Mentorship & Coaching

Top performers protect their time differently. Most of us lose precious hours to chaos and distraction. On the advice of my business coach, I did a time audit. What I learned changed everything. I tracked my hours for a week. Captured everything I spent time on. Now I’m working to eliminate, delegate, or automate everything that doesn’t move the needle. If you struggle to get the important things done, here are 12 productivity tools that actually work: 1. Timeboxing Divide your day into clear blocks. Give each block one purpose. Nothing else happens during that time. It's simple but powerful. 2. Pomodoro Technique 25 minutes of focus. 5-minute break. No compromise, no distractions. I was skeptical at first. Now I can't work without it. 3. Two-Minute Rule If something takes less than two minutes, do it now. Those small tasks pile up and drain your energy when ignored. 4. Kanban Board See your work move from "to-do" to "done." It's surprisingly motivating to watch progress happen visually. 5. 1-3-5 Rule Plan your day around: 1 big task 3 medium tasks 5 small tasks This creates balance and prevents overwhelm. 6. Eat the Frog Do your hardest task first thing. Everything else feels easier after that. 7. Flowtime Technique Work until your focus naturally fades. Take a short break. Learn your rhythm. 8. 80/20 Rule Focus on the vital 20% that creates 80% of your results. Be ruthless about cutting the rest. 9. Getting Things Done (GTD) Capture everything. Organize what matters. Let go of what doesn't. 10. Warren Buffett's 25/5 Rule List 25 goals. Circle your top 5. Ignore everything else. 11. Eisenhower Matrix Organize tasks by urgency and importance. It shows you what really needs your attention. 12. Task Batching Group similar work together. Your brain works better this way. The reality is simple: Time management isn't about squeezing more into your days. It's about making space for what matters most. Choose your minutes wisely. They become your life. ♻️ Find this helpful? Repost for your network. 📌 Follow Amy Gibson for practical leadership tips.

The problem with time management isn’t laziness. It starts when people try to use the wrong approach for the wrong problem. ↳ Some people lose focus easily. ↳ Some keep delaying small tasks. ↳ Some struggle to stop procrastinating. ↳ Some are managing too many projects at once. ↳ And some are simply trying to protect balance without losing results. That is why the answer isn’t to do more. It’s to find a system that truly works for you. Here are a few methods that can help: • Eat That Frog Who is it for: You struggle with procrastination. How to start today: Do the hardest task first each morning. • Pomodoro Who is it for: You get easily distracted. How to start today: Work 25 mins, take a 5-min break. • Eisenhower Matrix Who is it for: You have too many decisions. How to start today: Sort tasks: Do, Decide, Delegate, Delete. • 2-Minute Rule Who is it for: You delay small tasks. How to start today: If under 2 mins, do it right away. • Time Blocking Who is it for: You manage multiple projects. How to start today: Assign specific hours for specific tasks. • Task Batching Who is it for: You switch tasks too often. How to start today: Group all emails, all calls, all reviews. • The 8+8+8 Rule Who is it for: You struggle with work-life balance. How to start today: Split your day: 8h work, 8h sleep, 8h life. The goal is not to use every approach at once. It’s to understand what is taking most of your time, and choose a system that helps you work with more clarity and less overwhelm. Because strong time management isn’t only about productivity. It’s also about focus. Energy. Consistency. And protecting your attention from being scattered all day. The right approach can make work feel lighter. Not because you suddenly have fewer tasks. But because you finally have a structure that supports the way you work best. If you want to go deeper into these methods and build a system that actually sticks, I put everything together in one place. My Time Management Course walks you through each approach step by step, so you can stop feeling overwhelmed and start working with real clarity. Link in comments. Which of these approaches do you think would help you the most right now? _ ♻️ Share this if you believe better focus starts with the right system. ☝️ For more valuable content, follow Victoria Repa | BetterMe CEO & Founder

Women are overmentored and underchampioned. Every career advice panel, every women’s leadership summit, HR initiative lands on the same answer: find a mentor. Get guidance. Have someone to talk to about your career. We have plenty of people willing to give us advice. Sit us down and tell us to be more confident. Review our resumes. Suggest we think about how we’re coming across. Remind us it’s a marathon not a sprint. Reassure us that our time will come. Pat us on the head and send us back to wait our turn. What we don’t have are people in rooms we’re not in, saying our names when opportunities come up. People who will stake their reputation on us. People who will say “she’s ready.” People who will hand us the thing instead of coaching us endlessly on how to ask for it. Mentorship is someone talking to you. Sponsorship is someone betting on you. One of them changes careers. The other makes you feel supported while you watch mediocre men get promoted while you’re told ‘your attitude needs work’. Mentorship is a way of appearing to help women without redistributing any power. It costs nothing to give advice. You get to feel generous, get credit for caring, and never have to spend political capital. Meanwhile sponsorship costs something. Saying “I want her on this project”. Telling the CEO “she should be in this meeting”. Pushing back when someone says “she’s not quite ready yet”. Which is why so few people do it. Men get sponsored automatically. Men are presumed competent and promoted on potential while women are required to prove ourselves over and over and get promoted only on undeniable performance. A senior guy sees himself in the young guy, takes an interest, pulls him up. It’s just how things work. Meanwhile women get told to go find a mentor. Make it happen for yourself. The labour of our own advancement is always on us. “Find a mentor” assumes the problem is that we haven’t networked hard enough, haven’t asked the right questions, haven’t been proactive. That if we just read the right books and had the right conversations we’d finally crack the code. Meanwhile the actual decision-makers are busy sponsoring people who look like them. I’ve had mentors. Lovely people.. They told me what to read, how to navigate politics, when to push and when to wait. Very helpful. You know what actually moved my career? The few people who put me in rooms, made introductions that mattered, handed me opportunities. Who didn’t wait for me to be ready but decided I was ready and acted like it. So here’s my advice: stop looking for mentors. Stop asking senior women for coffee. Stop trying to absorb wisdom from people who have no intention of actually helping you get anywhere. Look for people with power and watch what they do with it. Are they talking to you or are they spending capital on you? Are they coaching you for the opportunity or creating it? Are they helping you get ready or are they deciding you are? Enough mentorship. Stick your neck out.

The difference between career plateaus and breakthrough moments often comes down to how we process setbacks. 76% accurate recovery prediction. 61% reduced recovery time. 82% renewal rate within 90 days. These aren't just hopeful claims. There's research-backed evidence that failure recovery is a learnable skill. We're not in an era where resilience is optional. We're in a time where your bounce-back ability determines your career trajectory. 💡 Elite performers don't just endure failure differently. They transform it systematically into a future advantage. Here's how research shows they do it: 🔹 𝗡𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 - Reframe setbacks within larger success stories rather than as isolated incidents. Stanford University research found this predicted recovery speed with 76% accuracy and improved subsequent performance in 83% of cases. 🔹 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗙𝗶𝗹𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 - Isolate exact failure points through detailed analysis rather than generalizing. Applied Psychology studies show this reduced recovery time by 61% compared to self-criticism approaches. 🔹 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗰 𝗩𝘂𝗹𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 - Share failures with 2-3 carefully selected trusted individuals. Harvard Business School research found this accelerated recovery by 40% and increased learning integration by 57% versus private processing. 🔹 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗲𝘁 - Treat outcomes as data points rather than judgments about your capabilities. MIT Technology Review studies show this approach predicted renewed achievement within 90 days with 82% accuracy. 🔹 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗥𝗶𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝘀 - Develop specific practices that reset mental and emotional states after setbacks. Research found structured rituals reduced rumination by 34% and accelerated return to productivity by 2.7 days. The world doesn't need more perfectionists afraid to fail. It needs resilient innovators who can extract maximum value from inevitable setbacks. That's the mindset we're helping build - for professionals who see failure not as the end, but as the beginning of their next breakthrough. Coaching can help; let's chat. | Joshua Miller 🚀 Download Your Free E-Book:  “𝟮𝟬 𝗦𝗺𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗦𝗵𝗶𝗳𝘁𝘀 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗕𝗶𝗴 𝗟𝗶𝗳𝗲 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀” ↳ https://rb.gy/37y9vi #executivecoaching #mindset #leadership

Two and a half years ago, I sought out a mentor. Not an employee. Not a partner. A mentor. Someone I’d first listened to on a podcast. He had already walked the road I was about to step on. He came into our business as an advisor. I invested thousands of dollars to bring him in. That decision changed everything. Through him, I learned the ins and outs of selling a recruitment business through an MBO. Two and a half years later, I executed exactly that strategy and sold a chunk of my company. That “expensive” investment came back tenfold. My mentor also had a mentor guiding him through the next stage of his journey. And that’s how I discovered the digital information space, how to package knowledge into products, and how to educate founders at scale. Another mentor showed me how to integrate AI tools and automation into our recruitment model, making our business leaner and more profitable. Right now, we work with a coach who teaches us how to run ads and build lead systems for both our coaching business and our personal branding advisory. And guess what? My wife, who had a 7Figure exit with her tech firm also has coaches. And she coaches others in return. There’s a pattern here. Every successful person I know has mentors. They don’t rely on “figuring it out alone.” Think about it: • Michael Jordan had Phil Jackson. • Serena Williams worked with Patrick Mouratoglou. • Steve Jobs had Bill Campbell. • Bill Gates had Warren Buffett. • Even Buffett had Benjamin Graham. The best in sport, business, and life don’t go at it solo. They compress time, avoid wasted effort, and build bigger futures because they stand on the shoulders of others. A mentor won’t do the work for you. But they’ll help you skip years of trial and error. That’s the cheat code in business. If you’re stuck in the maze alone, you’ll eventually find your way, but it will take way longer, and cost more in mistakes and missed opportunities. With a mentor, you still do the work, but you get there faster. I’ve seen this pattern in every successful entrepreneur I know. So if you’re building, scaling, or reinventing yourself in business — ask yourself this: Who’s guiding you through the maze?

“Women and People of Color are over mentored and under sponsored.” I shared this during yesterday’s Gallup and WOHASU ® Women’s Wellbeing Panel because it’s a reality we must confront. 💡Research from the Center for Talent Innovation reveals the stark truth: • 71% of sponsors say they’re helping protégés advance, but only 30% of protégés agree. • The numbers are even more troubling for Black employees, with just 5% feeling sponsored in their workplaces. Sponsorship isn’t just about guidance—it’s about action. Sponsors advocate, open doors, and use their influence to elevate others. Here’s what sponsorship looks like in practice: • Advocating for high-visibility projects: Recommending someone for a leadership role or a game-changing initiative. • Speaking up in key rooms: Endorsing their abilities and readiness for promotions during executive discussions. • Leveraging personal networks: Making introductions that lead to pivotal career opportunities. I’m forever grateful to my former boss, Jim Clifton, for being not just a mentor but a true sponsor in my career. His advocacy transformed my opportunities and trajectory in ways I’ll never forget. Sponsorship isn’t just a ‘nice-to-have’—it’s a necessity for building equitable workplaces. Who are you sponsoring? How can we do better? Let’s continue this important conversation. #EquityInAction #Leadership #WomenInLeadership #SponsorshipMatters #Gallup #WOHASU

For International Women in Engineering Day (INWED) 2026, let's skip the stock photos of women engineers in hardhats. Instead, let's focus on the repeatable gap we keep finding. According to NSF/NCSES data, women with engineering degrees start ahead of men. Yet, 1-5 years after graduation, 53.4% of women are working in engineering roles, vs. 49.3% of men. This surprises so many people. Then the shift comes. By 11-15 years out? Only 26.8% of women are still in engineering. Men: 41%. Same degree. Same starting point. Different outcome. Here's what my six years of research with women of color in STEM shows about why: Early career, the rules are clear. Prove your technical skills. Master the work. Women do exactly that, often better than their peers. Then the rules change and nobody tells them. By mid-career, advancement stops being about what you can do and starts being about who sees you doing it. Executive exposure. Sponsorship. Office politics. Nearly 16% of mid-career women of color in my research identify politics, visibility, and sponsorship as their primary struggle, not competence, not capability. They worked hard for years following the rules, then the game shifted entirely. That gap between 53.4% and 26.8% isn't a pipeline problem. It's happening inside your firm, in promotion cycles and visibility decisions you control. If you're celebrating women engineers today, ask first: how many of the women you hired 10 years ago are still here, and in what roles? If you don't know the answer, that's worth a conversation. #INWED2026 #EngineeringIntelligence #MissingMiddle #AEC #WomeninEngineering

Mentorship has been a cornerstone of my career, but my approach to building a network of mentors has evolved over time. Early on, I thought the best mentors were those who mirrored my role—essentially a more successful, more experienced version of myself. But I’ve since realized that this myopic approach often misses the mark. Some of the most valuable mentors I’ve had weren’t in venture capital at all. They came from adjacent industries like asset management, tackling challenges that are analogous to mine but offering perspectives I couldn’t see from within my own field. Here’s why this works: 1. Outside perspectives reveal blind spots: Mentors outside your industry can identify dynamics in your business that might be invisible to you because you're too close to them. These insights are invaluable for seeing the bigger picture. 2. Diverse thinking adds depth: A broader, more diverse network of mentors exposes you to new ways of solving problems, offering frameworks and strategies you might not encounter within your immediate circle. Building a mentor base is critical, but diversity is key. Don’t just look for people who are “you in 20 years” with more success. Instead, seek mentors with fresh perspectives and different lenses. That’s where the real value lies.

Mentoring and coaching are not the same thing. Most founders use the words interchangeably... And end up getting less from both. I did not know the difference until I spent 10 days training and qualifying as a business coach at INSEAD in 2023. Here is what I learned: ✅ Mentoring uses experience and shares learning. A mentor has been where you are. They have made mistakes, built the business, and lived through the consequences. When you bring them a problem, they draw on all of that to tell you what they would do and why. My first mentor was Nigel Morris, the co-founder of Capital One. Three hours in his office changed the direction of HomeServe in America. ✅ Coaching facilitates thinking, exploring options and decision-making. A coach asks the questions that help you find them yourself. The best questions are often the simplest ones. - "Why do you think that?"  - "What are you trying to achieve?"  - "What choices do you have here?" Sometimes the most basic questions elicit the most powerful solutions. The problem is that coaching alone would never have been especially useful for the founders I work with. And mentoring without first understanding the real issue or opportunity can miss the point entirely. So I combined them into what I call Coachment. You start with coaching, asking the right questions to properly diagnose the problem or opportunity. Then you move into mentoring, applying real business experience to what you have just uncovered. Think of it like a medical check-up. The X-ray machine diagnoses the issue. (The coach) And the specialist consultant uses their experience to decide what to do about it. (The mentor) Together they are far more useful than either one alone. Most founders I meet have never had either. If you are serious about scaling, you need to find both. If you'd like more information on building and scaling your business, subscribe to How To Make a Billion. It's a free weekly newsletter with lessons and frameworks from over 40 years of entrepreneurship. Subscribe here: https://lnkd.in/ergDQtiK Comment below with your thoughts on seeking counsel.  If you have a coach or mentor who has helped your business scale, please tag them to show your appreciation. 

Let’s stop romanticizing input. Start professionalizing decisions. Because a team that hears everyone but can’t converge isn’t inclusive but indecisive. I see it all the time: 1. Teams bring bold, diverse perspectives to the table. 2. They brainstorm, debate, expand thinking. 3. But when it's time to choose - silence, hesitation, power grabs, or rushed consensus. The biggest problem I see in companies is that they treat decision-making as a moment, not a discipline. That’s where I focus in my work with leadership teams: Not just on hearing more voices, but on building the muscle of inclusive decision-making as a repeatable process that turns diversity into direction. Here’s how we do it: 1️⃣ Make decision rights explicit.  Who decides? Who contributes? Who needs to know? 2️⃣ Separate idea generation from commitment. Diverge first. Converge second. 3️⃣ Create a decision rhythm. Clear steps, check-ins, and closure points. 4️⃣ Build psychological safety to challenge, not just speak. No point in diverse ideas if no one can question the status quo. Because diverse ideas only create value when a team knows how to decide together. P.S.: Does your team know how to end a conversation with a decision and not just more ideas? —————————— 👋 Hi, I’m Susanna. I help organizations build high-performing, inclusive cultures by turning psychological safety and diversity into business strategy. Let’s work on how your teams & leaders think, feel, and decide - together.