How It Works
This is focused, one-on-one work built around your specific situation. Not a course. Not a program with a rigid curriculum. Three sessions dedicated to understanding where you are, building your strategy, and preparing you to show up with clarity and confidence.
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Clients come to this work navigating everything from toxic leadership and performance review cycles to second opinions, treatment decisions, and care team conflicts. The situation changes. The underlying dynamic is often the same: someone with authority who expects you to go along without question, and someone who knows they need to say something different.
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Each Intensive is built around a single situation. Three sessions is typically enough to move from overwhelmed to prepared, and additional sessions are available for clients who need to continue the work.
Session 1
Situation Mapping
We map the situation together: what's happening, who holds the power, what you want to accomplish, and what has been making it hard to move forward.
Session 2
Strategy & Preparation
We dig into the challenge and build your approach. Using a structured framework, we develop the language, anticipate how the other person might respond, and think through how the conversation might unfold.
Session 3
Debrief & Next Steps
If the conversation has happened, we talk through how it went and discuss what comes next. If you need more preparation time, we use this session for that instead. Additional sessions are available to established clients if the work isn't done.
Work With Me
There are moments when the stakes are too high to stay quiet and
too important to approach without a strategy.
Workplace Advocacy
You already know what needs to be said. The challenge is saying it in a way that lands, with authority figures, in high-pressure conversations, and in environments where speaking up can feel professionally risky.
This work helps you find the language, the strategy, and the presence to navigate those moments without shrinking or burning bridges.
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Whether you're managing up, navigating toxic leadership, addressing dysfunction, pushing back on unfair treatment, or staying present when the room expects your silence, the approach is the same: clarity, strategy, and the confidence to use your voice.​ The goal is not confrontation. It is to be heard, understood, and taken seriously.
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Investment: $1250​
For established clients: Single follow-up sessions and two-session continuation packages are available.
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READY TO GET STARTED?
Healthcare Advocacy
Sometimes in medical scenarios the stakes are high, the authority gap is real, and the pressure to comply is overwhelming.
This work helps you stay present and clear in those conversations, ask the questions that need asking, and engage as an informed participant rather than a passive recipient.
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Whether you're preparing for an appointment, navigating a care team that isn't listening, or trying to slow down a conversation that is moving faster than you are comfortable with, the approach is the same: clarity, strategy, and the confidence to use your voice.​ The goal is not to challenge your care team. It is to participate in your own care with the clarity and confidence you deserve.​​
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This is strategic communication support, not clinical or medical advice. Pricing for healthcare advocacy is determined individually based on your situation.
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READY TO GET STARTED?
Shauna L. Vaughan
FOUNDER, PRESENCE WITHOUT PERMISSION
I didn't learn strategic advocacy in a classroom. I learned it in corporate environments, performance reviews, and eventually, in a cancer center.
For more than two decades, I worked as a strategic consultant with and for Fortune 500 companies. Those years were spent in environments where the power dynamics were explicit and the pressure to go along was constant. Through a lot of trial and error, I learned the difference between reactive defensiveness and genuine advocacy.​
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When my husband was diagnosed with cancer, I found myself in a new kind of high-stakes environment. The authority structure was different, but the underlying dynamic was exactly the same: people in positions of power, using urgency and expertise to discourage questions. I used the same skills I'd honed in corporate settings to navigate his care ... and it changed everything.
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That parallel is what this work is built on. The skills that allow you to stay present with a dismissive executive are the same ones that let you advocate effectively in a doctor's office. Presence Without Permission exists because those skills are learnable, and because the cost of staying quiet (in either context) is too high.
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Be sure to check out the Presence Without Permission podcast, too!
