Superwoman alert! Or at least someone I see as a superwoman. My guest today, Maria Colacurcio, not only has 7 children (you heard that right), but she also is a top-level athlete and is the founder and leader of her own company.
Woah. Maria shares with us how she doesn’t do it all, leans on her partner, and even boldly talks about how she has learned that each of her children do not need the same level of attention. Understanding that we do not need to do it all made me feel like my whole body did a deep exhale.
During our conversation, we also chatted about:
- Maria’s company, Syndio, and the work they are doing with pay equity
- What tips Maria has for balancing a full professional and personal life
- The seasons or rhythms she follows for making it happen and how her family is in the know with these seasons
- What she things women should stop doing
- What HYROX is and how she trains her body to support her life and work
7 Kids, One World Championship, and a Company Built on Equity with Maria Colacurcio
Happy early fall to everyone in the Northern Hemisphere and summer to those in other places and spaces in the world. It’s been so hot and humid in Chicago that I’m very excited about fall this year. In fact, I’ve had my first Pumpkin Spice Latte within the first day or two that Starbucks started offering them again. And did you see that Pumpkin Spice Latte commercial with Martha Stewart and Belmont Cameli? It was really cute. Anyway, I’m ready for sweater weather.
I’m also ready to tell you one of my deepest, darkest secrets. Here it goes. I go through fits and starts of taking care of myself. In some periods, I’m really on top of my stuff. I work out, drink my water, get my sleep. In the last year or two, not so much. I’m working more, sleeping less, and feeling like garbage. And the biggest secret of them all? I lie to myself that I can work through it. I keep thinking I’m still 25 instead of almost 50 and that all of this “extra” that I’m trying to squeeze into my days isn’t going to catch up with me. Wrong.
My guest today, Katie Hardie, confirmed that I need to get back on the health train. I cannot ignore the damage I’m doing by not taking care of myself. As the famous book says, the body does indeed keep the score.
During my conversation with Katie, we chatted about:
- Her personal burnout and pivot story
- Her company, My PEAK, and how she works with her clients
- How familiar she is with the ego story of “I will be different” than others when it comes to neglecting our health
- The small steps we can take to regain our health
- How the corporate world could learn a thing or two about athletic routines
- How we can break the cycle of self-sabotage
Important Links
About Maria Colacurcio
Maria Colacurcio is reshaping how enterprises govern their largest and most consequential investment: how they pay their people. As CEO of Syndio, she leads the company that defined the market for pay equity software and is now pioneering Decision Intelligence for Pay.
Under her leadership, Syndio partners with global brands including Walmart, Microsoft, and Salesforce to make every pay decision compliant, optimized, and aligned with business strategy. Maria previously co-founded Smartsheet, which went public in 2018. She has built her career at the intersection of technology, policy, and purpose-driven leadership, earning recognition as one of the 100 most exceptional entrepreneurs by Goldman Sachs Builders+ Innovators Summit.
Welcome to the Brave Women at Work podcast. This is your host, Jen Pestikas. I’m so glad you’re here.
Well, superwoman alert, superwoman alert, or at least someone I see as a superwoman. My guest today, Maria Colacurcio, not only has seven children, yes, you heard that right, but she’s also a top-level athlete and is the founder and leader of her own company. Wow, is all I have to say.
Maria shares with us how she doesn’t really do it all, leans on her partner, and even boldly talks about how she has learned that each of her children do not need or require the same level of attention. That in itself was interesting and groundbreaking to me, because I think, my older one, Charlotte, has the same needs as my little one, Olivia, and I’ve got to be at every game and do everything. And Maria kind of set me straight and said, “No, you need to talk with your kids, build that level of trust and honesty.” So it was fascinating to hear that alone. And just understanding that we do not need to do it all made me feel like my whole body did this huge deep exhale. It was just like, “Oh, thank goodness.”
During our conversation, we also chatted about Maria’s company, Syndio, and the work they are doing with pay equity, which I love to hear as music to my ears. What tips Maria has for balancing a full professional and personal life. The seasons or rhythms that she follows for making it happen and how her family is even in the know with these seasons. What she thinks women should stop doing, not start doing, stop doing. What HYROX is. This was totally new to me. I’m like, “What is HYROX?” And how she trains her body to support her life and her work.
Here is more about Maria. Maria Colacurcio is reshaping how enterprises govern their largest and most consequential investment: how they pay their people. As CEO of Syndio, she leads the company that defined the market for pay equity software and is now pioneering decision intelligence for pay. Under her leadership, Syndio partners with global brands including Walmart, Microsoft, and Salesforce to make every pay decision compliant, optimized, and aligned with business strategy.
Maria previously co-founded Smartsheet, which went public in 2018. She has built her career at the intersection of technology, policy, and purpose-driven leadership, earning recognition as one of the 100 most exceptional entrepreneurs by Goldman Sachs Builders + Innovators Summit.
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Also, if you haven’t downloaded one of the freebies from my website, check them out at bravewomenatwork.com. I have Five Ways to Managing Your Imposter Phenomenon, 24 Leadership and Career Affirmations, and 10 Tips to Winning Your Next Negotiation. Download one or all of them for free again at bravewomenatwork.com.
Also, if you’re going to be in the Green Bay, Wisconsin area—I know it’s random—on October 5th and no, the 6th and 7th rather, the 7th is the day of the conference, I’m going to be speaking at a women’s leadership conference. If you’re interested in that and I’m going to be talking live to quite a large group of people on negotiation, please contact me. I’m happy to get you hooked up with the conference information so you can attend in person. I don’t believe that they have a virtual option for this particular conference, but if you have any interest, let me know and I’m happy to hook you up with the conference information. Again, happening on October 7th, 2026.
All right, let’s welcome Maria to the show.
Well hello Maria, welcome to Brave Women at Work. How are you today?
I’m well. Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.
Of course. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about you, and you can start wherever you would like, and how you’ve gotten to where you are.
Sure. The way I describe myself is in terms of a non-linear journey. I’ve definitely had a journey that wouldn’t be considered standard. I think there’s a lot of talk about this now, and I love hearing it because so many of us don’t follow the path that we thought we would, particularly in our career.
I started as a history major. I worked at the Smithsonian in D.C., I waited tables, and I ended up working in marketing by a fluke. My clients at the time were non-profits and lobbying organizations, so I worked for folks like the Foundation for Pavement Preservation and the Popcorn Institute.
Wow.
I actually got into tech because I met a woman at a dinner party who said I need to move to Silicon Valley and work at a tech company, and her company had an opening she thought I’d be great for. Personally, I was in my early twenties and had just gone through a breakup, and it sounded like a great idea. So I made a huge switch, saw a little crack in the door and kicked it open, and ended up loving it. I’ve been in tech ever since and have worked at startups, I’ve co-founded startups, I’ve led companies like I’m doing now, and I just love it. I think it’s phenomenal to be building in this moment where AI transformation is changing absolutely everything.
That’s amazing. And so are you still in California today?
No, I’m in my hometown of Bellevue, Washington.
Oh wow, okay, so still West Coast. But I hear it’s beautiful out there. It’s absolutely gorgeous in that state.
If you come between July and the beginning of October, there is nowhere better. I actually took my sons to a concert a couple of weeks ago, and the artist was from Brooklyn. We were sitting there, and he said, “You have islands here in Seattle.” He said, “I flew in, and I had no idea,” looking at the San Juans. As you fly in, you fly over these pristine, glimmering, shimmering islands. They call it the Emerald City. This artist from stage was like, “I had no idea you had islands here,” and it’s true, it’s mesmerizing in the summer. It’s beautiful.
That’s amazing. Well congratulations and I can’t wait to hear about the company you’re leading today. I believe it’s called Syndio and Syndio AI, which is a proprietary AI model. So tell us a little bit about that, and then I want to talk because you are speaking my language with the whole pay equity thing. So I want to hear more about the work you do at Syndio.
Absolutely. We started eight years ago as a pay equity company. What that meant was companies were doing pay equity audits, and the way they were doing it was very manual. They would collect their data, ship it off to a consultant or a law firm, and wait six months. Six months after they had done that, they would get a 150-page cross-tab report as to whether they had statistically significant gaps, meaning they paid someone less because they were a woman.
It was a really interesting process, and becoming aware of it—I had never been aware of it—was actually when I worked at Starbucks HQ. I got to know the head of Global Employment Law and was involved in the communication of our first pay equity result, which was pretty progressive at the time. Howard really wanted to get up on stage at his annual meeting and share that result, which nobody was doing.
In being a part of that team, I really started to learn a lot about this archaic, expensive process. Not only that, by the time you get the data back, it’s out of date. You’ve made promotions, transfers, people have left, people have joined. It doesn’t even really make any sense, and the company has to look backwards, find these problems, fix them, and then pay to fix them.
That’s where Syndio began. It was this combination of talents and skills. There was this PhD, JD data scientist that was working on the problem. I convinced the head of Global Employment Law at Starbucks to join, and Syndio took off from there.
What was interesting about the way we’ve evolved since the dawn of AI transformation, which I really look at as three years ago when ChatGPT hit the scenes in terms of Gen AI. Obviously, AI has been around a lot longer since the fifties, and machine learning and all of that are mechanisms that we’ve deployed early on in our technology. But this idea that you had the confluence of pay transparency—so the fact that now we have to put good faith pay ranges on all of our job postings, plus you have the EU Pay Transparency Directive going head-to-head just hitting the market at the same time as this incredible opportunity with AI—really gave Syndio the opportunity to innovate.
To create something from the ground up that was really special and unique that solved the problem that our customers were dealing with. We made it more innovative for them to solve their pay equity issues. With our technology, instead of having to wait for those reports, they could get them immediately. They could identify the policies and behaviors that were driving the issues so that they could start to solve them.
When AI hit the scene, it really gives us the ability to do so much more than that. It gives us the ability to put into the hands of managers and people on the front line in the moment they’re making a pay decision, guiding that decision in a way that prevents the issues from ever happening in the first place.
So that’s a pretty cool story to be able to go from archaic, expensive, backward-looking find and fix, to more innovation, identifying, getting preventative about the policies and behaviors that are driving those issues, trying to get ahead of them, being smarter, and leveraging data and analytics to truly getting preventative, which is what we’re doing today. So would you say there are certain industries that are being more preventative versus others? Some maybe still want to be more backward-looking. Are you seeing tech companies or certain industries that are really leveraging your technology?
I’m not, honestly. Our customer base, we have about 400 customers, and I would say, unlike a lot of companies in tech who tend to focus on progressive tech as their customers, our customers really range across a variety of industries. We’ve got healthcare, pharma, oil and gas, manufacturing, tech, and retail.
I think it’s more about, number one, what is the propensity of the human beings leading the company to want to prevent these types of issues? Number two, are they really pushing AI transformation? A lot of the ways that we target companies is looking at, did they put in a Chief AI Officer? Did they really focus on talking about AI transformation in their earnings calls? These are the companies that are really open to deploying AI in a way that’s governed, in a way that’s ethical, but embedding it into the business processes and really driving innovation. Those are the companies that we tend to see jumping on board to deploy some of the technologies that we offer. But it really is industry agnostic. It’s more about the people, the leadership, and quite honestly, how they’re leaning in terms of are they AI opportunistic, are they afraid of AI, are they looking at it as an efficiency driver?
Another question. I speak to a lot of women about negotiation, and the fact that you’re trying to close the gap is amazing because if you look at the stats, they’re not in favor of women. You’re looking at it across the entire org, not just women. I’m actually working and supporting women. My question for you is, is your hope that this will be pervasive enough where, now I’m in Shangri-La, but maybe the fact that I have to teach negotiation so much won’t be as big of an issue? Or do you think that women will always have to defend, even with the technology?
It’s a great question, and I have a bit of a provocative view on this. I think it is incumbent upon employers to ensure that women are not having to pick up the skill of negotiation to ensure they get a fair offer. It’s incumbent upon employers to make sure that they are offering a competitive salary without regard to things like gender. Now that’s just not reality right now. But I really do believe we have all these trainings for women to figure out how to negotiate, and one of the things we forget is that in many cases, the harder you negotiate, the more negative bias you then encounter. Because you’re considered pushy, bossy, and hard to work with.
So there really is an easy, data-driven answer to all of this. One of the things I talk about a lot, and I think is really important for women, and I speak about this—I was just talking to a bunch of my college girlfriends about this very thing—is that we all are looking in our careers for enough meaning to justify the time we spend away from our families, from our kids, from our parents, from the people that we’re giving care to who are either getting older or we have limited time with because they’re young.
To me, the role and responsibility that I feel around what we’re doing today is so important because of what you just said. If we do not insert ourselves, if we do not insert ethical AI in a way that’s going to use math and deterministic guardrails to identify with data what someone should be paid, and insert ourselves into the process that way, and then build an AI to analyze and to close the feedback loop and to give predictions and trends and memorialize policies that you might not realize you have, it’s going to default to just these generic models that are going to exacerbate all the biases from the past. Because the training set is trained on the way we’ve made decisions before.
To me, part of the ethos of the company that I’m leading right now is how do we insert ourselves into this and make sure that there’s a speed bump here where we’re really thinking about with a human at the helm, what is the right way to make pay decisions? And how do we ensure that there’s manager readiness for people to explain why people are paid what they’re paid? I think that’s just absolutely critical in this moment particularly.
I agree with that. And while it would take one of my keynotes down, who cares, right? I would rather be able to go to audiences and say that there was some sort of algorithm that was supporting it, rather than women especially having to fight the good fight or understand. It doesn’t matter if you’re a woman or a man, I think that even as a hiring manager or as a leader in organizations, there is subjectivity to it. And I like the fact that you guys are trying to remove that factor.
Absolutely. And it doesn’t mean companies can’t be competitive for skills that are scarce. So, for deployed engineers for example, that is an emerging area, a titled set of skills that is really competitive, and it’s driving up salaries. But what it means is you have to memorialize that as a disciplined area that you’re willing to lean into and pay 99th percentile for. And then what that means is you have a responsibility to look six months later and say, okay, we invested a bunch in this highly sought-after scarce skill, are we actually seeing the results come out of that? And that’s the closed loop that AI makes possible. Because you can start to ingest performance reviews, engagement scores, revenue numbers, and actually look at all of that alongside these policies that are making bets to pay up for certain things, which we’ve never closed the loop on that before.
Exactly. And how long has Syndio been in existence so far?
We’ve been around for eight years.
Wow, a long time. A pretty long time.
We’ve been around for eight years, and then we introduced our AI decisions product about six months ago.
Okay, alright. Well still quite a while. So in terms of AI, and I know for you this is old hat so just bear with me because you talk about this every day, but I know you also love it. I probably have listeners that are afraid of it. I have people that love to use AI. I think there’s real benefit to it. I just wanted your opinion. We only have so much time, but I’d love for you to give me a broad brush of what is your vision on AI, how should we leverage it, any wisdom in terms of AI? Because people are all over the board right now with its usage, their understanding, their knowledge, their fear, all of those things. So since you do this, tell us a little bit more what you think about it.
It’s so interesting. My daughter and I just published companion essays in Fortune. Mine was very AI optimistic. She’s 19, she just finished her freshman year of college, and hers is very skeptical. I think the behind-the-scenes of what’s been really interesting between she and I since we published those essays is we both come a little bit more toward the center. Her perspective was, I think Gen Z is really concerned about jobs. I think the model leaders made a big mistake when they went out with the doom and gloom loop a couple of months ago and started saying this is going to completely eradicate the need for entry-level jobs. We’re not seeing that. We’re actually seeing a lot of these companies that have done layoffs are actually rehiring folks in different skill sets.
What we did unintentionally is we went out and told all the young people you should be afraid of this and pissed off about it, because it’s going to take all your jobs, and it’s going to do the same thing that social media did, which is we’re going to be really sloppy, then dump it on you, and it’s going to have disastrous consequences like isolation, loneliness, depression, everything they’re having to deal with coming out of social media that they didn’t really have control over.
In sitting back and actually having these conversations with her, it was really interesting. It changed my mind quite a bit in terms of, I’m an AI optimist, I use it, it makes me three to four times more productive. I have agents that do all sorts of things. I would highly recommend that. I would highly recommend people getting past the surface level of using consumer tools like ChatGPT, really get into whether it’s Claude or there’s a bunch of free resources now around how to use Claude or Claude Code or Codex. Start to get into the tools that enable you to build agents.
When I say that, it sounds fancy, but all it means is building a set of context and a harness around the interface, the chat that you’re having with AI, that is sustainable, that’s enduring. Instead of restarting every chat and it forgets everything, it’s about building a framework and a process where there are areas that it remembers. So there are skills libraries now, and you can train agents through Anthropic’s skills library. You could create an agent that has pre-loaded various skills on writing, for example. And then they’re going to have your library of training data. Maybe it’s old articles you’ve done, or writers that you aspire to sound like, or rules that you have, like “I never want to use em dashes,” whatever those things are.
It’s a corpus of context, and then you’ve got skills you can apply to that, that train it as to what your preferences are. This is really the best way to think about going out to use AI as a consumer. How can I get a little bit more sophisticated so I’m not using it just as a search engine, but I’m actually using it and training it to know things about me, know about some of my preferences, and to actually be able to show up and make me more productive. That’s layman’s terms how I would think about it.
And then I would be really, really careful because one of the things my daughter taught me was this idea of cognitive surrender. She wrote this essay on cognitive surrender, which is because these tools are so confident—and they are, and they’ve got this high temperature setting around creativity, they have to, otherwise they’re not going to be useful for strategic thinking—what that means is they can go rogue, what that means is they can hallucinate. But what it means is every time they go rogue or hallucinate, they’re going to do so with such confidence that it really does start to atrophy our judgment. And it really does start to atrophy the human element that we can bring to bear in terms of guiding the accuracy.
I think that’s one thing to really think about. Are you working the muscle of judgment? And are you working your listening muscle? There’s a bunch of things we do as humans when we’re listening. We notice body language, we notice someone leaning in, we notice someone fidgeting, we notice someone’s nervous, someone seemed awkward, someone seemed irritated. Particularly those of us who are empaths, we can pick up on energy, people’s energy. These are things AI cannot do. And so if we go into every single Zoom meeting and we know it’s being recorded, we know we’re going to get a transcript, we know we’re going to be able to feed that transcript to our agents, you become very lazy in terms of your listening and working that muscle of synthesizing and bringing all those things to bear.
One of the things I’ve learned from my daughter and from this evolution of listening to her and coming more to the middle is I’ve got to work that muscle. Because otherwise it’s going to atrophy. I have to really focus on listening and noticing body language and bringing my human senses to bear.
That was something that you had mentioned that is really scary to you. I think when we were preparing for this call, isn’t it? Where you’re really concerned about that atrophy.
I am really concerned about it. I think also because I’ve definitely passed the line of sophistication where it’s at risk. What that means is I am very sophisticated in how I leverage AI. And so it’s connected to all of my systems, it’s connected to all of my conversations. And so I noticed it was very easy for me to tune out in conversations and not bring my best self because I sort of had this backstop that, eh, it’s okay, I’ll get an update afterward. But that means I’m not participating. I’m not participating at my highest and best use in that moment, and it’s just wasting time. So I really do think you have to force yourself into analog conversations that are not recorded where you have to focus on listening and then synthesize it after the fact. You have to bring it back to your agents and you have to summarize what happened and explain what you observed and work those observation skills. I think it’s terrifying to think about the cognitive surrender that’s so easy with the confidence of these tools. And the fact that right now the one thing that sets us apart as humans is the thing that could most quickly atrophy.
Wow. Okay, I’ve got to start somewhere, so I’m not going to be starting with Highrox. But for someone that might be interested, what does a typical training session look like for you? Because I know you’re more advanced. And if someone is even interested in this, where would they start? So let’s start with what does your typical fitness routine or varying day-by-day look like? Let’s start there and then we’ll talk about how we get started.
My training definitely varies with where I am in the season. So I just started Highrox specific training again for a race that I’m going to do in December. So I’m in the base building aerobic base part, and then you get more specific to the types of things you’re working. Highrox, their tagline is it’s for everybody. And I do believe they’ve done a really good job of that. You see people walking on the course, you see these 78-year-olds doing the course. It’s pretty remarkable the types of humans, the body types, the ages of people that are competing. That’s what makes it really special I think, and why it’s taken off, because it’s not exclusive. I think that’s what’s really cool about it.
For someone that’s just starting off or thinking about wanting to do one, the thing you should really start focusing on immediately is running. Most of the race is running. It’s eight runs, each one is about a kilometer long, so about 0.6 miles. So all in, the race is about five miles of running. I would say if you’re thinking about starting it, you first want to build that aerobic base and really start running.
The cool thing is there’s so many training programs out there now. When we started and I would travel for work, I would get so frustrated because I’m like, I need a ski erg or a rower or a sled, and no gyms had this equipment. As it’s become more popular, all the gyms now have specific, not just the equipment, but specialized Highrox rooms where they’ve got all the stuff. It’s really come a long way. And there’s so many training plans that you can access that are like 10 bucks a month to get you going. But I would say running, start with running. Get to a place where you feel really comfortable running.
Okay, and then the lifting, and then all of those components. Okay, got it. So for you, now again I know that the kids are not all littles, right? We’ve got all the way up into college, but what does a typical day look like for you? Because I’m sitting there thinking, I get this question all the time because of all the work that I’m doing, but I’m not as physically fit admittedly as you are. So what does a typical day look like for you so you can get this training in and get all of your other things done?
That’s the part that I’m not super proud of now because now you’re supposed to be recommending that people get their sleep. And I get up really early. I get up at 4:45. I unload the dishwasher and I make French press for me and for my husband for when he gets up. I do my little chores and I catch up on my work stuff because I need an hour to wake up. I usually answer some emails and people are very accustomed to me catching up at that hour and then they know. And then I’ll work out.
After I work out, I try to make the little ones breakfast before they go to school. The little ones actually set the table, they have two spots at the counter, and every morning in that hour where I’m waking up, I actually put a placemat, and I have this weird habit of buying crazy fun paper napkins. So they always get different music notes or in the fall it’s turkeys or whatever, it’s so stupid. But I found that for my older kids, there was just a way that you start the day when you start it like that and there’s an actual table setting and they sit down and have a proper breakfast, you don’t have that feeling of stress and rush to start the day. It’s just something I’ve always done that I think has really helped me start my day calm, it helps them start it calm. It helps set the tone of, we’re not rushing, we’re good. We have time to sit down with our fancy paper napkin.
So I set the table and I make them breakfast, and it’s usually something super simple. And then I head into my home office, or I go to the office. It’s usually my home office, and I start my work day. I give them a kiss, my husband walks them to school, and the older kids come downstairs, grab a pancake, and are off. So yeah, that’s the routine in the morning.
The routine, yeah. And it sounds like for you the one thing you’d like to get a little more is probably sleep, right? It’s probably the one you struggle with the most.
It is the one I struggle with the most, for sure. For better or for worse, we have a universal bedtime in my house because we tried to have the littles, the five and eight-year-old go to bed earlier, and it just doesn’t work. There’s so many older kids, there’s so much going on, that it’s sort of like everybody winds down at the same time and goes to bed at the same time. So there’s not a lot of extra time, and then usually after that happens, I sort of have to catch up on a few things for work.
Yeah, you don’t have a lot of time. One last thing on this that I have, that I’m trying to get over, I don’t know if you have this, it’s like revenge bedtime procrastination, where it’s almost I don’t have enough time. So my kids, my little ones, she’s eight, she stretches her bedtime right. Let’s say it’s 9:30 or 10:00. Now I’m ticked because I don’t have any time for myself. So I’m trying to keep my eyes open because I’m so irritated but I’m depriving myself of sleep. Do you feel me here? Because I don’t have any time to myself.
I get more frustrated when I don’t get time with my husband because if you push it all until the evening now that you’ve gotten everybody to bed, I just feel like that’s the thing that gets squeezed out. And so we really work to—and I think that’s where the training helps, because on the weekends we work out together. We have workouts that we do together on Saturday and Sunday, and it’s so great. It’s this reconnection time for us while we’re doing double duty because we’re getting our training in. But that’s the thing where I get the most anxious where I’m like, come on you guys hurry up, I haven’t even talked to him all day. I want to talk to him. But yes, there is that anxious feeling, or I’ve had to really work hard to not have that “Oh my God, I have to get up so early” and I’ve now just accepted like, that’s just what my life looks like and that’s okay.
Yeah exactly. So what would you say are one to two ways that women can be braver at work today?
Such a great question. I think clarity is kindness, and again this is something I learned from a mentor. I think the bravest thing you can do at work is not sugarcoat when you have feedback for someone. Just address it directly, give it to them. It is the best thing you can do for them. And I would say above all, we tend to struggle with this, where we want to be liked, and your desire to be liked is really putting someone at a detriment in terms of what you’re able to share with them and how you can help make them better by just being really clear and giving them feedback that’s going to be hard to say in the moment. But that’s how people grow. I think that’s the bravest thing you can do, is just to be clear—that clarity is kindness.
Yeah. You know what? So I guess one other question, then we’ll wrap, is I’ve been told I can be brutally honest, right. Which I don’t know, I actually like when someone is just honest, I think they’re putting the label of brutal on there. I actually think it is kind to be really honest, even if it’s hard. What do you think?
I couldn’t agree with that more. I think if someone says I’m going to be brutally honest, it’s like, why is it brutal?
I know. That actually shows that you care about me enough to tell me the truth.
I think listen, it’s so easy to punt difficult conversations. Radical candor was such a hot thing when it came out. Kim wrote it, but I think a lot of the things that she talks about are still actually more relevant in this hybrid world, because it’s so easy to punt difficult conversations when you’re on Zoom. It’s so much easier to have them in person because you can use your body language, and you can show that you still care about the person, but you need them to step it up. Yeah, I think it’s a really difficult skill, but it’s something that we need to get better at.
I agree. So okay, let’s share all of the links. You’re going to share me your Fortune articles, you and your daughter, because we’ll link those up. The name of your company is Syndio and Syndio AI, but where can our listeners connect with you and all your great work online?
I have a Substack, I just launched it. I’m super excited about it. It’s called Pay Dirt. So I’ll give you the link to that as well. And then I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on X, all the things.
I love it, Pay Dirt. Like dirt, like the ground dirt. That’s awesome. I love it. I’m surprised that one wasn’t taken, so good for you. Well thank you so much for being here today and for the work, and just really inspiring us. Like wow, how you’re managing your time is something to really behold and you’re doing it. So thanks again for being here.
Of course. Thank you so much for having me.
Well, that’s a wrap on my discussion with Maria today. I hope you found our conversation both valuable and inspiring.
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