Niiamah Ashong

Coaching a Teacher of 50 Years Take Her Method Past One Person at a Time | Shirley Billigmeier | Ep 1000

August 8, 2026 by Niiamah Ashong

“This discomfort is not a bad thing, it just is.” — Niiamah

Join Niiamah Ashong and Shirley Billigmeier for a live Outlier’s Edge conversation about what your impulses are actually telling you. Most leaders treat discomfort as a state to end. Shirley makes the case that it’s a message with content in it, and that the reason you never hear it is that your fix works too well. She’s been on this since the early 70s, roughly two decades before medicine named the gut brain, after a PhD program refused to let her cross lanes, and she went out alone anyway.

Three things you’ll take away:

– The urge to act is the flashing light. The information is underneath it.

– Encouragement does nothing under pressure. Inventory what’s actually true instead.

– The signal you think you lost is unlistened to, not gone.

Timestamps:

00:00 – Welcome to Outlier’s Edge

00:58 – The chatter she couldn’t shut off

02:58 – Refused a PhD, went alone

05:10 – Building one person at a time

08:06 – The hardest part named

09:59 – Niiamah asks for her discomfort

10:54 – She reframes it as message

12:03 – The student texts instead

13:15 – Truth-based, not affirmations

17:58 – He answers four instantly

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Coaching a Composter of 24 Years Launch a World First Laughter Program | Cathy Nesbitt | Ep 999

August 7, 2026 by Niiamah Ashong

“Once we share it, it loses its power.” Cathy Nesbitt

Join Niiamah Ashong and Cathy Nesbitt for a live coaching conversation. Cathy has built a global movement and confirmed with the founder of Laughter Yoga that nobody on earth is doing the thing she believes she was made for. She still has not started it. Six years. This session goes after why.

What you get:

▸ Why the obstacle a leader names out loud is almost never the real one

▸ What it costs to put the true answer on the form instead of the acceptable one

▸ How confirmed proof of a wide open space can sit untouched for years

Timestamps:

00:00 – Welcome to Shape Your World Live

03:20 – The vision from the forest

06:00 – Be moved or lead nothing

07:50 – What she wants to build

08:54 – Laughter is not comedy

12:06 – Serving bigger is a dodge

16:17 – The cell phone excuse

18:45 – Left it off the form

29:13 – Where the guilt is running

52:25 – What she takes away

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Coaching an Agency Owner Stop Working for Free | Wayne Veldsman | Ep 998

August 6, 2026 by Niiamah Ashong

“It’s not about doing 10 times more, it’s just like receiving 10 times more.” — Niiamah

Join Niiamah Ashong and Wayne Veldsman for a live coaching conversation about the cost of being the hardest worker in the room. Wayne builds legacy for a living. He runs marketing for nonprofits and coaches the leaders inside them. A client recently told him he works harder than anyone she knows. He took it as a compliment for about two days. This session sits inside what that praise actually measures, what over-delivery costs when nothing captures it, and what a goal has to look like before effort stops working as a strategy.

Three things you leave with:
– Effort is not evidence. Being the hardest worker proves nothing moved.
– 10x and 10% are the same question asked from opposite ends.
– Doing more for free is a business model, not generosity.

Timestamps:

00:00 – Welcome to Outlier’s Edge
01:53 – Legacy is what happens today
06:42 – Mental, physical, financial daily check
11:28 – The coaching starts here
18:34 – His limiting belief about money
23:15 – “You work harder than anybody”
28:50 – Seems like you do nothing
29:02 – Ten times or ten percent
32:14 – Receiving more, not doing more
45:50 – Hard work cannot be enough

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Coaching a $4M Coach Fill a 15 Seat Retreat by Phone | Terri Levine | Ep 997

August 5, 2026 by Niiamah Ashong

“I really don’t want everybody; I want the right people.” — Terri Levine

Join Niiamah Ashong and Dr. Terri Levine. Terri has a community of ten thousand people. She fills her rooms fifteen at a time, by phone. This one is about what happens when a leader stops marketing and starts choosing. Curation over reach. Saying out loud what you are great at. Building the business around life instead of the other way around.

Three things you leave with:
– Why a bigger list makes a room harder to fill, not easier
– What it actually costs to claim you are the best at something
– How to design a room by what you leave out of it

Timestamps:

00:00 – Welcome to Outlier’s Edge
01:59 – The retreat she is building
03:13 – Why her, why now
04:35 – Claiming what she does best
06:17 – Going back to yourself
08:39 – Building it completely differently
11:08 – She stopped over filling retreats
15:41 – How she actually enrolls people
18:05 – Thirty clients in thirty days
24:17 – Life design before business design

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Coaching a Show Producer Get Storytelling Into Schools | Stephanie Garibaldi | Ep 996

August 4, 2026 by Niiamah Ashong

“Can we get it done without us having to be there?” — Niiamah

Join Niiamah Ashong and Stephanie Garibaldi for a live coaching conversation where she came in asking how to get storytelling into every public high school in the country. The conversation never gets there. That is the point.

What it covers. The gap between the size of your mission and the size of the machine carrying it. Why the work you are best at ends up last in line.

Three things you leave with:

▪ The ambition is not the problem. The capacity is.
▪ If you cannot say what you do, nobody can take it off you.
▪ Ten percent of the effort forces answers that more effort never finds.

Timestamps:

00:00 – Welcome to Outlier’s Edge
00:41 – Terrified sixteen year old
04:26 – The word that meant pregnant
12:18 – Storytelling in every high school
17:37 – The backstage pass begins
19:48 – She asks for an idea
24:11 – If I go down
31:14 – Ten percent of the effort
35:41 – Train the trainers
37:40 – Write down everything you do

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Coaching a Four-Time Author Own His Twenty Years | R. Karl Hebenstreit | Ep 995

August 3, 2026 by Niiamah Ashong

“I know what your website says. I know what your bio says. But who do you say you are, and do I believe you?” — Niiamah

Join Niiamah Ashong and R. Karl Hebenstreit for a live coaching session on what happens when a leader has built the body of work but has not yet claimed it out loud.

Karl came in wanting bigger stages. What surfaced was ownership. Four books, a TEDx talk, twenty years inside global organizations, and the sentence still sitting underneath all of it was “I’m not experienced enough.”

This one goes at the gap between what you have already built and what you are willing to say is yours.

Inside:
– Being called the thing is not the same as owning it
– More reach will not fix a message you have not claimed
– The leverage is with the leaders already awake, not the ones you are trying to convince

Timestamps:

00:00 – Welcome to Outlier’s Edge
01:00 – Karl names himself on air
02:52 – The reintroduction he didn’t expect
10:47 – The division that doubled yearly
18:57 – Now we find the edge
25:15 – Why isn’t this here already
25:36 – I’m not experienced enough
26:42 – Movement leader to movement leader
34:47 – You’re already in the surgery
39:07 – Go find the already awake

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Coaching a Physician Who Built a 20 Year Nonprofit Launch His Institute | Anthony Fleg | EP 994

August 3, 2026 by Niiamah Ashong

“Model the future now.” Niiamah

Join Niiamah Ashong and Dr. Anthony Fleg for a live coaching conversation about what it costs to stay behind your own work.

Anthony practices medicine backwards from the entire system. Where medicine asks what is wrong with you, he asks what is right. He built a nonprofit that ran for twenty years and kept his name off all of it. Then he names the thing he has never said out loud to anyone.

What you get:

– Why every deficit is a strength in disguise, and what that changes in a room
– The difference between a thin goal and a thick goal, and why the thick one is worth failing at
– What it actually costs to keep your name off your own work

Timestamps:

00:00 – Welcome to Outlier’s Edge
02:38 – Every deficit is a strength
05:12 – Honoring stops the whole conversation
09:33 – Proudly not on social media
11:28 – I will not help you
17:56 – Thick goals versus thin goals
20:30 – Not TED talks, 23 people
27:10 – It was never the strategy
30:20 – He names it out loud
44:08 – What he does Monday morning

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Coaching an Opera Director Booked Through 2028 Launch Her First Film | Kelsie Furst | Ep 993

August 3, 2026 by Niiamah Ashong

“What if you’re already ready.” — Niiamah

Join Niiamah Ashong and Kelsie Furst, executive and artistic director of Loveland Opera Theater.

Kelsie never set out to run an opera company. She came up through the chorus, auditioned pregnant, said yes every time she was asked, and rose. Now she wants to make something nobody will ask her for. This conversation is about the gap between the leader everyone recruits and the artist waiting for permission to start her own work.

What you’ll take away:
– Why the question of “enough experience” is the wrong question for a leader who has never qualified in advance
– How the constraints you carry from your old game quietly rewrite the rules of your new one
– The difference between a project that drains you and one that pays you back

Timestamps:
00:00 – Welcome to the Outlier’s Edge Podcast
00:33 – From Nutcracker to opera director
04:59 – Asked to lead the company
17:37 – What life changing would require
21:31 – You already know the answer
22:32 – The movie opera she wants
26:22 – Her fear of vanity
31:22 – Too nervous to start
32:39 – Experience is the wrong question
43:45 – Energy is not limited

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