What About The Restless Leader: A Call to Explore What’s Next
Jul 07, 2025This season marks a turning point—not just for the podcast, but for the visionary women who listen. If you’ve ever wondered what comes after success, you’re in the right place.
In this kickoff to a brand-new series, Kris introduces a deeply personal—and much-needed—conversation: what it means to go beyond the CEO. Because sometimes, the biggest transition isn’t building the business... it’s releasing your grip on it.
Here’s what we explore:
- What it really takes to prepare your business (and yourself) to function without you
- Why staying too long might be holding you—and your team—back
- How AI and legacy leadership tools can still support your team while you evolve
This isn’t about retirement. It’s about reinvention.
And if you’re feeling restless, you’re not alone.
Tune in now and meet the woman you’re becoming—one transition at a time. And be sure to listen to upcoming episodes as Kris explores the seven transitions every founder must face to move into her next chapter.
Contact Information and Recommended Resources
Join me in Sonoma in August so we can meet in person! Go to www.thevisionary.ceo/beyondceo to register your interest.
The One Hour Leader Blueprint thevisionary.ceo/onehourleaderblueprint
The One Hour Leader Coach thevisionary.ceo/onehourleadercoach
Transcript
Well, hello. Hey, hey. Hey. I'm coming at you for what I'm super excited about. We talked in the last episode about, you know, really the transition of the way that I'm moving my work. Right. And what I want to. Want to hold space for here in this podcast and then sort of let you know what's coming is that if you are a woman who is running your business and you're really at that point where you're like, okay, I gotta figure out the team thing, I gotta hire people, I gotta figure out how to manage people and have conversations with them about stuff that's going on, I got you.
All right? That is not something that I won't ever be able to help you with. It's just that that's not work I'm not doing personally. Right. And so. But my business is still supporting all of that and actually in many ways more readily and more tailored than I ever could have done myself. And so you have two options for that. You can go and, and access the One Hour Leader. We have completely rebuilt the all of my signature work through and into the One Hour Leader Complete Blueprint. And you're going to be able to get that if you go to thevisionary.CEO/one hourleaderblueprint. And that is all of the lessons that I have completed and so forth. Now, if you've already purchased Lead for Women, you have most of that already, so you don't need to get that. But if you have never actually accessed my content, you've just been listening to the podcast, I really want to encourage you to go do that. It's an incredible offer and I got you. Now, the second thing is we have created an AI support.
And if you've started to use chat, GPT or Claude or I know there's a lot of them, you understand that the good news about AI is it can really give you a lot of information. The bad news about AI is it really can give you a lot of information. And so what, what we have built is a private AI that is only designed out of my mind bank. So it's only using my specific tools, my content, my podcast, my videos, my books, etc. So that all of the answers you're going to get are coming directly from the work that I've created. So if you've really loved listening to me on the podcast and you've maybe come to a few things here and there, and you want to kind of hear the answer in the way that I would give it to you, I can Assure you this AI does that because I have tested it. I've actually talked to someone, given them my answer, and then we put it through AI and it's a thing. So there's that.
So those two things are readily available. Right. So you can absolutely access the One Hour Leader program, Like all the content, the videos, you can listen to them through audio. There's this audio podcast. And also, if you don't want all that and you just want to have access to a digital coach, you can go to the One Hour Leader Coach, the visionary CEO One Hour Leader Coach, and you can get that. Just that if you want them both, we could do that too. So anyway, we have it all for you. It's all available to you.
And I don't want you to think that's not. I'm like ditching it, never talking about it again. I just want you to understand that going through and forward with the new content that I'm going to be creating will be more focused on a woman who has achieved a lot of success in her life and in her business. And she's sort of standing in a different place now. It's, you know, okay, I've built this, I've done this. I don't know if the team is ready for me to not be a part of it yet. I need to figure that out. I need to figure out what I want.
Who am I if I don't figure out this business? Who am I if I don't know? If I'm no longer doing this business, what is my role? What do I want to create? And so that sort of leads me to where we are going forward. And I'm going to do a season here of Leadership is Feminine. And we're going to focus on beyond the CEO. We're going to focus on the seven transitions that I know that every woman needs to go through in order to know if she is ready and if her business is ready to begin a new chapter. Why am I doing this? Well, because I hear it. I hear it from so many of the women I work with. I hear it from other women that I talk to. I do think some of this has to do with where I am in life and who those people are that I talk to a lot as women who are really in this Gen X population.
Right. We, we run from about 40 or mid-40s to early 60s in age right now. We are the majority of the female founders on the planet. And we have built something that nobody really did before. And so we don't have a lot of modeling. And the very real truth is we should expect that if we're 50 some odd years old and we don't want to run the business that we've created anymore, we can expect to have a whole other life. But a lot of us have never really dreamed beyond where we are. And so it's a really interesting time because the women who were before us, they would finish working and they would finish working, they would retire, right? But I, I find that most people I know who have built company that nobody wants to retire.
I don't want to retire. I would like to just not have to work. And I do think there's a difference because I want to always create, I want to always be coaching. I always want to have relationships with other women that I can support them. Like, I really envision that. I just want to get to the place in my life where working is no longer required to generate money. Right. And I think that a lot of other people feel the same way.
So what I want to do over the next season is introduce you to the seven transitions that I now see every one of us has to go through if we want to figure out what truly is beyond this place that we're in today. Beyond the CEO. Now, not all of you call yourselves the CEO. I appreciate there's a lot of women who listen to my podcast who are VPs, who are senior vice presidents, are our, our CEOs of a company, CFO, CMO, CIO. Like there's a lot of you, chairs, division heads, executive directors. Listen, so I just use CEO. It's the shortest, little catchier. But the point is, right, what is beyond this place that you have arrived, this helm, this ecosystem you have created? And the woman who is wondering that is the woman who will know why I'm doing this podcast if you're not there, right? Like, and I've talked to women who are like, I don't, I don't think about what's beyond what I'm doing because I love what I'm doing and I want to stop what I'm doing.
I don't have any interest in ending what I'm doing. I think that's fantastic. That's great. There are a lot of women who, who are ready to. Itchy, restless, they're ready to sort of figure this out, right? Because one of the traps of not exploring this is that you stay very busy in what you are doing so that you feel valuable. Because we, we've equated production and achievement for so long to our own self-worth. And value as we. As how.
How. How was that surprising? Right? Look at the society we live in. So sometimes we end up staying in things for too long. You know, I have a. I have a really good example of this, and I've actually coached. Coached people, but I've witnessed this as well. And I. I will speak directly about women, although I've seen men do the same thing.
So this is not just a female thing. When the founder stays too long, when the leader stays too long, they don't release. And I know one particular person who's a contemporary of my mother's. She ran an organization for the majority of her adult life. She didn't. She might have created it, actually. She never left. And it stunted the organization.
It stunted its people that her best people ended up leaving because there was nowhere for her for them to go with her still there. And as she aged and as she got more. More herself, she became irascible, difficult to work for. I think she always was, kind of. But the older she got and so it. Her inability to let go of an identity that she had built so that somebody else and a whole new team of people could carry the legacy forward killed the company. And I. I don't say that lightly, and I don't say that to be threatening.
I don't. But I think you have to think about that. I do think it's a consideration. And so even if you're listening to this and you're like, I love my company. I don't have any interest in selling it. I don't have any interest in stepping back. I want to grow this sucker. I want to keep being.
Get it. But do me a favor. Just ask yourself the questions I'm going to ask you over the next few weeks. Just play with me. Because nothing's better than knowing, like, having some vision beyond where you are. Because what we know is nothing is created before we can conceive it. Right? We have to be able to conceive something before we can actually put it in the world. And so if you are here with me now, that means that you have an advantage because you're thinking about it, because I'm inviting you to.
So over the next seven or eight weeks, I'm going to go through each one of the transitions. The first transition will be can or how prepared is this business to operate without me? And how prepared am I to function without it? We have to ask both questions. And so next week, that's what we're going to do. And I've also prepared a really cool readiness assessment. If you're on my personal private subscriber list, you probably have already gotten these, this, this invitation to take it. So. But if you're not on my private subscriber list, I will be giving you the link to do that on the next podcast. And it's super fun.
I built it through ChatGPT. So it's a fun AI based tool to get you used to that and also to give you some powerful information about your readiness as it relates to the business, the team and you. All right, so thanks for tuning in today. If you need those resources that I've just mentioned, you can absolutely find those. I really want to encourage you to just. The links are going to be here in the podcast. You are not alone.
And I cannot emphasize enough for how we have positioned this AI tool. And right now we're doing a register for it, buy it and have it for life for a really, really reasonable price. Because I want to help change the lives of as many of you as I can. And I want you to know there are answers to these team and management problems that you're facing. You don't have to just kind of fix it on your, in your own brain, like you can have a thinking partner. And I just love that the tool I built is out of my own content. So it's not, it's not, it's not trolling the entire Internet, which is really, frankly, all the leadership advice on the Internet is, is very latent in leadership philosophy that started with men. And so I have a leadership is feminine approach and that's what you get through my AI.
So anyway, check it out, click the links, go see and then tune in next week for the first of the transition. Talk to you soon.