There are moments in communication when you are no longer defending an idea, but your own value. Not because you positioned it wrong, but because the context you work in offers no clear benchmarks. That space between subjectivity, pressure, and the need to articulate your own contribution has become one of the key points of professional insecurity today.
This is the space where Jule Kim operates, an executive leadership coach and keynote speaker based in Washington, whose work begins where traditional leadership models fall short. The focus is not on performance, but on what makes it sustainable: communication under pressure, decision-making in uncertainty, and credibility that does not depend on a title.
Her career does not follow a linear path. After experience at Microsoft and Amazon and reaching high-paying positions, she chose to step out of a system that did not align with what she wanted to build. Today, she works with leaders who are already “successful”, but are looking for clarity on what that success actually means.
Ahead of her session Talking on Thin Ice – Solid Communication for Delicate Situations at Dani komunikacija, she spoke about why communication in creative industries so often becomes personal, how the feeling of insecurity is formed, and what it really means to have presence when the stakes are high and the rules are unclear.
Creative industries are full of people who are professionally fluent but personally frozen, people who can craft a campaign message for millions but lose their footing the moment the conversation becomes about them, their work, their value, or their limits. What specifically makes communication in a creative professional context thin ice, as opposed to the high-stakes conversations that happen in other industries?
A lot happens in a creative context that doesn’t appear at the same level of intensity in other fields. Back when I worked as a writer and an editor, one of the things that struck me early on was how few rules there actually are. We think writing comes with all these rules, and there are some, just like there are some rules or guides in the art, design, or culinary fields.
But the guidance you’re given is very small versus the vast landscape of everything you could possibly combine and create. You have very few guardrails and mostly subjective standards. So you don’t really know which route leads to the promised land of success or being good at what you do.
This means there’s often no objective standard telling you whether what you made is good, and you can’t point to a direct line from your work to revenue or impact the way other fields can. You can’t say “these new features brought in this much revenue or this many more conversions.”
I felt that frustration constantly as a writer and editor. I could demonstrate some things, like I generated 30% more website traffic. But so much of the work isn’t defined with an outcome that drives revenue, which leaves you trying to make the case for your value without access to the proof or evidence that many other fields get to point to.
So then your sense of your own worth comes into play. And what makes this really tricky is that you’re not just building or executing. You’re pulling something out of yourself — I joke that creative work can feel like you’re giving birth. It’s an involved process of making thousands of subjective choices that reflect how you see, how you think, what you believe is worth paying attention to.
So when someone gives you feedback on the work, it doesn’t land as feedback on just the work. It lands as feedback on YOU. It feels personal because you are that close to what you produce, and so many of us struggle with a need to prove ourselves because of not having an objective yardstick to measure against.
That’s where a lot of the thin ice comes from, especially with speaking up for yourself, advocating for yourself, or trying to articulate why what you do matters. It’s hard to do this when you’re not given the tools to do so.
Your career path is the opposite of a clean institutional trajectory. A math degree you did not use. Law school you dropped out of. Corporate burnout. A photography business. Life coaching. And then, eventually, executive coaching for senior leaders. What did that refusal to stay in the wrong place teach you about the psychology of the people you now work with?
One of the biggest things my path taught me is something I see in almost every client I work with. People confuse how good they are at something with whether they love it. I call it the number one mistake I see over and over. Someone is excellent at what they do, and they take that competence as proof they’re in the right place.
And I know that because I lived it. I managed to get good at a lot of things I didn’t love. Being good at them didn’t make them right for me, and I was always honest with myself about that, even when the people around me felt quite strongly that I should stay in those professions.
Conversely, I’ve had lots of doubts with the career paths that felt really hard, because I falsely believed that not being good at something quickly meant that I should quit. That’s why I always tell people that they have to give something enough time so they can get good at it, and THEN decide whether they want to continue, whereas most people will quit because they set arbitrary and unrealistic expectations on how quickly they should become skilled in a field.
I also see a lot of the leaders who have gotten to an elite level of status and lifestyle, but in a field they don’t love, so they’re burning out. They know something is calling to them, but they’ve built a whole life around what they have now. The salary, the title, the comfort — it’s all very familiar.
And when the thing that could be the real thing shows up, they’re terrified because now the stakes feel real. This makes them think something is wrong, instead of accepting that this is just the reality of what it feels like to grow beyond your comfort zone.
You spent a decade climbing the corporate ladder at Microsoft and Amazon, reaching a salary of $300,000, and still walked away. The decision to leave a stable, high-status career in order to teach what those environments were failing to model is a significant claim about what they were actually producing. What were they producing?
This is probably not going to be a popular answer, but I think that tech jobs like these tend to produce people who prioritize and optimize for safety.
There’s a certain beauty to that, because knowing that you won’t just get up and walk away can help foster a level of commitment and care to your team that you otherwise might not have. But that need for safety also tends to come with a lower level of honesty, and not enough risk-taking because of a high degree of image management.
Imposter syndrome is one of the most discussed topics in contemporary professional development and one of the least structurally examined. It is usually treated as an individual psychological condition. In your work with executives and senior leaders, how much of what gets called imposter syndrome is actually a rational response to systems that are genuinely ambiguous about whose authority they recognize?
This is a somewhat loaded question to answer as a person of color who lives in the United States, because what’s not covered very much is how race factors into imposter syndrome.
For example, imposter syndrome shows up the most for Asian Americans, and is also very common amongst all people of color and immigrants here. You’re right that imposter syndrome is treated as a problem at the individual level, as in “there’s something wrong with me,” instead of recognizing that systemic bias often pushes people who look like me into imposter syndrome territory.
There’s a great HBR article that talks about this, if you’d like to check it out.
Executive presence is often taught as a set of behaviors to perform: posture, cadence, vocabulary, eye contact. You work from a different premise, one that is more psychologically grounded. What is actually being communicated in the moments when presence is genuinely felt, as opposed to merely observed?
The issue here is that the set of behaviors you just mentioned, like the posture and how you speak and the words you’re using and whether you’re making eye contact or not, are all things that I call the packaging. To some degree, the packaging can help; that’s absolutely true.
But what most of us fail to acknowledge is that people can see right through those behaviors when there’s no substance beneath the surface. We can sense when someone is being authentic versus performative.
And what that authenticity actually looks like, in practice, is pretty specific. One of the most common phrases I’ve heard from people when describing leaders they feel are authentic is this feeling that the person is genuinely comfortable in their own skin.
You can see when that’s true. Someone will be honest about something they don’t know, and they’re not afraid to take the time to think about something more deeply so they can deliver value in a way that meets the moment.
On an energy level, we can feel that through nervous system resonance. When you’re talking to someone who is settled within themselves, who knows who they are and knows their limits and accepts themselves, people like that give the people around them permission to do the same.
You’ll notice that when you’re around somebody like that, you feel calmer and more grounded as well, because that peaceful energy is contagious. The executive presence you see in people like this is a byproduct of how they feel about themselves. It’s not the other way around.
