In this episode of The Impostor Syndrome Files, we talk about how to take greater ownership of your professional experience. My guest this week is Laura Massetti, founder & CEO of Real Work Ready, who helps early-career professionals build the skills they need to navigate the workplace with confidence.

Laura shares her journey from a successful corporate career to building her own business in Italy. We explore what happens when our professional identity becomes intertwined with our sense of self and why changing our environment can create the space to reexamine who we are and what we want.

We also discuss the unwritten rules that make the workplace feel so confusing, especially as AI changes how early-career professionals learn and grow. Laura shares how feedback, mentorship and stronger workplace skills can help us feel less at the mercy of others and recognize that we have more control than we think.

About My Guest
Laura Massetti is the Founder and CEO of Real Work Ready™ — the operating system for the first five years of work. A two-time C-level executive, Laura spent 15 years hiring, managing, and writing the performance reviews early-career professionals are trying to navigate.

She had succeeded mostly by accident — by access, by being in the right rooms at the right time. Then she left New York, moved to Veneto in northern Italy, and started over. In that stillness, she found the question that changed everything: not how do I train people better, but what are managers actually evaluating? The answer was clear. It had always been clear. Nobody had ever written it down. So she did.

That document became Real Work Ready™ — and The Performance Model Framework™, the six competencies every manager scores, whether they say so or not.

Laura holds an MBA from Baruch College and has completed executive education at Harvard Business School and Imperial College London.

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Connect with Laura:
Website: realworkready.com
Free resource — The Manager Feedback Decoder (the 5 phrases managers say and what they actually mean): realworkready.com/decoder
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti
Podcast: Real Work Ready on YouTube — youtube.com/@Realworkreadyhq
Instagram: @realworkready

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