Media & Press
Deb Smallwood
Author, Researcher & Creator of SelfPowerment
Corporate Executive Leadership
Short Bio
Deb Smallwood spent more than four decades in executive leadership — as CEO, CIO, and Senior Partner at Fortune 500 companies — before conducting 62 narrative interviews with senior leaders that named a pattern millions of high-achieving women have lived but never been able to articulate.
Her book, SelfPowerment: The Inner Shift for High-Achieving Women Who Want More Than Just Success, and its research-based framework guide women leaders to shift from external proving to internal choosing — leading and living with clarity, confidence, and choice.
Medium Bio
Deb Smallwood spent more than four decades in executive leadership — rising to CEO, CIO, and Senior Partner roles across the insurance and technology industries — before turning her experience into research. Drawing on 62 narrative interviews with senior leaders across industries and generations, she identified the Invisible Advancement Cycle: a repeatable organizational pattern in which high-performing women are trusted with the hardest work while visibility, sponsorship, and advancement fail to keep pace.
Her book, SelfPowerment: The Inner Shift for High-Achieving Women Who Want More Than Just Success, and its research-based framework give women leaders the path from endurance to alignment — from "Will they choose me?" to "Do I choose this?" — leading and living with clarity, confidence, and conscious choice.
Mega Bio
Deb Smallwood spent more than four decades in executive leadership — rising to CEO, CIO, and Senior Partner roles at Fortune 500 companies including Liberty Mutual, KPMG, Tower Group Advisory, and ICW Group, and as Founder and CEO of Strategy Meets Action, a research and advisory firm she led through launch, growth, and acquisition.
Through that career — and her own moments of questioning the cost of constant proving — she became focused on a question she could not stop asking: why do high-achieving women keep delivering extraordinary results and still find themselves passed over, invisible, or stalled?
That question became two years of original qualitative research. Sixty-two narrative interviews with senior leaders — 52 women and 10 men — across industries, generations, and career stages. What emerged was a pattern so consistent it had to be named.
She called it the Invisible Advancement Cycle — a repeatable organizational pattern in which high-performing women are trusted with the hardest work while visibility, sponsorship, and advancement quietly fail to keep pace.
Responsibility expands. Authority does not. Performance stays strong. Advancement stalls.
And because no single decision signals exclusion, the pattern goes unnamed — experienced as personal when it is structural.
Those findings became the foundation of her book, SelfPowerment: The Inner Shift for High-Achieving Women Who Want More Than Just Success, with a foreword by Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author Karen Anderson. The accompanying white paper, What No One Talks About — But Women Know, is available as a free download at SelfPowerment.com/research.
At the core of the book is the SelfPowerment framework. It guides the Inner Shift — from endurance to alignment, from external proving to internal choosing, from "Will they choose me?" to "Do I choose this?" Built on four Principles — Acknowledge, Awaken, Accept, and Align — the framework gives high-achieving women a clear, structured path to lead and live with clarity, confidence, and conscious choice.
Deb is a keynote speaker, executive mentor, and Mastermind program leader whose work reaches women leaders and the organizations that depend on them. She lives with her husband of 49 years and enjoys family time with her two beautiful and smart daughters and her four amazing grandchildren.
Long Bio
Deb Smallwood spent more than four decades in executive leadership — rising to CEO, CIO, and Senior Partner roles at Fortune 500 companies including Liberty Mutual, KPMG, Tower Group Advisory, and ICW Group, and as Founder and CEO of Strategy Meets Action, a research and advisory firm she led through launch, growth, and acquisition.
Through that career — and her own moments of questioning the cost of constant proving — she became focused on a question she could not stop asking: why do high-achieving women keep delivering extraordinary results and still find themselves passed over, invisible, or stalled?
That question became two years of original qualitative research. Sixty-two narrative interviews with senior leaders — 52 women and 10 men — across industries, generations, and career stages. What emerged was a pattern so consistent it had to be named.
She called it the Invisible Advancement Cycle — a repeatable organizational pattern in which high-performing women are trusted with the hardest work while visibility, sponsorship, and advancement quietly fail to keep pace.
Responsibility expands. Authority does not. Performance stays strong. Advancement stalls.
And because no single decision signals exclusion, the pattern goes unnamed — experienced as personal when it is structural.
Those findings became the foundation of her book, SelfPowerment: The Inner Shift for High-Achieving Women Who Want More Than Just Success, with a foreword by Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author Karen Anderson. The accompanying white paper, What No One Talks About — But Women Know, is available as a free download at SelfPowerment.com/research.
At the core of the book is the SelfPowerment framework. It guides the Inner Shift — from endurance to alignment, from external proving to internal choosing, from "Will they choose me?" to "Do I choose this?" Built on four Principles — Acknowledge, Awaken, Accept, and Align — the framework gives high-achieving women a clear, structured path to lead and live with clarity, confidence, and conscious choice.
Deb is a keynote speaker, executive mentor, and Mastermind program leader whose work reaches women leaders and the organizations that depend on them. She lives with her husband of 49 years and enjoys family time with her two beautiful and smart daughters and her four amazing grandchildren.
