Shelley on Your Shoulder
Hosted by Shelley Saeger, founder of Seven Big Coaching & Consulting, Shelley on Your Shoulder is the leadership podcast that delivers practical tips, empowering affirmations, and real-world advice to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and purpose, because leadership is a choice, and how you choose to show up matters.
Shelley on Your Shoulder
Welcome to Shelley on Your Shoulder
Shelly Saeger introduces her new leadership podcast designed to help leaders navigate challenges with practical advice and real-world wisdom. She shares her journey from aspiring journalist to leadership coach and consultant, revealing how her passion for helping others find their voice has shaped her career and approach.
• Started with dreams of being a National Geographic journalist before discovering her passion for teaching and helping others succeed
• Worked in corporate learning and development across multiple industries, specializing in leadership development
• Drew inspiration from her grandmother who modeled how to listen, validate, and guide others to solve their own problems
• Created the podcast after hearing from clients that her advice was "like having Shelly on your shoulder" during challenging situations
• Each episode will feature conversations about specific leadership topics with actionable insights for leaders at all levels
• First official episode will focus on clarity, which Shelly believes is the foundation of good leadership
• Aims to build a community of growth-minded, impact-oriented leaders who can learn from and with each other
Have ideas for episode topics? Contact Shelly through the form at sevenbigconsulting.com. Subscribe and share with someone who's ready to find the clarity to lead and the confidence to succeed.
Welcome to Shelly on your Shoulder. With Shelly Sager, founder of Seven Big Coaching and Consulting, shelly on your Shoulder is the leadership podcast that delivers practical tips, empowering affirmations and real-world advice to help you lead with clarity, confidence and purpose, because leadership is a choice and how you choose to show up matters. And now here's Shelly on your shoulder. Hello everybody, I'm Drew Zagorski, co-host and co-producer of the show, and I'm really excited to introduce to you the show's host and creator, shelly Sager of Seven Big Coaching and Consulting. In this episode, shelly will share her background, her motivation and inspiration for launching the show and a little bit about what you can expect in each episode. So here she is, shelly. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm great Thanks, Drew. Super excited to be here today.
Speaker 1:Me too, and thanks for the opportunity to partner with you on creating and producing Shelly on your Shoulder. I think this is going to be a real helpful show for a whole lot of people. I'd like to just begin at the beginning. Can you share a little bit about your background and what inspired you to put the show together, kind of what brought you to this point?
Speaker 2:Gosh. It's been quite a journey and I'm going to try not to get hung up in a lot of the details, but I think, when I think about the journey to get to where I am today with this podcast, what comes to mind is the first thing that you should know about me is that I'm actually I'm a pretty adventurous person and you might think, well, why is that relevant to leadership? But actually I think what you find, if you're a leader or have been a leader, being adventurous is kind of part of what you need to be, and so-.
Speaker 2:Risk taker Risk, taker adventurous yeah, because there's so much of it. So if I go back to my college days and what led to the degree and my starting point, you need to understand this adventurous part. I was going to leverage my writing skills and I was going to be either a journalist for National Geographic or I was going to be on the rooftop reporting about major conflicts in the world. Because that was my story and that sense of adventure. And when I boil all of that down to what I felt like my purpose was, my purpose had always been, through college and before was to be the person who could be a voice for people who couldn't find a voice for themselves or couldn't get their story out for others, people who struggled to be heard, and so that was a really big motivator for me in college big visions, right. And so naturally, I graduated and I swapped the jungle for management at a retail store.
Speaker 2:Woohoo was selling men's suits, so I'm going to make this really quick, but here's the gist of that experience I was teaching men who had never worn a suit, sold a suit, didn't know how to tie a tie. I was teaching them how to do all of these things, how to make tailoring marks on suits and what I realized? My passion was to help other people achieve success. So teaching it became very obvious to me that teaching was really important to me and it fed my soul in a way that I would not have expected, and so that moved me into this space of going into corporate learning and development.
Speaker 1:So did you have any teachers in your family line?
Speaker 2:Not that I knew of.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So blazing a trail.
Speaker 2:Right, teaching was not even on my radar, okay, and I didn't actually even realize that there was this corporate role for learning and development. So you could say the adventure started anew as I was trying to figure out now how to take this experience and this passion I have for teaching and helping other people to be successful forward, and so that actually led me into this career of doing almost everything in a learning function in a variety of industries and a variety of companies. I worked with almost every level in the organization and leadership very quickly became my passion. So working with leaders to set expectations, to help them with difficult conversations, to teach them how to lead and build high-performing teams, and at that later part of my career, working with leaders to help them unpack really gnarly complex problems and challenges in a way that they could do it again and again and helped them bring their people along with them.
Speaker 1:So kind of rolling all that personal as well as institutional knowledge downhill.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so it's interesting because part of what I pull from all of this experience goes back to my original college days of being somebody who could help others find their voice and tell their story.
Speaker 2:What I realized was that was a really big part of what I was doing, even in a corporate learning function, and so what I also realized was this combination of giving a voice to others and this passion for helping others to succeed helped me get to this place today of running my own leadership, coaching and consulting business.
Speaker 2:And thinking about this inspiration for what I'm doing in this podcast, I think about one of the best role models that I've had in my life, which was my grandma, who was one of those people where any challenge I had, any situation, I would show up at her kitchen table and she listened, she made me feel heard, she validated me as a human being and always found ways to build me up, but also helped me to solve my problems myself, and so when I left those experiences, I felt confident, I felt I had a path, and I realized today that she's been a role model for me throughout my career, and so when I think about this podcast, I think a lot about being in this space of being able to be that role model, being that version of a guide to help other people feel heard and seen, and use the experiences that I've gained and the knowledge and the tools to help leaders who and I have been that leader before to find success, to find their voice and to really drive their career forward and be the best version of a leader they want to be.
Speaker 1:You know, having all of that going on inside of you and calling on these people from your past who you know, even if they're here or not anymore, I mean on this planet, they're all in inside of us, right? Those some of the voices that you heard, just kind of on your shoulder, that said, Shelly, you need to sit in front of a microphone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's one particular voice louder than any of the others in that space and that was my husband. So it's interesting in all of the people that I've worked with, in all of the conversations, what has often happened is people will come back to me and say, hey, you know that conversation we had, it was super helpful and it was like you were on my shoulder and I could hear the questions you were asking me and the things that you said, and it made me feel so much more confident in that situation. And it made me feel so much more confident in that situation. And so, after years of coming home and telling my husband about these experiences, he kept saying to me you need to do a podcast, you need to do a podcast. And his voice has gotten a little bit stronger and it's been coming a little bit more often, and so I feel like I'm finally at that space in my career, where in my life I'm ready. This is what I am supposed to do.
Speaker 1:Right, and you know you could once. Once we start piling up episodes here, you can check his phone right to see how many of them.
Speaker 2:He's listening to. Keep him honest, yeah, maybe we'll have him as a guest at some point. He can tell his seven big story there you go.
Speaker 1:So, speaking of the podcast, what's the format of the show going to be and what can listeners expect in each episode?
Speaker 2:The format of this show, drew, is so much of what we've been doing so far Interesting, fun conversation between two individuals talking about really important topics around leadership, because leadership is really challenging for so many people and we think that it's going to be easy.
Speaker 2:Oftentimes, people think it's going to be easy. Oftentimes, people think it's going to be easy and it's a lot more challenging than expected. So as we get into the show, the intent is to take a topic, take that topic every episode, dig into it a little bit more, understanding what the topic is, what that looks like in leadership, to create some space to share examples of where things go really well. Sometimes talk about things that are challenges and why it doesn't work the way that we would expect, but at the bottom line, every episode is to create some what I call nuggets, some bite-sized pieces of insight, wisdom and experience to help leaders at all levels think maybe a little differently about how they lead and be able to pull that in to be a more impactful leader, to make them feel more confident and more clear about their leadership.
Speaker 1:I can make a big guess about what the impact of that kind of a conversation on a regular basis with topics that resonate to me as a leader in my organization, what that will do, but from your mouth to the listeners' ears, what's the impact you hope to create by sharing all of these insights, expertise and advice?
Speaker 2:There's so many and I'm going to be really realistic. Advice oh, there's so many and I'm going to be really realistic, but I think the simplest impact is to create a community of leaders for leaders. So, really thinking about bringing people together to hear that you aren't alone as a leader, you're not the only person who has experienced the things that you might be experiencing. Trying to really focus on creating a community of growth-minded, impact-oriented leaders to learn from and learn with and share experiences along the way.
Speaker 1:If any listeners have an idea for an episode, what's the best way for them to reach you? Or reach out to you to talk about that or say, Shelly, this is something I've really been struggling with. I would love to hear your insight on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of my favorite things to be as a thought partner and a teacher. So if you have ideas, questions, needs, if there's something that you'd want us to focus on for an episode, us to focus on for an episode, the best way to do that would be to go to sevenbigconsultingcom and use the comment form and share your contact information and what you think that topic would be about. I'd be happy to have a conversation and take that topic and roll it into an episode.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, everyone, now you know a little bit about Shelly's background and this is going to be really a lot of fun. I think as you listen to these episodes, you'll find Shelly to just be a wealth of all kinds of insight and wisdom and knowledge and a lot of fun to listen to and talk with, and I get that benefit. Thank you, shelly, and so I'm looking forward to getting this rolling. What's going to be on our first real episode?
Speaker 2:The first real episode is a fun topic and it's clarity, because good leadership starts with clarity.
Speaker 1:Thanks to you, shelly, for setting all this up and being the creator of this hopefully, fountain of knowledge for people down the road. Thanks for listening to this episode of Shelly on your Shoulder. If you found today's episode helpful, be sure to subscribe and share it with someone who's ready to find the clarity to lead and the confidence to succeed. You can listen to Shelly on your Shoulder at 7bigconsultingcom or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can reach Shelly via the contact page at 7bigconsultingcom. On LinkedIn, by searching for Shelly Sager that's S-H-E-L-L-E-Y-S-A-E-G-E-R, or by clicking on the send us feedback link at the top of the episode description in your favorite podcast app. Until next time, lead with vision, act with purpose and inspire with heart.
Speaker 1:Appearance or mention of individuals, products or services on Shelly on your Shoulder does not constitute an endorsement. Shelly on your Shoulder is copyrighted by Seven Big Coaching and Consulting, all rights reserved. Any redistribution or reproduction of part or all of the content is prohibited without express written consent from 7 Big Coaching and Consulting. Shelling on your Shoulder is a production of 7 Big Coaching and Consulting in partnership with Left Brain Right Brain Marketing. You can find 7 Big Coaching and Consulting at 7bigconsultingcom and Left Brain right brain at lbrbmcom.