IAM1574 – Executive Coach Leads Her Clients to Embrace Their Evolution

Kashonna Marrow is an engaging speaker, an inspiring coach, a motivational author, and an insightful corporate trainer. Kashonna is the President & CEO of Simply Kashonna, a business built to promote BOLD, FEARLESS, and COURAGEOUS living. She goes beyond surface issues to address the challenges that inhibit personal, professional, and spiritual growth, leading her clients to embrace their evolution.

Kashonna has activated the purpose and call of many, helping them to discover, define, and develop their authentic self. Both, in the corporate arena and in the non-profit world, strategic growth and development of people have always been the focal point of her service.

• CEO Story: Kashonna worked in an environment that she loved, opposite to others’ experiences. The reason she left the corporate world is that she was challenged to do more and make a global impact. But it did not start right, her life fell apart, she stayed in the game however, and her perseverance, allowed her to evolve in the game. From entrepreneur to a business owner. She is a visionary and allows other people to execute the vision. From speaking and life coaching to training and development, expanding her territory.
• Business Service: Speaking, life coaching, training and development, executive coaching.
• Secret Sauce: Keep learning, keep growing, and keep changing. Change is inevitable and necessary.
• CEO Hack: Sitting alone with yourself and understanding your efficiency and inefficiency. Doing a self-assessment.
• CEO Nugget: Allow yourself to embrace the gift that is in you. Honor and value your gift.
• CEO Defined: Creating exciting opportunities. Understanding that you are the chief experience officer of your life.

Website: simplykashonna.com , leadersmoveforward.com

Facebook: Simply Kashonna

Instagram: simplykashonna

LinkedIn: Kashonna Marrow

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Transcription

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00:30 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:58 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Kashonna Marrow of Simply Kashonna. Kashonna, it's great to have you on the show.

01:08 – Kashonna Marrow

Thank you so much, Gresham. It's great to be here.

01:10 – Gresham Harkless

Yes. Super excited to have you on and talk about all the awesome things that you're doing, all the great things that we talked about, and how powerful that word is that you're able to be able to accomplish. So before we jump into the interview, I wanted to read a little bit more about Kashonna so you can hear about some of those awesome and great things. Kashonna is an engaging speaker, an inspiring coach, a motivational author, and an insightful corporate trainer.

Koshana is the president and CEO of Simply Kashonna, a business built to promote bold, fearless, and courageous living. She goes beyond surface issues to address the challenges that inhibit personal, professional, and spiritual growth. Leading her clients to embrace their evolution, Kashonna has activated the purpose and call of many, helping them to discover, develop, and define their authentic selves, both in the corporate arena and in the nonprofit world. Strategy, growth, and development of people have always been the focal point of her service. Kashonna, again, is excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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02:06 – Kashonna Marrow

I am ready, Gresham. Thank you so much. I'm always just humbled when I hear all of that. I'm like, oh my goodness, is that really me?

02:12 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. I think it's so powerful and you obviously being able to work with people to bring out those, their passion, their gifts, and have that come to fruition. But I love to kind of hear sometimes we forget about it ourselves. So I love that you've been able to do that too.

02:26 – Kashonna Marrow

Yes. Thank you so much. It is definitely an honor just to be able to work with people, to be able to just do what I am called to do, and that is to help people become better. When you get a chance to do that every single day, there is no day that is a bad day. So it is a wonderful privilege and opportunity that I have to be able to see people just have those aha moments and walk in their purpose.

02:48 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. The insanely important part about getting that call is to make sure that you are answering that. So I love that you actually answered that and you are fulfilling that and doing that on a regular basis. So I guess to kind of kick everything off, I want us to rewind the clock and hear a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

03:07 – Kashonna Marrow

Well, I thank you so much for asking me and again, thank you so much for having me on the show. I am truly honored to have this space to just be able to share my story. I don't have the story like other people where I was forced into this space where I had to make a decision because I was in a really bad space or a bad job. I actually came from a position that I loved. I loved what I was doing. I loved going to work every day. It was a great space to be in.

So people would say, well, why did you leave? Because I was really challenged to do more. I was challenged to go outside of where I was and just really make an impact, a global impact. When you hear that word, it's almost scary and intimidating, right? Because I'm like, I'm doing great in my community, I'm doing great locally. But now being called on a global scale, it really challenged me. I'm a little bit of a competitor. I love a good challenge and so I did just that.

I went out when I first started my business or first went full time, I should say, because I started a business a long time ago, but just didn't really believe in myself enough to go ahead and start executing in the business what I was believing. Nine years ago I said, okay, well, I think I'm going to believe in myself now. I'm going to do this. I actually did it. Stepped outside of my full-time employment Step into my business opportunity. If I can be honest with you, I thought the phones were going to be ringing off the hook when I did this. I was like, oh, yeah, people are going to be calling me and business is going to be great because they want me to speak.

They want me to coach them. It is going to be amazing. Well, didn't quite happen like that. That was not my story. It happens a little bit differently, actually. When I left my job, my life fell apart. I was like, are you kidding me right now? Little did I know that I was kind of being tried through the fire, if you will, to just see if I had the perseverance, if I had the fortitude if I had the wherewithal to be able to stand in this entrepreneurial world. I believe that entrepreneurship is so glamorized sometimes that you don't really get a chance to see the backstory.

You don't get a chance to see what's behind the curtain. Like the push and the prayers and the tears and the wanting to get a job every week. You're like, it's easier to just get a job, but. But I stayed in the game, if you will, and really allowed myself to evolve in the game. What happened is I kind of shifted, if you will, from an entrepreneur to a business owner. Really what that means to me is I stopped feeling like I had to do it all myself and understood that I needed more people around me who were able to occupy the spaces that I was not as strong in so that I could do something else. I want to be a visionary.

I want to be that person who casts the vision and allows other people to allow other people to execute the vision. So when I realized that I was shifting into that, it was a big move for me, honestly, because I am so busy sometimes in the business that I really couldn't see myself working outside of the business. So as I began to evolve and become a business owner, things began to look really different for me. I really realized that I couldn't do it all myself, and if I was going to grow, I couldn't do it all myself. So that is kind of my story in a nutshell.

I transitioned from speaking and life coaching to training and development. Not stopping speaking the stop. I didn't stop speaking in life coaching, but I actually added to my arsenal, if you will. Now I am in training and development. I own a training and development company as well as executive coaching. So I really expanded my territory and I started to do something. I mean, just that I've never thought I would be doing, But I absolutely love what I do.

07:18 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. This is why I love the work that you do and being able to, for lack of a better term, empower people to kind of have that realization, that understanding that you do have those things within. So I know you touched a little bit upon, like, how you work with your clients. I wanted to make sure that you covered everything, how that process goes, and how you're making that impact with them.

Then I wonder, too, if I asked usually for your secret sauce, the thing you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique, But I almost wonder if it's that competitiveness that you talked about, that. That kind of. It sounds like an insatiable appetite to always improve and to get better and always know that there's another level. Do you think that's part of your secret sauce?

07:55 – Kashonna Marrow

Absolutely. I think there's beauty in understanding that I have not arrived. When you understand that you have not arrived, you know that there is always room for you to develop. There's always room for you to grow. There's always room for you to make sure that you're tapping into something new. In one of the recent articles, or maybe three or four years, maybe about three years ago, I read an article and they were talking about how students who graduated from college, the information that they learned was only valid about two to three years after they graduated. I'm like, wait a minute.

People are still paying student loans? What do you mean? Two to three years later? But what they were saying is, that our culture, our world is moving so quickly at an elevated pace that if you don't stay current, if you don't stay relevant, you miss it. You miss it. I always understand that I am growing. I have to grow. I have to change. Because if I am not changing, I am not growing. If I am not growing, I become ineffective.

When I become ineffective, I become irrelevant. I say that everywhere I go because I think it is important to understand that change is inevitable, and it is necessary. It is necessary for growth. It is necessary for development. So when I have the opportunity to train in both the public as well as the private sector to go in and speak to leaders as well as their employees. I'm building a bridge between the two because I want them to understand that they need one another in order to impact the bottom line.

Because if your people don't know how to talk to each other, if they're not effective communicators then guess what happens? Nothing gets done. If they don't understand how to handle conflict, if they don't know how to manage it or help resolve it, nothing gets done. If they don't have emotional intelligence, nothing gets done.

If they don't understand how to team build that, it's not an event, but it's an everyday skill that we must incorporate in our culture in order for our teams to grow and to function well, nothing happens. I go in and I help them to understand this and when they understand this, then they have the ability to grow and they become wiser and they become better and they become more strategic in their approach as businesses.

10:18 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I almost wonder if this is like maybe part of, I call it your CEO hack, which is like the app, a book, or even a habit that you have that makes you more.

10:27 – Kashonna Marrow

Effective and efficient, sitting alone with yourself and understanding your efficiencies and inefficiencies where are you? When we do that self-assessment, that's your soup. That becomes your superpower that you can sit back and say, you know what, I'm really not the best in this area. When you're able to identify that and then figure out what you need to do to make sure that that area is supported in the way that it needs to be supported, I think it's your superpower or it's an even stronger ability to sit back and say, hold on, I need counseling because I have some, I have some trauma that I haven't dealt with and it's seeping into my finances, it's seeping into my children, it's seeping into my business. That's your superpower.

When you're able to be so self-aware you understand that there are some things that I need to address and I won't hide them. I won't even pretend as though they aren't there. I won't become conflict-avoidant. But I'm going to take it on head-on so that I can be stronger and maybe wiser because of it. Because I'm there, I can get to my next. Yeah, release yourself of that stuff, release yourself of the stuff that's holding you back because that's what it's doing. It's holding you back because you don't address it. Unaddressed pain will stop you from pursuing your purpose.

11:54 – Gresham Harkless

I absolutely love it. So would you consider that to be what I like to call a CEO nugget? This is a little bit more Word of wisdom or piece of advice? I like to say it might be something you would tell your favorite client, or if you happen to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

12:06 – Kashonna Marrow

Oh, my goodness. That's a. That's a good one. Oh, am I stumped? No. Let me see. Okay. So my CEO nugget would be, allow yourself to embrace and honor the gift that is in you. So I would say make sure that, again, you honor your gift. One of the things that I have learned over the years is this. You will protect what you value. If you truly value your gift, you will protect it. You will make sure that you honor it at all costs.

It will become so valuable that you can't compare it with anyone else's because it's yours to own. It's yours to own, it's yours to appreciate. It's yours to work, it's yours to execute. It's yours to do whatever it is you're called to do with it. So just make sure that you take out time to find out what your gift is and honor it embrace it and value it, because it's yours, and it's only going to be as effective and impactful as you make it.

13:25 – Gresham Harkless

I absolutely love that nugget. What would you consider to be your answer to my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO? We're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So, Kashonna, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:38 – Kashonna Marrow

Creating exciting opportunities. Understanding that you are your chief. You are the chief experience officer of your life. So you get to create. The canvas is clear and it's clean, and you have the brush in your hand, and you actually get an opportunity to create the life you want. That's powerful. No one else gets to paint it for you. No one else gets to tell you what it needs to look like you have the brush. Make sure that as the CEO, as the chief Experience Officer, every day you wake up you get to create exciting opportunities. The power is in your hands. So what are you going to do with it? That's what being a CEO means to me.

14:29 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, Kashonna, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I wanted to do now was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and, of course, how best they can get a hold of you. Find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.

14:44 – Kashonna Marrow

Absolutely. So you can definitely come to my website. We love love love to have subscribers to our blog. So that's simply Kashauna.com there. You will see me as a speaker. You will see me as a life coach. I have videos there to just kind of encourage you along the way and inspire you to go a little bit further. You can also reach us My development company and executive coaching company IS leaders move forward.com and we love, love love to engage with businesses, those who are decision makers.

If you're looking for someone to come into your organization, I amongst others on my team will be more than happy to come and impact or shift the culture of your organization. I am on all forms of Social Media, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn as Kashonna Marrow. Just Google me. I am sure you will find me somewhere in there and I will be more than happy to engage with you and we will find out what you need and make sure that you are matched with who you need so that you can go to your next level. So again, thank you so much Gresham for having me today. It has been an honor to spend this time with you.

15:59 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. Honor is definitely all ours and I truly appreciate everything you are doing. Of course, we are going to have the links and information in the show notes as well too so you don't have to necessarily google, just scroll down to the show notes. You'll see all the links and information that Kashonna has been working on and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:15 – Kashonna Marrow

Thank you so much. You do the same. I wish you the best.

16:18 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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