Melanie Holscher

I spent years leading teams and selling; winning sales awards along the way, but more importantly building relationships and learning what consultative selling really requires. I learned what sales is and isn’t, what I could and couldn’t control, and how to make decisions confidently.

Maybe the best realization: don’t take rejection personally, because it was never about me. In leadership, I thrived on understanding different perspectives and finding common ground. My own leaders and mentors poured into me generously, and they taught me something I still use every day. I can’t connect the dots for someone else. But I can put the dots close together, then lean in with curiosity to challenge, encourage, and inspire.

National Salesperson of the Year. Regional awards and Team MVP. Amazon best-selling author.

The book came out of a grim, life-threatening season, not a career plan. The awards mattered less for the recognition than for what earning them required. You don’t get there without learning to be coachable, and without a lot of people investing in you along the way.

Great coaching challenges even the most stubborn perspectives and deep-set beliefs. When our own thoughts are working against us, it’s really hard to win. We attach meaning to words that make our world harder, and before long our minds are full of reasons why we can’t.

Coaching clears the cache. It finds evidence of what we can do. Mindsets shift, habits change, and the results follow.

Clients tell me I should write a book of all my little analogies. But the thing I hear most is some version of this: “Melanie, sometimes you say the thing that’s right there in front of me and I just didn’t see it.”

That’s what happens when you’re in the weeds: you can’t see the one thing that would make the biggest difference. A coach isn’t smarter than you. A coach is just standing somewhere you can’t stand. The results I’m proudest of come when clients act outside their comfort zones; when they finally do the things they always knew they should be doing but had convinced themselves they couldn’t. I believe everybody has a next level, and a great coach helps unlock it. That’s why I do this.

I chose coaching because I wanted to help people develop the skills, systems, and discipline to achieve their goals. Four years in, I found myself in a harrowing lifequake: stage IV ovarian cancer, and a prognosis of months to live.

Seven years later, I marvel at how much coaching shaped my cancer journey. In all those years helping clients build a healthy mindset, I had been preparing myself for the ultimate test of my own. It was my fellow coaches who rallied around me and helped me apply the Southwestern coaching principles to my crisis — challenging me to focus on what I could control, which had nothing to do with the cancer in my body and everything to do with my mind.

My coach asked me how I could be thankful for this cancer. It sounded insane at the time. But the seed was planted, and every day I searched for things to be grateful for. Every day, I found them.

Much later, a doctor told me: “Mindset impacts outcomes.” I’ve built my coaching on that belief ever since. I encourage every client to shape their mind into a place where growth is possible, because I know what it can survive.

Everybody has a next level.