Nada Nasserdeen, two-time TEDx speaker, bestselling author, and CEO of Rise Up For You, went from a $100 in her pocket and two suitcases to building a global leadership development company. In this powerful conversation with Melinda Lee, Nada shares how rock bottom became her foundation, the neuroscience behind self-confidence, and why 95% of leaders think they're self-aware, but only 10% truly are.

In This Episode, You Will Learn:

The 4 Pillars of the Top 10%

Nada’s research with Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurs revealed the non-negotiable skills for success:

 “If you don’t believe in yourself, your communication collapses.”

• Self-Confidence
• Emotional & Social Intelligence 
• Transformational Leadership 
• Influential Communication 

Why Leaders Fail at Communication

“Influence isn’t about talking, it’s about evoking movement.”

• The fluff trap: “People talk in circles because they’re nervous or unprepared.”
• Nada’s drill: Random Q&A sessions to train precision (record yourself and cut filler words!).

Confidence Is Learned, Not Inherited

Nada couldn’t pronounce R, S, H, or Z until age 17 -practicing in the mirror to break her toddler-like speech.

How singing hid her impediment and led to a career in musical theater (and later, commanding boardrooms).

The Breaking Point That Built An Empire

“Everything you need is already inside you. Rise up for you.”

Nada’s company was born from divorce, debt, and losing both parents within a year. All while showering at a 24-hour gym and working from a hospital.

Connect with Nada Nasserdeen

Website: NadaLena.com  

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadalena/ 

About the Guest: 

Nada Nasserdeen is a TEDx speaker, bestselling author & founder of Rise Up For You, who transformed personal adversity into a global leadership movement. Her neuroscience-backed Rise Power Method has trained 100,000+ leaders across 50 countries - from Fortune 5 boards to at-risk youth.

Fun-facts:

• 💡 Philanthropy with Punch: Teaches soft skills to incarcerated youth, earning her the OC Sheriff’s Award for transforming lives behind bars.
• 📸 Times Square Icon: In 2023, her impact was immortalized with a billboard in NYC.

Welcome. Dear listeners, to the speak and flow podcast where we dive into unique strategies to help you and your team achieve maximum potential and flow. Today I have an amazing leader and honored to have her here. She is a 2 times Tedx, speaker, bestselling author, CEO, and founder of Rise up for you, Netta Naserdin! Hi Netta.

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Nada Lena: Hi, Melinda! Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

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Melinda Lee: I am so excited we're going to dive into some really amazing strategies. And before we dive into that, can you share with the audience. When did you know this is like meant for you? What you do.

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Nada Lena: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. When I look back at my life now, everything that I'm doing now. I've always had a passion all the way back down to like high school. So I often reflect on who was Netta when she was in high school, and I remember being that friend or that young girl that would look at my friends and be like, Hey, you can do it like you can act like if I can get the A in the class, you can get the A in the class.

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Nada Lena: And so I think I've always had this innate passion of just helping people wanting people to be their best. My parents always taught my brothers and I to put our best foot forward, and so I've always been that girl in school. That's

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Nada Lena: this, too. I mean, I was a cheerleader. So it's always been a part of me to push people to be their best, simply because I always had this mindset of. If I can do it, I know you can do it. And so all the way back to high school, I've kind of been that person that's like, Hey, I believe in you. Let's let's make this happen together.

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Melinda Lee: Oh, my gosh! And you really have the proof in the pudding because you, before we started, you mentioned you started this company which is so successful right now. But you barely had anything.

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Nada Lena: Yeah, I was at my lowest point. Actually, so.

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Melinda Lee: Oh!

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Nada Lena: When I 1st started the company I just got out of a divorce that only lasted 4 weeks, so I lost everything. I went from a 6 figure executive to a hundred dollars and 2 luggage

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Nada Lena: my father had recently passed, and when I started building this business, which I didn't even know how to build a business. I've never. I don't have a business degree. I don't know anything about entrepreneurship. My father just came to me in my dream one day, right when I was getting the divorce, and he said, Neta, everything you need is already inside of you. You just have to rise up for you, which is the name of the company.

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Nada Lena: so I think he had already passed away, and so all I knew is, I was at my lowest point. I thought it was my lowest point.

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Nada Lena: and all I could keep hearing was rise up for you, rise up for you. So I thought, okay, well, maybe I should build something on my own, even though I don't know how to build a company. I've never done it before.

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Nada Lena: And so I started building rise up for you with like no money. I was completely in debt, heartbroken, you know. My father had passed away, and 3 months after I started building the company, my second parent, my mother, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. So I was building the company out of a hospital. I took showers at the 24 h fitness.

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Nada Lena: I would go back across the street, open up the laptop. What do people need in the world? Who's Tony Robbins? What's coaching and training how to build the business, how to build a website. And I just started researching. And 9 months later my mother passed away.

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Nada Lena: And so I found myself 31 turning 32 years old, and all this stuff just happened. But all I can continue to think was rise up for you, and I knew in my heart, and I knew in my soul that this company was meant to be. And and this company was going to make an impact, and I just doubled down on myself. I didn't know anything about building, but it didn't matter. I believed in me right.

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Melinda Lee: And so.

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Nada Lena: It's really important that even if you don't know something that you still have belief and faith in yourself, to learn the something.

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Nada Lena: I had that belief in me. And I bet, basically, I bet on myself. And I started building the company, rise it for you. And today we're all over the world. We have clients all over the world, from Fortune 5 down to entrepreneurs that we work with. And currently, right now, I have a team of about 16 to 18 people depending on the season, and the project.

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Melinda Lee: Thank you for rising up for you, because now you're rising up, all of us, and that's such an inspiring story. Me having my mother also passing away with cancer, and so really touched my heart. And so thanks for sharing that. And so you're rising people up. And you have a methodology that helps us to get to the 10%. So can you share with us what that is.

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Nada Lena: Yeah. Well, before you know, when I started building my company, I just had a very real conversation with myself. It's like.

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Nada Lena: Am I good at? What do I know, and what have I seen? And before I started building, rise up for you, my 1st career was in performing musical theater. I used to tour the world internationally, and then I transitioned into being an executive for an education corporation, and I was a professor in the evening. So those are the roles that I had before I started the company, and there was always this reoccurring problem that I saw whether it was with professionals that had Phds

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Nada Lena: to students that were coming into college, and that was a severe gap in soft skills and the emotional and social intelligence and self confidence in being able to communicate effectively and being able to lead. So I was always surrounded by people that were amazing amazing singers, amazing dancers, professionals that had Phds master's degrees, all the skills that they needed.

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Nada Lena: but yet the majority of them were underperforming, not only professionally, but in their life. They were unhappy, they were miserable, they did not feel fulfilled at work, they did not feel fulfilled at home, they struggled with communication, they struggled with self doubt.

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Nada Lena: I spent the majority of my time as an executive, solving people problems versus like taking the company to the next level through like vision and strategy and that kind of thing same thing in. When I was at the college I saw these students coming in. They would rather take an F than raise their hand and ask a question because they didn't want to look done.

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Nada Lena: And so when it came to building the business, I I can see. And I recognize, okay, this is a problem. And so what we're going to build is gonna try to solve that problem.

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Nada Lena: And so what we found in all of our research and all of my experience and all of the research that we've done, and all the companies that we've worked with, which has been a lot. By the way, we're talking like hundreds of companies, we have found that there are 4 skills that really help you. What I say be seen be heard and be relevant to help you be in that top 10%.

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Nada Lena: So think about how many people and those of you that are listening. You might have. You might have had this feeling where you're like. I'm really good at what I do.

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Nada Lena: I.

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Nada Lena: Great product. I have a great service. I'm great at my job. I have all the skills that I need to be successful. I have a Phd. A degree. I've been doing this for years. Okay, how come they're getting the promotion. How come? How come they landed the client? How come I've been running my business for 10 years, and I'm only making like 600,000 or 500,000. And this person just started 2 years ago, and they're a multimillion dollar company.

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Nada Lena: right? And so we have figured out that there's the 4 pillars, self confidence, emotional and social intelligence.

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Nada Lena: transformational leadership and influential communication that have to be learned, mastered, and cultivated for every professional and organization to really be the best that they can be, and every one of those pillars has a very robust content and curriculum that we built.

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Nada Lena: We have books behind it. We have a ton of research behind it all, and if the individual or the organization doubles down on getting the coaching and the training and the knowledge around this, they will see an impact in their roi and their ability to perform.

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Melinda Lee: Oh, wow! Those are really solid pillars, and I'd love to dive into each. And yet we only have a certain amount of time. Let's go into the confidence and the influential communication especially this is speaking flow. Can you share with us more about that? The influential communication, especially when the stakes are high. What does that mean like when you're having influence? When you speak.

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Nada Lena: Yeah, absolutely. So. The 4 pillars that I mentioned they go in order. So we start with self confidence, and we end with the influential communication which is being.

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Melinda Lee: Got it.

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Nada Lena: It's the most difficult pillar, which is why it's at the end.

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Melinda Lee: Hmm.

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Nada Lena: Because when it comes to influential communication, the reality is is that we're we're all communicating every day all day long.

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Nada Lena: Influential communication means that your power, your presence, your precision, the purpose behind what you say creates movement in the audience, or the listener or the receiver. Every time we communicate. Even right now you and I are communicating without us recognizing it. We have an outcome. We want an outcome to the communication.

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Nada Lena: Whether it's your leader that's running a meeting. Your outcome is that you want to empower your team to go, take action, go do the task or the job, or whatever it is that they need to do. If you're sitting in front of your board your stakeholders.

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Nada Lena: you're communicating right. There's an outcome that you want from your board when I'm sitting in front of prospects or potential clients. There's an outcome, right? I want them to partner with us. I want them to work with us. There's an outcome to this podcast and so the influential communication part is learning and building the skills that influence people. To say.

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Nada Lena: all right, let's do like, I'm gonna take movement with you right.

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Melinda Lee: Yeah.

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Nada Lena: So influential. You evoked something in me that I'm going to move with you and take action.

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Melinda Lee: Yeah.

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Nada Lena: People struggle with that so.

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Melinda Lee: Oh, my! Gosh!

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Nada Lena: Things that we see. The biggest challenge that I see is that.

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Nada Lena: Well, self-confidence is always a massive one, but it's precision.

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Melinda Lee: Oh, okay.

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Nada Lena: Not able. They're not able to cut the fluff and the fat out of a conversation.

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Melinda Lee: Oh, cutting the facts too.

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Nada Lena: Yeah. The fact, the facts.

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Melinda Lee: The fat. The fat got it? Got it? Okay?

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Nada Lena: Facts are important.

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Melinda Lee: You got it, you got it, got it. The fluff and the facts.

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Nada Lena: The plug in the back. Yeah.

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Nada Lena: right? So how many times have we been in a meeting, for example? And we have somebody that's trying to communicate, and it's full of like.

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Melinda Lee: Right, right.

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Nada Lena: No. Can I? Do you mind if I interrupt? Can I say something? There's all this stuff that then takes away and distracts us from the influential message that you're trying to say. That's just one thing or somebody that talks around in circles, and by the time they get done talking you have no idea what their ask is what they want. You have no idea what what the point of the conversation was.

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Nada Lena: That is really really important when it comes to influential communication.

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Melinda Lee: And what do you think is happening? That's causing people to do that? Do you know.

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Nada Lena: I think the biggest thing is self confidence, because people get in their head. And so when people are communicating, they sometimes get nervous.

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Nada Lena: It also depends what type of communication like am I sitting in front of my executive? That makes me nervous? Am I pitching something to a board? But oftentimes people struggle with self confidence. And so there's a bunch of stuff that's going on in their head while they're trying to communicate. And I always say that self confidence impacts your capacity to communicate. So if you struggle with self-confidence, your capacity

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Nada Lena: to communicate effectively is going to be hindered drastically. The other thing that we see is that people do not prepare enough, because being able to improvise is a skill. And this is something that we teach an influential communication.

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Nada Lena: If you're in a meeting, and then somebody asks you a question. It's a skill for you to answer off the top of your head and answer in a way that's clear and concise.

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Nada Lena: And so one of the strategies that we do with our clients is that we will ask them a random question. Every coaching session, for example, we'll say, all right, random question. We'll ask them the question, and then we have them respond off the top of their head, record it, and then listen to how well they responded. Was there? Was it full of filler words? Was it off on a tangent, or were they able to stay common, collected, and answer the question like a politician? Really.

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Melinda Lee: Right cause, you only have a certain amount of time, especially in those meetings, and you want to be clear concise, precise.

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Melinda Lee: yeah.

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Nada Lena: Absolutely, absolutely.

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Melinda Lee: And it does. It's a skill. It's not something you either don't have or you have. It's something that you can build.

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Nada Lena: Yes, all of these are scores that can be.

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Nada Lena: which is why we teach this at the company to big organizations and entrepreneurs and individuals, but some of us have it a little bit more innately than others, because it really.

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Melinda Lee: Right.

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Nada Lena: That's on your experience, your childhood, how you are raised. Self confidence is the perfect example of that right.

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Nada Lena: My family. My parents, were super amazing parents. They taught my brothers and I to always love ourselves, to always have self confidence. And so that's a skill that has been ingrained in us since we were little babies.

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Nada Lena: And so I would say that we are one step ahead of the majority of individuals when it comes to that, because we were taught it at such a young age. Now you have other individuals that were not taught that when they were born, and they were not taught that in their childhood. And so they really have to work much harder, because there's a bunch of beliefs that they have to kind of break down. There's a narrative that they need to rewrite. And there's years and years of that narrative that they have to change and shift.

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Melinda Lee: Yeah, do you support people with that.

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Nada Lena: Oh, absolutely, absolutely

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Nada Lena: self-confidence, emotional intelligence, leadership, and influential communication are the 4 pillars that we work with, one to one coaching. We do team training that can last 3 to 5 years, 6 months like. So we we do it all.

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Melinda Lee: Right. And what are some of the things that you do to help people with eliminating the dow and all the years of programming? How do you.

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Nada Lena: It's all strategic. You have to have strategies around it. So one of the main strategies that we have is called the 4 B's to reverse engineering. And it's really a neuroscience practice to to teach you how to coach yourself.

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Melinda Lee: Hmm.

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Nada Lena: Get you to become self aware. That's the 1st step, because you can't change what you don't know needs change.

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Melinda Lee: Right.

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Nada Lena: So the 1st step that we do is teach people to build that self awareness and to start understanding and catching their thoughts, because once you can catch your thought or your belief, you could start to examine it and understand. Why do I have this belief? Where did it come from?

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Melinda Lee: Yeah.

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Nada Lena: Behavior that it's causing in me. And now how do I break it?

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Melinda Lee: I love it, love it, love it, love it. It's so true. And can you share? You're such a great speaker, and these are all skills that I've worked on, probably. And I'm just curious. Can you share your story from before when you're building your confidence and building your influential communication? What was that story? Personal journey for you.

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Nada Lena: Yeah. Well, you know, I shared a little bit about when I was at my lowest point. That started the company.

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Melinda Lee: Right.

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Nada Lena: But believe it or not, I had a massive speech impediment. I was afraid to speak until I was a junior going into my senior year. So up until the summer of my junior year in high school I had a speech impediment with 4 letters RSHS. And Z.

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Melinda Lee: Oh!

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Nada Lena: I couldn't make those sounds, and

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Nada Lena: I was in high school talking like a toddler, and so I didn't like to talk because I was so embarrassed. The only time you could not hear my speech impediment is when I sang, which I think is why I got into singing every time I sang you couldn't. You couldn't hear it, and it wasn't until my the summer before my senior year of high school that I went into the mirror, and every day I practiced I would figure out where my tongue should go.

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Nada Lena: figure out how to make the sound, and then I broke it. In that summer before I became a senior in high school, and then I went on to be a performer. And so the performance aspect really taught me how to be on stage, how to read a room which is what I use today, how to tap into my emotional intelligence and self-confidence, because, remember, it's the question is, and

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Nada Lena: in this world that's completely inundated, every industry is full and inundated. How are you seen, heard, and relevant? So when I was a performer and I walked in, and there was hundreds of performers in the room, but there was only 36 seats. The question was, how am I going to be one of those 36 seats. Everybody in here is amazing. And so I really started to learn the art of performing. How do I step on stage?

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Nada Lena: How do I turn my body? How do I create nonverbal communication where people want to look at me and say she is an amazing performer. Get her, get her in the center stage.

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Melinda Lee: Got it. Oh, thanks for sharing that story, because nobody you can never, ever tell right all the work and the effort and the journey that you put in to get to where you're at. And it's so inspiring.

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Melinda Lee: Thank you. So

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Melinda Lee: inspiring. So I'd like to. I learned so much today. And I'm so inspired by your story, by your journey, and all the insights that you shared with us. Can you share one more thing with the audience, which is what is that one leadership, golden takeaway that you? If there's just one thing that you just want to share with them.

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Nada Lena: The leadership. Golden takeaway, I would say, is that 95% of leaders think they're self-aware and only 10% actually are.

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Nada Lena: So if you really want to step into your leadership power, you need to start with personal leadership, get to the core of your self confidence. Understand how people are seeing you versus how you think they see you, because our perception of ourselves is always biased and it's always altered. We have blind spots. We all do.

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Melinda Lee: Right.

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Nada Lena: And so if you really want to make a huge impact as a leader, start with you, and if you're not doing that work, then, more than likely, you're not making the impact that you want to make as a leader. And one thing that I do know in working with all of our clients. And all the coaching is that the majority of people they do want to make an impact, they want to have a greater purpose. And so if you really believe in that, then you need to be committed to it, not interested in it to very

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Nada Lena: things.

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Melinda Lee: Oh, thank you so much. It's so true. Taking that deep dive within ourselves in order to change the world.

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Nada Lena: Yeah.

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Melinda Lee: I love that. Thank you, Neta, and thank you listeners for joining. I trust that you've gotten your takeaway to implement right away. And remember, anytime you have an opportunity to communicate. You have an opportunity to connect and inspire and make a difference in the world.

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Melinda Lee: See you next time much love, take care!

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Melinda Lee: Thank you.