Thought Leadership Studio Podcast Episodes:
Lead with Boldness with Cassandra Sparks
Episode 95 – From Comfort Zone to Calling: Bold Choices, Inner Alignment, and Trading Routine for Adventure
#coaching, #communication, #consulting, #creativity, #inspiration, #interview, #interviews, #leadership, #lifebalance, #motivation, #paradigmchange, #paradigmshifts, #personalbranding, #persuasion, #speaking, #storytelling
Or Click here to listen or subscribe on appWhat this episode will do for you
:- Learn from Cassandra’s Bold Journey: Hear how Cassandra reinvented her life multiple times, leaving comfort zones behind to align with purpose and passion.
- Understand the Boldness Continuum: Discover how bold choices—big or small—can shift your mindset and lead to living more authentically.
- Overcome Internal and External Barriers: Explore Cassandra’s strategies for navigating fear and self-doubt, and handling resistance from others with empathy and confidence.
- Develop Your Internal Compass: Gain insight into identifying and aligning with your core values to guide decisions and build a more fulfilling life.
- Lead Others Across the Bridge of Change: Learn how transformational coaches and thought leaders can guide others from stale mental models to meaningful new paradigms.
- Embrace Everyday Boldness: Be inspired to shake up routines and live with a greater sense of intention, adventure, and self-awareness.
Cassandra Sparks.
In this episode, I'm excited to introduce Cassandra Sparks - transformational coach, speaker, and author—who helps people live Bold AF: bold and free.
Why boldness? Because Strategic Thought Leadership means guiding others beyond outdated thinking into more empowered, authentic action based on new mental models - and boldness supports both that leadership and the journey across that bridge.
Cassandra’s own journey includes bold reinventions: leaving a stable career, launching a successful real estate business, and starting over to follow her calling. Her programs like Blueprint for Boldness help others do the same—trusting their inner compass, embracing fear, and making powerful, aligned choices.
We explore how small, bold steps spark transformation, and how living authentically means choosing growth over comfort.
Some of Cassandra's coordinates:
Curated Transcript of Interview with Cassandra Sparks
The following partial transcript is lightly edited for clarity - the full interview is on audio. Click here to listen.
Chris McNeil: I'm Chris McNeil, and I'm sitting across Zoom with Cassandra Sparks, who understands boldness for what it really is Firepower in disguise. It's this inspired and strategic approach that has earned her a reputation for delivering results for professionals across the real estate, entertainment, media, and tech areas.
As a motivational speaker and Coach Cassandra has helped hundreds of high achievers progress from just going through the motions to leveraging bold action as an accelerant for authority and authenticity. Welcome, Cassandra. .
Cassandra Sparks: Thank you so much for having me, Chris.
Chris McNeil: My pleasure. So sometimes we start these interviews with a discussion about pivotal moments, transformational times in the life of the guest that set them on the path to doing what they're doing. Now, if you had one of those, a pivotal moment or a phase shift or an awareness or insight, that was kind of the "aha thing" that points you to what you're doing now?
Cassandra Sparks: Yes, indeed, Chris. I have had in fact, at least three really pivotally transformative moments in the last several years.
Chris McNeil: Awesome.
Three Bold Moves That Changed Everything
Cassandra Sparks: A lot of my work is about living boldly and living authentically, and I like to consider myself or label myself as bold AF. And I've made three bold choices that had changed the trajectory of my life. I'll go through them super fast for your listeners.
My first one was choosing to leave the very comfortable, stable position that I held in higher education. I worked there for over a decade. I had permanency, I had a steady paycheck and wonderful benefits. Unfortunately, I felt stifled and unable to grow professionally, so I made a bold choice to move from that space to one of the least predictable industries and created a successful real estate business.
Now, I did not do this alone. I had an amazing mentor in real estate and business partner who helped guide and shape my journey, and together we created this amazing real estate team that doubled our size, our team size, and doubled our production year over year. We became a team of excellence and were sought after in the upstate New York area, and we were on top of our game.
Unfortunately, I felt myself getting burned out so quickly in that work because it takes 90 days to close on the sale of a house in upstate New York, and the price points were relatively low compared with the rest of the state. So we had to do a lot of volume all at once. We were juggling, let's say 10 to 20 different transactions at one time. And so that just wasn't sustainable for me...
Which led me to my next bold day of choice, of completely changing every part of my life all at once. Now I consider myself to be an overachiever, always have been. And in true overachieving fashion, I just said, let me finally live the life that I've been waiting 20 years to live. Because I knew 20 years ago that I wanted to be a motivational speaker and a coach, and I knew that I could not really do that where I was planted geographically.
So I made the very hard choice to change my marital status change where I lived. I moved to South Carolina where I knew no one all by myself, didn't even have a job lined up other than the business that I had started, changed my financial status every part of my life all at once, and that was two years ago. And it's been a wonderful journey. I think I felt every emotion on the planet in the last two years while experiencing what it means to live bold and authentically.
It's thrilling, it's terrifying, it's exhilarating, it's freeing, it's scary and wonderful and everything in between. So yes, I believe that pivotal moments can shape us and our outlook defines how we move forward with those moments.
Chris McNeil: Absolutely. It's what we do with those, isn't it? I love the reinvention aspect and it's like a total reinvention of your self-concept in a sense too, isn't it?
Cassandra Sparks: Yes, absolutely, yes.
Your Inner Compass as the Ultimate Change Strategy
Chris McNeil: Let's go into that. What does it mean to reinvent yourself in this manner? You've done it three times.
Cassandra Sparks: Yes.
Chris McNeil: And so you got some experience worth sharing. What would you share with our listeners about what it means to recognize you're in the comfort zone that doesn't suit you, then reinvent yourself to get out of it?
Cassandra Sparks: Absolutely. I think my first two bold AF moves, I reinvented myself professionally, and that was the main impetus or the main change factor. But my third bull day of choice was a change of everything all at once, professional, personal, fiscal, et cetera, and really carving out an entire new life for myself.
So what the last bold AF not last, the most recent bold AF choice taught me was or reminded me. I always knew this, but what it reminded me of was the strength that I have and how well I know myself and my values, and that compass, that internal compass that I have really helped me create solid footing in a brand new terrain and brand new space and create connection with people to start life anew after being coupled for nearly 20 years with a wonderful human being. What does it mean to now be a single person?
What does it mean to not have the same support group right there and available to me easily geographically? What does it mean to be a motivational speaker and coach? All right. You've waited 20 years for it. You've started the business. What does it look like? How do you do it? So figuring out all these different pathways was extraordinarily exciting and challenging. And really what I think helped me is trust in myself and knowing what I know to be true. And that is I have a passion for this. I have a burning desire to do it.
I have important things I need to say to the world and share with the world, and I know I can help people to unleash their hidden firepower just like I did. So really that's what I'm taking away from all of these pivotal shifts is turning inward and asking yourself, I know this about me to be true, and then filling in the blanks.
Chris McNeil: So being really clear on that internal compass in terms of self-concept and value systems and core beliefs.
Cassandra Sparks: 100%, yes.
Chris McNeil: So what would be some examples of a strongly built internal compass to help guide us in these times of change in terms of what values are important to you that have helped you in these, or what core belief systems have helped you?
Cassandra Sparks: That's such a great question. For me personally, kindness is one of my, it sounds so basic, but it is such an important belief and value for me. Kindness and empathy are at the core of me and my work. And even as I made hard decisions about leaving certain parts of my life, I left with kindness, left with love and built my life forward with kindness and love. So that's a big part of what I find to be important, and knowing that for me, hard work, the knowledge that I have, the experiences that I've curated and cultivated, speak loudly.
And I don't necessarily have to shout about it, but I have the experience. So believing in myself again was so crucial, and I'm not going to lie, Chris, there were plenty of moments of doubt. I think it's very important to address authenticity and realism as a motivational speaker and coach and to say there are moments of doubt and sadness and feeling hopeless or lost. That's the human experience.
And to say that I didn't experience that would be an outright lie and do a huge disservice to the folks that are tuning in because it's through those moments of doubt and uncertainty where we can really learn about how strong we are, how resilient we are, and what we're capable of. Because the truth of the matter is, is we've survived all of our hardest days, and that's such a wonderful thing to remember.
Yes, life is hard and throws us curve balls and sometimes wants to keep us down, and it's how we can grab onto that strength, pull it up from our guts up through our heart and into our brain so that we can come out of that and move forward with the realization of who we are and the gifts that we have to share with the world.
Guardians of the Threshold: Overcoming the Inner and Outer Voices of Doubt
Chris McNeil: Well, the heroes in Stories, the Heroes Journey type stories, they have the guardians of the threshold of change, and those can be external, but those can also be internal.
There's echoes of the voices of people in the past who've tried to define us as less than what we are and how do we deal with those? How do you deal with those and bring the bold AF mindset to overcoming the internal and the external guardians of the threshold?
Cassandra Sparks: Of course. And to your point, I often say we are both the hero and the villain in our own story.
We are our own harshest critics. Again, I think that's part of human nature. We often talk to ourselves in a way that we would never speak to a loved one. We're hard on ourselves. We might have negative self-talk. Being aware of when that self-talk is happening and literally asking yourself, would I say this to my best friend, my partner, my family member, a parent, a sibling, a child, whomever?
The answer is likely no. So when we find ourselves in that villainous space of our own doing, we can then become our own hero by reminding ourselves, Hey, this is not my truth. This is not who I am. This might be the story that I'm telling myself. And the truth is I am blah, blah, blah. I am all the positive things that you are that you know to be true about yourself. And in terms of other people, those, what was the word that you used? I love, I would like to hear that again.
Chris McNeil: Guardians of the threshold?
Cassandra Sparks: Guardians of the threshold.
Chris McNeil: Yeah, that's Joseph Campbell's work on the Hero of a Thousand Faces. Oh, I love it. And the mythological construct of the story of the hero's journey, the growth of the hero comes from overcoming the guardians of the threshold. The change.
Otherwise change would be easy, but not significant. If you want to bring back the elixir of truth to your tribe, you have to overcome the guardians of the threshold.
Cassandra Sparks: That's really great. That's really great. I like that so much. Other people, oftentimes, let's talk about strategic change. Part of my coaching is helping folks navigate change strategically, whether it's changing jobs, asking for a promotion, changing a part of their social structure, marital status, relationship status, what have you.
And a large part of that process is once we do all the groundwork of getting the change in place, a plan in place, then it comes time to talk about that change with other people. So I often coach folks on language that they can use that empowers them about the change because it's harder for people to become naysayers when the person or you are speaking about the change with clarity, with confidence, with empowerment, and with belief.
And if those folks are still offering negative comments, I offer suggestions on how that person can allow those comments to flow in, filter out, and be strained out of themselves because we want it to almost like Teflon bounce off of them versus weighing them down and becoming negative self-talk that fuels that doubt. So really for me, I find the phrase, thank you for your feedback to have a lot of power.
I hear you and thank you for your feedback. It acknowledges the other person whilst not really opening the conversation for much further debate and saying, I hear you and thank you. And that can kind of end it without having to go too much further in.
Bold AF: Replacing Comfort with Conscious Choice
Chris McNeil: Absolutely. That's a good strategy for diffusing the negative beliefs others might impose on you. And then of course, you have the voice in the head of all the different communications around limitations, and how do you turn those voices down or just laugh at them, ha ha. Or just treat them like you're walking by a TV that's playing that or talking about somebody else and it doesn't apply to me.
How do you gain that distance and replace it perhaps with affirming? You spoke of confidence. The bold AF state includes confidence and clarity or two things I'm getting. What else does the bold AF state, that state that takes you past these barriers that allows you to step into a consciously designed remake of your life that you have chosen completely and fully?
Cassandra Sparks: A bold choice can be anything from trying a new type of coffee in the morning or trying a new workout regimen, a new workout move. It could be traveling a different route to one of a, let's say, work or to church or to your family member's house, something new. It could be choosing to wear a bold color. It could be choosing a new hairstyle. It could be speaking up in a meeting at work and saying, I disagree, and here's why.
There's so many different iterations of what boldness looks like, and it is so custom for each of us. I call it the boldness continuum because it really does kind of look like this. You can be a bold beginner and you can move to the bold AF side, and there's everything in between. So how do we keep making bold choices? Because when we make bold choices, what happens is we start to authentically live our lives without even thinking about it.
We're making choices that feel right for us. They're giving us courage, they're giving us new ways to look at the world, and that is just thrilling. When we can open up our mindset and our worldview to new things, we just inherently make those bold choices. And then authenticity roles organically from that.
Chris McNeil: There's an aspect of waking up out of your habit patterns and choosing consciously.
Cassandra Sparks: That's right.
Chris McNeil: And so is there kind of a self-monitoring aspect? Where am I just acting out of habit or am I choosing this? Is there another choice I haven't considered because I'm acting out of habit? Is that a piece of it?
Cassandra Sparks: I do. I do think there's a level of self-awareness that's required to live boldly, and sometimes we can become robotic, and that's some of the work that I do is to help folks from just going through the motions to living with purpose. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
I don't want folks to hear that and think, oh my gosh, I'm doing something wrong, or That's bad because it's not. It's I think a side effect of living comfortably and being in a routine and feeling like, okay, things are fine, things are good. Could they be better? Yes. Do I have the ability to do and be more? Yes, absolutely.
So it's that level of self-awareness of assessing am I doing this out of comfort and habit and routine, and what can I do to help me move in a direction that feels a little bit more bold, different, exciting, to help us shake things up? Because monotony can get really tedious and boring and doing the same exact thing every day without any growth can lead to someone feeling stagnant, stuck, suffocated, and then that negative self-talk clicks on so fast and so hard, and there we become the villain of our own narrative.
Crossing the Bridge: Leading Others from Comfort into Bold Adventure
Chris McNeil: Again, this makes perfect sense, and it's some .... in Strategic Thought Leadership, sometimes we'll use the metaphor of an adventure guide, and what I'm getting is that bold AF is about living life with a sense of adventure where adventure becomes a higher value than comfort.
Cassandra Sparks: Yes.
Chris McNeil: And we set ourselves up for challenges by getting out of the comfort zone and putting ourselves somewhere that we're not used to being, having to think on our feet. And of course, in this type of thought leadership, it means we're taking people on an adventure trip with us and having to entice others to step out of the comfort zone of stale old belief systems or mental models, perhaps about whatever category we're in of a product or service or a type of profession.
Here's a standard way of thinking. That's the comfort zone. I want to lead you out of that across a bridge to a whole new land of more value or more excitement or making smarter decisions, more clarity or attaching it to a whole different purpose or value system than you may have attached to it before. That gives it more meaning and depth.
So what does it mean to lead people across the bridge? You do it for a living- across the bridge, out of comfort, into adventure.
Cassandra Sparks: I like to say that I walk beside folks on their journey and I'm not in front of them. Sometimes I have to give them a little push, and that's great. I can offer some suggestions about what has worked, what I've seen that hasn't worked for myself and for other people.
But getting folks from one side of the bridge to the other requires real talk from the client and me in a safe space where they can say, this is what I'm afraid of, this is what I am excited about and this is why I want to do this. So what I'm afraid of, it's so important for me to honor that fear is a real thing and it can be paralyzing. And if we don't give it the honor and attention that it deserves, we can't overcome it because we're just saying, oh, it's no big deal. It's no big deal.
I do the same thing with my public speaking training program. We have to honor and understand the fear in order to leap over the hurdle of the fear. So that's a key part of crossing the bridge and then reminding folks why they're excited about that change. What's on the other side of that bridge? What are you working toward? What will life look like for you when you get to that other side of that bold and authentic life and continue down that path because bold and authentic living is constant, right?
You have to keep doing it and making those bold choices every day to keep moving forward on your authentic path. And then reminding them of the, why are we doing this? What is your motivation? Is it so that you can make more money? Is it so that you can be a happier person? Is it so that you have more faith in yourself? Or is it that you can show up better for every single person in your life? Whatever it is, whatever the why is tapping back into that as a source of motivation is key.
Chris McNeil: It seems like inner alignment seems to be a common theme in your own moves out of the comfort zone so that you're more authentic, authentically living your higher values, your deepest self that you, that's been trying to come out. We find ourselves in situations where we're impeded then that fear piece, and there might be something to it.
There might be a part of ourselves that's intuitively saying, you need to check this out first. So maybe it requires some negotiation. Hey, fearful part. What are you trying to do for me? What's your intention here? Is there a way to meet that intention and step out of the comfort zone at the same time? So you are with me on this adventure. Can you join me on this if we meet your concerns?
Cassandra Sparks: Yes.
Chris McNeil: A little inner dialogue perhaps might be in order for that.
Cassandra Sparks: I like that.
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The transcript is lightly edited for clarity and is a partial transcript- the full interview is on audio. Click here to listen.
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