Kristiana Corona:
If you think about this process similar to how Michelangelo created The David, he sculpted this incredible statue out of a block of marble, and the way he thought about it was, "I see the statue inside the marble, and my job now is to just chip away and remove everything that isn't the statue."
Ever feel like everyone else has leadership figured out and you're just making it up as you go? I've been there. I spent two decades leading design and technology teams at Fortune 500 companies, and for years, I looked like I had everything pulled together on the outside. But on the inside, I felt burned out, overwhelmed, and unworthy of the title leader.
Then, a surprise encounter with executive coaching changed my life and dramatically improved my leadership style and my results. Now, I help others make that same shift in their leadership. This podcast is where we do the work, building the mindset, the coaching skills, and the confidence to lead with clarity and authenticity, and to finally feel worthy to lead from the inside out
Hello and welcome back to the Worthy to Lead podcast. I'm your host, Kristiana Corona. My goal for the episode today is to tell you a quick story because I think that this is gonna be really relevant to a lot of people. So I recently went into a Frost Bank because I was trying to apply for a small business loan for my business, Worthy to Lead.
So I've had a lot of these conversations. Typically, how they go is it feels like you're taking a test, and so you walk in, it feels very transactional. You get nervous, you get anxious. Inevitably, they ask you a question you don't really know the answer to, and then you're like, "Ooh, I should know that answer."
And you know, the whole thing just feels intense. It feels like a lot of pressure. It can definitely create stress because the whole goal is to try and get permission from someone that has money to give you money. So I know that a lot of you are going through different situations, whether you're going to a bank, you're trying to get funds from an investor, trying to get an okay from the board, or just get your project funded by the executives that you work with, and that can be a really stressful situation.
But what I noticed was I took a very different approach to this conversation. I prepared very differently, and I focused on my mindset, and this conversation was completely different. It just went completely different than the other conversations that I've had in the past. So I wanted to share five of the tips and the things that I think helped the most to go from feeling like you're in this anxious, tense mode of, "I need to, you know, convince this other person," to showing up relaxed, feeling confident, having the answers to the questions that you need, and then being able to just be present in the moment and have a good human conversation because at the end of the day, that's really what we all want anyway.
So my goal in this conversation is just to share some of those key points and what preparation led me to feeling completely different in the room. I have to give a shout-out to Ray, who is the small business banker at Frost. If you're in the Austin, Texas area, you should definitely go meet up with Ray.
He's a super cool human being, and he absolutely treated me like a partner in this conversation. So thank you, Ray, for inspiring this episode. Let's jump in. Okay, so one of the key things that we all know is that when someone wants to show up really well during game time, they're not winging it. They're not just showing up.
Like, if you went to an NBA game, they're not just showing up and shooting that perfect three-pointer on the first shot, right? Like, they have done so much intense preparation, so much practice. There's so much discipline there. And I want you to think about the high-stakes conversation that you're going into, and what due diligence is actually required from you to be able to shoot a perfect free throw in the room.
Now, some of you have a lot of practice, and you might be very comfortable kind of speaking off the cuff, which is great, and some of you may not be, and you need a little more practice. But the point here is you still need the foundation of information that you're gonna share. And so that comes down to doing due diligence, and the thing that I really wanna emphasize here is knowing your numbers and refining your core story.
So for example, in the conversation that I had at Frost Bank to qualify for a small business loan, I needed to be able to share, like, this is what my business does, here's my team, these are the services that we offer, these are the people that we partner with, and here's our pricing and how many clients we have, and just sort of that general overview, right?
I need to have all my financials up to date. I needed to have my P&Ls, my taxes, my balance sheets. I need to have my personal finance statement and what was my current revenue, and also, what was my projected revenue for the rest of the year and for the years to come? Had I actually done any of that modeling?
So as you go through this process, there's going to be things that you're very comfortable with, and there's gonna be things that you're not comfortable with. But I think identifying what are the key pieces of information that I have to know? What numbers do I have to know going into this? You need to be crisp, and you need to have the fresh answers.
It can't be last month's answers. It's also important to think about, like, what are the goals for how I would use this money, right? Like, realistically, how would I spend it? What would I put it towards? How can I show that it would add value to my business? That's a dimension that I needed to think about.
And then I also wanted to communicate what were some of those long-term goals. Like, not just the next couple years, but long term. Where do I wanna grow this business to? Do I have a vision for that? Is that something compelling? And so as I went through that process of gathering, I put together a rough draft, and I didn't put pressure on myself to make it perfect.
I pulled slides from other decks that I had. I made new ones with different numbers, and I just roughly put it in order of what made sense to me. This is where the real work started. So kind of taking that rough first draft Then you just move things around. You rearrange them. You take whatever you think the most important point is, and you put it at the front, and then you reiterate it again later in the story, right?
So you can't be precious about that first draft, and one of the best ways to make it better is to actually practice presenting it out loud to yourself. And as you hear yourself saying it, a lot of times you're gonna say, "Oh, well, that's unnecessary. I don't need that," or, "That sounded really long-winded," right?
"I don't need that point to take 10 minutes, so how can I make that faster and crisper and more to the point?" And so you go through this sort of culling process, right? You refine things, you move them around, you remove stuff. And I would say if you think about this process similar to how Michelangelo created the David.
He sculpted this incredible statue out of a block of marble, and the way he thought about it was, "I see the statue inside the marble, and my job now is to just chip away and remove everything that isn't the statue." And so that's your goal here, as you're refining that core story, is to think about, well, what is all the detail that is taking away from the beauty of this final statue or this final story?
And so if there's extra, take it out or put it in the appendix, or just think about it as a, a side note, as a talking point, but it doesn't have to be the core of your story. Okay. So after you have just, like, a really rough draft of the story and you've started to carve away some of the excess detail and you've maybe moved things around to where they feel pretty good to you, then it's time to put on the hat of the person that you're gonna be meeting with, and thinking about, "What are all the different questions or concerns that they might have that I need to answer?
And in the story that I've created, have I responded to those things? Have I put the most important concerns and questions first, or am I thinking about it from my perspective, like what I think is interesting or important about me?" And so a lot of times when we write stories, we are constantly putting ourselves as the hero of the story, and it's all about us and all about what we like and what we do, but that's not the point of this presentation The point of this presentation is to, as quickly and efficiently as you can, to answer the questions the other person has.
And so you have to physically take that other hat off and put on the hat of the person that you're gonna be meeting with. And actually, in one of my earlier podcast episodes, I had Marsha Fox on my podcast. She's an ex-McKinsey strategist, and she was talking about the importance of role-playing your executives.
So really understanding their world, their concerns, what are they going through, how is that going to affect the way they show up in the room, the questions that they ask, their skepticism of this particular idea. And so, you know, as I thought about that similar exercise and I was kind of role-playing what would my banker care about I thought about things like, okay, they probably talk to a lot of coaches every single week who want funding for their business.
So what makes me different from all the other coaches out there? What makes my business proposition different? Why would I stand out from the crowd? Why should he say yes to me versus all of these other qualified coaches? I had to think about where are my financial projections realistic, and where are they maybe too optimistic?
Where is my business not diversified enough? You know, how do I explain my numbers? Where are some of the numbers that maybe are sticky, and how could I tell a story around those? And is my roadmap compelling? Is this something that if it was pitched back to me, that I would want to invest in? Do I feel like the mission is compelling?
And so I'm thinking about all of these things, and then going back and looking at my presentation again, I'm realizing, oh, you know what? I'm taking six slides to get the context of who I am and not getting to the meat of this story. So I'm gonna put the context of what is differentiating and also, you know, what are some of the risks and how am I mitigating those risks of being a small business.
I'm gonna put that towards the front. Uh, for example, questions that they might ask about, like, "What's your backup plan, and how are you gonna handle if you are out of the office sick or you're on vacation? Like, who else can do the work? How will you avoid burnout?" Those are all really relevant questions that someone might have, and so how am I addressing those particular questions and objections in the beginning of this presentation?
So I'm thinking about all of those things. I'm coming up with, well, what are my responses to those? How would I answer that if they asked me that question? And just weaving it right into the story. So the way that you can help yourself feel easy and natural in the room, in the moment, is to ask yourself those challenging questions, especially the challenges about failure.
What would you do if this failed? What would you do if this didn't work out the way you wanted? What would you do if your projections were completely wrong? What would you do if this client didn't re-sign? And if you've thought about those things in advance, then you can show up thoughtful, and you can show up easy and natural and not defensive and not rushed and not trying to sweep anything under the rug.
Like, you can just Be who you are and have a thoughtful response. The third thing that I did, and I really recommend this, and this is actually something that I spoke about in another podcast that's coming out soon, is really about how you sharpen your story by using your different sounding boards. So if you're doing all of this in a vacuum, if you're doing it the night before, which I do not recommend because you're in your own head, and there are things that you're not gonna think of, and there's things that you don't know, you want to put it out into the world and talk to people you trust who are going to gut check your assumptions on key areas.
So for example, if I have questions about finance or business, I talk to my finance and business mentor, and one of the things that he does for me is he helps me to say, "Are you thinking ambitiously and big enough about your business? Where are you thinking small? Where should you be thinking bigger, more long-term, more aggressively about the investments that you're making?"
And vice versa, I can ask him, "What does this term mean? I don't understand. Why is it important?" Rather than assuming or just skipping over it or not addressing it at all, which is a problem, I can use that moment to say, like, "Here's something I'm not confident in. How can you help me sharpen that and make sure I'm not missing anything?"
I also talk to my executive coach, and my executive coach comes in from the perspective of what is the business that I wanna be building in context of my broader life? How am I thinking about all of those balls at the same time, and the way I'm having to juggle them, and what I wanna put down, and what I wanna pick up, and finding something that works for me holistically.
There's aspects of business that I have to do, but she'll also challenge me on, "Well, what do you want to do? Where do you wanna see this going? This is your business. You have control over that, so what does it look like to make decisions that are based out of abundance and clarity, rather than fear or anxiety?"
Right? So that's a very different perspective, and then that helps me to gut check, "Okay, is what I'm putting together here as a story sound and resonant with the things that I care about for my life and the bigger picture?" I also have other partners, like coaching partners that I talk to, where I can validate my pricing, I can validate my ideas, I can think about what would it look like to expand my business, to include more people, and to have a bench, and to offload work in different ways, and, you know, what agreements would I need to have in place in order to do that, which all of this came up in the conversation.
All of it. We talked about finance and what was realistic and what was ambitious. We talked about burnout and how I can keep going, and if, you know, certain patterns of behavior are leading to burnout. We talked about who else is in your network that can help grow this business. Have you thought about what it would look like to expand?
Why, yes, I have. And then finally, I talked to my team and I thought about, you know, where are the bottlenecks? Where are the things in our business that are not scalable, where we need to implement a better process, right? And what feels too heavy that we just shouldn't be doing anymore? And so having the answers to those things, we were able to evaluate, oh, there's probably some changes that we could make in the next quarter to the business that will reduce some of our expenses.
They will improve efficiency, improve automation, uh, reduce the overall workload for the team. And so those questions also came up in the conversation. And, you know, we're talking about, well, you know, do you have flexibility to reduce this particular line item in your P&L? And yes, I do. In fact, I have a plan for how I'm going to do that.
So do you see how all these pieces start working together in concert? I think it's amazing. It feels like magic when you can sit down and reverse engineer those things, and then you have other experts that you're constantly refining your story with because they're seeing things from other perspectives.
And then you have a really well thought out argument for why you're there, what you wanna accomplish, and You answer the questions. Now, you're not going to get every question, but you probably will get 80 to 90% more if you do this type of preparation in advance. So highly recommend it. The other caveat I'll say is during this stage of sharpening, you don't wanna go in feeling protective.
You don't wanna go in and come across as defensive to the people who are trying to help you make the story better, who are your sounding boards. You wanna be open, you wanna be okay if you're wrong, and you wanna be able to rethink your approach and be flexible if new information arises. So let's say during that conversation with my executive coach, for example, we came up with this really interesting insight that actually I don't wanna be doing this particular thing in my business anymore.
And how does that then change everything else that I've lined up? What else needs to change? What launches need to change? What speaking engagements need to change? What do I need to change about how I show up on social media? What are all those different aspects that may change because we rethought a core part of this argument?
And so the more open and flexible you are to being able to see those things shift based on the information you're getting from wise advisors, not from everyone, not from the whole internet, but from wise advisors that you trust, it can really, really help you to go into these high-stakes conversations with a certain level of confidence and grounding because you have iterated to the point where you've realized like, "No, I have conviction.
This is what I wanna do." The fourth step of this process is about when you get in the room. And when you get in the room, it's kind of counterintuitive, but you need to let go of the outcome. And the reason why I say that is because when you try too hard to steer the conversation in a certain way, to follow the structure that you put in place in your presentation, to force things to have an outcome and a specific action that comes next, people don't like it.
They don't like it. They feel manipulated. It doesn't feel like a natural, organic conversation that you wanna be a part of, and it doesn't develop trust. So I think one of the most important things is when you get in the room after you've done all this preparation, you've sharpened your story, you have your resources, you know your numbers, you know why you're doing the things you're doing, you have your backup plans, when you get in the moment and you get in the room, just be present.
Like that's the time to relax. That's the time to let go of the outcome and just be there and be willing to listen to what comes up to respond and have a deeper conversation and ask why and be curious about the other person's concerns or questions. There is no perfect order for your slides. You will never be able to anticipate everything that someone else is going to think of and the order they're going to think of.
And so don't even try. Don't even get caught up in the perfection of it. Just do your best to put together a really great story. Have a rich appendix of slides in case there's other deep dives that people want to do And then by the time you have done all of this, you're gonna feel so comfortable talking, you're not even gonna need the slides.
But you can jump around. So for example, in this conversation, we started off with, you know, "Who are you? Tell me about your life. Tell me about your family." We talked about marching band. We talked about our kids going to school. We talked about whether it's important or not for someone to wear a full set of clothes when you're working from home, or if it's okay to wear your pajamas, and can you really show up as your best professional, authentic self in your pajama bottoms when you're presenting.
And, you know, I think we both agreed that there are moments that you have to dress up, uh, to, to feel real. But, like, nothing to do with a financial conversation, right? It's just casual getting to know you. And those things are woven in throughout the entire thing, and it just depends on the person and how straightforward they are and if they're, like, really driven to getting to a specific outcome on their end.
The point here is to be flexible and to allow it to be a little bit organic, to go out of order. Like, we hopped around that slide deck about 10 different times. Based on the question that he was asking, I went to this financial modeling. Then he asked another question, I went back to the team slide. Then he asked about, "Well, how would you use the money?"
And I went over to the slide that talked about how we would use the money. So at the end of the day, don't try and force the conversation to be a certain way. Don't try and make it linear. Just try and be in the moment, because if you have done your homework up until that point, your knowledge and your responses will flow out in the answers that you give.
And you may go completely out of order on the slides and jump from here to there, back to this other slide, back to this other slide, and that's okay. The whole point is that you are building trust based on the talking points that you're making. In fact, my friend Rayna Lesser Hannaway, who spent over 30 years assessing founders and small businesses and having them pitch to her over and over and over again as a buy-side analyst and an investor, she says that the conversations that make or break her decision to invest is what happens in between the slides.
So someone can have perfected their pitch deck and be a professional in the way that they deliver and execute that pitch, but what she learns from the conversation that happens in between and those challenge moments is judgment, self-awareness, their ability to lead, and how well they have set up their team for success.
And those are not things that you're going to be able to get out of the pitch portion of this conversation. So just leave plenty of room for the organic questions. If you've done your homework, that part of the conversation is gonna be so much easier The final point that I'll make is that this is ultimately a relationship-building method.
So as Ray would say, remember, this is step one or two of sixteen. So Ray reaches out and does a lot of cold calling, and his entire process, his outreach process, he told me, takes on average sixteen touch points to go from someone that doesn't know him to a closed client. And at first, I was shocked by this, but then as he was talking about it and just relaying to me the different touch points, the different platforms, the in-person, the call, the follow-up, how you figure out if there's interest or not, where you go from there.
I mean, it is an iterative process, so by times seven or eight, that's really when people start getting excited. That's when they start opening up and seeing possibility. And everything else up until then is about relationship building and just getting to know each other. And so when you think about the long game here of building relationships, that's ultimately what you're doing.
The same is true when you're pitching new ideas inside your company or to investors. This is just one of many conversations, and that's the whole point. So don't treat it like a racetrack. Treat it like a relationship. Ray said that the number one reason that he sees small businesses fail is because they're stubborn, and they show up in a transactional mode.
"I don't want your help. I don't want your partnership. I don't want your ideas. I don't want you really looking into my books." Even when they're making catastrophic financial decisions where if they just would've showed up as a partner and open and willing to have a conversation, he probably could have helped guide them to get their business back on track.
So it's important to be honest about what you know and what you don't know and be willing to listen and learn while you're in the room. I think that was one of the most fun parts of this conversation was that I got to get advice from him and support from him, and I also got to give advice 'cause there were certain things that I knew about.
And so it's a trade, it's a mutual benefit for each. So at the end of this conversation, after lots of back and forth, after lots of ideation, we had come up with three different options that were possible for me to explore. We weighed the pros and cons of those. We talked about the implications, what is needed, and I walked out of that room feeling armed with so much more information than I ever would have had I approached that conversation in a really transactional way and only come in to close a deal.
Just to wrap things up, here's what I'll say. It is so nice to sit down and feel like you can have a deep, insightful, meaningful, emotional connection with someone as part of a conversation, even when it feels really important, when you don't want to mess it up, when you feel anxious about the outcome of all of this.
Just remember that you're building a relationship, you are working on creating a partnership here, and you are giving them evidence of why they should be your advocate. And in doing so, you can let go of the hard selling. You can let go of controlling the outcome. You can let go of acting transactionally and only showing up for all business and no humanity.
Because at the end of the day, we all need human connection, and when you take the time to put in the human connection in that moment, that builds trust, and that pays dividends for years to come. So take the time to do your homework. Take the time to refine your approach and gain the conviction that you need in order to show up in the room and be able to relax and be present.
And at the end of the day, just remember, this is step one or step two out of 16, so you have plenty of more interactions to be able to work through the details and get to the next steps. But just remember on the other end of this is a human that needs connection, and that's really the most important thing at the end of the day.
Thanks again to Ray at Frost Bank for being the inspiration for this episode. If you're in Austin, go meet Ray. He's fabulous. I'll put his contact info in the show notes in case you want to reach out to him. As always, I would love for you to share these episodes. I hope you found this valuable, and if there is anyone else in your life that is going through a situation where they have a high-stakes conversation and they're feeling anxious, please send this to them and remind them that all of that preparation is really worth it.
And when you do that, and when you have that mindset of, "I'm coming in to partner with you," you can really show up differently. You can have your head in the game and have a delightful conversation that actually creates energy for you instead of being something that you're dreading or anxious about. So I hope your next high-stakes conversation goes well, and I look forward to seeing you at the next Worthy to Lead podcast.
Until next time, keep showing up, keep doing the work that matters, and keep leading like you're worthy to lead, because you are. Bye for now
