Working with a CEO, client, or leader who constantly shifts priorities can feel exhausting—and sometimes downright impossible. You’re doing your best, but every week brings new “goalposts,” last-minute pivots, or indecisive directions that leave you scrambling. The good news? You’re not powerless.

Today, we break down practical strategies for supporting inconsistent leaders without burning out. From asking clarifying questions and reflecting patterns to documenting decisions and framing future impacts, you’ll learn how to maintain control, create accountability, and keep your sanity intact—even when your leader’s attention keeps bouncing from one shiny object to the next.

Whether you’re a team lead, integrator, or consultant, these tools will help you navigate unpredictable leadership while staying productive, professional, and proactive.

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

How To Support An Inconsistent Leader (Without Losing Your Mind)

We have been talking a lot about accountability lately because there is a lot to say about accountability. One question that is really important to ask is, what do you do when the person who usually is in charge of keeping everybody accountable is the one who is most in need of being held accountable? What do you do when the boss or, maybe in your case, the client keeps shifting the goalposts?

We talk about how breakdowns in consistency and accountability start at the top, but today it would be useful to flip the script. If you are the team member, the integrator, the right hand, or the department lead dealing with a CEO who ping-pongs between ideas, abandons priorities, or resists feedback, this episode is for you. This episode is just as useful if you are a coach or consultant who sometimes deals with wishy-washy clients.

In both scenarios, it can feel like you are absolutely powerless. You are doing the best you can, but your name is not on the door. What can you do? I do not think that is the case. Gwen, what do you say to the person who comes to you who is like, “I’m doing the best I can, but the boss is the indecisive one, the boss is the one who is constantly shifting priorities. All I can do is go with the flow?”

My first question always is, “Is that really true, or is what you need to do hard?”

Maybe, “What I need to do is hard because it feels inappropriate. It is not my thing to do. It is not my place.”

Reframing Feedback As Personal Impact

That really is often why it does feel hard. It is always about making it about you, not about them. If you have a boss or a client who keeps moving the goalposts all the time or shifting the direction, the classic shiny object syndrome that we see a lot. What you can do is not make it about them doing that thing. Instead, make it about me being able to do my job effectively. That is where we can have that hard conversation so that it does not come across as “You are screwing me,” even though that is probably what you are saying in your mind.

It’s always about making it about you, not them. When a boss or client keeps moving the goalposts, focus on how you can do your job effectively—that’s where the hard conversation starts. Share on X

To say, “I feel like I am failing because,” or “I feel like I cannot be successful because.” In the last episode, we talked about Chris Voss. I’m probably going to boof it up. “When you blah, blah, it makes me feel this way, because.” What they talk about is that there has to be something that actually affects the other person. “When you move the goalposts every two weeks, it makes me feel unproductive, and that concerns me because then I am not actually able to maximize my time that you are paying me for.”

It is still about me, but the bad effect is for them. I am paying you for work, and you are not actually able to be productive. I do not want to pay you for it and not be productive. It is about their behavior and their actions, but it is also about how I am responding to it. To me, that is the hard conversation. It is not threatening. It’s not saying, “If you do not, I’m going to blah, blah, blah.” It does not have that threat. It really is about “Help me help you.”

When we have the tough conversation in that way, it allows folks to actually make progress. One of the things I said before we started recording is that someone who does not want to be held accountable, if you do not have authority over them, like a boss or a client, you cannot hold them accountable. I had this conversation quite some time back. It was a great podcast with Ashley Connell, who has an agency for one of my business managers, and we were doing it as a LinkedIn Live.

If they don’t want to be held accountable, there’s no way to hold them accountable. Share on X

One of her online business managers says, “What if you have someone?” I said, “You’re not going to like my answer. My answer is you cannot make them.” The reality is that a lot of times, they do not understand what their behavior is actually causing. There are situations where someone really, truly just does not want to be held accountable. I am good at this, and I still cannot do anything about it. Most people actually are okay being held accountable. They just do not realize that is what they need. Often, they have never been held accountable.

Some people truly do not want to be held accountable, and in those scenarios, you have to ask yourself, “Do I fit in this organization? Do I fit in this dynamic? Are they the right client for me? Is this the right environment for me to work under?” Generally speaking, inconsistency is not malicious. They are not moving the goalposts because they do not want you to win. In some cases, they do not realize they are moving the goalposts.

To them, it is just a tiny shift. They do not realize it is a completely new direction. Metimes it is simply their own challenges with executive functioning. They are overwhelmed, and so they are fixating on a different area. They do not realize where you are going. Let us just assume the best of everybody involved. I must take it from a CEO perspective. What are some of the contributing factors to a CEO who seems to be ping-ponging all over the place and changing direction?

Understanding The Entrepreneurial Brain

We talked about it a few episodes back. A true entrepreneurial brain. I say an entrepreneurial brain is someone who really has all of the real characteristics of entrepreneurial behavior, who sees all the possibilities. They cannot see them. As they are going down the path, whatever the path is toward this given goalpost, they see all of the other goalposts that are out there, where most of us do not.

We might see one other goalpost, and it was like, “We can see this goalpost over here, and we can isolate it.” For them, it is almost like a blur. “There is this goalpost, and there is that one,” and each one is in their mind a few millimeters’ distance from the other. As you’ve said, they are seeing another possibility, like, “This other goalpost is just a little more shiny. We really should hit that one instead.” They do not see it as a change in direction. It is just part of a continuum in their mind. For them, “It is not that big of a deal.”

Instead of taking three steps, we take five, but it is only two more steps. “Those three steps were huge, but two more are not that big of a deal.” In their mind, it is not working that way. That is really the case with most entrepreneurial CEOs. They see all of these possibilities, and it does not feel like that big of a deal because they see them as potentials, not like, “How would I do this?” It’s just like, “I can do this.” For them, all of them are equally accessible in their mind. It does not feel like a shift in the same way it does for the majority of the population.

Most people are actually okay with being held accountable; they just don’t realize that it’s what they need. Share on X

In these situations, I can be one of four things. You actually do not do this. “This is silly to talk about, but there are four things I can do with you.”

To be clear, I’m not a typical entrepreneur because I do not have that much entrepreneurial brain. I do entrepreneurial work. I’m not an entrepreneur by my own definition.

I can think of four things that I can do to help guide a client toward staying the course. These are things that I was able to do when I worked in higher ed. My people just do not want to be held accountable, and it is what it is. Metimes you work for visionaries who do not want to be held to the long-term consequences of their decisions. You have to work with that.

The first thing is that you can ask clarifying questions that clarify the commitment. Instead of saying, “It feels like we are constantly changing priorities,” one of the things that used to be very successful for me is saying, “Does this replace this priority, or are we adding to our list of priorities?” For example, in higher ed land.

“It said the priority was enrollment, but now it sounds to me like we care less about the number of students we enroll and more about making sure we enroll in this particular program. Is that a replacement, or do we need to increase numbers in this area?” When I was working with online course creation companies, I was really working on launches a lot. It’s like, “What do we need to pause to make room for this?” We still only have a three-person team.

We are already maxed out, so we cannot actually add anything. We can pause something temporarily and come back to it later, or we can replace something completely, but we cannot add anything.

I always felt like that did, because you do not want to say the team cannot do that, because then that makes it sound like the team isn’t qualified or the team doesn’t have skills. What you really want to show is that there are only so many hours in a day. We’re only allocated to work so many hours on the project. There are trade-offs, and I do not know if people realize the trade-offs that have to be made when they are making the requests.

Part of it is that a real entrepreneurial brain often skips about 48 steps. For them, their minds move so quickly that they do not think about this and that. It’s like, “You go here.” It’s like, “It’s not actually three steps. It’s actually 48.” It feels like it shouldn’t take much to do because it’s only three steps. It feels like it should not take much to do because it is only three steps. How hard could three steps be? It is not three steps. It is 48 steps. That is absolutely one of the ways to do it.

The second thing you can do is simply reflect the pattern back. What we like to say is, “You’re moving the goalposts on me.” What you can say instead is you can say, “I have noticed a shift in direction three times. Can we take a moment to get clear on what matters most here? I want to make sure we are on the same page so that we do not lose momentum.” It is a little less accusatory, and you get to point to the data.

Inconsistency is not malicious; they’re not moving the goalposts to keep you from winning. Share on X

This is a good reminder to look at the feedback episode that was just before this one, which was part of our accountability series. How do you ask the question so that you actually focus on the thing and not make it about them? If you need to make it about anybody, make it about you, but really focus on the action, the behavior, as opposed to the person.

Public Documentation Of Decisions

This is not new, because we live in an age where everybody keeps their receipts. It’s documenting the decisions publicly. What I have learned recently, especially in the last year, is that when I send a recap email, oftentimes the other person recognizes that we were on different pages all along already. We started on different pages. When I send a recap email, that’s like, “What we agreed is that we are going to do this and we’re going to do this by A, B, C,” and when you start to lay out the timeline that was agreed upon, they’re already seeing issues.

If we do that, that’s the whole quarter. I didn’t mean to make this one thing our only priority this quarter. What else do you think we need to fit into the quarter? If this one thing isn’t the whole priority, what else do we have to fit in? Does that mean we have to extend the deadlines? For us to do this by that deadline, it has to be our only priority.

Documentation like that often feels like a CYA, your behooey, but it’s not. It’s one of the things that I’ve talked about for years, about agreements. I’ll say, make sure you have an agreement with somebody. In this case, I do not call it a contract because a contract really implies legality. They’ll say, “You mean a contract.”

I’ll say, “No. I actually just mean an agreement.” They’ll say, “I need to have a little lawyer look at it.” It’s like, “No, you do not, because what we’re really focused on is making sure that we understand what both parties are agreeing to.” Back when I was talking about it, the numbers we were talking about, no one could either afford to hire an attorney or sue anybody over anything. It really was not about the legality of it. It was about saying, “You agree to this, and I agree to that, and that we both looked at it and we think that this is true.”

  

  

That’s what that summary recap is really doing is to say,“ This is what I heard. Is this what you meant? A lot of entrepreneurs say, “It’s three steps.” It’s like, “You’ve got three steps. You have to do this, but then I have to do that. You have to do that, but then I have to do that.” By putting that in there, it’s like, “It’s not three steps. It is 48 steps.” You do not have to approach it as a CYA. You actually approach it as, “I want to make sure that we both understand.”

Generally speaking, I do not oftentimes hear a leader say, when you say, “What are we doing this?” I do not oftentimes hear a leader who says, “I never said that.” What I oftentimes hear, and they do not say it quite like this, is that it’s not that they do not think they said it, it’s that they do not realize that saying this meant that to you. That’s the piece they do not, “I didn’t realize that what I said meant that,” or “I didn’t realize I said it like that.” When you clarify it all in writing, then it takes out that he said, she said piece of it.

The other thing about doing that as well is that it allows for that reality of a lot of times, because entrepreneurs do see all the possibilities, they may talk about all the possibilities. In your mind, your eyes are getting bigger and bigger, and we have to do that and that. The other thing when they’re not actually implying that they want you to do those things. This is something I’ve seen a lot in conversations.

Instead of saying, ‘It feels like we’re constantly changing priorities,’ one approach that worked well for me was asking, ‘Okay, does this replace an existing priority, or are we adding it to our list of priorities?’ Share on X

I’m sure you’ve experienced as well on both sides of the equation where the entrepreneur is talking about all the things, but they aren’t necessarily meaning that I want you to implement all the things. This is another great reason to have that recap to say, “Out of this conversation, this is what I got out of it. Is that where we’re headed? Is that what we’re doing?” As I said, it is often our natural response, like, “That’s just me doing CYA.” It’s like, no, it really isn’t. It really is about clarity.

Just to recap, in case anybody’s losing the thread here. The first is asking the clarifying commitment questions. The second tool I think you have in your pocket is reflecting back the pattern that you’re observing, rather than making any accusations. The third is documenting the decisions publicly. You do not have to document the whole conversation, just the decisions. This is where I think we landed. Priority one, this month is X, and we’re pausing priorities Y and Z, and our deadline is on the 30th.

“I’m doing this, and you’ll get me this by then.”

Strategic Framing Of Future Consequences

The fourth thing I learned was working with web teams. I can do some website stuff these days only because most websites are built on the theme, and I can make a theme work. Not because I’m actually good at any code or anything like that. What I learned from working with web teams is framing things by referencing future impact. I would work many times. I was like that go-between. I got the web team here. I’ve got leadership here, and we’re supposed to redesign a website. Leadership says, “I want this, I want that. I want to make it pop.”

Some nice, very generic, not useful descriptor.

You go to the web team, the web team is like, “What does make it pop mean? Are we using neon colors? Is that a sound? Is it what? There’s all this frustration because everybody feels like they’re just chasing their tail. I worked with a web developer, actually, he wasn’t a designer or anything, but he was so good about saying, “Tonya, what you need to explain to them that they signed off on this and they signed off on that. We have spent the last two weeks building this out.

If they want us to pivot to them, all we’re doing is moving around some boxes. I get that that’s what they think, but we actually hard-coded a theme based on what they approved. For us to move the boxes around at this stage actually means we clear off the two weeks of work we did, we start from scratch, and we’re now going to have to take another two weeks to build out a theme according to this. Is that the trade-off they want to make? Do they hate the location of the boxes that much?”

I remember in the moment thinking, “I didn’t understand that that’s what they were signing off on either. I didn’t understand that to get to here, you already had to do some work.” I’m just as guilty of thinking it was a lot easier than it really was. This has probably been like 15 years, 20 years maybe, since I’ve worked with this individual, but I’m always going like, “What are the consequences of this? How much time has this been? What are we really losing here?”

What I recognized in that moment was the way that I often took the developers’ responses to leadership, just made it sound like they didn’t want to work that hard. They just didn’t want to do the work over again. It wasn’t that. They were going like, “That’s two weeks, and our deadline is here. We have a little bit of buffer, but we do not have that much buffer built in.”

A real entrepreneurial brain often skips about 48 steps. Share on X

It was really about sharing that strategic perspective. It’s like, “If we change here, we have to move the timeline.” You do not realize that now, but four weeks from now, you’re going to be angry that we’re not done. Can you think of anything else? Does that seem to summarize the most powerful things you can do when you feel like you’re not in a position of power to hold people accountable to what they’ve said?

It’s versions of what you’re talking about. This isn’t like separate. It’s more of a tactic to use the things that you’re doing. Part of that is establishing a regular conversation, because then this doesn’t feel like it’s out of the blue.It’s one of the reasons that we developed the tool that we’ve used internally now for years, as an accountability process, is that we have them use the tool every week. It’s not like wait until everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket before you tell us anything. Usually, when it’s gone to hell in a handbasket, I do not have time to tell you what’s going on.

When you have that weekly touch point, then you have a weekly opportunity to ask for clarity, a weekly opportunity to talk about your trade-offs. The trade-offs oftentimes aren’t that big if you’re discussing them weekly.

That’s the place where, if you can create a rhythm, and it doesn’t have to be weekly, it could be every other week, but it needs to be more than like once a quarter or worse, once a year, doing like a performance review thing. That’s not helpful. It needs to be regular because it presents an opportunity on a consistent basis to be able to ask questions, get clarification, adjust priorities as needed, and do all of these things. Once it starts being established, that’s when I think it becomes way easier to, as you said, realize it’s like they’re starting to shift.

They haven’t even realized that they’re starting to shift. Let’s ask the question if they’re shifting. If they say yes, then it’s like, “Great. We’re going to shift too.” It’s the classic descriptor about, and I’m going to get the information completely wrong. I’m not even going to try to give you accurate information, but I was talking about a pilot who was doing a speech, and he talked about how often adjustments are made on a two-hour flight. It’s a gigantic number, way more than you would think. Even if you think it’s a big number, it’s way bigger.

It’s a bigger number than that.

Documentation often feels like a CYA—'cover your booty'—but it's not. It's really about making sure we understand what both parties are agreeing to. Share on X

Maintaining A Rhythm Of Conversation

Way bigger than that, like I said. I’m not even going to try to pretend. That’s the whole thing. If you get off just by a tenth of a degree, which really is a very tiny amount, but you extend it out any distance, all of a sudden, you are way off course. If you catch that early, then it’s still tiny. That rhythm of conversation is another thing. Back to, sometimes leaders do not know that they need to be offering that. That’s a place where you can make it about you. Would be really helpful for me if I could meet with you for 15 minutes or 30 minutes once every two weeks.

We’ve talked about what you can do. Before we close up, we have to talk about what not to do. Maybe this is just my own version of therapy here, Gwen, because I remember in my twenties seeing people much more senior than me doing things and going, “I cannot say I know what to do, but I do not think that’s it.”

I’m sure that’s it.

Here’s the first thing. You’ve got a boss who’s like flip-flopping in the wind in your opinion. First thing not to do. Do not go around complaining to your coworkers about it, or to other vendors, or in the case of a client, to your contact. First of all, do not go around gossiping sideways because those people do not have any more power than you do. All you’re doing is so now we all agree that the boss changes their mind every other moment.

That doesn’t help any of us move forward. The first thing not to do is not go gossiping or complaining to your coworkers or to other people who are in similarly powerless positions, in your opinion, because it’s not like somebody else is going to go tell the boss something different. Either you do it or keep your mouth shut. What would you say? What is an example you would have for what not to do?

When you said that, it’s like, I do not know. You said that, it’s like, “Yeah, that’s a really good one.” Another version of that is I do not like to jump to their boss if that’s appropriate, if I haven’t tried to fix it with them first. I’m not saying you should never go to their boss. There are situations, and I’m old enough that the whole sexual harassment thing, what we used to call sexual harassment, was not at all what we call sexual harassment now. That was just like you had to put up with that stuff.

Unfortunately, it was the time. If you’re getting sexual harassment, you’re probably not going to be able to deal with it with your boss, probably. You need to go to HR or someone else. The type of thing that we’re talking about, just being accountable to staying the course, doing those things, do not jump without first having tried to deal with it yourself. What that does is it disempowers you when you do that because it says, “I do not have the authority to do anything. I’m poor.”

It makes you a victim instead of empowered. Most people do not actually like a victim. Much better to be empowered. Now, as I said, sometimes you’ve tried, and it’s really not doing anything, and there are obviously critical situations where you need to do that. For just the average day-to-day thing, take the empowered statement first instead of just jumping. I have seen people who just absolutely will not talk to their boss, but they will go talk to their boss’s boss.

Avoiding Passive-Aggressive Compliance

I always think that’s funny too. Do not go around to your coworkers, thinking one of them is going to go talk to the boss. Do not go to the boss’s boss if you haven’t gone to the boss yet. Third, I’m going to actually discuss two sides of a coin. Do not quite quit. That’s the new term for it. Also, no malicious compliance.

What I mean by that is if you have a boss who has a history of changing their mind mid gear, it would be normal, I think, to take the approach of “Rather than getting started on this today, I’m going to give it five days. I know we only have ten days to do this, but I’m sure they’re just going to change their mind five days from now. Why would I waste my time and energy?”

Frame things by referencing future impact. Say, 'If we change here, we have to adjust the timeline, and you might not realize it now—but a few weeks from now, you'll be frustrated that we're not done.' Share on X

If they do not change their mind, now you’ve got five fewer days to do it, and so you’re going to end up not doing it to the full extent that you could. You’re not going to be able to deliver excellence. Let’s just compliance piece. “This is what they say they want. I guess I’ll give them the bare minimum of what they say they want. Knowing full well this isn’t what we need.” Just have the hard conversation. Do not be all passive-aggressive about it.

I would add all types of passive-aggressive behavior. Be an adult. Treat them like an adult and be an adult and have the conversation. Any time that we’re not, we’re not being effective. It really is about having the conversation. I would say to summarize is for all things of like, do not have the conversation.

I’ll give you one more.

Talking to your coworkers, talking to your boss, and quiet quitting are all not having the conversation.

Rejecting The Role Of The Martyr

There’s one more way that we avoid having the conversation. This one I want to bring up because most people think it’s a positive. I am actually going to refer to it as a negative, and then I’m going to explain, and you’ll see where most people think it’s a positive. Do not martyr yourself. The other way, and I have been guilty of this, I did not think I was murdering myself because I didn’t do the whole, look at me, I work so hard thing, because that’s what I thought of as a murder, but I was murdering myself.

What I mean by that is you quietly absorb the chaos. You go, “This is what they want me to do.” You go, and you run full out, and you do that, and you deliver it. They go, “Wait, no, I want this instead.” You’re like, “You go full out. You work the long hours, you work the weekends, you do whatever.” You say, “I have to.” They move the goalposts on me, and now I have to go over here. They never say anything to the boss about it.

They may never say anything to the coworkers, but everybody sees, and they go, “You cannot expect me to work 90 hours a week as Tonya does.” Meanwhile, the boss is like, “Tonya’s never said she works 90 hours a week. I just assume that this is 40 hours a week.” I, Tonya, always have a smile on my face. “I assume she loves chasing these rabbits left and right.

That’s a biggie. That’s a tough one to balance because sometimes we need to do that. It’s the trick of, are we doing it on repeat? Sometimes something comes up, and it’s like, “That totally changed things. We’ve got to rework, we’ve got to do whatever.” We want to jump in, and we want to make that happen.

It’s back to what you said about having the conversation.

Don't jump in without first trying to handle it yourself. Doing otherwise disempowers you, because it signals that you feel you have no authority to act. Share on X

It is about having the conversation and saying, like I said, one is if it happens once a year, that’s a whole different thing than if it happens once a month. Which is a whole different thing than if it happened once a week. At the end of that saying, so this happened back to feedback. Let’s make sure we understand what caused that to happen and how we can avoid having that happen again in the future. It’s really easy to get caught in that martyrdom because we want to do a good job.

It’s perfectly okay to say I can get this done, but it would require me to work two late nights this week and probably over the weekend. Is it that high a priority that we make this shift? If it is, I’m totally happy to do that, because there are times they will say, just get it done. There are other times the leader will say, “Maybe not.” Especially if you’re hourly paid. The leader may second, “Wait, you’re telling me this doesn’t fit in your regular work week? In that case, maybe I’ll ask somebody else to do it, or maybe we’ll just stay the course that we were already on.”

Being really aware of that. In every case, it really is about having the conversation and not assuming that it has to go poorly.

What you have really highlighted. This is not about you trying to control the other person. It’s just about you helping them to think more clearly. As you’ve said, we talk about this all the time, with the outside perspective that every leader needs somebody in their life, in the organization, who is willing to say, “Are we sure about this?” Most leaders do not have that because everybody has been conditioned to be like, “They’re the boss. They must know what they’re doing.” Meanwhile, they might be just flying by the seat of their pants like everybody else.

Most of the time, they are to a large degree. Anybody that you talk to will say if they’re really talking about it in a safe environment where they’re comfortable saying it, they’ll say, “No, most of the time I’m just trying to figure it out as I go along.”

If you have a boss or a client who keeps changing priorities on you, let’s just sum up where we’ve landed today. We’ve talked about how a lot of times, that loss of consistency is not malicious. They’re not setting you up to fail. They do not think it’s fun to watch you do all the things. They either have so many big ideas going on in their heads, see so many priorities that they’re not realizing that they are making you chase a bunch of things.

  

  

Sometimes there’s pressure from some other area, and they haven’t thought to tell you. It’s like every word they say has like 49 additional words that you need for the context of the situation. Gave you four different approaches to influencing upward. Gave you some approaches on how you can ask clarifying questions that do not come across as if you’re being rude or defiant. Talked about documenting the decisions and how that can protect everybody.

Talked about what not to say, which I think is sometimes just as important as what to say. Recognizing that you can take an empowered position. That’s really the through line of today’s episode, even if you have a wishy washy client or a wishy washy boss, there is a position of empowerment you can take. Even if the big question that you end up asking yourself is, do I need to let this client go? Do I need to find a different work environment? Would you add anything, Gwen?

Nope. That really is the biggest thing about owning your own power within the situation and being respectful. That’s all it has to be. Being respectful doesn’t mean being the victim.

We’re leaving it right there. That’s a good mic drop moment. I like that one. If you are listening and thinking, reflection would be helpful in a number of ways, whether this is helping you help your CEOs better reflect, or if you like the idea of taking a moment week to week to personally reflect, Gwen has an amazing product for you. It is her really good question email. It is free. It costs you nothing.

Every Friday, she will send you a question, just one question, very little context that you can spend some time reflecting on to be more strategic, and help you inform your future decisions. If you respond, Gwen will give you a reply. If you do not respond, no harm, no foul. You’ll get another question next Friday. You’ll go to www.tonyakubo.com/Question to sign up. Just remember, better questions create better leadership all around.

  

Mentioned in This Episode

• Gwen’s One Really Good Question

 

About Your Hosts

Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.

Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.