You have the expertise. You have years of hard-won insight. But expertise alone does not move people. Anyone can publish now, and AI hands out confident answers whether they are right or wrong. In that noise, the experts who stay silent lose ground. Their best ideas never leave the room.

My guest has spent more than 20 years solving that problem.

Bill Sherman is COO of Thought Leadership Leverage, co-host of the Leveraging Thought Leadership podcast, and lead author of The Thought Leadership Handbook. He has helped first-time authors, Fortune 500 CEOs, and New York Times bestselling authors codify and scale their ideas. His core belief is simple. Your ideas cannot speak for themselves, but you can.

In this episode, we cover:

• What thought leadership actually means: taking ideas to scale to create impact, often without positional authority
• The Four Elements of Thought Leadership: core idea, content library, market offerings, and platform identity
• Why platform identity is where most experts get stuck, and how to give your ideas a brand of their own
• Why we need more and better thought leaders now that the gatekeepers are gone
• How to use AI for research without handing over your thinking, and why the voice must stay human
• One step to leverage uncertainty: narrow your focus to expand your view

You may lead inside a Fortune 500, run your own practice, or simply want your ideas to be heard at work. This conversation gives you a framework to stop sharing information and start advocating for change.

Connect with Bill Sherman

Website: https://aha-moments.com/
Book: The Thought Leadership Handbook, available on Amazon and wherever books are sold
Podcast: Leveraging Thought Leadership
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-sherman-aha-moments/

With Special Guest: Brian Biro, America's Breakthrough Coach and Bestselling Author of The ROI of Kindness

Kindness has an image problem in business. Brian Biro has spent decades proving that image is wrong.

In this episode, Meridith welcomes her longtime mentor Brian Biro, "America's Breakthrough Coach," to make the case that kindness is not a soft skill leaders can afford to skip. It is the foundation of trust, performance, and results. Brian traces his passion for kindness back to his own mentor, legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, and shows why the companies that top every industry, from Southwest Airlines to Starbucks to Kaiser Permanente, all share kindness as a core value.

Brian introduces his ESPN framework for building people: deliver thanks with real Effort and energy, use the power of Surprise, be fully Present, and choose Now over "as soon as." He and Meridith also tackle the question every leader eventually faces: how do you stay kind while still holding people accountable? Through stories, including Coach Wooden confronting a star player over a broken team rule, and Meridith's own story of delivering hard feedback to a talented young executive, they show that real kindness means telling someone the truth because you believe in what they can become, not withholding it to protect their feelings, or yours.

What you will take away from this conversation:

• Why the Pygmalion effect means what you focus on in your people is what you create in them
• The ESPN framework for building trust: Effort and energy, Surprise, Presence, and Now
• Why kindness and accountability are not opposites, and how to deliver a hard message with genuine care
• The difference between being liked and being respected, and why leaders who chase the first lose both
• Brian's closing truth: "The love we fail to share is the only pain we live with"

If you lead people through uncertainty and want a culture that performs and holds together, this conversation gives you the blueprint.

Connect with Brian Biro:
brianbiro.com | Book: The ROI of Kindness

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianbiro/

With Special Guest: Richard Newman, Founder and CEO of Body Talk

Most leaders think a failed change initiative comes down to a bad strategy. Usually, it comes down to bad delivery. In this episode of Ask for Change, I sit down with Richard Newman, founder and CEO of Body Talk and author of the bestseller Lift Your Impact. Richard has trained over 150,000 leaders at companies like Microsoft, Virgin, and 3M. His path started in an unlikely place. He was a painfully shy teenager who spent six months in a Himalayan monastery with monks who spoke no English. That forced silence became the foundation of his career.

Richard's research with UCL psychology professor Adrian Furnham surveyed more than 2,000 people worldwide. The results are hard to argue with. A few specific shifts in posture and presence changed how people voted for a candidate by 59 percent. Nonverbal signals move an audience 42 to 44 percent more than words alone.

We talk about why teams lose trust in a leader before that leader even speaks. We break down the three Cs every leader needs during change: clarity, care, and courage. And we unpack why the habits you call "just who I am" are actually the habits holding your influence back.

If your organization is running into change fatigue, this episode gives you a different lever to pull. Not new words. A new presence.

Connect with Richard:

http://www.richardnewmanspeaks.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardnewmanspeaks/

https://www.instagram.com/richardnewmanspeaks/