Ora Shtull is an Executive Coach and the author of The Glass Elevator: A Guide to Leadership Presence for Women on the Rise. In both her work as a coach and in her book, Ora encourages a complete approach to success, focusing on both professional and personal elements. Ora has developed a model for identifying and developing behaviors that help her clients influence, engage, and connect with the people around them. She has served as Adjunct Professor of Business Communication at NYU’s Stern School of Business, and in 2011 she won British Airways’ Face of Opportunity contest.

Earlier this week Ora took a few minutes to chat with me about some of the key concepts from The Glass Elevator. Click the play button below to listen to the interview. Here are some of the questions I had for Ora:

If not for a glass ceiling, why is it that women seem to stagnate professionally? And how is The Glass Elevator a different path to success?

In the Glass Elevator, you offer up 9 proven skills to help women achieve. Could you tell us about  1 or 2 of the most important skills to help ignite success?

There are a number of different similes referring to glass that are used to describe the challenges women face in the workplace–glass elevator, glass escalator (men moving up past the women who hired them), glass cliff (women being promoted–and basically being sacrificed–during times of organizational chaos.) Do you believe that these barriers exist or does boarding “the glass elevator” remove those challengers?

In your book, you clearly are not advising women to become more like men in order to succeed. Instead, you seem to be encouraging women to use more of their inherent talents, such as Empathize, which is usually considered a female trait, and not often as valued as, for example, being objective or detached, which is generally a more masculine trait. How does empathy help women improve?

Also in your book, you tackle some very basic life-skills concerns: food, diet, sleep. Why did you decide to include these topics in your book?

What is the one takeaway you’d like to leave with listeners today?

Play the interview below

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Thanks to Ora for taking the time to talk to me. Visit Ora online. She’s also recently done a stint as Thinker in Residence over on our KnowledgeBlocks.