Leadership Insights | Maria Wade Executive Coach

Practical wisdom for senior leaders navigating complexity. These posts explore the skills, mindsets, and practices that help executives lead with clarity, build trust, and create environments where people thrive.

When the Perfect Day Exercise Changed My Career

After I published my post on the Perfect Day exercise, a colleague reached out with something that stuck with me. She shared my resistance to the “where do you see yourself in five to ten years” question, but she named a specific version of the trap I hadn’t fully articulated: the way we default to planning our futures in terms of roles.

I want to be a director. I want to run my own firm. I want to make partner.

These sound like ambitions. They feel concrete. But they are actually some of the most limiting ways to think about what comes next, because they lock your imagination into a structure someone else designed. A title tells you almost nothing about how you’ll spend your Tuesday afternoon. And yet, when most people plan their futures, that’s where they start.

I know this because I lived it.

The credentials that didn’t open the doors I expected

When I moved to the United States, I arrived with years of leadership experience, including C-level positions, and a career I had built in my home country. I had real ground under my ambitions. I did what seemed logical: I set about verifying every credential I could. I passed my PMP certification again. I earned a Change Management certification. I updated my résumé and started applying for the roles that matched my background.

The rejections came steadily. Not one or two, but enough to make me question whether everything I had built before was transferable at all. I was making decisions based on roles I had held, qualifications I could prove on paper, and what seemed like a rational next step. I was asking the labor market to confirm an identity I had carried with me across an ocean. It kept saying no.

At the time, this felt like failure. I was qualified. I had done the work. The logic was sound. Why wasn’t it working?

Looking back, I can see what I couldn’t then: I was trying to fit myself into a shape that had already served its purpose. The roles I was chasing belonged to a version of my career that was complete. But I didn’t have language for that yet, so I kept applying for variations of what I already knew.

What the exercise showed me that my résumé couldn’t

Somewhere in the middle of all those rejections, I did the Perfect Day exercise.

I didn’t write about a title. I didn’t describe an office or a reporting structure. What came out, when I let myself write freely, was this: I saw myself working with people. Having real conversations. Sharing ideas. Asking questions that mattered.

That was it. No company name, no industry, no level. Just the texture of a day that felt like mine.

I shared this with a friend. Her response was immediate: “What about coaching?”

It was one of those moments where someone sees something in your own writing that you haven’t seen yourself. The Perfect Day exercise had bypassed all the categories I had been sorting myself into, the titles, the credentials, the logical next steps, and revealed what I actually wanted to do with my time. Not what I was qualified for. Not what made sense on paper. What I wanted the hours to feel like.

Why roles are a trap and days are a compass

Here is what I have come to understand, both from my own experience and from years of working with clients who face similar crossroads: when you define your future by a role, you are borrowing someone else’s structure for your life. You are saying, “I’ll know I’ve arrived when I have this title, at this kind of organization, at this level.” But titles describe positions in systems. They don’t describe the quality of your experience inside those systems.

Two people can hold the same title and live completely different days. One is energized. The other is depleted. The title is identical. The days are nothing alike.

The Perfect Day exercise cuts through this because it asks you to describe experience, not position. When you write about a day, you can’t hide behind abstractions. You have to say what you’re actually doing, how it feels, who you’re with, what the rhythm is. And what emerges is often different from what you would have put on a goal sheet.

I’ve watched this happen with clients who come to coaching convinced they need a promotion, a lateral move, a new company. Sometimes they do. But sometimes, when they write their perfect day, the surprise is that the change they need has nothing to do with their title and everything to do with how they’re spending the hours inside it.

What the rejections actually gave me

That was five years ago, and I have never been happier in my work. The rejections that felt so discouraging at the time turned out to be the most productive thing that happened to my career, because they made it impossible to keep following the old map. They forced me to stop asking “what role should I have?” and start asking “what kind of day do I want to live?”

Coaching is the answer I found. My days are filled with exactly what surfaced in that exercise: working with people, having conversations that matter, asking the questions that open something up. But also reading, learning, writing, making sense of patterns I notice across clients and situations, and a constant process of creation. The day I imagined is the day I live.

But the point of this story isn’t that everyone should become a coach. The point is that the future I actually wanted was invisible to me for as long as I was looking through the lens of roles and titles. The moment I described a day instead, it appeared. And someone who knew me recognized it before I did.

If this sounds familiar

If you’re in a place where the roles available to you don’t feel right, if you’re wondering what comes next but every option you can name feels like a variation of something you’ve already done, try a different question. Don’t ask what you want to be. Ask what you want a day to look like.

You might discover, as I did, that the answer has been waiting for you to stop looking in the wrong direction.

You can start with the Perfect Day exercise. If you’d like a guided version with prompts and reflection questions, I’ve created a free workbook to walk you through the process.

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Creating Your Perfect Day

I used to ask my clients where they see themselves in five to ten years. I stopped.

Not because the question is wrong, exactly. But because the answers almost never helped. People would produce something that sounded like a résumé from the future, or they’d freeze up entirely, unsure how to predict a life that keeps surprising them. And honestly? I found the same thing in my own life. A ten-year plan gives you a destination. It doesn’t give you a way of living.

What I’ve found more useful, both in my coaching practice and personally, is an exercise that has been around for years and works as well now as it ever did. I replaced “Where do you see yourself in five to ten years?” with a different question entirely:

Tell me about your perfect day.

One day. Not a career trajectory. Not a milestone. Just: what does a single day look like when it’s exactly the way you want it?

Why one day is more powerful than you think

Most people hear “perfect day” and assume it’s a lightweight exercise. A nice daydream. Something softer than real planning.

It isn’t.

When you visualize a day in rich, sensory detail, something happens in your brain that doesn’t happen when you set a five-year goal. Your brain is, at its core, a prediction machine. This is one of the central insights from neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research: the brain doesn’t passively wait for the world to happen and then react. It is constantly constructing predictions about what will happen next, based on everything it has learned before. Those predictions shape what you notice, how you feel, and what actions seem available to you.

This means that when you imagine your perfect day with enough specificity, you aren’t just fantasizing. You are training your brain’s predictive model. You are giving it new data about what a good life looks and feels like, so it can start filtering the world differently. Your brain doesn’t cleanly separate “real” from “vividly imagined.” The neural patterns overlap. A detailed visualization literally begins to reshape the predictions your brain makes about your own future.

This is why a five-year plan often fails to motivate: it’s too abstract to activate that predictive machinery. “Become a VP” or “Launch my own practice” doesn’t give your brain enough sensory information to work with. But “I wake up at 6:30, the house is quiet, I make coffee and sit on the porch for twenty minutes before I open my laptop” does. Your brain can simulate that. It can begin to orient toward it.

How the exercise works

You write about one perfect day. Not an exceptional day, not a vacation day, but a day in your regular life as you want it to be. You stay in the present tense. You include details: what you see, what you hear, how your body feels, who is around you, what kind of work you’re doing.

You don’t worry about “how.” You don’t try to be realistic. You focus entirely on the what.

The results often surprise people. One of my clients, a senior executive who came to coaching to “figure out her next move,” discovered through this exercise that her perfect day didn’t involve a title change at all. What she wanted was a morning where she wasn’t already in reactive mode before she finished breakfast. She wanted one meeting-free afternoon a week to think. She wanted to pick up her kids without checking her phone in the parking lot. None of this required a career overhaul. But she hadn’t been able to see it until she stopped thinking in terms of milestones and started thinking in terms of hours.

Another client noticed that her working days and her weekends represented completely different visions. She needed two versions of a perfect day, because what restored her on Saturday had nothing to do with what energized her on Monday. So we separated them. Both versions mattered.

And then there was the client who was in the middle of this exercise when she walked past a chair in a shop and had an immediate, physical recognition: this chair belongs in my perfect day. I asked her if she had a picture of it. She did. We saved it. That image became an anchor, something concrete that made the visualization feel less like an idea and more like something already beginning to exist.

That physical recognition is worth paying attention to. Barrett’s research on interoception, the brain’s capacity to read signals from the body, suggests that these gut-level responses carry real information. When your body says “yes” to a chair, or a neighborhood, or the image of yourself working in a certain way, that’s your predictive system telling you something about what it’s already learned to want. The exercise makes those signals louder.

What your perfect day reveals about you

Sometimes what shows up in a client’s perfect day tells me something they haven’t said out loud yet.

When someone describes a day that’s entirely about rest, beaches, palm trees, nowhere to be, nothing required of them, I pay attention. Not because there’s anything wrong with wanting that. But because, in my experience, when an entire perfect day is built around escape, it often means the person is at the edge of burnout or already past it. What they’re describing isn’t a life they want to build. It’s the recovery they desperately need right now.

So I’ll ask: how long would you actually want to stay on that beach? A week? A month? What happens after that? And usually, the conversation opens up. The beach was the exhale. Underneath it, there’s a different day waiting, one connected to what they actually care about and want to contribute. The real exercise begins when we connect the images and desires that surface to their values, to what drives them, to their why. That’s where the perfect day stops being a pleasant fantasy and becomes a compass.

Why reading it regularly matters

Writing the perfect day is just the beginning. The real work is returning to what you’ve written, regularly. Not to admire it, but to keep feeding your brain’s prediction system with specific, sensory-rich information about the life you’re building toward.

Here is what I have noticed with clients who do this consistently: they start making small decisions differently. Not dramatic changes. Small ones. They decline a meeting they would have accepted. They rearrange a morning routine. They say no to something that looks good on paper but doesn’t match what they actually want their days to contain. The perfect day becomes a filter, a way of evaluating choices that’s more honest than any strategic framework.

And because it describes a single day rather than a distant goal, it stays flexible. Life changes. What you want from a Tuesday in March might be different from what you wanted in September. You can revise your perfect day whenever it needs revising. It grows with you. A five-year plan feels like a commitment you might fail to keep. A perfect day feels like an invitation you keep extending to yourself.

Start with what you already have

Here is something most people don’t expect: when they write their perfect day, they discover that parts of it already exist. Maybe you already have the morning coffee ritual, or the walk, or the relationship, or the kind of work. You just hadn’t noticed, because you were focused on what’s missing rather than what’s present.

That recognition matters. It changes the exercise from aspiration into honest inventory. What do you already have? What’s close? What would need to change?

You don’t have to wait five years. You don’t have to overhaul anything. You might just need to notice what’s already there and protect it, and then, slowly, add the rest.

The day I realized I was living mine

I want to tell you something that happened to me.

A few years ago, I started working with my visibility coach, Eve Voyevoda. One of the first things she asked me to do was imagine my desirable state five years out and then reverse-engineer the path back to today. It was a different exercise from the Perfect Day, more structured, and honestly, at times quite painful. Reverse engineering a five-year vision forces you to confront every gap between where you are and where you want to be. I did it. I wrote it all down, including the sensory details of that future life and, alongside them, the business metrics and revenue targets I believed I needed to get there.

About a year and a half later, a client who had just completed her own Perfect Day reflection came to our session and said, “I live my perfect day.”

And then there was silence.

I managed to say, “Tell me more.” She described the state she was in, one she recognized as what she had written about. The life she had imagined had become the life she was actually living.

Later that day, I opened my own notes from the exercise I’d done with Eve. I reread the sensory descriptions I’d written, the morning, the work, the feeling of the day. And I realized, with genuine surprise, that I was living my perfect day too.

I ran to my husband to show him my old reflections, to point at the pages and say, look, this is my life now. He read them with his habitual groundedness and asked, “What about all these numbers and business goals?”

He was right that they were there. At the time I wrote those reflections, I was certain I needed specific revenue figures and business milestones to arrive at my best life. Life proved that it wasn’t true. What I needed was clarity about my purpose and serving it, day in and day out. The numbers I’d written down hadn’t materialized the way I’d planned. The life had.

That’s what this exercise can do. Not magically deliver a future. But clarify what actually matters, so that when you arrive at it, you recognize it.

If you’re curious about how the Perfect Day exercise changed the direction of my own career, I wrote about that here.

Try your own Perfect Day exercise. I’ve created a guide with questions and prompts to walk you through the process. You can download it here and take thirty minutes to write the day you actually want to live. Then come back to it in three or four months and see what’s changed, both on the page and in your life.

What surprises you? What’s already there that you hadn’t noticed?

Leadership Insights

Humble Leadership: The Power of Keeping an Open Mind

“Humility is the most important quality in a leader. Being humble doesn’t mean to be passive. This is a difficult dichotomy to balance. But as with all the dichotomies–being strong, but not overbearing, for example–just the awareness of these two opposing forces becomes one of the most powerful tools at a leader’s disposal. Leaders must be humble enough to listen to new ideas, willing to learn strategic insights, and open to implementing new and better tactics and strategies. But a leader must also be ready to stand firm when there are clearly unintended consequences that negatively impact the mission and risk harm to the team.” – The Dichotomy of Leadership, J. Willink and L. Babin.

Senior leaders talk about humility often. They want to be approachable, open‑minded, and willing to learn. At the same time, they need to project confidence, make high‑stakes decisions, and hold firm when it matters. The tension between humble leadership and strong executive presence can feel confusing: if you admit you don’t know, will people still trust you? If you stay open to others’ views, will you be seen as indecisive?

In the Leadership Integrity Framework, humility lives at the intersection of Purpose, Presence, and Partnership—knowing your limits, showing up with grounded confidence, and relating to others with genuine curiosity.

Humility Is Not Low Self‑Esteem

Part of the confusion comes from how we use the word “humility.” Leaders sometimes mix it up with self‑doubt, passivity, or playing small.

A useful way to differentiate:

Humility: Willingness to seek advice, listen to other points of view, and be open to changing your approach. You acknowledge both strengths and limits.
Low self‑esteem: Persistent lack of confidence in who you are and what you can do. You mostly see your flaws and rarely claim your strengths.

Humble leaders recognize they are imperfect and still capable. Leaders with low self‑esteem see their imperfections as proof they do not belong. That difference matters for executive presence. Humility strengthens credibility; chronic self‑doubt erodes it.

What Humility Looks Like in Practice

True humility is not weakness. It requires enough inner stability that you don’t need constant validation to feel legitimate.

In practice, humble leadership can look like:

Admitting when you were wrong—and correcting course without dramatizing it
Saying, “I don’t know yet, let me look into that,” instead of pretending to have all the answers
Acknowledging that someone else has the better idea, and championing it visibly
Staying open to feedback, even when it is uncomfortable or challenges your assumptions

These behaviors draw directly on intellectual humility. As Adam Grant describes, intellectual humility is the capacity to stay curious instead of defensive, to search for what is true rather than what makes you feel right. For senior leaders, this is not a nice‑to‑have; it is a core competence in complex environments.

From a Leadership Integrity perspective:

Purpose keeps you rooted in your values, so you can admit mistakes without losing your center.
Presence allows you to communicate “I don’t know” in a way that still feels steady and responsible.
Partnership turns humility into a relationship strength—others feel respected, heard, and invited into problem‑solving.

Do You Lose Confidence When You Admit You Don’t Know?

Many executives quietly fear that if they show uncertainty, their confidence will be questioned. They imagine that saying “I’m not sure yet” will undermine their authority or credibility with the board, their team, or key stakeholders.

What people actually read as weak is not uncertainty; it is avoidance.

Dodging hard questions.
Offering vague answers to protect your image.
Defending an outdated position because changing your mind feels like failure.

By contrast, saying “Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t yet know, and here’s how we’ll find out” often increases trust. It demonstrates clarity, integrity, and a commitment to the work over ego. In other words, the combination of intellectual humility and clear next steps strengthens executive presence rather than diluting it.

The Goal: Confident and Open‑Minded

If you’ve just explored confidence, it can sound like humility asks you to swing to the opposite pole—to defer, stay quiet, and let others lead the way. That is not the invitation.

The real work is balance:

Presenting confidently and staying open to being wrong.
Taking a clear stand and being curious about perspectives you have not yet considered.
Owning your expertise and recognizing it is incomplete without others’ insight.

This is a vertical move: from “either I’m confident or I’m humble” to “I can be both confident and humble in the same conversation.” It is also where Purpose, Presence, and Partnership reinforce each other instead of pulling you in different directions.

When leaders embody this balance, they quietly dismantle the myths that “confidence equals competence” and “humility equals ignorance.” They show that the most trustworthy leaders are often the ones willing to keep an open mind while still taking responsibility for the call.

If you see yourself in this tension, notice your next meeting where you could practice both: state your view clearly, then ask one genuinely curious question that might change your mind.

*If you enjoyed this post, you may like my latest post on confidence.

Photo by Giulia Bertelli on Unsplash

Leadership Insights

The Surprising Truth Behind Confidence

“Lack of confidence kills more dreams than lack of ability. You’re capable of more than you think. Don’t be your own bottleneck.”

– James Clear

In senior leadership, confidence is rarely a simple “do I have it or not?” question. More often, it shows up as something subtler: second‑guessing your decisions, over‑editing your contributions in meetings, or worrying that if you speak too strongly, you will be perceived as arrogant. Many executives sit in this tension, wanting to be seen as confident leaders while quietly fearing they might be “too much.”

In the Leadership Integrity Framework, confidence sits at the intersection of Purpose and Presence: knowing what you stand for and showing up in ways that reflect it. When those two dimensions drift apart, confidence either collapses inward into self‑doubt or inflates outward into something that feels like arrogance.

What Confident Leadership Actually Looks Like

When most people talk about confidence in leadership, they describe a feeling—an inner sense of steadiness or conviction. In practice, leadership confidence looks less like a feeling and more like a set of recognizable behaviors:

Speaking up in difficult conversations and staying in the debate
Raising issues with senior stakeholders that others are reluctant to surface
Negotiating for what you genuinely believe you or your team deserves
Giving full credit to others without feeling diminished by their success

These expressions of confidence share a common thread: a leader who is anchored in their values and willing to stand behind their judgment. That is Presence—your internal clarity made visible through your choices, body language, and communication.

Confidence vs. Arrogance: Why They’re Not the Same

One of the most common concerns leaders bring into coaching is the fear of being perceived as too confident: too direct, too strong, too self‑assured. They have a mental image of the arrogant leader—dismissive, self‑referential, uninterested in feedback—and they want to avoid becoming that person at all costs.

Here is the surprising truth: confidence and arrogance are not two points on the same line. They are closer to opposite poles.

Confidence is grounded in self‑respect and respect for others. It sounds like, “Here is my view, and I’m open to being wrong.”
Arrogance is grounded in insecurity and defensiveness. It sounds like, “Here is the view, and disagreement is a threat.”

Genuine confidence is compatible with humility, curiosity, and learning. Arrogance is what happens when leaders use certainty to shield themselves from vulnerability, feedback, or shared accountability.

From a Leadership Integrity Framework perspective, confidence is an aligned expression of Purpose and Presence—your inner compass and your outer behavior working together. Arrogance appears when Presence is cut off from Purpose: strong performance signals with little inner reflection or relational awareness.

How Relationship Patterns Shape Your Confidence

Underneath most “confidence issues” is not a personality flaw; it is a relational pattern. How you habitually relate to people directly shapes how confident you feel and how confident you appear.

When leaders build relationships on:

Honesty and openness about what they see
Willingness to share opinions and invite others’ views
Genuine interest in feedback, even when it stings

…their authenticity does a lot of the confidence work for them. Colleagues experience them as grounded, approachable, and dependable, even when they are still developing in a new role.

By contrast, when leaders relate from:

Conflict avoidance and a strong desire to “look good”
Guardedness and reluctance to show where they need support
Difficulty giving credit or receiving help

…their lack of transparency becomes their confidence problem. Others experience them as distant or self‑protective, which undermines both trust and executive presence.

This is where the Partnership dimension of the framework comes in. Confidence is not only an internal state; it is relational. How you connect, listen, and respond to others either amplifies or erodes your felt sense of confidence.

How to Build Confident Leadership Without Losing Humility

The good news is that leadership confidence is not a fixed trait. It can be developed through intentional, research‑aligned practices that integrate Purpose, Presence, and Partnership.

You can start with three concrete moves:

Deepen your self‑awareness.
Explore your values, triggers, and habitual stories about your own capability. Notice where “I’m not ready” has become a default narrative rather than a data‑based assessment. Reflect on questions like: When do I actually feel most grounded in my leadership? Where do I reliably under‑estimate myself?
Practice brave vulnerability.
Identify specific areas where you need support or perspective and name them explicitly. Asking for help does not weaken your authority; it signals maturity, self‑knowledge, and commitment to the work over ego. As Jocko Willink and Leif Babin note, confident leaders elevate others, encourage them to step up, and push praise down the line rather than hoarding it.
Audit how you show up in relationships.
Watch your micro‑behaviors: Do you celebrate colleagues’ wins without qualification? Do you listen to feedback with genuine openness rather than immediate defense? Are you willing to say, “I got this wrong,” without collapsing into self‑criticism?

Leaders who work at this integration often describe feeling more quietly assured. Their confidence becomes less about projecting certainty and more about staying consistent with who they are and how they want to lead.

The Heart of Confident Leadership

If you want to build sustainable, authentic confidence, start with how you relate to yourself and to others.

Purpose clarifies what you stand for.
Presence communicates that clarity in a way others can feel.
Partnership ensures your confidence strengthens relationships rather than constricting them.

In the end, nothing signals real confidence more than an open mind and an open heart.

Photo by Amandine Lerbscher on Unsplash