Kristiana Corona, PCC

I attribute my success to perseverance and the willingness to take a leap of faith—embracing new beginnings, putting in the hard work to build new skills, and intentionally creating space for continuous growth and improvement.

The best career advice I’ve ever received is to take a leap of faith and trust my gut, even when the path forward feels uncertain.

I would say just expect that things are going to be hard. You may be a master at your craft in one thing, but you have to be okay becoming a beginner again at something else. When you take on that new skill set, you have to be okay taking your ego and putting it on the shelf, and saying, I'm going to be terrible at this, but I'm gonna keep working on it, and I'm gonna create a rhythm of working on it and getting feedback, and getting better and better and better until I master it to the level that I need to for this role, or until I find someone else to do it. Sometimes we think we have to be good at everything right away, and I think that's the messy middle that people don't talk about, is that you're really bad at it at the beginning. I was really bad at podcasting when I started, and now I have 50 episodes. The further you get in your career, the harder it is for yourself to be able to say, I'm gonna show up not very good at this at the beginning, and that's okay. You have to forgive yourself, because no one else cares. You just have to do the hard work to get better at it, even when you're good at something else. Don't be afraid to be a beginner again in the middle of your career, or even if you've just been 5 years in your career. It's okay to start over and learn a new thing, and it's gonna really help you grow and realize you can learn new things.

When you go from being a leader on a team where you have a really smart team and you've gotten good at delegating, to suddenly having to wear all the hats and do everything yourself, that is a huge shift. For me, figuring out what an appropriate workload looks like when I am the bookkeeper, and the salesperson, and the coach, and the content creator, and all of the different roles that you play, that's been the challenge. What that has been like over the past year is figuring out what I love to do and what I can have capacity for, and then where do I need to find my other who's, the people who can really help me bring this to life. I now have a part-time operations manager who helps me take big ideas and make sure they get across the finish line. I have contractors who can help me with podcast production, and I'm bringing in an intern who's going to help with marketing. So I would say, for someone who teaches people how to stay out of the weeds, as an entrepreneur, you have to get back deep in the weeds at the beginning. And then, as you work your way out, you start to realize, these are the things I want to hold on to, and these are the things that someone else can help take on, just to make sure that the business moves forward and you don't get stuck.

I'm at a point in my life where I really do need to balance what it looks like to care for multiple generations and also have a fulfilling career, and I wasn't willing to sacrifice one for the other. With Worthy to Lead, I have the flexibility to be able to work from home, set my own hours, and support the same leaders I was working with in the past, but just in a different capacity. I really get to focus on what I love now, which is helping to develop human-centered skills and helping leaders find their way navigating in this world where there's less flexibility. It feels kind of like a full-circle moment being able to do that for them. I really try and organize my schedule in such a way that I'm able to be more effective with how I use my time, instead of just randomly bouncing from thing to thing to thing without intention.