From CIA to CEO with Rupal Patel

Episode 40 of the The Best Guest podcast, hosted by Victoria Bennion, titled "From CIA to CEO with Rupal Patel" was published on June 28, 2022 and runs 23 minutes.

June 28, 2022 ·23m · The Best Guest

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Episode Description

On today's episode of the podcast we welcome agent-turned-entrepreneur Rupal Patel. We talk about:

Rupal's journey from the CIA to becoming a CEO
Writing From CIA to CEO
Your Personal Energy Map
Reframing the idea of Self-Promotion

About Rupal Patel

Rupal Patel’s high-octane career has taken her from jungles and war zones to boardrooms and international stages. After a thrilling career at the CIA, she earned her MBA from London Business School and started her first award-winning business 10 years ago.

Called a ‘Power Woman’ by Harper's Bazaar Magazine, Rupal is a sought-after international speaker and business consultant who has spoken in front of thousands. As a sitting CEO, author, executive advisor, coach and mentor, Rupal helps founders, leaders, and next generation change-makers reset their mindset and make the impossible possible.

Her new book From CIA to CEO (Bonnier Books, May 2022) provides a powerful new toolkit for leaders and entrepreneurs that reveals how the techniques of the CIA can help anyone find their voice and thrive in the world of business without conforming to stale stereotypes or dated “best practice”.

Rupal shares the unique skills she developed as a woman and field agent in the high-stakes, alpha-male world of the CIA, and combines those clandestine insights with her experiences as a CEO and business advisor. She brings tools and tips from the top-secret world of the CIA into everyday living and leading: methods like Profiling and Situational Awareness that help uncover and amplify strengths, and game-changing new frameworks such as Identity-Driven Leadership and Personal Energy Mapping that unlock performance, develop mental toughness, and build steel-core confidence.

With motivating stories and truly unique exercises, Rupal helps her audiences leverage the CIA mindset to remake the rules of success and become unstoppable.

Key Takeaways

From CIA to CEO is a book fundamentally for living and leading based on your values. What's important to you, setting yourself bold, big dreams, ambitions, goals, and then it contains a very practical toolkit for how you do it. You can explore and experiment. Take some of those CIA tools that I was trained in and adapt them.
Discover your Personal Energy Map - Consciously map what your energy ebbs and flows are in the course of a day, week, month, season and where possible align the activities you do in your life and career with where your energy is ebbing and flowing.
It's so important to put ourselves out there. People talk about it as self-promotion, as if it's somehow this in your face endeavour, where you're in people's faces. I would like to flip that and reframe it for people. It's not about being self-promoty. It's about being more visible. It's about sharing with the world, what you do, how good you are at doing that thing, the service you provide, the product. You've got this amazing idea that you want to bring attention to. If you don't, in a way it's being very selfish.