In the many years I've been coaching Nonprofit leaders, I've learned a lot of things. One of the things that really interests me is how some leaders are super coachable and they make giant leaps when they get great coaching. And others, even when they have great coaching, don't tend to make the same kind of progress.

What I've realized over time is that there are certain traits or aspects of a leader that actually cause them to be more coachable.

These are traits that anyone can cultivate. It's not that you're born with this and you either are coachable or you're not. Even someone who is very coachable can be more so, and can cultivate those traits even more intentionally.

When we do that, we open ourselves to the possibility of much greater and faster growth. And that's what we all want. We all want to have massive impact in the world, and one of the ways we do that is we grow. We become even more impactful leaders and even more impactful advocates.

In this episode, we reveal:

· The common “default mode” that may be blocking your ability to receive the greatest benefits of coaching

· What’s really going on when you get stuck while pursuing a big goal, and what to do about it

· How inaudible “noise” may be sabotaging your creativity and your ability to “be in the zone”

· Why we fall into the trap of arguing for our limitations, and how to escape that trap

· The difference between productive impatience and self-defeating impatience

· How to stay open to the gifts the universe is trying to give you

If you found value in this episode, please share it with other progressive nonprofit leaders. And I’d be grateful if you would leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts, which will help even more people find out about this podcast.

Thanks!

It's time we talk about a really common problem that actually has a simple solution, but that Nonprofit leaders are often very nervous about trying to address. And that's when your champions are getting your messaging wrong.

You spend a lot of time and effort getting your messaging dialed in so that it is clear and compelling around all aspects of the true value of the work that you do.

And then a champion who you otherwise love goes out and gets a key piece of messaging wrong. And suddenly, your message is muddied, and the clarity around the extremely high value that your stuff is worth starts to be diminished.

I'm sure I don't have to explain to you why that's a problem. That said, Nonprofit leaders often tell me that they are very uncomfortable and nervous about correcting a champion.

But if we want our champions to be as effective as possible on our behalf, we’ve got to help them get it right. And that means correcting them and getting them to use the right messaging. The good news is there’s away to do that that will have them thanking you for the correction.

In this episode, we reveal:

• The most common ways champions will get your messaging wrong
• The three things we have to do to get the champion to use the right messaging
• How to correct the champion in a way that will make them thank you for it
• Two ways to get the champion’s staff to reinforce your preferred messaging
• How to help the champion create new messaging “habits” that stick

If you found value in this episode, please share it with other progressive nonprofit leaders. And I’d be grateful if you would leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts, which will help even more people find out about this podcast.

Thanks!

We're a little more than 30 days out from the 2026 elections, and I don't have to tell you there's a lot at stake up and down the ballot. From Congressional and Senate races to state legislatures, and on down to city council, county board and school board races.

All of them matter. And all of them have the potential to have a big impact on the wellbeing of your clients and their families.

Hopefully, most of your eligible clients are already registered to vote, perhaps with your help. Yay! Registration deadlines are about to close in a number of states, but there may still be time to register where you live. So double check your deadlines and do everything you can to get your clients registered in the time left.

But now it's time to focus on helping your clients make a plan to vote so they can be assured of their vote counting. This is especially important in the current climate, where there are so many efforts underway to undermine and suppress our clients' voting rights.

In this episode, we break down everything you need to know to help your clients make sure their vote gets counted:

• The three key ingredients to a successful plan to vote
• The most helpful and effective questions to ask your client about their plan to vote
• Six essential pieces of information your clients need to make sure their vote counts
• How to address voter suppression efforts aimed at your clients
• How to help clients who want to vote on Election Day instead of voting early
• A one-stop, easy-to-use resource to help you and your clients with their plan

Link to one-stop voter resource: BallotReady.org

If you found value in this episode, please share it with other Nonprofit leaders. And I'd be grateful if you'd leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts, so even more people can find out about the show.

Thanks!

If you’ve ever said to yourself, “If only I had a paid advocacy person/team, everything would be great,” you’re in good company. But you might be surprised by the path you need to take to get there. It’s not as intuitive as it might seem, and there are some common mistakes that often block that path.

Here’s the thing. Even if a funder dropped a ton of money on you today to go do advocacy work, and you went out and hired a policy and advocacy staffperson. We can't just say to that person, “go do advocacy. Get the decisionmakers excited about investing in our work and creating policies that will benefit the people we serve.” It doesn't work that way. There's really no scenario in which you can hire the advocacy people, turn them loose and then the rest of us can just get back what we do every day.

I get it. We all go there from time to time. When we're feeling overwhelmed and we're feeling like, ah, how do we fit advocacy and strategic relationship building into all the other work that we have to do? It is tempting to say things like, gosh, if I only had an advocacy person or an advocacy staff, that would be so much better. And it could be.

But only with the right combination of factors in place. So let’s talk about how we can actually prepare and set ourselves up for the day when we do get to have those dedicated paid positions that can take a chunk of the work and really focus on it. And take out advocacy game to the next level.

In this episode, we share:

• The three things you must already have in order for paid advocacy staff to succeed
• What funders look for when deciding whether to invest in your advocacy work
• The biggest mistake that will block you from getting funding to do advocacy work
• The most strategic (and practical) way to begin growing your advocacy capacity right now
• Unexpected benefits of growing the advocacy capacity of your existing staff

If you found value in this episode, please share it with other progressive nonprofit leaders. And I’d be grateful if you would leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts, which will help even more people find out about this podcast.

Thanks!

I had a conversation with a client recently that surprised me. Then I thought about it some more and I realized it was something that a lot of nonprofit leaders struggle with. It's just that this client was experiencing a version of the problem that was a bit unusual.

This client is a CEO who has decades of experience and accumulated wisdom and perspective. But one day, this CEO shared with me that although she was considered a big expert in her previous field, she didn't have the same expert reputation in her current field. And therefore, she didn't feel like she could claim expertise at all in that field.

She was working backwards from the fact that over a span of 20 years, she had built this really strong reputation as a huge expert in her previous field. And then reducing that to the conclusion that it takes 20 years to build the knowledge, the reputation the relationships, etc. And that is patently not true.

But her biggest mistake was she made the erroneous assumption that the only reason her expertise in that prior field was valued was because of those 20 years of investment. And that anything less was not enough.

This is a really insidious form of self-limiting thinking. A lot of leaders may not have anywhere near 20 years of expertise. And yet some of them are very successfully claiming the expertise they do have and getting great results from decisionmakers because of that. Others are operating from the same self-doubting and self-limiting thinking as my client of, "I don't have enough (fill in the blank) yet, so I can't claim I'm an expert."

My client was taking herself out of the game before she even started. The stories she was telling herself led her to avoid claiming the expertise she already has. And that meant she wasn’t sharing her expert analysis and perspective with the decisionmakers that needed it in order to make smarter decisions.
Including decisions about funding and policy that directly impact her organization and the people she serves.

In this episode, we share:

• The two main causes of failing to claim our status as an expert
• Common fears and stories that cause leaders to doubt their expert status
• One powerful reframe that will help you claim the identity of expert
• The easiest and fastest way to establish your expert identity
• One highly effective practice you can start today to increase your comfort with owning your expertise

If you found value in this episode, please share it with other progressive nonprofit leaders. And I’d be grateful if you would leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts, which will help even more people find out about this podcast.
Thanks!

If you’re like many Nonprofit leaders, you already have a big vision that you want to make happen.

Taking that big, amazing vision and bringing it into being requires being able to bring along the influential and powerful decisionmakers who can help you make it happen.

Even the most amazing visionaries don't bring their vision into reality in the world without involving other people. And for those of us in the Nonprofit universe, some of the people that we absolutely need to have bought into our vision are those decisionmakers that are investors, that can bring resources, influence, reach, and the ability to help make things happen. We’ve got to have them on board.

Unfortunately, as you probably have already experienced, having an amazing vision does not automatically translate to having those decisionmakers jump on board, and be enthusiastic in helping to bring that about and make it happen with you as a partner. That's what we want. But getting that is often a struggle, quite honestly.

Today I want to break down what's in the way that sometimes causes it to be a struggle. And what we can do to clear that out of the way and get on the path to getting those decisionmakers fully on board with the vision and diving in with both hands.

In this episode, we share:

• The four ingredients of a compelling vision
• The unconscious ways we often undermine our efforts to get decisionmakers excited about our vision
• The biggest common mistake leaders make when sharing their vision with decisionmakers
• How to create the emotional power that will connect with the decisionmaker’s subconscious and engage their imagination
• The three key elements of a winning engagement strategy around your vision

If you found value in this episode, please share it with other progressive nonprofit leaders. And I’d be grateful if you would leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts, which will help even more people find out about this podcast.

Thanks!

It's time we looked at a piece of your messaging that I haven't talked about enough. Our voice is our most powerful tool, quite honestly. If we are able to use it to its maximum effect. This is the completely secret ingredient that is not getting enough attention.

But too often what's going on is that we're not using our voice to maximum effect.

You know I am all about great messaging. Great messaging is essential to your advocacy success. But what happens a lot of the time, and particularly in three specific scenarios, is that our voice doesn't match our messaging. And that's where we get into real trouble, because that mismatch can torpedo even the very best messaging.

I don't want that to happen to you.

Here’s what’s going on and why it matters. What we humans do when someone else is talking to us, is our subconscious is processing the sound of the voice and drawing all sorts of conclusions. And making all sorts of decisions about that person before the conscious thinking brain ever gets involved.

If a decisionmaker’s subconscious is processing the sound of your voice as, " yeah, no, that's not for me." That will cost you the investment. That will cost you the thing you came there for. Because their subconscious has already decided that it's a no.

The conscious brain will sit there and listen politely, and it might even smile and nod and ask a couple questions, but it won't engage. Because the subconscious already told it, "Nope. We're not doing this. This isn't for us." That's where it becomes incredibly costly. And we can't afford that.

In this episode, we share:

• What the decisionmaker’s subconscious needs to hear in your voice in order to get to “yes”
• What a decisionmaker’s subconscious hears when your voice is not aligned with your message
• How total alignment between message and voice led to a $15 million investment for one Nonprofit leader
• The three most common scenarios where there’s a high risk of your voice being out of alignment with your message
• The most dangerous wrong conclusion Nonprofit leaders often draw when a decisionmaker disengages
• One action you can take today to improve alignment of your voice with your message

I’ll be bringing this powerful voice coaching tool into my work. If you found this episode intriguing, message me and let me know if you’d like to learn more, or if you’d like to find out how to work with me to increase the power of your voice.

Message me through the podcast website or on LinkedIn.

Whether you’re focused on it or not, the 2026 elections are just around the corner. This is a moment of golden opportunity to help make sure that every one of our clients who's eligible to vote is registered and has the opportunity to have their vote counted.

There's a lot of moving parts to that, and a lot of opportunities for us as Nonprofit leaders to help our clients make sure their vote is counted. But today I'm focusing on one very critical technical detail, which is registration.

The good news is there is a ton of voter enthusiasm this year. We're seeing it everywhere. There's been a whole series of special elections leading up to now. A lot of states have already held their primaries. And the turnout for all of those elections has been off the charts.

That's really exciting news because it means that people do want to participate. They do want to make their voice heard. And they are really clear that the ballot box is one of the most critical places they can do that. Which is awesome because it means we don't have to spend a ton of time helping people understand why it's important to vote.

They already know that. And what they want is to be able to vote and not have it be a hassle, to have it be safe, and to make sure that when they do vote, their vote is counted.

But the bottom line is you can't vote if you're not registered. And registration deadlines are coming up. We still have plenty of time, but quite a number of states have registration rules that say you have to have your registration submitted and approved at least a month before the election.

We want to be able to support clients in ways that are easy for us - and for them - to make sure they are registered and that their registration is fully in order.

In this episode, we share:

• A quick breakdown of which states allow online registration and which do not
• The two key requirements for online registration that you and our clients need to know about
• The best one-click resource for the online registration rules for your state
• The best one-stop, state-specific resource to help you with paper registration for those who can’t register online
• Four key actions to take between now and Sept 1 to prepare to help clients with their registration

Links:

Episode 147 – Why Your Clients are Most Likely to be Harmed by Attacks on Voting Rights and What to Do About It

The best quick access resource for the online voter registration website for your state is https://www.rockthevote.org/online/ This page gives you a direct link to online voter registration in your state.

The best source for info on how to get trained on how to help with paper registration, as well as all the info you need on the registration rules, etc. for your state, is https://www.nonprofitvote.org/voting-in-your-state/

If you found value in this episode, please share it with other progressive nonprofit leaders. And I’d be grateful if you would leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts, which will help even more people find out about this podcast.

Thanks!