While I climbed the corporate ladder - from entry-level jobs putting myself through college to my last role as a VP - I had the opportunity to hire, manage, learn from, and coach hundreds of people. And after all of it, I learned what makes a company successful and a person successful share one thing in common - LEADERSHIP.

Leadership gets confused with "managing" others, and I hear people say it's only relevant if you are in a corporate job or if you lead a team, but that's not true.

Leadership is about achieving your goals. It's as much about how you lead yourself as it's about how you influence others. And as critical as it is, it's not something most of us are taught.

I've been studying leadership for 20 years- in college when I became interested in Organizational Psychology and in my masters program. But nothing prepared me for the working world as much as the opportunities I had to fail as a leader- in how I lead myself, my teams, and the business. My advantage was that day-to-day I got to coach and study other people, so I know what works.

Combining that with my experience coaching business owners and executives, I've learned that no growth or slow growth is a leadership problem.

Each of us does work that matters, and by finding the leader within, we get to exponentially increase our impact, influence, and income without working harder.