Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, where we help

leaders activate performance and engagement without burning out. Whether it's boot camps,

keynotes, or pulse checks, we design solutions that create meaningful change. If your organization

is experiencing major change or could stand to amplify its performance and engagement,

shoot me a note.

I'd love to be your partner. So I recently wrapped another cohort of my activation boot camp.

What I love most about these is that I get to help leaders shift perspective to take action and to build a new sense of confidence while also driving meaningful change within their teams.

And that perspective shift really is the key, because leaders see their team struggling,

maybe with overwhelm or burnout or lack of clear priorities or collaboration challenges,

whatever it may be. And leaders, by and large, they want to help, but they just don't always

know how. And it can feel really

disempowering. So we start in every boot camp by taking a step back and reframing the challenge,

asking ourselves, not what are our teams telling us they need, but what do we think they

actually need? Professional development is a great example of this. So in this most recent cohort,

teams were clamoring for more development, and leaders felt really hampered because budgets had

been spent and programming had already been designed. So how, they were asking, are we supposed

to give our teams the development that they need and want?

Now, here's where the shift, the reframe, came in. Because while our teams may be asking for formal

learning and coaching programs, what really is development? Programs are one vehicle, but development

is fundamentally about opportunities to build skills, to demonstrate competence,

to be challenged to think bigger, to be more innovative and creative in how we deliver impact.

So we asked ourselves, where are the informal hidden opportunities to drive more development?

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