Have you ever been mid-sentence and caught yourself editing in real time? Not lying. Not even being fully strategic. Just shrinking, quietly, while the conversation keeps moving.

Denise Foss knows what that feels like. She is the founder of Create Loudly and the creator behind the Stand in Your Power card deck, and the deck itself was born in the middle of a final-round interview for a senior leadership role. She had done the earlier rounds. She knew her material. Then one question caught her off guard and somewhere in her answer, she noticed it happening. She was molding her response to fit what she thought they wanted to hear instead of trusting what she actually knew. She recognized it while it was still happening, and did not stop it.

She left the call, went for a walk on a trail near her home, and by the time she got back, she had realized something. She already had the tools to meet that moment differently. She had practiced them. She just had not applied them when the pressure was on, when the role was on the line, when someone with a C in their title was asking the questions.

That walk became the foundation for the deck.

I had Denise on Winning Season this week and the conversation kept pulling me back to one thing: power is not a destination you arrive at and then maintain automatically. It is something you practice, and the practice gets tested most in the moments you want it to work most. A high-stakes interview. A salary negotiation. A conversation where part of you is already calculating what the other person wants to hear.

The Stand in Your Power deck has 17 themes built around that tension. Each theme has three cards: an Insight card, an Inspiration card, and an Integration card. The Insight grounds you in the concept. The Inspiration gives you a quick shift in perspective. The Integration gives you something to actually practice. That third card is the one that does the most work, and I say that from experience.

My first week with the deck, I pulled an Integration card, got out my notebook, and then went to clean my baseboards. I am not proud of this but I am telling you because it is real. Something about the question on that card surfaced exactly what I had been avoiding, and instead of facing it, I found something productive-adjacent to do. Eventually I sat back down, made a cup of tea, and worked through it. What came up was worth it. But I needed to move past every internal blocker I had first.

Denise calls this the AND philosophy, and it runs through the whole deck. Some cards will feel like they contradict each other. She put that in the guidebook on purpose. We are not consistent, perfectly coherent people. We need firm boundaries AND we need to stay open. We can be grounded AND still be learning. The deck does not tell you which version of yourself to be. It asks you questions until you can hear yourself more clearly.

She said something during our conversation that stayed with me. Standing in your power is not a solo act. It is relational. You do not build presence by going into a room and deciding you are confident now. You build it in relationship to the people and situations around you, which means the practice does not stop when the conversation ends.

The deck is available at createloudly.com. Denise has a special offer for the Resilient Leader Insder community: use code Power26 for free shipping on your order. The code is valid through May 31, 2026, and is currently available for US shipping only.

The full episode is live now on Winning Season. Denise is warm, thoughtful, and honest in a way that makes the conversation feel like it is happening with you, not for you. Worth your commute, your walk, your lunch.

🫶🏽Jvt