Mindset & high performance 4:51 · Transcript included
Lara Nercessian, founder of Boss in Heels, on the 3 keys to reaching your potential.
Lara and Jess first met at a Tony Robbins event in 2019 and have cheered each other on ever since. Drawing on her coaching practice and conversations with thousands of people, Lara shares the three pillars she sees in everyone who reaches their potential: their relationship with fear, their relationship with time, and their relationship with themselves.
Interviewed by Jess Wilson · Influential Women Series · The Pillars, Sydney · October 2026
Three keys to reaching your potential.
- 01Feel the fear, then act anyway. High performers haven’t stopped feeling fear. They trust themselves to take the aligned action despite it, while people who stay stuck let the fear make the decision for them.
- 02Give it longer than feels comfortable. Reaching your potential takes reps and consistency over a long stretch. Most of us pull the plug because results didn’t arrive in the time frame we expected, not because the work wasn’t working.
- 03Self-trust is built one kept promise at a time. Every time you follow through on your word, you bank an internal vote of confidence. Over time that compounds into self-trust, and into an identity as someone who does what they say.
Full transcript
Lightly edited for readability.
Jess Wilson: Lara, you are very much so a leader in the mindset space, in the high-performance space. We actually met back in… I think it’s 2019-ish, and have just become fast friends, but also supported each other over that time as well, which has been a joy. It has been the greatest pleasure and privilege to know you over that time, and to witness each other’s journeys.
Lara: It’s been incredible, yeah. When was it? It was at a Tony Robbins event that you were speaking at, and I remember being in awe of you. I was watching you on stage command this audience of thousands of people, and I’m pretty certain that once there was a break I made a beeline to you, because I was like, I immediately need to know this woman, who she is. I just loved everything about you and your story. And then the rest is history.
Jess Wilson: I remember it so clearly, because you were like, “I’m starting a blog.” It wasn’t a podcast at the time.
Lara: And it was the Boss in Heels blog, yeah.
Jess Wilson: And then it’s obviously morphed into the wild success that it is today. Not only do you have the Boss in Heels podcast, you’re also the host of The CEO Magazine’s podcast, and you’ve just become this juggernaut of an inspiring woman to so many other women in the country. And you speak a lot around reaching your potential. Can you share a bit more around what the mindset pieces are that are involved in really reaching your potential?
Lara: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s so many elements to this, and what I’ve really seen in my own coaching practice, and in speaking to thousands of people over the course of my career, is that it really comes down to these three key pillars.
Lara: The first one is relationship to fear. So when we feel like we fear something, like we’re doing something new for the first time and it feels really scary to do that, people that tend to go on and reach their potential, or become high performers, have transcended that relationship to fear. It doesn’t mean that they don’t feel the fear. It just means that they feel the fear, and they trust themselves to be able to take the aligned action despite being afraid of what could happen, of what might go wrong. Whereas people who tend to stay a little bit more stagnant, or smaller in their reach and their potential, allow the fear to stagnate them. They decide that because they feel afraid of doing something, they’re just not going to do it. And so that’s a really key piece.
Lara: The second thing, and that is a huge one, is relationship with time. Those who really go on and reach high levels of performance have a different relationship with time, whereby they are willing to put in the reps and consistency over an extended period of time, irrespective of how long it may take to actually get there. When we give up on something because of the time that it takes to get there, it’s a very short-lived kind of strategy. It’s like, “I’ll only do this so long as I’m seeing an immediate outcome or an immediate result.” And we decide, because we haven’t seen the result that we think we should have seen within the time frame that we expected to see it, that it’s not working. So we end up pulling the plug on ourselves, and stopping ourselves from doing the aligned actions and behaviours that would ultimately, inevitably become a success if we just stayed the course long enough.
Lara: So that’s number two. And then the third piece is identity and relationship to self. Those who go on to achieve high levels of performance have a lot of self-trust and self-efficacy built up within themselves. They trust themselves to be able to go ahead and do things, because they have enough internal votes of confidence that they have followed through on their word over and over again, and that compounds into self-trust and self-confidence over time. When you identify as being the kind of person that does things because they say they’re going to, because they honour their word, because they follow through on their commitments, that’s a very different outcome and trajectory than someone who doesn’t trust themselves to follow through on what they said they’re going to do, and therefore just doesn’t.
Lara: And so they’re the three key elements that I see play out time and time again.
Jess Wilson: It’s almost like that self-credibility piece: you look back at the things that you’ve achieved, you look back at the things that were really difficult…