624: Stop Fighting Imposter Syndrome When It Can Multiply Your Executive Presence and Get You Promoted

Know Your Own Executive Presence Strengths & Opportunities:

Click here to pinpoint the specific area in your executive presence that’s keeping you invisible to senior leadership and guarantees you stay working hard as a pack mule who never gets promoted.

What if the self-doubt you’ve been trying to eliminate is actually one of your greatest advantages in high-stakes meetings?

When you’re presenting to the C-suite, defending a proposal, or answering an unexpected question, it’s easy to become consumed by how you’re being perceived. But Avi Liran offers a different approach: stop trying to perform confidence and start focusing on contribution, preparation, curiosity, and trust. In this episode, you’ll discover how to reframe imposter syndrome, prepare for challenging questions, and stay grounded when the stakes—and your nerves—are high.

By the end of Laura’s conversation with the delightful Avi Liran you’ll know how to:

🎉Turn imposter syndrome into something productive instead of letting it undermine your confidence

🧲Handle difficult C-suite questions with curiosity, humility, and the powerful phrase you can rinse and repeat to build rapport with anyone

🧩Build the mindset that helps you stay grounded when presentations, meetings, and workplace relationships don’t go as planned

Play the episode to learn how to transform self-doubt, tough questions, and high-pressure leadership moments into opportunities to build trust, credibility, and confidence.

Access the Executive Presence Scorecard assessment here.

To learn more visit www.speakupwithlaura.com. New Speak Up podcast episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday early in the morning.

About our guest:

Avi Liran (CSP) is Global Chief Delighting Officer and an energetic motivational speaker who goes above and beyond to deliver tangible results to organizations. As the embodiment of Contagious Positivity, he’s celebrated for leading businesses toward profitability with a smile. Avi’s approach is a masterclass in how to reshape the very core of a business with delightful mindsets, particularly through joy and appreciation in the workplace. This transformation creates the contagious positivity that leads to significant improvements in performance, employee well-being, and customer satisfaction.

Having helped many Fortune 500 companies achieve profound transformations, Avi’s philosophy is simple: delight your people, and they will delight your customers. This contagious wave of positivity is the secret ingredient to a thriving business environment, one that Avi has successfully instilled in organizations worldwide. Through his engaging, heartfelt, and dynamic speaking style, Avi ignites long-lasting change, one keynote, one workshop at a time.

With Avi, you don’t just gain a motivational speaker; you gain a transformational leader and partner in building a business that champions employee and customer delight as the pathway to greater profits and sustained growth. Engage Avi and spark Contagious Positivity in your organization today.

Develop your executive presence through strategic communication, executive confidence, and leadership influence. Each episode provides practical strategies to help you speak up in meetings, communicate with senior leaders, present ideas with clarity, build executive visibility, strengthen your leadership presence, influence without authority, stop overexplaining, answer difficult questions with confidence, and become a trusted executive leader.

Whether you're preparing for your next Vice President promotion or looking to communicate with greater credibility and gravitas, you'll learn actionable executive communication skills that accelerate career growth.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Executive presence and influence in high-stakes leadership situations
• Building trust through contribution, kindness, and appreciation
• Using imposter syndrome to improve preparation and performance
• Handling difficult questions and challenges from senior leaders
• Using “Tell me more” to demonstrate curiosity and confidence
• Preparing for C-suite presentations and executive Q&A
• Staying composed and credible when you don’t know the answer
• Leading with humility without diminishing your authority
• Turning your inner critic into a “Chief Risk Officer”
• Using gratitude and positive reframing to manage stress and self-doubt
• Creating engagement and buy-in by inviting challenge
• Why appreciation and positivity can strengthen leadership influence