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Nancy McClelland

The Case for Building Your Accounting Career Around the Person You Are

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Halfway through the second day of an accounting conference, Jean Zick often feels her brain slow down. The lights, conversations, and crowded schedule drain her energy. Her type-A instinct tells her to attend every session because she paid to be there. But experience tells her to take a break.

That push and pull is at the heart of Episode 35 of She Counts. Nancy McClelland and Melissa Miller Furgeson, sitting in for Questian Telka, share two conversations recorded at the Theater of Public Speaking Curtain Call retreat. Jean explains how she learned to work with her introversion. Terri Warren describes how a layoff and two strokes forced her to redefine success.

Their circumstances are different, but their message is the same. Understanding yourself gives you more choices. You can stop pushing against who you are and start building a career that fits.

 

Naming what drains you turns judgment into useful information

Jean was sensitive to sound as a child. She was also shy, timid, and quick to cry. Years later, after staying home while her children were young, she returned to the business world and began her career as a CFO. Networking came with the job, but large conferences left her depleted.

“This is just really draining me of energy,” she remembers thinking. “I need to do something about it.”

Jean learned that introverts and extroverts respond differently to stimulation. An extrovert may enter a bright, crowded room and think, Bring it on. An introvert may wonder, Where can I hide? Neither response is a defect.

“We are all on one big spectrum,” Jean says. “There’s nothing wrong with you. We’re just wired differently.”

Her process includes:

  1. Identify the situations that overwhelm or drain you
  2. Accept your response instead of asking what is wrong with you
  3. Recognize that response as a signal
  4. Decide what would help you participate without exhausting yourself

Nancy describes herself as an extreme extrovert and recognized the same pattern from the other side. She’d judged her own “spazzy extroversion” as a failure. Professional expectations can make anyone feel as though they show up incorrectly.

Once we stop making that judgment, we can move from shame to strategy.

Plan for participation instead of relying on endurance

Jean doesn’t try to turn herself into someone who loves entering a room full of strangers. Instead, she plans for the way her energy works.

Her conference strategies include:

  • Find a wing person. Ask someone comfortable meeting people to make introductions. Nancy and Sharrin Fuller have even invited conference attendees to find them when they need that support.
  • Attend first-timer events. At Scaling New Heights, volunteers at the first-timers breakfast help newcomers make an initial connection and continue checking on them during the conference.
  • Schedule breaks in advance. Don’t wait until you’re completely depleted.
  • Reset your body and mind. Jean may step outside, walk, drink water, and eat a snack before returning.

“In the early conferences, I felt like I was hiding,” Jean says. “When I do that now, I know I’m using it to re-energize.”

The action may look the same, but its meaning has changed. Taking a break is a deliberate way to remain engaged.

Jean also encourages introverts to recognize their strengths. They may be empathetic listeners, comfortable with silence, thoughtful questioners, and builders of deep one-on-one relationships. Nancy may briefly meet 50 people at an event, while her introverted husband ends the evening knowing what is really happening in a few friends’ lives.

Those strengths can also shape how firms build stronger teams.

Smaller spaces can create stronger working relationships

When Jean joined a large networking organization, she didn’t try to meet everyone. She joined a committee and gradually got to know eight or 10 people.

She uses the same approach in her fully virtual firm, whose employees work across 12 or 13 states. Slack’s Donut app pairs two colleagues for a 30-minute monthly conversation with one rule: Don’t talk about work. Her firm also holds a monthly team meeting, smaller client-service meetings, and check-in huddles every other week.

During large virtual meetings, employees begin with a three-to-five-minute icebreaker in breakout rooms of about three people. That smaller setting helps them warm up before returning to the full group.

For firm leaders, the lesson is not to assume one social format works for everyone. Use pairs, committees, mentorship programs, and small groups to make connection easier. When colleagues know one another, collaboration becomes more natural.

Jean learned to design work around how she’s wired. Terri’s challenge was learning to work with the person she had become.

A change in capacity calls for a new definition of success

Being laid off from public accounting “totally shattered everything I knew about myself,” Terri says. She built her identity around the idea of “Drive, drive, drive. Push, push, push. Work, work, work.”

With help from her community, she rebuilt her confidence and created success within her own walls. Her daughter captured that confidence in a bright pink cape covered with sparkles, crystals, and pom-poms.

Then Terri had a stroke and spent 12 months in rehabilitation. About a year-and-a-half later, she had a second stroke. Still determined to prove that the strokes wouldn’t define her, she worked 10 times harder for four months.

Eventually, she hit a wall. Work the old Terri could have done easily now drained her. Refusing to accept her deficits had become part of the problem.

“I was in the way,” she says.

Terri created a new scoreboard. She no longer needed “layers and layers and layers of work and clients” to prove she was successful. Instead, she could use her expertise to train and coach others. When her body told her to stop, she could put away the computer for the day.

Her cape became reversible. One side was bright pink, but the other used darker greens, blues, and purples with smaller sparkles. Terri was still stubborn, valuable, and fully herself. Her new definition of success simply looked different.

Build a career for the person you are today

Terri closes with two reminders: “Be graceful with yourself,” and use the GROW model (goal, reality, options, and will) to examine your needs, capacity, and choices.

Together, Jean and Terri offer four actions:

  • Notice what drains or overwhelms you
  • Stop treating your response as a personal failure
  • Put support and boundaries in place before exhaustion arrives
  • Revisit success when your life or capacity changes

You don’t owe the profession a version of yourself that no longer fits. Listen to the full episode of She Counts, then ask: What are you still asking of yourself that no longer fits who you are?

Vulnerability, Curiosity, and the Messy Middle of Leadership

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At Nancy McClelland’s “Vulnerability as a Strength” panel at Scaling New Heights, the session opened with a word cloud. The question on screen was, “How does it make you feel when you think you’re the only one who doesn’t have it together?” Almost every answer was some version of “poopy” — alone, overwhelmed, not awesome. By the end of the session, the same room answered a different question. “How does it feel to realize you’re not the only one who struggles?” The screen filled with seen, validated, not alone, resilient, community. There were tears in that room. Nancy took a picture of the word cloud.

In Episode 33 of She Counts, Nancy and co-host Questian Telka talk about the two very different sessions they each led at that conference. Nancy ran a panel on vulnerability in leadership. Questian, along with co-presenter Ashley Rhoden, COO of High Rock Accounting, led a session on guiding clients and teams through change. When they compared notes afterward, they realized both talks made the same point. The strongest leadership skill in accounting isn’t having all the answers. It’s being willing to say out-loud what you don’t have figured out and staying curious enough to notice what your team and clients aren’t saying. As Questian put it, “Vulnerability is about recognizing and naming what’s happening inside of us. Change leadership requires us to recognize what is likely happening inside of someone else.” They’re two facets of the same muscle. Here’s how each one works, and why leadership happens in the messy middle.

Why admitting what you’re not good at makes you a stronger leader

Nancy has now run this panel twice. Both times, she started with what she calls a deeply invasive survey designed to reveal deeply rooted feelings and how people cope with them. Then she pulls out the common themes.

Patterns repeated across all six widely admired leaders: Every one had made a costly business decision. Every one had made a major client error. Every one had faced a physical or mental health crisis. The themes that came up included reconciling perception versus reality, building resilience through community, balancing control with letting go, finding meaning in the past, and managing stress and anxiety. These are the same coping strategies often used in cognitive and dialectical behavioral therapy.

There can be a huge gap between how leaders look and what they’re privately carrying. Questian described a friend telling her she “seemed to have everything perfectly together.” She nearly spit out her drink. “I feel like I’m falling apart most of the time.” Both hosts admitted they tend to share the hard stuff only after they’ve worked through it, like the woman who returned to a professional group after a long absence and explained, “It was just too hard to reach out while I was in the messy middle.” When leaders only share mistakes after they’ve been polished into a tidy success story, nobody gets to see the real scale of the failure, or how a person keeps going before they solve the problem.

The panelists were honest and specific about their weak spots, like conflict avoidance so strong it gets in the way, ADHD, the discomfort of hiring and firing, and the desire to be loved that makes holding people accountable genuinely hard.

So how do you admit a weakness without making your team fear for their jobs? Nancy’s answer, drawn from her panelists, is:

  • Your team already knows where you’re weak. Pretending otherwise backfires.
  • Name it, then ask for help. “You’re really good at this. I’m not. Do you have ideas for me?”
  • Invite people with complementary strengths to help shape the firm’s future and offer the same support back. Mentorship goes both directions.

That same self-awareness makes you attentive to what’s happening inside someone else. And that’s where Questian’s session picks up.

Reading the change your client never announced

Questian’s practice is niched in nonprofits, where boards turn over constantly, and the decision-makers change with them. Change rarely arrives as an announcement. It usually shows up sideways:

  • Slower response times
  • Canceled meetings
  • New, unfamiliar faces in meetings
  • Shifts in who’s making decisions
  • Unexpected reporting requests
  • A client simply going quiet

She lost her first client that way. The organization was losing funding, responses stretched out, meetings got canceled, and eventually the executive director called to say they had to tighten their belts. In hindsight, the signs were all there.

Her advice is to meet regularly, build genuine rapport, and ask open-ended questions. What’s new? What’s changed? What are you planning for the next few months? Her questions, not their announcements, surface the most information. Nancy connected this to the “lead with curiosity” lesson from the Reframe conference: resisting the accountant’s instinct to jump straight to a solution. She also passed along a tip from Twyla Verhelst: before your next client meeting, run the transcripts of your last two or three meetings through an AI tool and ask what’s worth following up on. It’s not a substitute for rapport, but it’s a memory aid for when you have more client relationships than you can hold in your head.

This helps you become the person a client calls first. Change stops being a threat and becomes the doorway into advisory work. And as Questian pointed out, it’s far more expensive to find a new client than to grow a current relationship.

The messy middle is where leadership happens

Whether the change is internal, such as new technology, standardized processes, and documented SOPs, or on the client side, the hard part is emotional rather than technical.

Change happens in three parts: ending the old way, the messy middle, and the new beginning. “When you are in the messy middle,” Questian said, “that’s where we lose people and where we fail.”

Resistance almost always traces back to a fear of losing something, whether it’s control, expertise, authority, job security, or identity. Documenting SOPs so a team member can take a vacation without their laptop sounds like a gift until someone thinks, if you create those SOPs, then you can replace me. So get buy-in early, while feedback can still shape the decision. Frame the change as solving their problem. And remember that a launch date doesn’t come with an emotional switch. Questian described one team member who met her with resistance at every turn. She simply kept showing the benefit until they came out the other side and buy-in finally landed.

When a client’s needs shift, name it out-loud. Compare the original scope to the new outcome they’re after. Sometimes scope grows to support a negative. For example, helping a nonprofit evaluate cost cuts or a workforce reduction is a distinct project that deserves its own pricing. Center the conversation on the client’s needs, be transparent, avoid surprises, and lead with sensitivity, especially when the situation is painful. Absorbing unbilled, out-of-scope work “builds resentment,” Questian warned, “and it weakens the relationship.”

And there’s a bigger reason to get good at this. As Nancy argued in nearly every talk she’s given this year, as AI takes on more technical work, empathy and connection are more valuable than ever before. Trust and psychological safety stop being soft skills and start being the professional skills that set you apart.

Two questions to sit with

Nancy summed up her panel in three lines:

  1. No one has everything figured out
  2. Vulnerability doesn’t weaken leadership when it’s paired with responsibility and self-awareness
  3. You build resilience through community

Questian’s take is that relationships and scopes evolve when organizations evolve, and that evolution is an opportunity.

“Resilient firms aren’t built by people who never struggle,” Nancy said. “They’re built by people who don’t hide their struggles.” For women navigating rooms where they’re often the only one without a seat at the table, that reframe can mean pulling up a chair. Transparency is a professional strength, not a liability.

Nancy left listeners with an exercise. Write down every person who actually knows what you’re carrying right now. If the list is short, you’re not letting anyone in. Then flip it and ask yourself, “Whose load can you help lighten?” Or, as the hosts asked on LinkedIn, which side of leadership needs more attention from you right now, being more honest about what you’re carrying, or becoming more curious about what someone else is carrying?

They closed with a line from Nicole Davis, highlighted on one of Nancy’s slides from her SNH panel: “Vulnerability is a strength that the greatest leaders wear with pride.”

Listen to the full conversation between Nancy McClelland and Questian Telka and earn CPE credit for it on the Earmark app.

Take a step instead of a leap when you’re ready to begin again

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You can build a client forecast, test three scenarios, and explain risk down to the dollar. Then you close the laptop and leave the spreadsheet about your own future unopened for years.

Fear rarely introduces itself by name. It can look like a business plan you never write, a job you stay in through burnout, or constant work that keeps you from sitting intentionally with your thoughts.

In Episode 34 of She Counts, hosts Questian Telka and Nancy McClelland share two conversations recorded at the 2026 Theater of Public Speaking Advanced retreat. Katie Helle, CPA, explains why she waited seven years to start her firm. Mariana Alvarez describes how she rebuilt her identity after 17 years in an abusive marriage.

These experiences aren’t equivalent. One is about career risk; the other begins with survival. Yet both women found that change came through support – and one careful step at a time.

Turn vague fear into questions you can answer

“We should use it as information, not instruction,” Katie says. Fear can raise valid questions. The problem comes when we let those unanswered questions make our decisions.

Katie managed a CPA firm for 15 years and had long wanted to work for herself. She had entrepreneurial experience, including running a successful home-based jewelry business. Still, leaving a comfortable position felt risky because she was her family’s main income earner.

Her fears piled up. What if she didn’t make enough money? What if she was unprepared? What if clients didn’t want to work with her?

Then she used a familiar accounting tool: a spreadsheet. She calculated how much she needed each month and how many clients it would take to reach that amount.

“Once I dug into the spreadsheet and did the math… the math worked,” she says. “It was very logical. But my brain was telling me something different.”

The numbers didn’t eliminate all the risk, but they made it easier to examine. Burnout finally pushed her to act. Katie loved her job, but long hours, a small child, and running a household had become too much. Her spreadsheet showed that she might be able to earn what she needed in fewer hours.

If you are considering a change, ask:

  • How much income do I need each month?
  • How many clients, projects, or hours would produce it?
  • How much savings should I build first?
  • What do I still need to learn?
  • Who could help me test my assumptions?

Once the numbers are visible and viable, the next challenge is finding support.

Take a step instead of a leap

“You don’t want to take a leap,” Katie says. “You want to take one step at a time.”

That could mean researching pricing, building savings, learning a skill, or contacting someone who already runs the kind of firm you want. Katie stresses that quitting without a plan is not the answer. Small, measurable actions prepare you for a responsible change.

Community also changed what Katie believed was possible. Nancy and other women in their mastermind encouraged her to revisit her spreadsheet. Katie also learned from online accounting communities where experienced firm owners share what they know.

“We’re not gatekeepers,” she says. “There are things that you don’t know, but it doesn’t mean you can’t learn them.”

That support did not decide for Katie. It helped her trust the evidence she had already gathered.

The process was still uncomfortable. Katie argues that discomfort may show you are approaching growth rather than heading in the wrong direction. Nancy connects that idea to imposter feelings: learning begins when you enter a place of “not knowing”.

Katie cites a 2025 report that found 60% of people wanted to change jobs but were afraid to act. She challenges anyone in that situation to write down the change you want, name each fear, and place one step beside it.

But some fears require a different first step. In Mariana’s story, that step was safety.

Put safety before forgiveness

This section discusses domestic abuse.

Mariana was married for 17 years. She stayed in the relationship because she feared losing her children.  At times she believed the abuse happened because she wasn’t good enough, attractive enough, or able to communicate well. After leaving, she blamed herself for staying as long as she did.

“Then I learned that wasn’t true,” she says.

Mariana is careful not to turn forgiveness into “another burden” for women who remain in abusive situations. Her order is clear: first safety, then support, and then the work of finding your own truth. Forgiveness may come later.

After leaving, anger and bitterness became a protective wall. Over time, Mariana realized that carrying the wall forward kept the experience present in her life. Reconnecting with childhood friends and family helped. They remembered her as kind, cheerful, friendly, and talkative, even when she could no longer recognize those qualities in herself.

Her recovery involved safety, stability, therapy, reflection, and steady support. She also drew an important line, recognizing she wasn’t responsible for the abuse, but she could take responsibility for her healing and future. “I had to do the work,” she says.

That work helped Mariana recover her voice, which leads to a lesson many women may recognize at work as well.

Reclaim your voice without apologizing

Mariana wanted her children to live in a peaceful home where silence meant they were safe. She especially wanted her daughter to see genuine inner strength rather than a facade.

Work initially became another hiding place. “I worked long hours. I worked a lot,” Mariana says. Healing included learning that she didn’t always have to stay busy to hide a feeling or prevent a storm.

Katie and Mariana began in very different places. Yet neither waited for fear to disappear before acting. Each found support and moved forward one decision at a time.

Your next step might be calculating a savings runway, contacting a mentor, asking for help, or beginning the work of forgiving yourself. You don’t need to see the entire path before you start.

Listen to Episode 34 of She Counts to hear Katie and Mariana share their stories in full, and then name one small step you can take today.

“I Don’t Deserve This” and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves During Awards Season

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Imagine finding out you’ve been nominated for one of the most prestigious recognition lists in your profession. Thousands of ProAdvisors across the globe, and someone thought you belonged among the best. But your first thought is, “I don’t deserve this. I’m not good enough. I don’t know enough.”

That was Questian Telka’s immediate reaction when she learned she’d been nominated for the Insightful Accountant Top 100 ProAdvisor list. And the kicker is, at that very moment, she was preparing to deliver a session on imposter syndrome at a major industry conference.

How do we know this? Because Nancy McClelland shared the actual WhatsApp text thread on Episode 29 of She Counts, the real-talk podcast for women in accounting. In this episode, Nancy is joined by guest co-host Melissa Miller Furgeson, stepping in for Questian. This topic is near and dear to Melissa’s heart, having applied for the Top 100 ProAdvisor list for five years before making it.

Together, Nancy and Melissa pull back the curtain on the messy, complicated emotions that swirl around professional awards. The desire. The dread. The jealousy. The shame about feeling envious. All of it, out in the open.

 

The tug-of-war between wanting recognition and dreading rejection

Let’s go back to that WhatsApp thread – it captures something many women in accounting feel but rarely say out-loud.

Questian’s first instinct after her nomination was not to tell anyone. “I am embarrassed even to share it because I know I won’t make the list,” she texted Nancy. She was already preparing her public disclaimer before celebrating the achievement.

Nancy admitted she wasn’t going to post about her nomination either. Then she saw a colleague share theirs and watched friends rally around them with congratulations. Nancy felt sad nobody was lifting her up before catching herself: “I hadn’t even given them the opportunity.”

Nancy’s reframe stopped the spiral. “Literally, not a single soul will see the final list of who wins and think, ‘Oh, of course Questian and Nancy didn’t win. I figured they wouldn’t.'” The fear of losing publicly is a movie playing in our own heads, not in public theaters.

What makes this fear even more frustrating is the enormous amount of work these applications require. As Nancy explained, most of them demand extensive documentation. The Insightful Accountant application requires you to track all your continuing education throughout the year, not just CPE. “It’s a huge amount of work when you’re applying,” Nancy said, “and it’s actually a huge amount of work throughout the course of the year.”

When the system fails you, you have to advocate for yourself

Both Nancy and Melissa experienced something that adds another layer to the vulnerability: system glitches that initially left them off finalist lists.

In 2024, Nancy discovered she wasn’t on the Top 100 ProAdvisor finalist list despite completing the grueling application. When she reached out to Insightful Accountant, their system showed she hadn’t submitted. Nancy knew better. She’d kept records of her answers because the application was “very difficult.” They added her name to the list, but at the bottom, out of alphabetical order, where fewer people would notice and be able to vote for her.

The same thing happened to Melissa in 2025. The system lost her application, but showed she’d spent significant time on it. They let her use points from her 2024 application, adding her name… also at the bottom of the list.

“I am really proud of both of us for being brave and following up,” Nancy said, “and finding out it was a system glitch rather than a failure on our part.”

This adds another dimension to the courage required: not just applying, but advocating for yourself when things go wrong.

The middle school energy nobody wants to admit

“You want recognition, but you fear rejection,” Nancy said, naming the tension directly. “You want visibility, but you fear judgment.” Then she compared the entire awards cycle to middle-school popularity dynamics.

Melissa said she’d literally discussed this exact parallel with her therapist that day.

Nancy’s philosophy is, “We don’t grow out of the people we were when we were younger. We just grow into a different version of that person.” The worry about belonging never fully disappears. Awards season dials it right back up.

Nancy illustrated this with a story about discovering Financial Cent’s Top 30 Accounting and Bookkeeping Firm Owners to Follow list. Her emotional journey included:

  1. Opening it, excited for recommendations
  2. Feeling proud seeing friends on it
  3. Realizing she wasn’t listed
  4. Spiraling into jealousy and shame
  5. Feeling shame about feeling jealous

She made herself breathe and refocus on gratitude. When she returned to finish reading, there she was at number 30. She’d spiraled through five emotions before finishing the article.

“Happy-jealous-proud should be a word,” Nancy suggested.

Even successes can trigger hesitation. Nancy was thrilled to make the Forbes Best-in-State list this year. It’s an award where you don’t even know you’re being considered until you win. But she’s been hesitant to share it because Forbes charges a fee to use its logo and name in promotional materials. “I’m kind of waiting to figure out how that works exactly before I tell people about it,” she admitted.

Breaking the shame spiral through honesty

Melissa was candid about jealousy. “It’s so real and natural and something I feel more often than I care to admit.”

She reframes her mindset by saying, “We want other people to do well,” Melissa said. “We love our colleagues and friends, but we also want a little bit for ourselves.”

Nancy’s therapist keeps it even simpler. When Nancy worries about being jealous, her therapist asks, “Do you want what they have?” When the answer is yes, “Well, that’s just a fact.”

No moral judgment. No character flaw. Just information.

The power of community courage

If these feelings are universal, the solution isn’t to eliminate them. It’s to act despite them, together.

Nancy organized nomination sessions for Ask a CPA members. People showed up thinking they were there to help others apply. The idea of applying themselves hadn’t crossed their minds.

Then one usually introverted and quiet member spoke up for the first time, to say, “I’m just gonna say this out-loud in case I’m not the only one. Does anybody else in here feel like an imposter?”

Every hand went up.

The group rallied. Members nominated one another, worked through applications together on mute during virtual study halls, and held one another accountable. As a result, 15 Ask a CPA members made the Top 100 finalists list.

Among them was Sandy Rehart, who’d been working in accounting for decades but never applied. Like Melissa years earlier, Sandy assumed “they weren’t talking about me.” Nancy got emotional describing Sandy’s joy at finally seeing her name on that list.

When the nomination matters more than the win

Nancy’s experience with the AICPA Global Women to Watch award proves this point. The hardest part was asking a colleague to nominate her, essentially saying out-loud, “I want this. Will you help me?”

When she posted about the nomination on LinkedIn, talking about the women who inspired her and what it meant personally, the response was overwhelming. But when she actually won, “practically nobody said anything.”

The vulnerability in sharing the journey resonated more than the achievement itself.

Understanding what awards really are makes sharing easier. “Awards are visibility events. They’re not objective truth,” Melissa observed. Vendors benefit every time you post about a nomination. That’s the business model. You’re not bragging, you’re participating.

Practical permission: Scripts for showing up

Nancy calls it “flexing the Ask muscle,” or pushing through fear to ask for what you want. Every time you do it, it gets a little easier.

As Melissa tells her adult kids, “What’s the worst that can happen? You don’t have it now. If you go for it and don’t get it, you’re in exactly the same place.”

For those ready to post but unsure how, here are suggested scripts from the episode:

  • “Look at all the incredible people on this list. What an honor to be included.”
  • Share that tooting your own horn is hard, and why you’re doing it anyway
  • Tell the personal story of why this award matters to you
  • Express gratitude by tagging people and vendors who made it possible
  • Frame it as paying it forward. “I want to be the example for others that someone was for me.”

Nancy teared up when Melissa said, “We are not rooting for each other to lose. We celebrate each other.”

Raise your hand. Someone behind you is watching.

The most important takeaway from this conversation is to show up for the awards process, even when you feel undeserving. It creates permission for others to show up, too.

As Nancy said in that original text thread, “If we don’t show up, then other people don’t feel like they have reason to show up, either.”

For women in accounting, especially in a profession that hasn’t always rewarded self-promotion, these conversations matter. Every woman who posts about her nomination, asks for a recommendation, or fills out an application after years of assuming “they’re not talking about me” is lighting the path for someone behind her.

Melissa closed the episode with a quote from Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space: “Never limit yourself because of others’ limited imagination, and never limit others because of your own limited imagination.”

Listen to the full episode of She Counts to hear the complete text thread and the unfiltered emotion in Nancy’s and Melissa’s voices. Then head to the She Counts LinkedIn page and share: What’s an opportunity you’ve been too afraid to pursue, or a time you went for it anyway?

The shiny trophy is nice. But the courage to raise your hand is what actually changes things for you and for every woman watching who needs to see someone go first.

You Don’t Have to Feel Confident to Act With Authority. Here’s the Hack

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Picture a sixth-grader in the mid-1980s, standing at the edge of a school dumpster, working up the nerve to climb in. Cassie Divine had accidentally tossed her orthodontic retainer onto her lunch tray and into the trash. This $150 device might as well have cost a million dollars, in her household. Her mother insisted she  find it. So in she went, alongside the school janitor, digging through the garbage until she came up with the retainer in hand.

The retainer got sterilized, but her reputation didn’t. Word spread, and in an era when Garbage Pail Kids were having their pop-culture moment, a classmate landed on the nickname that followed her for years: “Trashy Cassie.” She was certain her life was over. She begged her mother to let her switch schools.

If that middle-school logic sounds familiar, you’re in good company. On this episode of She Counts, hosts Questian Telka and Nancy McClelland both admit they made the exact same plea to their own mothers. “Can I just change schools?” seemed, at the time, like a completely reasonable solution to an unbearable problem.

But this episode isn’t really about surviving middle school. It’s about what that scrappy, humiliated, dumpster-diving version of Cassie became, and how, three decades later, Cassie discovered she could summon her on demand.

From Dumpster to Boardroom: Meeting Your Alter Ego

Fast-forward thirty years from that dumpster. Cassie Divine is a former Intuit SVP who led QuickBooks for nearly two decades. But Cassie found herself in another impossible situation. She was leading an initiative where tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars were on the line. But her senior male colleague kept talking over her, dismissing her ideas, and twice called her boss to complain that she was being “too aggressive.”

“I remember driving home on my commute and thinking through like, what are my choices?” Cassie recalled. The adult version of “Can I switch schools?” had arrived.

Nancy and Questian immediately recognized the double standard. “With a man, it’s leadership and confidence,” Nancy pointed out. “But with a woman, it’s aggressive.” When they asked if either had met a woman who hadn’t faced this, the answer was unanimous: never.

Stuck in traffic and dread, Cassie thought about Trashy Cassie, the girl who climbed into that dumpster and survived the humiliation that followed. “She can deal with this,” Cassie realized. So she channeled that sixth-grader’s resilience long enough to text her colleague and set a clear boundary: “You can’t treat me like this. You can’t treat our team like this.”

“You don’t have to become someone tougher,” Cassie explained. “You remember that you already are her, and she’s available for you to be in this moment.”

The beauty of this approach is that you’re not pretending or manufacturing a new personality. You’re accessing real strength from your own history. When Cassie needed to advocate for a team member, she remembered being “the toughest mom you’ve ever seen” as she advocated for her daughter in a hospital room. That’s who she became in the meeting.

Building Your Catalog of Courage

The alter ego only works if you can summon it intentionally. That means building what Cassie calls a “catalog” of the times you’ve survived hard things.

“You’ve survived 100% of your hardest days,” Cassie said, borrowing a line from Peloton instructor Robin Arzon. Those survival stories can include advocating for someone in a hospital, surviving an illness, or even finding the right words to console a teammate who lost. Each memory is proof that you’ve already been the person who could handle whatever you’re facing now.

Nancy suggested turning this into a journaling exercise. Name your alter egos and write down their three strongest traits. What makes Trashy Cassie powerful? What about the version of you who comforts someone through loss? “Reject everybody else’s definitions for you,” Cassie advised, “and decide the ones that you are.”

The shift is profound. Instead of asking “Can I do this?” you ask “When have I already been the person who could?”

But we often believe you need to feel confident before you can act that way, and that trips up many ambitious women.

Confidence Is Something You Do, Not Something You Feel

“You’re not going to feel confident until you act that way,” Cassie said, cutting straight through one of the biggest myths about professional authority.

Nancy, drawing on cognitive behavioral therapy, explained the mechanics. Your thinking, feeling, and doing selves don’t need to align in order for you to take action. Her shorthand is “putting your yoga pants on.” You can dread the class, doubt you need it, and pull the pants on anyway as you head there. The action doesn’t wait for the feeling’s permission.

Cassie keeps the wisdom “Just act as if” on a Post-it note. The feeling follows the behavior, not the other way around.

For Questian, this revelation reframed her entire early career. “I looked up to women who were farther along and assumed they felt as confident as they appeared,” she admitted. “The idea that they might be projecting confidence they didn’t feel was a foreign concept.”

To trigger this shift on demand, all three women use specific cues. Cassie keeps a picture of a goldfish wearing a shark fin. It looks like a shark in the water, but it’s still just a goldfish underneath. It’s a good visual reminder.

Then there’s the music. Cassie maintains “imposter syndrome playlists” to hype her up beforehand, and one called “Victory Lap” loaded with ridiculous anthems like DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win” for celebrating afterward. Nancy rediscovered Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing” during a brutal tax season, hearing it as proof she’d survived before and would again.

Each time you act confidently and survive, you bank more evidence. The behavior gradually becomes genuine confidence. It’s a hack that builds on itself.

The Guardrails: Clarity Over Cruelty

With this kind of power comes the need for boundaries. Cassie is clear that “this isn’t permission to be unkind. This is permission to be clear.”

The alter ego is situational armor. It’s something you put on for a specific moment and take off when it’s done. If you feel yourself ramping up the “tough lady” too much, that’s your signal to recalibrate. The goal is always clarity, and you never want to lose alignment with your values.

Cassie’s most powerful reframe might be to lead with the outcome rather than the feeling. “So many times our feelings affect what we say and how we say it,” she explained. “If instead I’ve shifted to why it’s important to give this feedback or why it’s important to raise my prices, it sets the tone for everything.”

Her final guardrail, written on another Post-it, is “Talk less, say more.” She learned this after spending 15 minutes explaining her feelings to a difficult colleague and getting nowhere. In a similar situation some months later, she kept it simple. When he said “I don’t know what you mean,” she replied, “I think you do,” and that was that. It was far more effective.

The group shared their favorite conversation-enders. After drafting 17 angry email responses to a jerk colleague, Cassie finally sent just one word: “Unsubscribe.” He read it exactly as intended (“I’m done with you”), and it led to their most productive conversation ever.

For accounting professionals, these tools apply directly to our daily challenges, including pricing conversations, scope creep, and difficult clients. The same playbook works whether we’re setting boundaries with a bully or holding our rates with a demanding client.

Permission to Be Powerful

What Cassie offers is permission to access the strength you’ve already proven. Her mission with Career Hack reflects her goal of helping more women gain power and use their voices more often. Not everyone needs to be a CEO, but learning to act with impact makes the profession better for everyone.

“Women don’t lack capability or intelligence or ambition or work ethic,” Cassie said. “But I do think we lack permission.”

The next time you face a hard conversation, a big project, or a room full of people who underestimate you, remember you don’t need to become someone new. You just need to remember who you’ve already been.

As Nancy put it, “When have I already been the person who can handle hard things?”

Listen to the full episode, and then join the conversation by following the She Counts LinkedIn podcast page and share your answer: When have you already been the person who can handle hard things?