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Education
BREAKOUT | WEDNESDAY, 12:00 - 1:00 PM PDT
Stop Acting. Start Leading. The Armor You Wear Is Costing You More Than You Think.
Marketing and BD professionals are among the most skilled actors in any industry. They read rooms, manage relationships, project confidence on command, and absorb pressure without flinching.
What no one talks about is what the act costs.
Marketing directors learn early to manage up. BD professionals learn to project certainty they don't always feel. Firm principals learn to absorb everything and show nothing. These are survival skills. They work... until they don't. Until a key hire walks out the door. Until a client relationship that looked solid goes cold. Until the leader who held everything together realizes they cannot feel the work anymore.
This session names what that armor actually costs and gives leaders a practical framework for showing up without it. In pursuit rooms. In firm leadership. In conversations that determine whether your best people stay.
Learner outcomes
1. The ability to identify exactly how armor shows up in their client relationships, firm culture, and internal leadership, and make intentional choices about when it serves them and when it is quietly destroying trust.
2. A presence-over-pretense framework applied directly to their BD and leadership practice, so team and client loyalty holds under pressure, transitions, and high-stakes decisions.
3. Language and structure for communicating boundaries as a professional discipline, protecting capacity and credibility without burning relationships.