Client case study
Heather Perry was already carrying more leadership capacity than her role reflected. The work helped her change how she handled organizational dynamics, feedback, and her own internal ceiling so she could inhabit the next level before anyone handed her the title.
Heather Perry had spent over a decade grinding her way up through a multi-site urgent care company she joined in 2004. By 2016, she had earned a master's degree, taken on increasingly complex financial responsibilities, and caught the attention of the CFO, who had started grooming her for a bigger role. On paper, her trajectory looked strong.
Underneath it, she was struggling.
The challenge was not one of competence. Heather knew the business well, often better than the department heads she had to influence. The challenge was that she had grown up in this organization. Everyone had watched her start as an analyst. Some of the leaders she now needed to work alongside, or above, still saw her through the lens of who she had been, not who she was becoming.
There was one operations director in particular who consistently dismissed her input in budget meetings, overrode her recommendations, and showed her little professional respect. She suspected accountability never landed on him when the numbers went wrong. It would land on her. The pattern repeated itself even after she moved into a director role. The dynamic followed her up the ladder.
Compounding all of this was the CFO who was championing her growth. He was pushing her hard, but not in a way she could easily receive. His development style was blunt to the point of being harsh. Sit down, get yelled at, be dismissed. No framework. No guidance. Just pressure.
And at the same time, she was navigating a divorce.
“I felt stuck. I knew I was capable of more and I was being pushed more, but I knew something within me needed to change to activate the more.”
The coaching program included weekly sessions, reading assignments, and real exercises designed to surface the internal patterns that hold people back. It was not therapy. It was not a seminar. It was closer to directed self-examination under guided pressure.
For Heather, a few specific elements proved decisive.
One session asked participants to identify their work nemesis, the person they consistently struggled with, and then examine their own role in the dynamic. Not how to change the other person. Not how to get around them. How to change your own behavior to produce different outcomes, regardless of who the other person is and regardless of whether you like them.
Heather had no doubt who came to mind immediately. She had been butting heads with this operations director since her analyst days. He was machismo, dismissive, territorial about operations, and indifferent to the financial picture she was trying to present.
The reframe was uncomfortable but clarifying: he was never going to change. The question was what she was going to do differently.
“I had to take my ego out of it. Stop trying to prove myself to him and switch to, maybe I can stroke his ego a little bit to get what I need.”
She started showing up differently in meetings. Calm, grounded, numbers-ready. She stopped defending her position and started framing her recommendations in terms of what mattered to his team. She began doing something the pre-coaching version of her would not have done: pulling him aside directly to say, “Look, I know we don’t agree on everything, but we need to move this forward.”
It worked. He eventually gave her the professional respect she needed to function, not warmly, but functionally. The outcomes improved.
The CFO who was grooming her for the top finance role had a habit of sitting her down, yelling at her for twenty minutes, and ending with “okay, good talk.” It was hard to receive and hard to parse.
The work Heather did through the program helped her change how she processed those conversations. Instead of internalizing everything as evidence she was not good enough, or defending herself against the criticism, she learned to find the one true thing in what he was saying and use it.
“Take the one thing he was really worried about. Change it. And keep moving forward.”
Heather grew up in a family where almost no one had a college degree. She was the first among 27 cousins to earn a master's. The internal story she carried into her professional life was shaped by that background: people like her do not hold the fancy titles. The ceiling she felt was not just organizational. It was personal.
One of the things the program helped her see was the smallness of that story. She had been fixed on the idea of becoming Director of FP&A. She had even looked up the career path, understood the job description, and was ready to demand the title. What she did not see was everything that was possible beyond it.
“Part of what the coaching helped me realize is that I am in control of me, my emotions, and my progression.”
The shift was not from wanting less to wanting more. It was from forcing outcomes through willpower and entitlement to creating conditions through growth and self-awareness.
The timeline speaks for itself.
The director role she had been chasing became a waypoint, not a destination. Within four years of the coaching program, she was CFO, overseeing, among others, the controller who had been her superior.
The difficult operations director she had struggled with for years eventually became her peer as COO. She managed the working relationship. The outcomes changed. The respect, such as it was, came.
When asked where she would be today without the work she did with Anthony, Heather did not hesitate:
“Stuck in middle management hell. Very boring.”
On what she would say to someone considering working with Anthony:
“You are thinking very small. You are thinking worldly cause and effect and not taking accountability or the adventure of your own life and destiny.”
On what Anthony’s coaching is actually like:
“He is not going to pull punches and try to make you feel good, but he’s not going to do it in a way for you to feel shame. He is going to force you to be honest and shine a light on all the things that have helped you be comfortable instead of the movement and personal responsibility you need to take to expand your life.”
On the honest limits of the work:
“Anthony is not a magic pill. You have to do the work. But Anthony is going to help you focus on the right work at the right time.”
Industry reference generalized to multi-site healthcare at the subject's request.
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