The Best Career Advice I Ever Got

How I Stopped Presenting Data and Started Leading by Framing Decisions.

A lot of people say the best career advice they ever got came from a formal mentor or a leadership program. For me, it came from something much smaller—an offline message I wasn’t expecting, sent after a presentation I had just given. It was short, simple, and easy to overlook. But it ended up changing the way I think about leadership.

That day, I had just finished an analytics deep dive for a group of senior executives. I’d walked through forecasts, data signals, performance metrics, everything well-prepared, everything grounded in the work. The feedback was positive. I wrapped up feeling confident, maybe even a little proud of a solid job done.

Then the message came from someone I respected a lot. Not my manager, not a mentor—just someone who’d seen the presentation and wanted to say something.

“Great job today. Next time, don’t just present the data. Use it to shape decisions. Show up where strategy and plans actually get made.”

I read it more than once. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I had just walked through all the numbers. Wasn’t that the point?

But over the next few days and weeks, those words kept echoing. They quietly started to shift how I saw my role and the work I was doing. I’d spent so much time making sure everything I shared was accurate, complete, and clear. But I hadn’t asked the bigger question: Was any of it actually helping drive a business decision? Was I moving anything forward?

That message wasn’t a critique of my presentation. It was an invitation to think differently. To show up differently. To shift out of the role of someone who explains the work, and into the role of someone who helps shape the conversation. Someone who not only just deliver results, but also plays a part in influencing the outcome.

That shift didn’t happen instantly. But once it started, it changed everything: how I prepare, how I listen, how I speak up, and what I choose to say. So let me share how that shift unfolded for me and how you can start making it in your own way, starting now.

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