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Women are told they have to choose between family, career, and personal growth.
I’m Bree Katulak, wife, CEO, mom of four, and I’m here to tell you that’s just not true.
Every two weeks, I’ll share my journey of balancing a high-powered career, a busy family, and my pursuit of growth, along with candid conversations with inspiring guests who have done the same. We’ll discuss the challenges we face as women in male-dominated fields, the importance of grace, and how we keep moving forward.
Whether you're striving for a career milestone, seeking balance, or just need to know you're not alone, Unstoppable You is here to remind you that success is about showing up, embracing your journey, and doing it your way.
So, if you're ready to stop choosing between your dreams and your life, pull up a seat, and let’s be unstoppable, together.
Katie Cosgrove (00:00):
Being a good leader, being respected as a business person, as a woman isn't necessarily having to be the most dominant or loud or demanding person, but it comes from leading with authenticity. I'm almost always 30 years junior to the people I interact with. I'm almost always interacting with very smart, experienced men. And if I tried to look and act and lead like them, that's the opposite of being authentic.
Bree Katulak (00:25):
Hey, I'm Bree, and this is Unstoppable You, the podcast for women ready to stop choosing between their dreams, family, and personal growth. People are surprisingly comfortable with the version of you they've already decided you are. Becoming yourself isn't the hard part. Believing you're allowed to is. Hey there. Welcome back. Today I'm talking with Katie Cosgrove, partner at Cosgrove Partners. Katie and her brother are helping lead the next chapter of a company their father built. But what impresses me most isn't that she's stepping into a leadership role, it's how she's doing it. Because there's a difference between inheriting an opportunity and earning people's trust. And that tension feels really familiar to me. Throughout my career, there have been several moments where my title changed, but people's perception of me hadn't caught up yet. When I became CEO after years in finance, I wasn't trying to convince myself I could lead.
(01:32):
I was trying to convince everyone else, not because they doubted me, but because they'd only ever known me as the finance person. And sometimes growth isn't about becoming someone different. It's about giving people enough time and enough consistency to see who you've become. That's why I'm so excited to have this conversation with Katie, because whether you're stepping into a family business, taking over from a respected leader, starting a new career, or simply growing into the next version of yourself, eventually all of us face the same question. How do you honor the people who came before you without spending your life living in their shadow? So today we're talking about identity, leadership, legacy, and what it really takes to build something that's unmistakably your own. So Katie, before we get started, I want to ask you, what does having it all mean to you?
Katie Cosgrove (02:34):
For a long time, having it all, I was thinking a lot about personal milestones, professional milestones and things, where am I going to be? Where am I going to be? And the more I look at my work and my life, I think that's really evolved. It's a lot less about a milestone or where I want to be. And it sounds cheesy, but not necessarily about where I'm going, but how I'm feeling during the process. I value ambition, so I think it's important to have a direction that you're heading and goals. But I think that looking at how you feel about yourself, feeling satisfied with living by your values, who you are, how you feel about yourself, second and probably most importantly about the relationships that you have in your life, both personally and professionally. I think that the people that you surround yourself with don't have an impact on how you feel about yourself is silly.
(03:25):
At the end of the day, you do get to choose who you spend your time with and where you spend your energy. And I think that you want to have security financially so that you're not worried. You want to have security from a safety perspective, but ultimately confidence in yourself that you can withstand challenges and then satisfaction with who you are and the people you spend your time with. I
Bree Katulak (03:45):
Think that's a great answer, especially as you're talking about how you feel about it. I think so many people forget that aspect when they think about ambition and having it all. It's more about the title or where you're at in a certain point in the milestones like you referenced, but how you feel, I mean, that's your life.
Katie Cosgrove (04:05):
Right. It's less about where you're going. Can you wake up every single day and feel happy with who you are and ultimately recognize that the people that you spend time with and what you can give to them, but then also what they give to you has a huge impact on if you feel like you have it all.
Bree Katulak (04:20):
That's a fantastic way of framing it, and I really like that. I think something I love so much about asking that question at the beginning of every interview is the variety of answers I get. And I think you're the first person that gave me that type of answer that's been more tied to feelings than milestones, and I think that's fantastic. So do you feel you always had a pretty solid outlook on what your core values were or was there a certain event that took place that made you do that introspection?
Katie Cosgrove (04:48):
I always felt like I knew what they were. With that said, I think that there have been both personal and professional things that have happened that have caused me to think, oh, maybe my values are different than what I though they were. Not necessarily from a core of how do you treat people or how do you interact with the world around you, but I value introspection a lot. I've probably taken every possible personality test or this, that, and the other. And it's important to learn about yourself, but I think that as you have walked through challenges or you've walked through wins, I think that those things evolve and what is most important at one phase of your life is different than it is in another.
Bree Katulak (05:24):
I could not agree with you more on that front. You said you value introspection in everything. So what's something throughout your career that you've almost had to unlearn in order to become the leader that you are today?
Katie Cosgrove (05:36):
I think they say in psychology for every three or every one negative, it takes three positives to make up for it. People are really wired to remember the negative or remember the hard things. For myself, I had to unlearn things that held me back, self-imposed insecurities or outside comments and realizing that being a good leader, being respected as a business person, as a woman isn't necessarily having to be the most dominant or loud or demanding person, but it comes from leaving with authenticity. So I think something I probably had to unlearn is seriousness or credibility and how I define that compared to other people. It doesn't need to look like somebody else's, it needs to be me. I'm almost always 30 years junior to the people I interact with. I'm almost always interacting with very smart, experienced men. And if I tried to look and act and lead like them, that's the opposite of being authentic.
Bree Katulak (06:33):
Exactly. So as we continue that part of the conversation, was there one specific moment or a series of moments that you felt like, okay, I'm going to stop trying to prove myself to you? Because if you're saying you're always about 30 years junior to the people in the room and then start just becoming yourself saying, "Hey, I bring a skillset to the table. Let me show it to you."
Katie Cosgrove (06:55):
I wouldn't say there's one moment. I think that there's been a lot. So in my career, I like my work. I've liked every job I've had and they've all been pretty different from each other. I was a sorority girl in college and my first job out of school was selling industrial supplies for Grainger. I did not look the part. I didn't know much about it, and I had to recognize that maybe what people were seeing was different than who I was, and I felt like I had to prove myself, like I belonged there. I think I felt like that in my next job, I had gotten promoted, I was young and was 25 and I was managing a large team of people, and I felt like I had to look a certain way or be a certain way. There's been boards I've been involved with, groups I've been involved with, and yeah, I'm just naturally someone that's like, "Oh gosh, did you mean to ask me to do that?
(07:43):
Am I supposed to be at this table?" And then I wonder if other people wonder if I should be at the table. So it's not necessarily one event that happened, but I think I've been lucky enough to have mentors and people in my life that have said, "Hey, yeah, you don't look like everybody else that's sitting at this table or sound like them or you don't have the same experience as them, but that's why we want you there." Those lessons over time have allowed for me to say, "Hey, not only do I belong here, but maybe I'm going to bring a different perspective."
Bree Katulak (08:09):
Do you feel like there's something that you would tell younger Katie now if you could go back? I
Katie Cosgrove (08:14):
Think that would be a long conversation. For me personally, it was comfortability with what I wanted other people to view me as versus what I viewed myself as. And I think trying to probably fit into other people's definition of what I thought was professional or what I thought was X, Y, Z. And just naturally, I think my personality is I want people to feel comfortable around me and I want people to be happy and relaxed. The way that I prefer to interact with people can be misperceived as unserious or youthful or even naive. There was a period, especially in my career when I was younger, trying to look more serious or look more dominant or be the boss. And gosh, there were a lot of mistakes in that. I spent a lot more time trying to worry about fitting into someone else's definition of what made them comfortable or what they expected to see from a leader or an advisor or a consultant.
(09:11):
And rather than authentically saying, this is who I am and I bring value to the table, I probably spent a lot of time trying to fit into someone else's definition versus being proud of my own.
Bree Katulak (09:24):
That's really interesting because I definitely did the same thing earlier in my career, and I think I still catch myself doing it to a certain extent. Having grown up as a CPA and in accounting and in finance, you are not the stereotypical accountant, right? I mean, they're like, wow, you actually look people in the eye. And I'm not saying that against any other accountants, but I do have that bubbly personality. And I mean, even my first mentor at Ernst & Young was like, he called me spirit fingers in the audit room. That was my nickname. So I haven't always been able to be that other version that I thought I should fit into the mold. It always just comes out my natural tendencies, but it is interesting as I notice how I shift or put on a certain mask as I enter certain rooms because I think that's how I'm supposed to behave or expected to behave.
Katie Cosgrove (10:13):
Totally. So I went to a small, private, very conservative Christian high school, and when I was graduating, I was going to IU. So massive school, completely different. And I remember my mom, it could sound bad, my mom's awesome, but my mom said, she was like, "You just have to recognize that you're going to meet a lot more people that come from different backgrounds, and there are going to be people in rooms that are smarter than you. There's going to be people in rooms that when you walk in, you're like, Oh, are they prettier than me? When you go from being a big fish in a small pond to being a small fish in a big pond, there's kind of that aha moment. But I think that that was super valuable that she told me that going into college because that comes with confidence, especially in your career.
(10:53):
And when you think about what am I supposed to look like or who am I supposed to be? How am I supposed to sound? You spend a lot more time holding yourself back versus authentically being yourself. And I think that there are always going to be people that don't like you, that don't relate to you, that don't see things the way you see things, and that's okay. And not everyone has to. And I think when you stop worrying about that, you free yourself up to A, be more authentic, be more confident, and ultimately the world would be pretty boring and probably not very successful if everyone was the same.
Bree Katulak (11:28):
Has there been a season where you felt that people had already decided who you were before they actually knew the true Katie and what you brought to the table?
Katie Cosgrove (11:37):
I work for my family business, so my last name is in the name of the business. And I had been successful in my career prior when my dad called me to ask me to come work for him. I was like, "Oh, I don't want to be the boss's daughter." And he was like, "Why?" And I said, "Well, I don't want people to think that I got the job because of my last name." I know for a fact, because we work with other family businesses, I know a lot of people face that at one level or another. People assume that you got it because of that, or they assume that you are entitled or you're not going to work as hard. And I think on that, I think a lot of people are wrong because I think they don't recognize that that carries a certain amount of weight or expectation
Bree Katulak (12:18):
Or
Katie Cosgrove (12:18):
Burden too. I don't get to turn off my laptop and not think about it. I'm trying to honor a legacy of someone that built something before me, but I'm also highly invested in the people that we get to employ, the people that we get to partner with and serve. And so I think sometimes whether it was my job at Grainger and they saw a sorority girl walking into the manufacturing plant or walking into a room and my last name is the name of my business, I probably felt like people judged a book by its cover or by its title. I probably wasted a lot of time worrying about that until I'm lucky enough to surround myself with other people that are in that position and recognize that you can waste a lot of energy trying to prove something when ultimately feeling good about where you are and who you are and recognizing that that's a heck of a lot more important than what other people are feeling.
Bree Katulak (13:08):
You can't own how other people react, but you can own your actions, that's for sure, and how you feel about them. That's important to understand. So being a leader in your family's company, how do you go about earning people's trust?
Katie Cosgrove (13:22):
Everyone gets an opportunity. They don't all look the same, but at the end of the day, everyone gets an opportunity to work hard or prove themselves, whatever that may be. I think trust is earned. I don't think it's given right away. Some people are more like that. I'm probably not wired quite like that, but I think that it comes over time. And I think I did for a long time a lot of urgency to try to get there like, okay, what do I need to do to get them to trust me or see my value or see my credibility? And I think that urgency causes you to stub your toe a lot more. It slows it down and it makes it a lot less enjoyable. We have a framework, we have a methodology. My dad started the business 20 years ago. I follow that. With that said, I'm not him.
(14:02):
I'm a completely different person. Our brand and our company might have a certain amount of trust and credibility that comes with it, but me individually, I think you have to earn that by honoring your commitments, by being honest, especially when it's probably not something someone wants to hear and leaning into that and being uncomfortable for a minute. But over time, that's ultimately what builds trust between people. It's a currency. Trust is a currency that you trade on and without it, there's really no point in being in relationship, whether it's personally or professionally.
Bree Katulak (14:34):
You've mentioned honoring the legacy and then also being your true authentic self. I guess what are some of the struggles or tensions that you've had honoring those expectations and those legacies while also following your own instincts and developing into the next generation of leaders at Cosgrove Partners?
Katie Cosgrove (14:52):
I think it goes back to, first of all, respecting what came before and who came before, respecting the legacy there, but also knowing yourself. My dad started it 25 years ago. He had more than 40 years of experience being an executive. I wasn't a CEO in a Fortune five or Fortune 100, but I did get to learn from one. So I know what his strengths are. I also know mine. I see where they overlap
Bree Katulak (15:20):
And
Katie Cosgrove (15:20):
Where they're really different. And I think recognizing at the same time, everyone you interact with has a different background, a different experience, and as much as you can learn well and relate from people that have walked a similar path from you, you also learn a lot from people that had different paths. And so for me, I think it's honoring the legacy that came before, but also recognizing that my lived experience and my perspective is going to be different and recognizing who should be in what room and who should be having what conversation, it matters a lot.
Bree Katulak (15:50):
That's a good way to frame it. I've noticed this in my own life, especially as working in organizations, I feel like it's easy or it comes natural to me to have that reset, set a strategy, set a roadmap with a framework, and then piece out how we're going to get there over a variety of projects. But what I've noticed is in this business I'm trying to create, it's maybe not as natural to me because I have a lot of ideas and I just want to start doing everything. So as you guys focus on helping other companies transition generationally or to a new ownership group, et cetera, how does that differ from doing it internally? Do you feel like you have struggles or no, this is what we do? It's easy both ways.
Katie Cosgrove (16:38):
It is so much easier to preach than practice. Right. Yeah. It's so much easier. I think I always had a really healthy respect for working with people in general is always going to be challenging. Working with your family brings a totally different level to that. A, because you don't want Christmas or Thanksgiving to feel uncomfortable, but you also are carrying a lifetime of experience and relationship into a professional setting. And I think I have had and always have had a very healthy respect for families that work together. I think doing it ourself is so different. It's just like anybody. It's a lot easier to say, "Hey, we see this from the outside and you're doing this and we can help you guys." Our job's just to advise and point out things that it's kind of hard to see the forest through the trees. Our job is to do that.
(17:26):
We're having to follow our own direction on that internally, and I think there's parts of it we're good at. We have insight into what roadblocks we might face, what relational elements might cause a roadblock or just a pause. With that said, it's personal. It's different.
Bree Katulak (17:43):
Very.
Katie Cosgrove (17:43):
And so I think that we're doing a pretty good job of taking the framework that we apply to other businesses and saying, "This is what we need to follow with ourselves." It's the being mindful of it every single day and staying disciplined on, "Okay, it's not that different, even though our company might look different." It's trying to stick to that as much as possible. And I think that there's challenges in it, but that'll make me better ultimately at what I do. I have a healthy respect for it. I have a different degree of empathy and understanding and stories of being able to say, "Hey, my job as an advisor isn't to say, Oh, I know this and you don't. My job is to say, Hey, actually I walked through something really similar. Here's how we handled it. I wouldn't do it that way. I would do it this way.
(18:25):
It's the ability to admit both our strengths and our mistakes.
Bree Katulak (18:28):
Having those lived experiences that you can pull on and advise based on those stories, it's critical. I feel like that helps accelerate that trust factor that we were talking about before because they feel like they have a partner that knows exactly what they're going through.
Katie Cosgrove (18:44):
It's so funny. I hadn't heard this until I joined a consulting firm, but people say consultants are the people that borrow your watch and tell you what time it is. And those are career consultants who are smart people, but oftentimes they go to school, they get an MBA, and then they go into advisory right away. One of the differentiators for us is that all of us have been in the jobs that we advise against. So I was in sales, I was in marketing, I led a sales organization, and now I advise against that. I've advised on people topics, but that's because I've had to hire and train people in previous careers. And I think that similarly, while that's important from a consulting practice perspective, that we've done this job, so we get to talk to you guys about our experience and see an outside perspective, but man, is that amplified when we really walked through our own family transition as well and we know what it's like to work with a dad or a brother or a sister or a mom when all you're thinking about is, "Well, back when I was 10, this is what happened." I think that that, and I've heard from our clients that that creates more trust because not everyone has done it.
Bree Katulak (19:53):
Not everyone has. Okay, so this is a question I have to ask everybody. What does being unstoppable mean to you?
Katie Cosgrove (20:01):
It kind of goes back to the having it all a little bit in that I think it starts with knowing yourself and liking yourself and then being intentional around who you surround yourself with and who you spend time with, making sure and being really intentional. And I think it requires a lot of intentional focus to say, these are the situations that I will pursue or the opportunities or the customers that I will pursue that are not going to call those things into question. If this is what I know about myself and this is what I like about myself or don't like about myself, how do I make sure that I'm surrounding myself with people that sharpen the areas that I want to work on? And then how do I surround myself and pour energy into the people that reward those things? Because I think to be unstoppable, it's a constant effort of reminding yourself who you are, why you're there.
(20:54):
And I don't think that's going to be something that you should ever stop working on is it takes constant attention.
Bree Katulak (21:01):
I had a conversation recently and this really stuck with me and I think it fits well here is we're never a static human being. If you think you've made it to a certain point, it's only this point in time, but we're constantly evolving and learning and taking in new information and data and becoming the next version of ourselves. And I think that's important and I think that is the journey, that is life. That's the fun part is we can reinvent ourselves however many times we want. And as long as we're doing it with that intentional alignment, like you said, I think that's where it can get really interesting.
Katie Cosgrove (21:35):
Yeah, it's like anything, you take your eye off the ball and that's when things get out of hand. And so I think that most of this comes from within. It comes from how you feel about yourself, how you feel about the people that you're around, and they take effort, relationships take effort, yourself takes effort.
Bree Katulak (21:50):
Absolutely. How do you stay humble while owning your ambition? Because you've accomplished a lot and you are crushing it.
Katie Cosgrove (21:57):
Humility is a funny thing to me, and I don't think that it's the opposite of ambition. Most people that are boisterous or they brag or they have huge egos, they're usually making up for something, whether that's lacking confidence or lacking self-esteem. I mean, ambition is good. I think forward momentum, it has a purpose and it's driven, but I think that how you handle yourself in success or once you've gained the confidence and where it comes from, I think it's remembering where you came from, remembering the hills that you had to climb or the challenges that you had to face and remembering that confidence didn't always come naturally. And so I think that spending time thinking about, "Hey, what was it like when I felt this before when I didn't feel as good about X, Y, Z?" I think that that provides empathy, which allows for you to maintain humility.
(22:48):
But I think most of the people I know at least actually have the opposite problem. It's not a humility problem, it's a confidence challenge. And so I think it's being intentional about that too.
Bree Katulak (22:59):
So you had mentioned you didn't always have the confidence. For certain tasks, were you always willing to raise your hand and take on a hard project because you had confidence you could see your way through it? Or what type of confidence are you referring to when you say that you didn't always have it?
Katie Cosgrove (23:14):
There were certain areas where I probably came off way more confident. I've always been very social. I've always loved engaging with people. I've never been afraid to speak. I think that it was confidence in, do I belong here? So I was capable. I was not always the hardest worker in school. I didn't always have the best grades. And a lot of that was just the time and energy and effort I gave to it. And I think that going into my career, I was like, "Man, do I belong here? My equal at work has a way more advanced degree or went to a different school or has X, Y, Z experience." And my confidence was, "Oh gosh, do I have to prove myself?" The confidence that I needed to gain came on redefining what success looked like and not having it look another way. I could still walk into a room and hug people and laugh and joke and make things comfortable, and that didn't make me less serious or less good at what I did.
(24:10):
It was just my approach was different. And I think I second guessed that a lot. I didn't always have the confidence that I was being taken as seriously as I wanted to be. I always was pretty confident that if I was given a challenge, I could find a way to figure it out. And I think that's been really valuable for me, but I think where I had struggled historically with confidence was being more concerned with what other people though about me versus, "Oh yes, I belong here because I know I do."
Bree Katulak (24:34):
When you reference redefining success, how did you used to define success and how have you changed that definition?
Katie Cosgrove (24:42):
I used to define a successful person as what I saw in leadership. I saw certain age, certain gender, certain title, certain resume, certain experience, certain way of owning the room, of speaking and talking as, oh, that's what it means to be a leader or an owner or something. And that was not me. I've worked with clients or prospects that don't view me that way. And I feel like you can save yourself a lot of heartache and banging your head against the wall from trying to pursue opportunities or rooms that ultimately you're probably not supposed to be in any way.
Bree Katulak (25:21):
Absolutely. Every no is just as important as every yes.
Katie Cosgrove (25:26):
Yeah. And oh my gosh, you learn from those a lot more, but also they are, for someone that's competitive, that was so frustrating. I'm like, no, no, no, you need to see that I can do this. I can think of a couple of situations where I was like, they're not going to see me the way I want them to, and why am I trying to fit into that definition? And it takes having your feelings hurt probably or being frustrated or competitive because you feel like you lost a game. I used to think it was you had to be serious, more dominant, or probably more prescriptive in the way that you spoke or interacted. And now I see it as who am I? I'm somebody that wants to be open and talk and hear how people think and feel and share outside perspective that gives them a different way of thinking about it, and that's successful.
Bree Katulak (26:13):
I agree. Being that authentic version of yourself and owning the situation and providing the valuable impact that you can provide for that situation is critical. If you stripped away your title, your last name, your career, all of that, what do you hope that people will say defines who you are?
Katie Cosgrove (26:34):
Hopefully all of the same things that they would say if I kept those. I don't do my job because of my last name or because of the money that I make. I believe in helping people thrive. I believe in especially helping the person or the business that has the odds stacked against them. I want them to go out and win. And I was taught and I believe that to whom much is given, much is expected, and I'm lucky to have the life that I have. I'm lucky to have been born into the family that I was, the country, the part of the world where I live every single day. Not everybody has the same luxury of safety or security, and I was given that. So what that means to me is taking what was given to me and being able to pour into other people.
(27:19):
And I would hope that regardless of where I worked or what I did, and if my name and things were stripped against me, I hope that people see that life is serious and there's always challenges. And if you've been lucky enough to survive hard things and you're capable of building something, then you're just as responsible for helping others that have had a hard time. I would hope that people would remember that or think that of me, whether it's supporting the small business owner who treats their people right and cares about that equally as much as earnings to rescuing the mutt of a hound dog that I have rather than paying for a hypoallergenic, probably really clean, nice dog. I feel like things were given to me and it's expected of me to do that for others.
Bree Katulak (28:05):
I love that so much. What would be things that you would tell a young professional coming into the workforce now that you wish you would've either taken more seriously back then when you were coming out of the workforce or you didn't know then?
Katie Cosgrove (28:18):
It sounds a little harsh, but I wish the mom would've said it probably more bluntly to me is like, shut up and learn for a minute. Take a minute. I think
Bree Katulak (28:26):
That's a good message. I
Katie Cosgrove (28:27):
Do. If you are lucky enough to have exposure to other leaders and other people, listen, take as much time, fight for the seat that gets you to see as many possible different styles and titles and levels and types of experience. Prioritize the ones that look a lot different than you because those are ultimately the ones that you'll learn the most from, and then be really intentional about finding people that look like what you want to look like in the future. I had great professional role models. I had my dad, I had a lot of my dad's colleagues, and they all look and sound a lot different than I do, but I was also lucky enough to find smart, hardworking women that had achieved a lot. And I can see some of myself in all of those people, but also you learn just as much about who you want to be by seeing what you don't.
(29:21):
And so being quiet and being in the room to get to see as much as you can, not being afraid to ask questions, and then not getting hung up on thinking that you have to look or sound or act like them. Advice that I give to a couple of the young women or I say girls that I get to mentor is invest in knowing yourself, invest in taking care of yourself because ultimately you might change jobs, you might move, different people come in and out of your life, and ultimately that's the most important relationship you have is the one with yourself. And luckily, I think our world is heading towards that. I think people are really spending time doing that, and I think that's so important because at the end of the day, You can change jobs, you can change city, states, friends groups, you can change a lot, but you really can't change that you're the person that has to answer themselves.
Bree Katulak (30:09):
I love that so much. And so much about what you previously said about shut up and listen, I think is so great. I think any one of the people in my early stage of career would probably say, "Yeah, Bree should have done that too." Or even my in-laws. I really thought I came out of college knowing way more about the real world than I actually did, and it was a very humbling first couple of years. And now I want to learn and absorb from everyone. I realize how much I don't know and it's insane. Yeah.
Katie Cosgrove (30:38):
Not at all to discount how people should feel from a confidence perspective or importance perspective, but I think there's an interesting point in most people's career where if you're enjoying success and you're doing well at your job, regardless of how big or small of a company you work with, people start to be like, "Wow, they couldn't do this without me. I am this. I felt that in heaps. One of the jobs that I had before I worked for my family." And there's a point in time where you realize every job can be taken on by somebody else. And recognizing that allows for you to say, "Okay, I have a little bit more humility." And I think that gets learned
Bree Katulak (31:17):
Always. Just like companies can find another person to complete our tasks, they're not going to get the same thought leadership, but you can bring your experiences that you've gathered throughout the chapters of your life and apply them elsewhere. No one is ever stuck. And I think that's such an important message for people to understand. And you can always reinvent yourself. There may be consequences to doing it, but you can always reinvent yourself. As long as you're focusing on, like you said before, staying true to yourself, how things make you feel in your life and it's giving you your best energy. I think that is so important to understand, not just for young people coming into the workforce, but middle-aged people like myself and even older people.
Katie Cosgrove (32:02):
We practice a lot of Cosmo partners when we work with businesses. We say, "Yes, you should work on your gaps. You should know yourself, know your strengths and your gaps and absolutely work on it. But man, you should spend the vast majority of your time reinforcing your strengths versus your gaps and surround yourself with the people that fill them." In our business, my dad, he was an executive. He has financial acumen, came up through sales, so he's got a little bit of the strengths on both sides. I came up through sales, people, relationships, things like that, that's good for me. And the amount of times I spent trying to make sure that I was intimately familiar with a balance sheet and cash flow and all of these different financial metrics. I mean, I have to know what I have to know, but I also recognize that my skillsets are valuable where they are.
(32:46):
And I'm so lucky in that my business partner, my brother, he came up through finance and data on a completely other side. And gosh, are we lucky that we have each other to work with and him downside out? And I think everyone should find that in their career, whether you're an entrepreneur or whether you're working in a team of people is yes, recognize your gaps, work on them, but spend a lot more time reinforcing your strengths and your differentiators because A, you're going to be better at it, you're going to enjoy yourself more. And B, there are people that have different skills that are going to compliment yours well and let them be great at that.
Bree Katulak (33:20):
Exactly. Don't bring yourself down. Thank you so much for the conversation today, Katie. It's been fantastic. I always love talking to you. It's always so much fun. Well, for the audience, they can find you on LinkedIn at Katie Cosgrove. That's C-O-S-G-R-O-V-E. And thank you so much for the conversation. It's been great.
Katie Cosgrove (33:42):
I'm excited to see everything you're doing.
Bree Katulak (33:44):
All right, here's my challenge for you these next two weeks. I want you to think about one place in your life where you're still trying to fit somebody else's definition of who you should be. Maybe it's at work, maybe it's in your family, maybe it's in leadership role, or maybe it's simply because you've spent so long trying to meet other people's expectations that you've forgotten to ask yourself what actually feels authentic to you. One of my favorite moments from today's conversation with Katie was realizing that all of us inherit expectations. Some of them come from our families, some come from our careers, some come from the titles we hold, and some come from the stories other people have already written about us. I know that feeling. For years, I worried that people only saw me as the finance person. When I stepped into leadership, I spent so much energy trying to prove I belonged there.
(34:40):
Then one day before a major company presentation, someone tried to hand me a framework for how they thought I should deliver it. And another leader simply said, "Let Bree be Bree." I trusted my instincts. I told the story the way I wanted to tell it. I asked people to close their eyes and I made them feel something. And afterward, people told me it was one of the best presentations they'd ever seen. For years, I thought I was trying to convince everyone else that I could be more than the finance person. Looking back, I think I was the last person who needed convincing because that was the moment I realized I didn't have to become the leader everyone expected. I just had to become the leader I already was. So here's my challenge. This week, ask yourself one question, whose permission am I still waiting for?
(35:33):
Because maybe your boss already believes in you, your clients already trust you, your friends already see your gifts, and the only person still asking for proof might be you because the people who make the greatest impact aren't the ones who perfectly fit someone else's mold. They're the ones willing to break it, not out of rebellion, out of authenticity. And maybe that's what becoming unstoppable really looks like, not proving you're enough, finally believing you don't have to become someone else to be enough. The moment you stop asking for permission to become yourself is the moment you become the leader you were meant to be. This is your life. Define it, live it, become unstoppable. Thank you for listening to Unstoppable You. If this episode was helpful, I'd love to know. Connect with me on LinkedIn at Bree Katulak. That's K-A-T-U-L-A-K on LinkedIn and shoot me a message.
(36:39):
This show is for you. Be unstoppable. I'll see you next time.