Ep 32: Live from PodFest 2025 – Alicia Couri on Leadership & Mindset

Welcome to The Shattered Mindset Podcast! In this special episode recorded live at PODFEST 2025, host Melvin Larry sits down with Alicia Couri, CEO, speaker, and leadership expert. Alicia shares her incredible journey from Trinidad to Florida, her experiences with dyslexia, and how she helps leaders unlock their true potential through self-awareness and confidence-building tools like the Kolbe Assessment and the Johari Window framework.

Alicia discusses the power of reframing labels, overcoming childhood challenges, and embracing strengths that others may see as weaknesses. She also dives into her concept of "Audacious Confidence," an unshakable belief in oneself that empowers individuals to take bold steps and achieve success.

📘 Resources Mentioned:

• Download Alicia's free resource: The 7 Secrets to Audacious Confidence
• Follow Alicia on social media: Alicia360
• Subscribe to Alicia’s YouTube channel for confidence tips: Unleash Your Audacious Confidence

🔔 Don’t forget to subscribe, like, and share this episode with someone who needs to hear it!

Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction and welcome from PODFEST 2025
01:45 - Alicia's journey from Trinidad to Florida
04:30 - Founding two companies: Leadership & Digital Media
07:15 - Transitioning from radio to podcasting
09:40 - The Kolbe Assessment and discovering personal strengths
14:50 - Overcoming childhood challenges and labels
20:30 - The power of self-awareness in leadership
24:10 - Audacious Confidence and stepping into your purpose
30:00 - Alicia’s personal transformation and pageant experience
35:40 - Closing thoughts and where to connect with Alicia

✨ Join us as we continue to shatter limiting beliefs and unlock new possibilities!

#Leadership #Mindset #Confidence #PersonalGrowth #TheShatteredMindsetPodcast #PODFEST2025 #AudaciousConfidence

Transcript

Welcome back to the Shattered Minds set podcast where we explore the pivotal moments
that redefine our thinking and set us on new paths. I'm your host,
Melvin Larry, and I'm so excited to be here with my new friend Alicia Couri.
Did I say that right? Alicia Couri, yes. You know what, you came so close more
than most. - You gotta get a pass. - Yes, you gotta get a pass. - You gotta eight,
eight. - Very good. So we're here at PodFest 2025 and just excited to be here and
just met so many great people here and it's been amazing as you know.
The Shattered Mindset podcast, we talked about mindset and life lessons and happened
to have the opportunity to meet Alicia among some of the other wonderful people here
and she just shared her story it's phenomenal remarkable and I just asked her to be
a guest on our show so welcome. Well I appreciate you inviting me onto this it's
such a powerful platform and a powerful show talking about mindset.
Thank you thank you so if you don't mind would you just take just a moment just
to just to tell everybody who you are? I live in South Florida. Originally I was
born in Trinidad and I grew up in Australia and I moved to Florida back in the
early 90s. Actually I moved the same year that Hurricane Andrew moved through.
A
of the moving experiences there and I am a CEO. I founded two different companies.
One, we work with leaders and their teams in helping them work better together and
create synergy within their teams. And the other one is a digital media platform. So
that's why I'm here at PodFest because we have podcasts and we have web shows and
learning more about how we can Make those available to a wider audience and you
know, just really produce better higher quality content Well, I hope it's been as
phenomenal for you. It's been for me. Absolutely. It's been here. There have been some
really amazing learning tracks that we've been involved in learning how to using AI and automation
how to monetize our podcast even more effectively, you know, just really how the
game is changing for podcasting and video production. - So how did you find your way
into podcasting? - I had a radio show that went into video.
So I went from radio show into doing Facebook lives and then created more content
on YouTube and other live platforms and then I had I was invited to a podcast a
podcast workshop and I thought well podcasting seems so expensive it seems so out of
reach for me and I hooked up with a company that produced my podcast what turned
out to be my podcast and I kind of just did what I love doing. What you're doing
here is just doing the interviews and then I just shoved it over to them to do
everything else. And so that's kind of how I got into the podcast world and I did
it. It's a leadership -based podcast and I did it to create, really create warm
leads for my leadership business. Great, great. Tell me a little bit about your
leadership business. Well, we use different assessment tools to help gain more
understanding and more awareness because self -awareness, the growth of self -awareness
is the leader's greatest tool in business. The more you can be aware about yourself,
the more self -awareness you have, the greater opportunity you have for success
because so many times, the failures come because of our blind spots and things that
we're not aware of about ourselves. And it's really interesting. So there's this tool
called the Jahari window that I look at. I don't know if you, so that, you know,
when you look at a window, different window panes, there's one window pane that is
things you know about yourself that everybody else knows about you. Right. There's
another window pain of things that you know about you than nobody else knows and
you don't want them to know. And then there's a window pain of things that other
people know about you that you have no awareness around and then there's that
undiscovered window pain of things that you don't know and they don't know. That's a
lot of windows there. Yeah, that's four. It's four windows. It's like a window,
right? Four pains and so we like to tackle those two pain, window pains,
of what other people see in you that you don't see in yourself to bring awareness
around that and then the things that you are not aware of yet. And so that's why
we use some of the assessment tools that we have and it's not a question of making
you wrong about something, it's like bringing it to the surface so that we can deal
with it and we can handle it and we can give you tools around how to successfully
navigate things. - Wow. - Yeah, so that's-- - How does that benefit the individual?
- So we had a discussion last night about one of the assessment tools I use, called
Kolbe, K -O -L -B -E. And that assessment tool is so powerful because a lot of times
we're doing things throughout our lives and having judgment on it.
We're feeling like it's wrong or negative or we shouldn't be that way and we fight
against that when in fact we've always or society has labeled it a negative when in
fact it's it's one of your greatest strengths. For instance we talked about with
Holby the follow -through. So if someone is a short line follow through and you can
follow me to find out more about all these terms I'm talking about, but which means
follow through is how someone deals with systems and processes and patterns and if
your way of handling systems and patterns, systems is to be random,
to be, to adapt. A lot of people throughout your life is probably called you
disorganized. Yeah, yeah. And you've taken that on as a judgment, as a negative.
Yeah. When in fact, your greatest strength in adapting in that,
that particular strength is that you don't get bogged down by a lot of redundancies.
Yeah. Like you can see flaws in certain systems and you shortcut, your gift is
shortcutting things. And just like a bee flies, you know, a bee doesn't fly in a
straight line. A bee flies, you know, zigzag patterns and yet it pollinates so
effectively. So if you look at, you're able to see something and shortcut it and
reduce bureaucracy and reduce redundancies and get to the solution faster,
that's your gift in that. And so a lot of times we've been label things that we
think are negative, but when you start breaking it down into the strengths like
that, you realize, oh, wait a second, it's pretty powerful. - But you know, in
general, the society doesn't understand that people don't understand that you know I
mean there are things that occurred in my life in my childhood that I didn't
understand until my adulthood right and some things I still don't understand and some
things we bury we bury as we bury and we carry right because of shame yeah and
that that again that whole thing of mislabeling certain things. Oh,
you're wrong. You have shiny object syndrome. You can't finish anything. That was my
label. You can't finish things. But that was my strength. My strength is in the
starting and then the gathering of the people that need to finish. So with that
thought, take me back to little Alicia. Okay. And take me back to,
I don't know, three, four, five, and things that may have happened that,
because I always believe that things are series of dots that connect lines, you
know. Do we have the time? We really have the time. Not today, but we will. I
don't know if we have the time to go back to four years, three -year or four -year.
Well, you know, give me the cliff notes and tell me how your life from that age,
where you can remember has done something to shape the Alicia that's talking about
you know leadership and KOLBE and things of that so okay so as a child I was
a force of nature so I was a little tornado and my parents didn't really know what
to do with me. And so I got a lot of labels as I was growing up.
I got a lot of labels because I didn't conform to the standard of what society
expected. Now, what age were you thinking when you said it? Because if you're three
or four or five, you know, you don't even know about conforming. Well, I don't know
about conforming. I just knew I got into trouble a lot. Because I couldn't conform.
I just got in trouble all the time. Because I was not following the rules, I was
not conforming. My father passed away, I told you recently, and I asked him this
question. I interviewed him a year before he passed, and I asked him what is
something that was quintessential Alicia? What is something that in my childhood is
quintessential me? And he said when I was in high school, so I'm skipping ahead a
little bit He was called into the principal's office because I was rollerskating in
the hall In the hallway in the school not the hallway the main hall. Okay.
I was really getting in the main hall and I have an older sister who is Perfect
in every way at that girl. Yeah in my estimation growing up she never got in
trouble straight -A student always did what she was told and when he went in to see
the principal the principal was like their sisters they're related like how could
this one come from the same family and so he's like that is quintessential like you
didn't care that there was a rule against Roller skating or any kind of activity
like that you just strapped on the roller skates you barred someone's role Okay, you
were roller skating through the and that never would have been your sister and my
sister would never do that Yeah, so it's things like that He's like I was always
called into the principal's office always because I didn't listen I wasn't doing what
I was supposed to do I wasn't doing what I needed to do doing class and all those
things. And so, you know, I felt like my whole life,
I felt like not only was I dumb or stupid,
but I couldn't do what everybody else did. And I felt like the black sheep of my
family my whole life. And I felt kind of an outcast. Wow. And that's why some of
these tools that I tools that I'm certified in, I find so powerful because there
are so many people who experience that and feel that and have felt that and they
carry that and they bring it into adulthood, they bring it into business and it's
in the back of their mind, it shows up in their actions when they're doing things
and so if we could free them from that by actually showing them no that wasn't a
bad thing it was just misappropriated. It was a strength. So some of the kids who
are labeled slow and so forth just learn differently.
They learn differently. I mean I was dyslexic but back in the 80s in high school
elementary through high school. You were just called dumb, right?
This lexia was just kind of coming on the scene, but it had to be severe enough
for them to say that something was wrong. Mine wasn't that severe, but I knew
something was not right, but I couldn't articulate it,
and so when I had to take tests and it was difficult and it was a challenge, I
just felt stupid because they knew I was smart. It's like, you have the ability,
you're just not applying yourself. You're just lazy, you're just, you know, like all
those other things you get labeled with. And it's not that it was none of that.
It was that with numbers and letters, I transposed things. So I had trouble, I had
trouble with languages because again, letters and numbers got confusing.
So with Spanish, with French, with math, with physics,
with you know anything with a formula, with numbers and letters. So when did you
recognize that and what did you do to address it all?
When did you know that you could do something to address it? It wasn't until I was
an adult, really yeah you know because how far into adulthood oh probably in my 20s
but in college yeah when I was away from from my family like I moved away I left
the country away and I started my own life and I said you know this is a new
chapter nobody knows me around here is from Trinidad to Miami. Okay all that when I
left when I went to college and I was like nobody knows me here right I get to
write whatever
chapter. I want to write it's like and so nobody here here is gonna call me stupid
nobody here because they don't know me so when I went to college I got to decide
what that experience was gonna be for me and how it's gonna show up and I
graduated summa cum laude and I barely barely got out of high school yeah so it's
it that showed me that I have I am intelligent. - Yeah, some of us graduated sooner
or later. - Sooner or later, right? (both laughing) So, you know,
it's-- - But how did you deal with it? Once you, once you, okay, you, did you
embrace it? Did you rebel against it? - Oh, I embraced me, it's stupid. I embraced
it. I was like, they don't expect nothing from me, so I'm just not going to try.
And I spent a lot of years doing that. I spent a lot of years trying, trying,
trying so hard. - Even after graduating at high levels like that? - Oh, no, no. Once
I was in my 20s, and I was-- - You started to deal with it. - I recognized that I
learned differently. And then when I started having children, I was like, I'm going
to treat my children differently because I want them to recognize their intelligence.
However, that intelligence shows up and one of the things that I did very early on
was had them read from very young, because reading was something that was difficult
and challenging for me and you know when you go undiagnosed with dyslexia that is
that's why it was challenging. So having them do that early in life gave them more
of a head start than I did. And so, yeah, just learning how they learn,
watching how they learn, and then encouraging that in them. - And of course your
children reap the rewards of the benefits. - Our dysfunction and our pain.
- Yeah, I mean, they learn, you're able to guide them and then because you
understand yourself, how, what can other people learn from because I always like this
is all about learning and lessons and the value. What do you think is the value
that you can get from going through all of that? And it was tough.
No, yeah, it was tough. I mean, but other people have had it much tougher, you
know. But the thing is, if there's thing in your life that you find shame or you
feel embarrassed about, examine like take yourself out of the emotion of it and
examine it from like a third like I guess from an observation perspective So like
step away from it and look at it. Is it true? First of all, is that true about
you? Was I stupid? No. So that was not true. So what is true then?
What is true for me? What can be true? So you get to decide, that's the thing,
choice. You are at choice. And you get to decide who you are from this moment on
you don't have to carry baggage that other people think about or have labeled you
as you get to decide that moment of awareness I'm going right back to self
-awareness that moment of awareness when you have an epiphany or have that awareness
about you let's say I used to bite my nails I used to bite my nails all the time
in in high school and it was horrible And then I got into like higher level of
high school and all the girls had beautiful nails, and I was like I gotta stop
biting my nails So that was an awareness. I'm like, I don't want to I don't want
to look like that anymore And so I chose to stop nobody was telling me what to do
because nobody could tell me what to do anyway That's just why and I made the
decision to stop. So, if you look at it just as a simple thing like that, if you
recognize that there's something that's holding you back, look at it from a different
perspective, look at it as someone brand new looking at something without the emotion
involved and then choose what's next. Like, how do you want to be perceived next?
You told me that you were, you know, working with people on different levels in
leadership and corporate. We talked about working with people in professional sports
and so forth. So what, you know, what do you feel like you bring to them as a
result of the things that have been implanted in you? So many things, so many
things. But most of all, I talked about using the assessment tools and bringing,
again, helping them see themselves, see their strengths through a different lens,
and then being able to take that information and activate it in their life to make
a change or to create really the life that they desire.
So that's what working with me does. It helps shift your perspective,
shift your identity and create the next level that you want to go to.
- Now you've gotten your message out, or messages out in different forms.
You've had three to four different podcasts, web shows, webinars,
and so forth. Are your the messages that you're getting out are they synced or
joined in some way or are they geared toward different aspects? Well I have a
through line. Everything I talk about there is a line of audacious confidence
involved. - I've heard that. - Audacious confidence is that unshakable belief in
yourself that's bold and it allows you to step out and do things that you didn't
think were possible. So I want you not just to be confident, but I want you to be
bold and confident. I want you to act with boldness and take those steps and That's
kind of what I am I focus on when I when I work with people.
It's like How can we create and and I'm not like gonna push you in the deep end
of the pool? And I say you gotta be bold. There you go people. No, we how does
it? How does a shy introverted person become bold? Well, what is bold for you?
Yeah, what is bold for you? Right? Bold for me is something different than for you.
So I'm very individualized that way. What do you want to accomplish? What do you
want to achieve? And then how can we still respect who you are but allow you to
act with boldness and develop that confidence? Because it's only through doing do you
really develop the confidence? You have to do it. You have to be an option. Yeah,
you know, a lot of the viewers, the listeners to this podcast, maybe range anywhere
from 35 to 55 and beyond to somewhere around those areas.
And they've had different experiences in life. And they are different places in life.
And some of them are watching some of their children. Yeah, are watching and
listening as well what if you were going to leave something for them what would you
say I know you you gave something earlier but what would you leave
that's a good question in that what can I leave with you what do you want that's
I think that's the fundamental thing is What do you want? Not just what someone
wants for you, but what do you want? And take some time to really understand what
you want, because it's only through your identifying your desires and what you want
can you actually move in the direction to get it. If you don't know what you want,
then right where you are is what you're gonna keep getting. So you need to
understand what do you want. So tell me about some of the resources that you have
Okay, so I have my seven secrets to audacious confidence, which is our top peak
method And you can always download that as a free gift on our Red Carpet CEO
website So it's Red Carpet CEO calm. Okay, they can do that and
Go follow me, you know, Alicia 360 you'll find my instagram my youtube my facebook
i'd love for you to subscribe to our youtube channel because we're always giving
confidence tips on our youtube channel uh show unleash your audacious confidence
listen that shows geared for women but men come on board and they watch and they're
always commenting they come on live and they say i know this isn't for women is it
okay for me to be here i'm like you're fine you're cool so yeah we We take all.
- So, is there a question that you haven't been asked but you always wanted someone
to ask you? - I don't think so. I don't think that I, 'cause I'm pretty open about
a lot of things. And so,
I don't know that there's something that someone, I haven't covered, 'cause even if
someone doesn't ask me the question, I tend to-- - You're probably gonna tell it.
- I tend to spit it out anyway.
One of the things that, in The Seven Secrets, one of the things that I do talk
about is developing an alter ego, which is something that helped me tremendously,
because at 50 years old, I was invited to do a pageant from time I was 48,
and I didn't do it. I never thought I was pretty enough. I didn't thought I could
be in a pageant and all these things. I had all the imposter syndrome,
I had all the things. And so when I made the decision to do that pageant,
the seven secrets that I put in there, I walked through every one of those steps
to get on that stage and I won my very first pageant ever in my life I was 50
years old and I won and so it is those steps are very powerful in helping you to
overcome a lot of your own insecurities especially if you have fear of visibility
fear of speaking in front of people like those steps I go back to those steps all
the time So it's not something that I just wrote in a book. It's something that I
use. - Awesome. You had a wonderful Ted talk. I got a chance to see your Ted X.
It was great and it's been such a joy just having an opportunity to share with you
here and I appreciate you taking some time out. I know you were on your way and--
- Well, I appreciate you asking, yes. - I appreciate much and you know I'm just so
happy that these folks will have an opportunity to hear from you, to see from you
and look forward to connecting with you more in the future. Absolutely thank you and
thank you very much for watching. So that's a wrap folks so hey listen we are just
so excited that you had an opportunity to tune in with us so in the meantime I'm
just going to ask you to keep adapting, keep adjusting, keep growing.
Don't forget to subscribe and like and share this with somebody else. I'll see you
the next time on the Shattered Mindset Podcast. Take care, take charge, God bless.
(upbeat music)