Meet Karen Cayetano Leano

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Karen Cayetano Leano. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Karen below.

Karen, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?

Confidence and Self -esteem come from within. Confidence is taking risks and trusting that even if you fail, its ok – it’s still a win that you tried. You gain these from trusting yourself to get things done.

I have an ongoing to-do list. And for the longest time, things would sit on that list – I would have projects/ideas that I would want to execute. But many things came in the way of execution. Whether it was something with the kids, getting sick, feeling tired, maybe a better project seemed more enticing – things would prevent me from completing tasks. On the outside I would be proud for completing those more enticing projects, but at night as I stared at my to-do list, i would berate myself for not completing what I originally intended.

This is where I realized, my to-do -is like my personal list of mini dreams. Our everyday actions is what leads us closer to our dreams and I was not prioritizing my list. I was letting my emotions, other priorities, and lack of focus stop me from completely my tasks.

So I worked on my self integrity. I worked on keeping my promises to myself. I worked on completely my tasks – no matter now small or menial they were. And it was in this small gesture, that my self confidence and self esteem grew. I learned to trust myself and know that if I made promises to myself to complete something, I would do it.

Its ongoing work that you need to practice every single day. Focus on you, your needs, honor them and this will increase not only your confidence but also your worth.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

As a content creator for Paris and a Latte, I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world and work for many well known brands such as Virgin Voyages, David Yurman, Bloomingdales, Google, and more. But I found working with smaller businesses so much more fulfilling. As I would meet with small business owners to not only talk about the specific campaign we were working on, I would hear their story, their WHY. And THAT was what I wanted to share. It was their story of how they started and why they started that was most compelling. This led me to start my Social Media Agency, Karen Leano Creative, where I truly got to help owners, share more of who they were, develop their personal brand, and in turn increase their confidence. I helped them step into their influence which is a gift that keeps on giving. As we shine brighter, whether in business or in our personal lives. we give people permission to shine brightly too. The purpose of shining isn’t to outshine each other, its to give others hope that it can be done. This is the power of personal branding. Its not your business that inspires, its your hustle and your belief in yourself that’s inspiring.

I love helping small business owners showcase a bit of themselves in their social media. But bigger picture, I’d love to showcase owners and their resiliency and knowledge through interviews and maybe a future podcast. But for now, lookout for new episodes of my IG Live Series, “Step into your Influence” on my @karenleanocreative IG page.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

1) Networking skills are so important – one of the first books I read right out of college was “Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferazzi and it discusses the importance of never having lunch alone – always meeting people, adding value to their lives – because in the end, the people we do business with are people we play golf with or experience things together with.

2) Public Speaking Skills – This is a skill you use everywhere. Whether you are leading a meeting, speaking in a room of 100 people, or showing up on you social media live, you want to be able to speak clearly, concisely and in an engaging way so this is something you can really work on and improve. Practice this daily – even by just showing up on your stories on instagram and talking about your day .

3) Leadership skills- one of the things i learned early on from speaking to other entrepreneurs was that they wish they delegated part of their work to other people sooner – this way they could really spend their time focusing on what they were good at. I agree with this. I started my Agency 5 years ago but I only started expanding my team last year. I could’ve been so much more efficient had I started delegating my work earlier. So work on your leadership skills and delegation skills

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

Books are a shortcut to lessons many people before us have learned the hard way so I try as much as I can to make time to read books.

The most recent book I read was “Worthy” by Jamie Kearn Lima and the most fundamental lesson she taught in that book was the difference between self worth and self confidence. Self confidence is something we gain from doing something over and over again. It increases by external factors – maybe people give us praise, applause, so we feel good. Its not consistent though – its almost something we have to earn. Self worth is something within us that is constant. It doesn’t matter what happens externally from us – it is constant. Its an internal belief system that we need to work to make sure it is high. Self worth is increased by working on our self confidence plus working on a higher purpose bigger than ourselves.

I’m working on living a fulfilled life and helping others do the same.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.parisandalatte.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/parisandalatte
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karenleano/