The Best You - A Coaching Podcast: Personal Growth Through Real Conversations · Gary Gillan

Empowering Women in Leadership with Dr. Rhonda Parmer

·51 min·3 clips

The EASE framework breaks leadership into Engage, Align, Simplify, and Empower.

1. The Best You - A Coaching Podcast: Personal Growth Through Real Conversations features Dr. Rhonda Parmer on empowering women in leadership and her EASE framework. 2. Gary interviews Dr. Rhonda Parmer, an executive coach, writer, entrepreneur, and former public-education leader, and her career matters because she spent 31 years in schools. 3. The episode asks what it takes for women and other leaders to navigate male company, build confidence, and avoid burnout. 4. Rhonda says she worked in public education for 31 years, from substitute to associate superintendent, and spent the last 12 years coaching and supervising leaders. 5. She describes patterns around confidence, courage, belief, burnout, procrastination, and being “frozen,” and says movement began when people believed in themselves. 6. Rhonda links her framework to underperforming schools where teachers and students were told that other people like them had already succeeded. 7. She says her first year as a principal included a diagnosis of two cancers, one stage three and one stage four. 8. Rhonda and her husband role-played how to ask for help, including whether she should send an email, speak face to face, or tell people in small groups. 9. That experience pushed her toward a leadership model that later became EASE, even though she says it was not named that at the time. 10. Rhonda says the last five years of public education included work with pastors and nonprofit leaders, not only school administrators. 11. She says the same leadership challenge appears across education, oil and gas, utilities, construction, and other sectors because people are still people. 12. Rhonda discusses the DISC assessment through John Maxwell and says the first 21 to 25 years of life shape the subconscious through what is seen, taught, and reinforced. 13. She says that blueprint can include a “little sound” saying, “you’re not good enough,” “you don’t belong here,” or “who do you think you are.” 14. Rhonda says there is a 33 to 50 chance of rewiring those beliefs, and the first step is noticing that the pattern is happening. 15. She says women and men can start the work around age 12, and prevention begins even earlier through the words used around children. 16. Rhonda gives the EASE breakdown as Engage, Align, Simplify, and Empower, with a workplace example of moving someone from HR into communications when that is where the strength fits. 17. The tone is practical and conversational, with Gary repeatedly reflecting back Rhonda’s ideas and comparing them to his own education and project-management experience. 18. The format is an interview that mixes biography, coaching language, workplace examples, and short back-and-forth exchanges about self-talk and control. 19. People in education, leadership coaching, and women’s advancement. 20. Listeners looking for a narrative episode rather than a leadership framework discussion.

As heard by us

A reflective coaching conversation about confidence, service, burnout, and leading with less self-doubt.

This episode keeps its focus on confidence, leadership, and the awkward work of speaking plainly in male company. Dr. Rhonda Parmar and Gary also widen the frame to self-awareness, service, and burnout, so the conversation feels practical rather than abstract.

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Why you'd press play

You need help finding your voice in rooms that still feel stacked.

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