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Leadership With a Twist

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by Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler

24 episodes

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Podcast Overview

Where mindful leadership meets practical action... Empowering Leadership Teams' Podcast, Leadership With a Twist, features mother-daughter executive coaching team Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler sharing actionable leadership strategies, team empowerment tools, and mindful practices for today's leaders. Join them and guest experts to elevate your leadership skills and discover your authentic leadership potential.

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Publishing Since

1/14/2026

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Recent Episodes

July 22, 2026

The Intuitive Leader: Harnessing Inner Wisdom for Innovation

AI can gather your data and organize your options in seconds. It cannot tell you when something feels off. Coach Heather and Coach Barbara sit down for a conversation about inner wisdom, the intuition and gut instinct that partners with strategy and data, and why it belongs in your leadership decisions. They unpack why entrepreneurial teams build unsustainable habits under pressure, how a five-minute break restores more capacity than pushing through, and why modeling a gut check in a meeting gives your whole team permission to do the same. Key Takeaways <ul> <li>Inner wisdom is a decision-making input, not a replacement for strategy or data.</li> <li>Unsustainable habits form when leaders make fast decisions under pressure, and those habits eventually lead to burnout.</li> <li>Modeling a gut check in team meetings builds psychological safety and stronger collaborative thinking.</li> <li>Intuition is a muscle. Skip practicing it and it weakens.</li> <li>AI is an intellect partner. It cannot sense when something is off in the room.</li> </ul> Action Steps <ul> <li>Before your next big decision, pause and check how it actually feels, not just what the data says.</li> <li>Model a gut check out loud in your next team meeting.</li> <li>Build a five-minute break into every two hours of focused work.</li> </ul> Questions to Reflect On <ul> <li>Am I factoring in my own capacity when I set deadlines, or am I just pushing through?</li> <li>Where has a fast decision under pressure become an unsustainable habit on my team?</li> <li>Do I trust myself enough to say out loud when something doesn't feel right? Want to talk through how inner wisdom shows up on your leadership team? Book a complimentary coffee chat with Heather and Barbara: <a href="https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/coffeechat">https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/coffeechat</a></li> </ul>   About the Hosts: Coach Heather and Coach Barbara are the lead Executive Coaches of Empowering Leadership Teams. They specialize in helping entrepreneurial businesses and their teams meet the moment and become the most empowered they can be to work together and achieve optimal results. With deep expertise in leadership development, team dynamics, and navigating organizational transition, they bring practical, actionable wisdom to leaders facing the challenges of today's rapidly changing business environment. Weekly Leadership With a Twist Newsletter: <a href="https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/huddle-subscribe">https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/huddle-subscribe</a> Subscribe & Review: If you found value in this episode, please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us create content that serves entrepreneurial leaders like you, and it helps other leaders discover these conversations. Questions or topics you'd like us to address in future episodes? Send us a message at or leave a comment on our latest post. Cheering You On!

July 15, 2026

Leading Boldly: Harnessing Courageous Confidence

Being nice is quietly weakening your leadership. In this episode, Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler name a pattern they see constantly in coaching: leaders who soften their message, pull back after one rejection, or take on responsibility for how someone else feels about a hard decision. Heather and Barbara unpack the difference between courageous confidence and self-protection, why your job is to make sure your message is received, not to control the outcome, and how the best business decisions never come from an emotional rollercoaster. They walk through the pause as your first line of defense, the prep, action, results cycle every team needs to complete, and why letting people process their own emotions is a gift, not a withholding. Key Takeaways <ul> <li>Courageous confidence means owning your perspective, your role, and your voice, even when the room stays quiet.</li> <li>Your responsibility ends at a message clearly sent and confirmed received. The decision on the other end is not yours to control.</li> <li>You are not responsible for another person's emotional regulation. Holding that line with compassion is what keeps your leadership steady.</li> <li>The best business decisions come from a grounded, prefrontal-cortex-online state, never from an emotional rollercoaster.</li> <li>Every business cycle, prep, action, results, needs to fully complete, including rest, before the next round of thinking begins.</li> </ul> Action Steps <ol> <li>Before your next high-stakes conversation, prepare your message so clearly that the other person has everything they need to decide. Confirm they understood you, then let the outcome be theirs.</li> <li>This week, notice one moment you start managing someone else's emotional reaction instead of standing in your own role. Name it, then return to the facts.</li> <li>Build a pause into your next tense moment, ten minutes, an hour, a day, before you respond. Use it to get grounded before you decide anything.</li> </ol> Questions to Reflect On <ul> <li>What would it look like if I led with more confidence this week?</li> <li>Where am I over-functioning for someone else's emotional experience instead of trusting them to manage it?</li> <li>Has my team fully completed the prep, action, results cycle, including rest, before we plan what comes next?</li> </ul> Ready to apply this to your team? Book a complimentary coffee chat with Heather and Barbara on courageous confidence and self-leadership: <a href="https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/coffeechat">https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/coffeechat</a>   About the Hosts: Coach Heather and Coach Barbara are the lead Executive Coaches of Empowering Leadership Teams. They specialize in helping entrepreneurial businesses and their teams meet the moment and become the most empowered they can be to work together and achieve optimal results. With deep expertise in leadership development, team dynamics, and navigating organizational transition, they bring practical, actionable wisdom to leaders facing the challenges of today's rapidly changing business environment. Weekly Leadership With a Twist Newsletter: <a href="https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/huddle-subscribe">https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/huddle-subscribe</a> Subscribe & Review: If you found value in this episode, please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us create content that serves entrepreneurial leaders like you, and it helps other leaders discover these conversations. Questions or topics you'd like us to address in future episodes? Send us a message at or leave a comment on our latest post. Cheering You On!

June 24, 2026

Navigating the Human Element: Strategies for Sustainable Leadership

Your team is not an infinite resource. Neither are you. In this episode of Leadership With a Twist, Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler dig into the human element of leadership, the people, the time, and the knowledge that actually get the work done. They name why “this isn’t sustainable” has become background noise in so many businesses instead of a call to action, and what happens when teams keep sustaining the unsustainable for months at a time. Heather and Barbara walk through a real coaching conversation about urgency versus emergency, why entrepreneurial teams running lean absorb so much of that pressure, and why slowing down is often the smartest move when your plate is overflowing. They lay out a practical approach to pausing as a team, naming the new normal honestly, and building a collaborative path forward instead of waiting to be rescued. Key Takeaways <ul> <li>Your team’s time, knowledge, and energy are limited resources. Plan around that reality instead of the wishlist version of your team.</li> <li>“This isn’t sustainable” is a signal, not a complaint. If you keep hearing it and nothing changes, you have a process problem, not a people problem.</li> <li>Urgency and emergency are not the same thing. Most overwhelmed teams have stopped telling the difference.</li> <li>Nobody understands your day to day better than you do, so nobody else is coming to name what is happening for you.</li> <li>A collaborative think tank conversation, with rest first, gives your team clarity that constant juggling never will.</li> </ul> Action Steps <ol> <li>Identify one task you have been holding “temporarily” for more than a month. Name it out loud to your team this week.</li> <li>Before your next planning meeting, ask each team member to bring three potential solutions, not just the problem.</li> <li>Use the Decision-Making Matrix to sort what is actually urgent from what only feels urgent because you are tired. <a href="https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/decision-making-matrix" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">DOWNLOAD THE DECISION MAKING MATRIX HERE</a></li> <li>Schedule real time off for your team this month. Rest before you reassess, not instead of it.</li> </ol> Questions to Reflect On <ul> <li>What have I been carrying for months that I labeled “temporary”?</li> <li>Where am I confusing urgency with emergency right now?</li> <li>Am I waiting for someone else to fix this, or am I willing to name it and bring solutions forward</li> </ul> Want to talk through sustainable leadership and the human element for your team? Book a complimentary coffee chat with Heather and Barbara: <a href="https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/coffeechat">https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/coffeechat</a>   About the Hosts: Coach Heather and Coach Barbara are the lead Executive Coaches of Empowering Leadership Teams. They specialize in helping entrepreneurial businesses and their teams meet the moment and become the most empowered they can be to work together and achieve optimal results. With deep expertise in leadership development, team dynamics, and navigating organizational transition, they bring practical, actionable wisdom to leaders facing the challenges of today's rapidly changing business environment. Weekly Leadership With a Twist Newsletter: <a href="https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/huddle-subscribe">https://www.empoweringleadershipteams.com/huddle-subscribe</a> Subscribe & Review: If you found value in this episode, please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us create content that serves entrepreneurial leaders like you, and it helps other leaders discover these conversations. Questions or topics you'd like us to address in future episodes? Send us a message at or leave a comment on our latest post. Cheering You On!

24 total episodes available

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What is Leadership With a Twist?: Where mindful leadership meets practical action... Empowering Leadership Teams' Podcast, Leadership With a Twist, features mother-daughter executive coaching team Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler sharing actionable leadership strategies, team empowerment tools, and mindful practices for today's leaders. Join them and guest experts to elevate your leadership skills and discover your authentic leadership potential.
How often does this podcast release new episodes?: This podcast updates daily.
Where can I listen to this podcast?: This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
Does this podcast accept guests?: Information about guest appearances is not available.

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