Sarah Griffen

Sarah Griffen Executive Leadership Coach and Strategic People Consultant

Helping Leaders lead with clarity, ease and impact.

A lot of people walk into interviews with strong experience and still come across less impactful than they actually are....
20/06/2026

A lot of people walk into interviews with strong experience and still come across less impactful than they actually are.

One of the most common things I see is how quickly answers turn into “we did this” and “we delivered that”, even when their role inside the work was much more specific and much more hands-on than that.

The issue is not honesty. It is that in the moment, it feels easier to blend into the team story than to separate out your own contribution clearly.

But when your part in the work is not clearly named, the interviewer has to do that work for you. And most of the time, they will not slow down to figure it out.

What changes the way your answers land is being able to speak in a way where your role inside the outcome is obvious without needing extra explanation.

If interviews ever feel like you are not fully getting across what you can actually do, this is usually where it starts.

Most senior leaders go into interviews well prepared.They know their experience. They've reviewed the brief. They've tho...
16/06/2026

Most senior leaders go into interviews well prepared.

They know their experience. They've reviewed the brief. They've thought through what they want to say.

And then the pressure hits, and the thinking that felt clear suddenly isn't.

Preparing in your head and performing out loud are two different skills. The second one only improves with practice.

Swipe to see what that looks like in practice. ➡️

16/06/2026

She walked into the meeting feeling prepared. She knew the issue, cared about the outcome, and thought she was ready for the conversation.

Then the meeting started moving faster than she expected.

Questions came from different directions, people started interrupting with new points, and instead of slowing the conversation down, she felt pressure to answer everything immediately. By the end of it, she left frustrated because she knew she hadn’t actually landed the point she was trying to make.

In this coaching work, one of the biggest shifts for her was realising she did not need to answer everything immediately to be seen as capable. That habit was actually making her lose control of the conversation.

We worked on slowing the moment down, preparing her key points beforehand, and giving her permission to pause instead of scrambling for answers in real time.

A few days later, she approached things differently. She took notes with her, stayed focused on the main issue, and importantly - she stopped getting pulled into every side question.

The reaction she got back completely changed.

A lot of capable people assume they need to become quicker thinkers or better speakers in meetings, when often the bigger skill is learning how to slow the conversation down enough to hold onto the point you were trying to make in the first place.

Sometimes that means pausing and saying you need more information before answering. Sometimes it means bringing the discussion back to the actual decision that needs to be made instead of getting pulled into every question or side topic.

That’s often the difference between reacting your way through a meeting and leading the conversation with more clarity.
If this feels familiar and you want to work on how you handle high-pressure leadership conversations, feel free to reach out to me via DM. I currently have a few spots open for executive leadership coaching and would love to help.

If you've ever walked out of an interview thinking "I didn't explain that well", this might be why.Most people don't rea...
14/06/2026

If you've ever walked out of an interview thinking "I didn't explain that well", this might be why.

Most people don't realise how much they use "we" when talking about their own work. It's not wrong. It just makes you invisible.

This small language habit changes the way people assess you in interviews more than most realise.

Especially at the senior level.

Because once your answers become too broad, too shared, or too team-focused, people stop being able to clearly see where you actually sat inside the work.

And when that happens, strong experience can start sounding surprisingly average.

This is one of those things people rarely get told directly, but it changes interviews very quickly once you notice it.

13/06/2026

The most powerful shift I see in coaching is when someone stops trying to become a different personality to succeed.

Most women I work with are not trying to become better leaders so much as they are trying to become a different version of themselves so they can finally feel like they qualify for the role they are already in.

So they end up managing how they speak in meetings, questioning whether they came across too quiet or too intense, and second-guessing decisions they were actually qualified to make in the first place. 🤷

What we end up unpacking in coaching is that a lot of what they see as weaknesses are actually already part of how they lead.

✔️Taking a moment before responding is often careful thinking.

✔️Noticing tension in a team early often means strong awareness.

✔️Caring about outcomes and people at the same time is often what makes them effective in the first place.

But because they have not been named that way, they start trying to correct it instead of trusting it.

And that is usually the shift. Not becoming someone different, just recognising what has been there the whole time and letting that be enough to lead from.

If this feels familiar and you are ready to stop second-guessing yourself at work, reach out to me for coaching support. I currently have a few spots open for executive leadership coaching and would love to help. 🤍

The way you describe your work to yourself matters more than most people realise.I have worked with women in leadership ...
09/06/2026

The way you describe your work to yourself matters more than most people realise.

I have worked with women in leadership who were already operating at a high level but still spoke about their work in a way that made it sound smaller than it was.

The decisions they had led, the complexity they managed, the way they held teams through change, all of it got quietly underplayed in how they told their own story.

Once that language shifts, things start to change quite quickly. Decisions feel clearer, boundaries become easier to hold, and there is less tendency to take on work that was never meant to sit fully on them.

What changes first is not the role or the capability. It is the way they are interpreting what is already true about them.

If you want more insight into the kind of shifts that happen inside my coaching work, you can follow along here 🤍

04/06/2026

A lot of the leaders I work with do not feel confident in the way people assume they should.

They second-guess themselves before big decisions. They think carefully before they speak. They do not always feel “certain” in the room.

And yet, they are often the ones people trust the most.

Because they notice things others miss. They listen properly instead of rushing to respond. They think about the impact before reacting. They carry a level of awareness that does not come from performing confidence; it comes from paying attention.

Somewhere along the way, confidence got treated like the main requirement for leadership. But in practice, I see something different. The most effective people are often the ones who are more focused on getting it right than looking certain while doing it.

If this made you pause, it is probably worth thinking about what kind of leadership actually works in your world, not just what it is supposed to look like 🤍

A lot of women in leadership are exhausted from trying to manage how they are perceived.They are careful with every word...
02/06/2026

A lot of women in leadership are exhausted from trying to manage how they are perceived.

They are careful with every word, overprepare before meetings, and put pressure on themselves to sound confident and composed all the time because they think that is what makes people take them seriously.

At the same time, they are quietly dismissing the qualities that already make them good at what they do.

The ability to stay calm in difficult situations. The ability to listen properly instead of reacting quickly. The ability to notice what is happening in a team before anyone says it out loud.
Genuine care for the work and the people around them.

These are not small things. These are leadership qualities.

I think many women would experience leadership very differently if they stopped measuring themselves against the loudest person in the room and started paying attention to the way people already respond to them, trust them, and feel supported by them.

You do not need to force yourself into someone else’s version of leadership to belong there.
If this felt familiar, I would love to hear your thoughts 🤍

30/05/2026

Does this hit home for you?

You’re not stuck in your career because you lack options. You’re stuck because you keep choosing what feels familiar instead of fully trusting what you have already proven.

I worked with a client who had experience across multiple roles, but she described it as disconnected and random instead of seeing the pattern running through everything she had done.

She felt stuck, but the reality was different.

She had repeatedly stepped into complex environments and taken on high responsibility work. She had already operated at a higher level in real situations, but she did not treat that as evidence of who she is.

That gap changed everything. Because when she saw her actual track record, she stopped aiming from uncertainty and started noticing what she had already been capable of all along.

A lot of people are not stuck because they are behind. They are stuck because they are not reading their own experience clearly enough to move forward with confidence.

Where are you doing that to yourself right now? 🤍

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