Leadership Sovereignty Podcast: Career Growth and Promotion

Most leaders walk into the room looking strong while falling apart inside. And without emotional intelligence, that pressure builds until something erupts.

In this episode of the Leadership Sovereignty Podcast, host Ralph Owens and co-host Terry Baylor continue their conversation with Amethyst Roberson β€” author, speaker, and emotional intelligence strategist. This is Part 2 of 5.

Amethyst introduces the internal audit framework β€” four questions every leader should ask themselves before walking into any high-stakes situation. She breaks down the difference between honesty and vulnerability on a team, explains why emotional intelligence is an inside job before it is an outside skill, and shares why the volcano effect is the most predictable leadership failure most professionals never see coming.

What you will learn in this episode:
- The four-question internal audit every leader needs before entering a high-pressure room
- Why you must self-regulate before you can regulate your team
- The difference between honesty and vulnerability β€” and why great teams need both
- How the volcano effect silently destroys team culture over time
- Why emotional intelligence starts with the conversation you have with yourself

This episode is for you if:
- You walk into rooms looking composed while carrying real weight internally
- You lead teams and want to build genuine psychological safety
- You want practical EQ tools you can apply before your next difficult conversation
- You are navigating workplace stress, pressure, or conflict and need a framework

πŸ‘€ View Amethyst Roberson's guest profile

🧾 Chapters
  • (00:03) - Leadership and Emotional Intelligence
  • (01:14) - The Inside Job of Self-Reflection
  • (05:12) - Honesty vs. Vulnerability in Leadership
  • (08:09) - Language and Generational Gaps
  • (12:55) - Bridging Communication Through Emotional Intelligence
  • (14:24) - Addressing Workplace Abuse and Communication

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πŸ“„ Full Episode Transcript

Creators and Guests

Guest
Amethyst Roberson
As a Licensed Professional Therapist, National Certified Counselor, and a seasoned educator in mental health and personal growth, she helps individuals and organizations navigate emotional wellness challenges. Her approach empowers clients to master their mental health, clarify their goals, and create actionable strategies for sustainable growth.

What is Leadership Sovereignty Podcast: Career Growth and Promotion?

The Leadership Sovereignty Podcast, hosted by Ralph E. Owens II and co-hosted by Terry Baylor, is a career acceleration platform

Leadership isn’t just a skill β€” it’s a career strategy for professionals seeking growth, influence, and promotion.

Hosted by Ralph Owens, Chief Information Officer, and Terry Baylor, CEO of a healthcare technology startup, the podcast delivers practical, real-world leadership strategies you can apply immediately. Each episode focuses on increasing visibility, navigating corporate dynamics, preparing for promotion, and leading beyond your title.

Expect short, high-impact conversations designed to help you think, act, and position yourself like a senior leader before you’re given the title.

You’re not just an employee. You’re the CEO of your career.

New episodes are released bi-weekly.

Amethyst Roberson:

So many times as a leader, I've walked in riding on character. So I got my shoulders squared up and I'm looking tough, but inside I'm tore up. My mama just died and this, this, this, and a volcano doesn't erupt overnight. And if there's no emotional intelligence in that person's heart, when that break happens, it erupts. That's where we get culture that really needs to be dealt with.

Amethyst Roberson:

We have to have a constant structured audit of what's going on internally so that when it shows up outside, we know exactly where it came from.

Ralph Owens:

Welcome to the Leadership Sovereignty Podcast, where professionals learn to navigate challenges at work through the power of leadership principles. I'm Ralph Owens, Chief Information Officer in the financial services industry, alongside my cohost, Terry Baylor, the CEO of a healthcare tech startup. Together, we've spent decades building teams, transforming organizations and coaching individuals through the moments that define their careers. We unpack the mindset, strategies and habits that help you lead with confidence, expand your influence, get promoted and increase your income. Now let's dive into today's episode.

Terry Baylor:

Yes. So question number two, emotional intelligence for leaders starts internally. Now this was a point that you talked about and that I mean, again, a light bulb went off for me, right? Because Ralph and I, we talk a lot about EQ. As we talk about that, that tends to be more how we exercise our emotional intelligence in relationship to others.

Amethyst Roberson:

Yeah.

Terry Baylor:

But the light bulb went off when you were like, These you, how are you relating to yourself? I'm like, What? What do you mean? How I relate to myself? Then what really opened that conversation up, when you stated that, I made a statement and you're like, Terry, you're spot on.

Terry Baylor:

I said, Because I see what you're saying. I talk to myself more than anybody. I have more conversations with me. I'm like, Oh my gosh, you're right. How am I treating me?

Terry Baylor:

So can you dig into that?

Amethyst Roberson:

Yeah, yeah, that rugged band to me, the way that you said it was so significant. It's an inside job. That was it. That's the book.

Terry Baylor:

It's like set it off. Set It's like it off.

Amethyst Roberson:

Set it So good. So when I think about that aspect, it is an inside job. So I always keep in mind that clinically when we talk about emotional intelligence, we're talking about stabilization versus solutions. So there's a time for where it's all our solutions performance, we got to get it done. But what happens before we get to that point is what we're talking about that inside job.

Amethyst Roberson:

So I'm really big on framework and questions to get people thinking and moving and motivated to make changes. And so management under pressure has to ask three questions or four questions. What do I think? What do I feel? What do I really want to say?

Amethyst Roberson:

And what do I want to do? Why is That's the internal conversation that Terry is referring to. You have to self regulate before you regulate because that's what's happening, right? You're regulating as a leader, but if you're not self regulating, then the team might not know what you're thinking, what you're feeling, what you really want to say and what you want to do. It also gives them a cue, again, remember that data for them to be more emotionally intelligent, meaning sharing what's going on inside of them.

Amethyst Roberson:

And I'll give you an example of that. It would be, I don't know why I'm using board meetings so much this morning, but let's just say you're in a team outing or something and you're in your regular mode, performance mode. We don't know that one individual on the team, they lost their mom the day before, right? So emotional intelligence would say, what do you think about what happened in your life? How are you feeling?

Amethyst Roberson:

Did you have anything you wanna say about that? What is it that you feel like you need to do for you to be okay? But we're also asking ourselves that question too. This is the audit that we talked about, the internal audit before we even get into the room. What am I feeling right now?

Amethyst Roberson:

What am I thinking? And so that's how you get that internal conversation going. It's real, it's just like what we do on the outside. We were taught how to communicate, how to be more efficient, how to manage conflict, but do we turn that on ourselves? Now I always do this thing, I do what's called the turnarounds.

Amethyst Roberson:

Have I communicated to myself? Am I influencing myself? Am I managing myself well? Am I experiencing conflict? That's how you manage yourself and walk it out every day.

Amethyst Roberson:

So that's the internal audit. What do I think, feel, say and do? What do I need to? Yeah, so many times as a leader, I've walked in writing on character, they know I said, I'm going to show up, I'm going to be there, so I got my shoulders squared up and I'm looking tough, but inside I'm tore My mama just died and this, this, this. But I have to do Here's another aspect of emotional intelligence, honesty versus another layer of sharing.

Amethyst Roberson:

Honesty is I can say that Ralph has on a black top, a shirt and Terry has like a teal or a blue. That's obvious what's going on in the room.

Terry Baylor:

But how

Amethyst Roberson:

do I be vulnerable? Vulnerability is sharing with me what I don't even know to ask about. That's when you have an emotionally intelligent team, when they share with you what you don't know to even ask about.

Ralph Owens:

Wow.

Amethyst Roberson:

That's a different level of relationship. And again, we're talking in terms of professionalism, but this is our own relationships with our spouses, with significant others, with church, it doesn't matter the setting, but it matters our EQ or how we manage ourselves internally.

Ralph Owens:

Yeah. I hear so much in that. I'm hearing, you know, a team dynamic EQ. How well am in touch with what they need or do they feel even comfortable enough to share with me? Which, you know, a lot of times is built on trust, what takes time, things of that nature.

Ralph Owens:

Can you just repeat those questions that you should ask yourself? I thought that was just so powerful because

Amethyst Roberson:

Yeah, absolutely. What do you think? What do you feel? What do you want to say? And what is it that you want to do?

Amethyst Roberson:

And do you need? That's the eternal check. Then that honesty versus vulnerability. Honesty is we do a lot of performance says what's in the room, right? Performance is always connected to what we can see and measure, but there are some things like the volcano effect.

Amethyst Roberson:

There are some things going before a volcano doesn't erupt overnight. It happens after hundreds and thousands of years of rock and the ground just battling itself out. And then there's a break in it. And if there's no emotional intelligence in that person's heart or in that team or in that system, when that break happens, that's the volcano effect, it erupts. That's where we get a culture that really needs to be dealt with.

Amethyst Roberson:

It doesn't happen overnight. We have to have a constant structured audit of what's going on internally, so that when it shows up outside, we know exactly where it came from.

Ralph Owens:

Wow. Wow, wow, wow. That is so good. That is so good. That is so good.

Ralph Owens:

I love that, know, just cementing the point, conversations that leaders should have with themselves. Absolutely. You having that conversation with yourself, or are you going in the room, in the boardroom, guns blazing? You have no idea where you really are.

Amethyst Roberson:

Oh That my

Ralph Owens:

is so good, that's so good.

Terry Baylor:

Know, one of the things that brings so I had a conversation, Amethyst, and let me see if this falls inside that framework. Okay. Because sometimes we conditions or I'll use the word frameworks again that we've been kind of raised under, right, or ideologies. I'll use ideologies.

Amethyst Roberson:

Absolutely. So

Terry Baylor:

a person shared something with me the other day, actually this week, and we were talking and the person shared, you know, man, I was really humbled by this situation because I ended up taking an opportunity that I normally wouldn't take, but I needed to take this opportunity to sustain. And the conversation had It was more so around, man, I had Typically when I'll say this, when church folks talk about I was humble, it has to do with a level of, I had to get better or I was too hard. You know how that So what was interesting is when the person shared with me, they end up taking this opportunity. I said, I will be honest with you. I thought something totally different.

Terry Baylor:

When you shared with me, you took that opportunity, here's where I thought. I thought, oh man, they getting that grind on now. Now they learning how to be resilient. Now they learning how to get that entrepreneurial hustle on. They're learning that the perfect scenario doesn't have to exist for me to excel.

Terry Baylor:

And I told them, I said, Look, and I'm a give you my direct words. I said, Bro, how much more do we have to be beat down? I mean, pretty low on the rung here. Much more humbling do you need? Do we need I mean, really?

Terry Baylor:

I mean, come on. So I said, I think it's a vocabulary game, honestly. I think the vocabulary that we've been given is when something that we have to go through that is uncomfortable, something that we have to go through that we didn't plan, it wasn't my plan, oh God had to take me through this to get me here. I'm like, but why did it have to be a struggle? Couldn't it have been, man, I grew out of this.

Terry Baylor:

I learned something about myself that I didn't know before. That found my grind. I found a level of resilience in me. I said, Man, honestly, I think it's a vocabulary game. I don't really know that it was that.

Terry Baylor:

Now I can't say that, but from my perspective, I saw a toughness in you established that you didn't have before.

Amethyst Roberson:

That's it. Yeah. That's good. It

Terry Baylor:

is I'm easy not God. I'm not God. But that's how I saw it.

Amethyst Roberson:

It is, it is. It is a language game. That separates the generations, the language. My generation didn't have the language for what we went through. We just had to kind of make it up.

Amethyst Roberson:

We're still making it up to be honest. We're making it up. We're just like, we take you by the look, you're going to do this. But now this generation has language for it. They have skill for it.

Amethyst Roberson:

They have technique. I think that's what you're talking about. And you're right, we didn't have What's resiliency? You better get your butt in there and do whatever I told you. Unless you look, put it in your church context is a whole another language, right?

Amethyst Roberson:

Yes. So yeah, the language is the bridge that we have to use to walk over generationally. And so when that's missing, like when there's abuse, and I know we're not in that vantage point, but when there's abuse, even corporately in church, home ministry, the difference in all of those, not the difference of the similarity is the language. That person who was abused didn't have the language. They didn't have the experience yet to get it out.

Amethyst Roberson:

What's language after language? My understanding, because guess what? I can speak Chinese and you can speak Spanish. We both have language, right? We still can't get through the door because we're talking two different languages, right?

Amethyst Roberson:

So what's the common denominator between if our language And I think what you were saying was your perception and that perception of that person was different, right? How do we get through that? We slow it down a little bit. We understand, we talk about not what we can see, but we talk about that vulnerable part of me. Now we're not just talking with our voices, we're using the idea of, I'm going to just go over to the door and I'm going twist a knob, I'm going to show you how to do that.

Amethyst Roberson:

So that's where emotional intelligence comes in. Emotion in the performance arena, I'm just going to tell you the data and I want you to perform, right? Emotional intelligence says, let me walk with you to process this with you. Matter of fact, I'll open the door because our languages are different. Let me turn the knob for you and we both walk through there and we'll do that until we both get it and we're both on the same page.

Amethyst Roberson:

But that's a process, right? That's a mentorship that takes time And that's what you were really communicating to that person. And along in that journey is when you get the resiliency and the things that you named and you're teaching that person, I see something in you that I didn't see before we walked through this.

Ralph Owens:

Correct.

Amethyst Roberson:

And teaching them how to do that. I can say so much about that, that point is so powerful. As it happens, it happens so quickly within all aspects of relationships and it's needed. Situations that improve or even get worse are based upon that aspect of communication that you just named. Two people speaking different languages, we see the door but we can't get through because we can't find the bridge to make it happen.

Amethyst Roberson:

Then we add gatekeeping in there, that's a whole another conversation.

Terry Baylor:

I appreciate that. Yes, yes, no, I appreciate that. You hit on There something is a lot of abuse in the workplace, a ton of it.

Amethyst Roberson:

I can't.

Terry Baylor:

People use language, people use little remarks, passive aggressive, they're all kind of, oh man. I appreciate you just even hitting on that and if someone is listening today, if you're not imagining it basically.

Ralph Owens:

Thank you for listening to the Leadership Sovereignty Podcast. If today's conversation helped you grow in your leadership, influence or your career, take a moment to visit leadershipsovereignty.com. There you'll find exclusive resources, free guides and ways to stay connected to our community of leaders who are building purpose and success. Don't forget to rate, review and share this episode with someone who's on the rise in their career. Until next time, lead boldly, lead with purpose and continue to walk in sovereignty.

Ralph Owens:

Take care.