Success Equals Persistent Alignment

Prepared for Deevo (The Brand Lab)  ·  April 2026

Jaclyn Strominger was terrified to make deep relationships with people, terrified, by her own word, because she was deeply insecure about how people would respond to her, now she runs a coaching practice built almost entirely on the idea that relationships are the single most underrated asset in business.

Jaclyn is the founder of Leap to Your Success, where she works with entrepreneurs, CEOs, and professionals on clarity, leadership, and the unglamorous execution most people skip past on their way to the next strategy session, she is a certified professional coach and a master practitioner in energy leadership, with the core belief about success: that success comes from consistent alignment, rather than just working harder.

This conversation on The Branding Lab covers what actually drives success when working harder is taken off the table, the daily habits, relationship capital, the specific levers that keep people stuck and the personal insecurity Jaclyn had to work through before any of the rest of it became possible.

Success Is Not a Strategy, it Is Alignment, Held Consistently.

Jaclyn's central claim is simple enough to write on an index card and demanding enough to actually live by. Success equals persistent alignment, over a long enough period that the small daily actions compound into something real.

The distinction she draws is between activity and aligned activity, most people who feel stuck are already working, the problem is that the work is not pointed anywhere specific. She describes clients who are doing plenty, filling their days completely, and still not moving, because nobody ever sat them down and asked which two or three things actually deserve their attention for the next 90 days.

“It's the small things you do day to day that are focused on where you are. The clarity that you have in your business that align with your vision and your values, that's unstoppable. It's not gonna get it overnight. It's the long game.”  — Jaclyn Strominger

This is where her background in direct marketing shows up in her coaching methodology. She calls it MMA: measure, monitor, adjust. In direct marketing for example, you never test everything at once, because testing everything gives you noise instead of data so you go ahead and isolate one variable, run it long enough to get a real read, and then decide whether to keep it or replace it so Jaclyn applies the identical discipline to personal and business growth: pick the one thing, run it for 60 or 90 days, If it didn’t move the needle, adjust and test something else. The framework is unglamorous by design, and that is exactly why it works.

The Mortgage Professional Who Was Busy but Not Growing

When a new client tells Jaclyn they want more success, her first move is to look at what they are actually doing day to day, because the gap between what people believe they are doing and what they are actually doing is where most of the stuckness lives.

She describes a client who was an excellent mortgage professional, doing real work every day, staying busy, and still not growing, the missing piece turned out to be simple: she was not reaching out to realtors, which was the actual bread and butter of her business so she was just working on the wrong activities, and nobody had asked her to look closely enough to notice the gap.

“She was making and doing work, but the work wasn't the right activities. So we really need to look at what are those actual activities that you are doing. And some, it's really, some people can't get past, and it also might be fear-based. I don't wanna make a phone call. I don't want to do that.”  — Jaclyn Strominger

This is the practical starting point for anyone who feels busy but not productive, a close, honest look at the actual activities filling the day, and an honest answer to whether those activities are the ones that move the specific outcome you say you want, most people already know the answer but haven’t been asked the question directly enough to say it out loud.

Your Net Worth Can Be Defined by Your Network

Jaclyn has said it a thousand times, by her own count, and it still lands every time she says it again: your net worth can be really defined by your network, taking it as a literal description of how opportunity actually moves through the world. Relationships are not a soft add-on to a growth strategy, in her framework, they are 100% part of success, in business and in life, without exception.

The distinction she is careful to draw is between relationships and transactions, relationship capital is more about genuine curiosity rather than walking into a room and immediately trying to sell something: how can we actually help each other, and who do I know that you should know, a conversation today can become the referral that changes someone's business thirty years from now, and the person who benefits from that connection is often not even the two people having the original conversation.

“Where relationship capital really comes in is being able to not look at people as transactional. I wanna know how we can actually help each other. Who can I connect you with that's going to need your services? Who in my network can I help you connect with?”  — Jaclyn Strominger

She has encountered pushback on this exactly once that she can recall, from someone who told her his success was entirely his own and he did not need other people for it, Jaclyn’s response? That he was living like a forest stranger in Alaska who did not realize the animals around him were part of his own ecosystem, the metaphor is a little absurd on purpose but the idea is that nobody's success is actually solitary, whether or not they can see the network holding it up.

Why People Lie to Themselves About What They Are Avoiding

Ask Jaclyn why people avoid the sales calls, the follow-ups, and the relationship-building they know they need to do, and she describes a fear people are unwilling to name honestly, even to themselves.

People tell themselves stories to avoid discomfort like I don't want to be salesy, they won't call me back anyway, I've already called them enough…these stories function as permission slips, ways of making the avoidance feel reasonable instead of fear-based. The underlying mechanism, in her view, is just that people lie to themselves because facing what they actually need to do is uncomfortable, and telling a better story is easier than sitting with that discomfort.

“They tell themselves lies because they don't want to really face what they're, what they really need to do, or they're afraid of something. A lot of it's based on fear, and for lack of a better word, not necessarily fear, but being uncomfortable. People don't like being uncomfortable, so they will lie to make themselves feel better.”  — Jaclyn Strominger

Recognizing this pattern in yourself is uncomfortable precisely because it works, the lie you tell yourself feels true in the moment, but the only reliable way through, in Jaclyn's experience, is an outside perspective, someone who can hear you say something and ask whether you actually meant it this is also a part of why she believes everyone benefits from some form of coaching: because we are all too close to our own patterns to see them clearly, the same way a doctor notices something in your answers that you would never catch yourself.

The Elevator Hello: How Jaclyn Actually Got Over Her Own Insecurity

Jaclyn's own transformation did not come from therapy, which she tried honestly and found not working for her, it came from something closer to structured exposure: getting uncomfortable on purpose, in small, specific, repeatable ways, until the discomfort stopped running the show.

She took a Dale Carnegie speaking course, which forced her in front of people regularly, from there she built her own informal protocol: say hello to a stranger in the elevator, smile at someone on the street, sit at a bar alone in Manhattan and get comfortable being the person who starts the conversation instead of waiting to be approached, none of these are huge dramatic interventions, they were small things that were uncomfortable, doing them repeatedly, until it stopped being uncomfortable.

“It was saying hi to somebody in the elevator. That person who I said hi to in the elevator became one of my best friends who I still talk to today. In order to get through anything, you have to get uncomfortable. You can't stay in your comfort zone.”  — Jaclyn Strominger

This is the piece that makes her coaching credible rather than theoretical, she is not asking clients to do something she figured out from a book, she built her entire relationship capital philosophy on top of a personal insecurity she worked through one small, uncomfortable interaction at a time, which is exactly the kind of daily consistent action her success framework describes in the first place, medium and message as one.

The LEAP Framework and the Plateau Almost Everyone Eventually Hits

Jaclyn's coaching runs on something she calls the LEAP framework: Leverage, Energy, Action, Performance: Leverage means identifying your specific strengths and weaknesses in communication, Energy refers to the emotional and psychological state you bring into every room, every phone call, and every email, whether or not you are aware you are broadcasting it, Action is the concrete plan built from that self-awareness and Performance is what results from doing all three consistently.

The energy piece is the one people underestimate most, Jaclyn runs an energy leadership index assessment with many of her clients specifically because most people have no idea what their default energy state is, or what happens to it under stress. Someone might believe they show up confident and instead be broadcasting something closer to compassionate-but-uncertain, without any awareness that the mismatch is costing them opportunities in every room they enter.

“A lot of us actually harbor a different status of who we are, and we don't realize it. I really wanna know how do you walk into rooms when you show up, when you pick up the phone, when you send an email, what is that energy? Because people don't realize it, that energy comes through.”  — Jaclyn Strominger

The most common pattern she sees across clients, regardless of industry or title, is the plateau: someone has been on a clear trajectory, hits a level of success, and then forgets to keep defining what comes next so they stay on the hamster wheel doing what got them there, without noticing that the destination changed or disappeared, getting stuck is almost always about losing sight of the vision that was supposed to be guiding the daily actions in the first place.

Key Takeaways

• Success equals persistent alignment, small consistent daily actions pointed at a genuinely clear direction, sustained over the long game rather than achieved overnight.

• The MMA method, measure, monitor, adjust, borrowed from direct marketing, is the practical engine underneath alignment. Pick one or two things, test for 60 to 90 days, and adjust based on what the data actually shows.

• Your net worth can be defined by your network. Relationship capital is a literal description of how opportunity moves, and it depends on treating relationships as reciprocal rather than transactional.

• People lie to themselves to avoid discomfort, the stories we tell ourselves about why we cannot make the call or build the relationship are almost always fear wearing a more acceptable disguise.

• Getting uncomfortable on purpose, in small and specific and repeatable ways, is how real change actually happens. Jaclyn's own transformation came from an elevator hello, not a breakthrough insight.

• The most common way people get stuck is forgetting to keep defining their vision after they have already achieved a version of it, the plateau is almost always about losing sight of where you were actually trying to go.

About Jaclyn Strominger

Jaclyn Strominger is the founder of Leap to Your Success, a certified professional coach and master practitioner in energy leadership. She works with CEOs, founders, and professionals on clarity, relationship capital, and momentum through her signature LEAP framework: Leverage, Energy, Action, Performance. Her background spans consumer marketing, magazine publishing, direct sales, and recruiting before she transitioned into coaching full time. Find her at https://leaptoyoursuccess.com/ or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Listen to the Full Conversation

This episode of The Brand Lab covers success, relationship capital, self-deception, personal insecurity, and what it actually takes to build the kind of momentum that does not depend on grinding harder than everyone else in the room.

🎧 LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:

Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and all major platforms.

Connect with Jaclyn Strominger at https://leaptoyoursuccess.com/ or on LinkedIn

Follow The Brand Lab and connect with Deevo at thebrandstoryteller.com