honest, one of the clients in the program, he said, Ash, I used to send this email every week to about 15 people, and I rarely got a response back. I applied some of the communication structures that you taught us, and I was so surprised. This guy emailed me back saying, Hey, could you tell me a bit more on this? Because I'd love to work with you on that. And he was blown away by this response rate that previously he just didn't see it before. And companies are realizing that velocity, the speed with which we're moving, if clarity can be one of the levers, oh my goodness, can you just imagine how this might impact a company that has 500 people, a thousand people? It just the multiplier effect is huge.

Kevin Yee: 22:03

Yeah, so interesting. As you think about like scaling your business, right? What are some challenges that you're noticing right now in your season of business? Maybe some things that people can't see outside looking at. If we look under the hood, what are some like hidden challenges?

Ash Seddeek: 22:18

To be honest, the very first challenge is the one we've been talking about. Is Ash willing to let the Mustang be driven by somebody else? So a big part is me and the conversation I'm having with myself around should I continue doing this myself or open up and let other people come in and give them the keys and don't act in a way where I'm too scared that they are going to drive the car into the wall. So I think a lot of us as we're running our businesses, we need to really understand what's happening on the inside because there's so much that's happening on the outside that is nothing else but a mere reflection of what's going on on the inside. So that's, I think, for me is challenge number one. Challenge number two is to come up with the gradual progression plan where I can bring in someone to work with me on facilitation, and we do such a great job that I can let them be the front end of a lot of those delivery sessions, and then I can focus more on the coaching, and then later on I can pull someone else on the coaching side as well so that I can be more on the business development and not so much the doer of a lot of this work. You see the dynamic here, and it's very similar to what we were saying about somebody moving from an IC to a people leader or from a people leader to a director. You have to find the different Mustangs that you've got in the garage that you are gonna have to hand over one by one. There are a lot of Mustangs, by the way. So one is oh, I like going in front of this audience and speaking. Well, can somebody on the team do it? Or I like to be the one that sends that email. Can somebody else do it? And so on.

Kevin Yee: 23:48

One question I have for you might be a bit cheeky, but you mentioned is Ash willing to let someone else drive the Mustang and hopefully not crash into a wall. What do you feel like the real challenges here?

Ash Seddeek: 23:59

The very first one is definitely getting past the internal resistance for sure. Because I think the idea about crashing it in the wall, I think there is no reason that would happen if we consciously do what I call strategic delegation, where if I know I'm gonna give the car keys to Kevin, I'm gonna get in the car with him first, we're gonna talk about how to operate everything, we're gonna do practice runs, I'm going to make sure I create what we can call the conditions for success. And that's what I work with my clients on is this idea of yes, you're not going to hand the keys and pray. No, what we do is we do a conscious, thoughtful plan of making sure Kevin is going to succeed at doing this. And that's how we do. We have to, we have to know that everything takes time. You cannot just wake up one morning and say, Hey Kevin, here are the keys. I mean, that's not gonna be fair to Kevin. But you know what? A lot of leaders, that's what they do.

Kevin Yee: 24:49

There's no small transition, of course. Like I hear this so many times, right? Like people are really great individual performers, but when they become leaders, they're just like have no support and they're just expected to just perform.

Ash Seddeek: 25:01

That's a great point, yeah. And I think we want to arm those leaders with the fact that you know what, reach out to people, give yourself time. We always talk about a 90-day plan, the first 90 days. I think that's always a good idea to at least think that. You know what? Nothing has to happen overnight. That's why, you know, one of the ideas we talk about is this idea of telling leaders that one of the best things that you can do is to make sure you schedule a meeting with yourself. That's a meeting where you sit down, you just take a deep breath. God darn it. You know, we're running so fast. So many emails, so many texts, like somebody at Cisco, she was actually showing me her webex text messaging. There are like hundreds of those and hundreds of emails and hundreds of meetings. And if you are in meetings back to back throughout the day, a lot of them are saying, when do I do my work? So the idea of meeting with self is about trying to block out all that noise, just even for one hour, where you are thinking about what is it that I'm working on? How am I actually leading my team? How am I managing this transition where I have to give up the keys of the Mustang? Am I doing strategic delegation? Am I spending enough time with my team? Am I even taking care of myself? You know, when was the last time I connected with my HR business partner? When was the last time I met with my own boss? When was the last time I had a skip level? Whether that's upwards or downwards. And here's what all of us are doing. All of us are keeping busy because it's the best execution we can give. And I think that's gonna be a hard message for many of us. We're keeping busy because it's the best execution we can give. I am busy today, I have a full calendar today, I have a full calendar this week. And the meeting with self is about saying, okay, we need to clear 15 to 20 percent on that calendar. If we want to run a strategic business and a strategic agenda, we cannot be like a horse that's tied to a cart going down the streets of London in 1920, but rather somebody who's very thoughtful. What rides should I be on? What streets should I drive? What people should be on in the car, what destinations am I going to the right destinations? And that's part of what all of us have to be thinking about.

Kevin Yee: 27:07

You know what reminds me of this book, The Road Less Stupid, and it has this concept of thinking time in it. When I sometimes think about like my friends' businesses, because I have a lot of friends, like some of them have AI tech startups and all that sort of stuff, right? Yeah, I feel like they're always running with their head cut off behind time and they can't run a strategic business. Which on the customer side, too, I'm just like, I don't know what the heck you guys are gonna launch next if you're gonna change any of my features. It makes me kind of like uneasy. And then I read this other like so there's like the whole startup like tech world, right? But then there's that book, like, hey, it doesn't have to be crazy at work, which is whole base camp philosophy and how they run their tech company, too. It's just really, really interesting the different modalities and stuff like that, too. Yeah, so with that being said, let's come to our final segment. It's called final advice, specifically overrated, underrated. So, as a business owner, you probably got a lot of advice, some of the good, some of the bad, some of it solicited, probably 99% of it unsolicited. So, in your opinion, what's some of the most overrated piece of business advice you've gotten so far? And what's some of the most underrated piece of advice that you've gotten?

Ash Seddeek: 28:17

We'll love to hear. I think tagging to what you were just saying, I think the the one about if somebody says to you you have to be incredibly productive and you have to be the highest productivity person on the team, I would very much encourage you to question that. And that leads us to the underrated one. The underrated one would be if I see Kevin sitting by himself, I should hold back from telling and saying to myself, oh, I think Kevin has nothing to do. Because when you see Kevin sitting by himself and he's thinking, that time that he's using for reflection, that time that he's using thinking about his business, will highly likely give us a whole lot more better outcome than if I have Kevin spinning all day long in 15 meetings, coming in and out, coming in and out, coming in and out. So a lot of the time, and even John Chambers at Cisco used to say this don't confuse busy with results. And to your point about inversion, is how can you take some of the most common mindsets and perspectives on oh, we have to be 150% productive? Well, that can actually get us into a situation where quantity is not necessarily quality, and what we actually want is the quality aspect.

Kevin Yee: 29:24

I love that. Really great reminder for a lot of people too, because I feel like the hustle advice and we call it hustle porn, right? But hustle porn is coming. Thank you for reminding us to go the other way sometimes. That being said, Ash, how do people find you and connect with you?

Ash Seddeek: 29:39

So definitely LinkedIn is one main place. Another one is to reach out by email, ash at executive greatness.com is a fast way to get a hold of me. And I think I mentioned to you that we can let people know this book is a great book that people also can check out because it reminds them of this idea of taking time to reflect. It has pages that you can use when you Are you sitting down doing nothing because it gets you thinking about yourself, your team, your organization? And it's a fantastic reminder of this exercise. And we definitely are going sort of analog with it because it's like you hold it up, it's a piece of paper, you get a pencil and paper, and you're essentially thinking about how can I read a more strategic agenda versus just being run with the rat race that's happening on a daily basis, as we discussed.

Kevin Yee: 30:23

Well, Ash, I just want to say there's so much that stuck out to me. I think earlier in the podcast, we talked about the value of long-term relationships and how it's helped you build your business. You talked about the nuances of vendor selection process behind your sales process and stuff, and selling them based off what they want and the language that they use. And then you're so open about some of your challenges as well, and it stuck out that stuck out to me. But the main thing I got was like you're really kind of humanizing coaching and business like throughout. So I just want to say thank you for coming on today and sharing your knowledge with me, with the audience, actually. And it's just a reminder that hey, your work matters, and I appreciate you coming here today as well. So thank you so much, Ash.

Ash Seddeek: 31:06

Thank you so much for having me. Thanks, Kevin.

Davis Nguyen: 31:08

That's it for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe to YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This conversation was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to seven and eight figures without burning out. To learn more about Purple Circle, our community, and how we can help you grow your business, visit joinpurplecircle.com.