Sinead Sharkey-Steenson is The Career Elevator Coach at Generation Women where she helps women get the promotions and pay-rises they deserve. Passionate about equality and seeing more women in leadership, Sinead blends practical strategies with simple mindset tools to achieve amazing results…with several getting over 100% payrises and multiple promotions! To date she’s helped close to 10,000 women take a step up.

Sinead draws on over 20 years corporate experience in HR, Leadership Development, Business Improvement, and Cultural Transformation to help her support women to achieve their ambitions. She has been recognised as one of 22 Leaders to Learn from in 2022 by Bunch Leadership App. She has developed and delivered career and leadership programmes for multiple global organisations including; Sensata, Citi, Deloitte, the IFA, and Lean In. Sinead has a lifelong love of learning and strives to bring the best academically and professionally to her work. She has a BA Hons in Psychology, MSc Computing, MSc Human Resource Management, is an NLP Master practitioner, Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, and an accredited ICF Coach and Positive Intelligence (PQ) Coach.

She’s a mum of two girls who have made her even more passionate about equality. She also loves live comedy and music, sleep, and cold water swimming…in that order!

In today’s episode Sinead shares her story taming her imposter. For years others described her as shy - but she didn’t feel like she was shy! She thought she observed and made her move when she was ready. It was always Sinead father’s dream for her to be an international lawyer and that became her goal and ambition too. Suddenly, at the age of 15 her father passed away. But she didn’t just loose her parent, she lost her compass. What did she want to do? Who was she really? Sinead went off to university, she studied psychology, and it didn’t take long for the shy 7 year-old to come back out. Her imposter kicked in. She lived in fear of being found out, of speaking up in meetings, of being asked to do anything on her own. Sinead realized she was going to have to tackle her imposter syndrome, step up, and change things for the better, and that’s exactly what she’s done.

“I was finally doing something with purpose and something that leaned into my strengths. When you can tap into those two things you find your inner confidence that was always there, it’s just you’re using a different muscle. That has been the biggest game changer in my life. Whenever I feel afraid, whenever I feel like an imposter or I’m going to be found out, I always go back to what am I good at, what are the skills I can use here to help me, and what’s the impact and purpose of what I can do.”

— Sinead Sharkey-Steenson

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7bZHrtjAzbksbLWNaak1NM

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stories-of-inspiring-joy/id1510488632

To connect with Sinead visit her website https://genwomen.global and on LinkedIn here Facebook @GenerationWomen and Instagram @GenerationWomen

Stories of Inspiring Joy is a production of Seek The Joy Media and created by Sydney Weiss. To learn more and submit your story, click here.

*Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Stories of Inspiring Joy.