Previously known as: SpeakEasyCoach.com & CLFConsultingServices.com

About Today's Empowered Woman & Cynthia Leeds Friedlander

Goals for Today's Empowered Woman

Make smart decisions in complex situations.
Stand up and speak out with integrity for what’s right.
Can respectfully refuse challenging requests.
Manage career with thoughtful insight, focused direction, and mutual respect.
Meet crisis with strength and stability.
Leverage hardship into growth and enlightenment.
Achieve understanding and benefit in the face of betrayal and deception.
Demonstrate an abundance of self-esteem and compassion for others.

Cynthia Leeds Friedlander

Is a change and awareness catalyst for Today’s Empowered Woman, providing communication excellence, asking transformative questions, and identifying the many connected multilayered elements beneath what people say. She:

Raises awareness and opens doors to action.
Listens with genuine concern and acute awareness.
Synthesizes and crystallizes issues and stress factors.
Provides customized tools and individualized action plans.
Renews focused direction and illuminates the paths to desired enhancement.
Brings diverse and extensive expertise, credentials, experience, and passion.
Speaks with authority, engages with authenticity, genuinely cares.
Enriches to the fullest Today's Empowered Woman.

Professional Bio

CYNTHIA LEEDS FRIEDLANDER is an award-winning acclaimed author, dynamic presenter and creative facilitator who connects with her audiences, providing interactive learning and practical take-aways. People go away from her presentations energized and motivated. She is as comfortable in a small group setting as she is as a keynote speaker, leaving her audiences filled with inspiration and equipped with new tools they can use right away.

As a seasoned coach, Cindy combines down-to-earth warmth and openness with sharp intellect and strategic business acumen to build trust, gain buy-in and address sensitive issues quickly and smoothly. She uses broad-based methods to decipher challenging situations in a practical, results-oriented manner. She is trained and experienced in diverse assessment tools, specializing in customized 360-degree feedback.

Most recently, Cindy has refined her professional focus on women, by launching two books, The Artful Liar, Reflections on Betrayal and Deception and Gagged, The 10 Mistakes that Stop Women from Being Heard at Work. She founded Today’s Empowered Woman, empowering women at challenging crossroads. TodaysEmpoweredWoman.com

These current accomplishments are well balanced, reflecting back to Cindy’s first professional role aligned with her graduate studies and following earning a Master’s Degree in Counseling. For 13 years, Cindy was the Coordinator of The Ellen Morse Tishman Memorial Seminars at Hunter College, CUNY, City University of New York for college-educated women with family responsibilities exploring reentry into the workplace.

In addition to being an accomplished speaker, coach and workshop leader, Cindy has considerable experience as a corporate and organizational consultant. Her corporate clients have included ABC/Disney, Harpo Productions, American Express, Deutsche Bank, Bloomberg, Time Warner and New York Life Investment Management. She works successfully at all levels, including CEOs, Presidents, senior and middle managers, and new team leaders. She was a Professional Services Consultant for Right Management and a Vice President at The Strickland Group for a total of more than fifteen years before becoming an independent executive coach.

She is a frequent presenter and seminar facilitator for diverse professional associations, alumni groups and businesses settings which have included Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School and Wharton. Additionally, Cindy is a counseling associate in the New York City Bar Career Counselor Referral program and advisor for The Corporate Workplace Program’s Advisory Board for The Children’s Aid Society. Cindy is a Counseling Associate for CYD, Comprehensive Youth Development, empowering New York City youth to create rewarding futures by partnering with NYC public high schools to prepare young adults, ages 14- 24, to secure a successful future for themselves and their families.

Cynthia Leeds Friedlander wrote a book examining a woman’s challenging health and medical crossroads, Breastless Intimacy – A Celebration of Love, Loss and Learning. This memoir chronicles the journey through a diagnosis of stage zero breast cancer, prophylactic bilateral mastectomy and breast reconstruction, after the death of her sister from metastatic breast disease. This book also focuses on dating and intimacy following mastectomy.

The first book Cindy authored is Speak Easy – The Communication Guide for Career and Life Success, an award-winning communication bible, acclaimed by Human Resources executives and senior managers as well as individuals of all ages from all walks of life. Speak Easy is a comprehensive communication handbook that engages the reader instantly as it brings together the emotional and the practical to provide the acquisition of new strategic communication skills and the simultaneous understanding of the underlying elements that significantly influence communication.

SELECTED HIGHLIGHTS FROM CYNTHIA LEEDS FRIEDLANDER’S EXPERIENCE:

-Coordinator, The Ellen Morse Tishman Memorial Seminars at Hunter College, City University of New York, for college educated women with family responsibilities, exploring re-entry into the workplace.

-Presenter, Work-Life Balance Communication Essentials / Responding to Difficult Requests at PepsiCo’s WIN, Women’s Initiatives Network, featuring Speak Easy, The Communication Guide for Career and Life Success

-Group Leader/Facilitator, Dating After Mastectomy Group and Friends and Family Support Group, SHARE Cancer Support. SHARE’s mission is to create and sustain a supportive network and community of women affected by breast and ovarian cancers.

-Keynote Speaker for the International Trademark Association’s International Leadership Meeting (http://www.inta.org/Leadership/Pages/2011LM_Program.aspx)

-Design and delivery of two-week Communication Essentials program for NATO’s Joint Forces Training Center (In Bydgoszcz, Poland)

-Creation of the LIFE (Leadership Information For Excellence) Program for ABC Disney, providing 360-degree feedback and executive coaching to Division Heads

-Development and facilitation of an interactive team brainstorming two-day managers retreat for the National Trust for Historic Preservation to create a roadmap for future success built on individual vision statements, communication tools for effectiveness, missed opportunity analysis, best ever strategy team presentations

-Coaching sessions and leadership development for all new R&D team leaders at Bloomberg, L.P.

Cindy held key leadership roles in Career Development for the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and Yeshiva University. She has been a program coordinator and adjunct faculty instructor at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Prior to gaining her Master’s Degree in Counseling, Cindy had extensive experience in both the retail and manufacturing sides of the fashion industry. Her background also includes teaching French and Group Guidance.

Cynthia Leeds Friedlander has a Master’s Degree in Counseling from Hunter College and a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of North Carolina. She speaks French and studied at the University of Grenoble, France.

Cindy maintains a private coaching practice, and has worked with thousands of individuals, throughout her extensive coaching career, from career entry and re-entry to career transition and retirement planning. Her current priority is empowering women at challenging crossroads.