Big Swings Only

You’ve hit the goals, earned the promotions, and it still feels like it’s never enough. The problem isn’t your ambition. It’s where your ambition is coming from. Former Googler Brooke Taylor, author of Healing the Success Wound, joins Kwame Christian to unpack the one addiction society applauds: the addiction to achievement. Brooke shares how a stack-ranked sales job at Google, her father’s termin...

Varun Sharma has spent years working in green energy and hydrogen. So why is he now taking on defense and oil & gas clients? Kwame Christian welcomes Varun back to the show to unpack "pragmatic idealism": holding on to your ideals while staying honest about how power actually works. Drawing on a decade in Estonia on NATO's eastern edge, a father who served in the military, and his years in governm...

Vanessa Van Edwards once lost a dream TV deal over small talk. After 20 years of research, she knows how to turn small talk into real connection. On this episode, Kwame Christian sits down with Vanessa Van Edwards, behavioral researcher, founder of Science of People and bestselling author of Captivate and Cues, to unpack her new book, Conversation: How to Connect with Anyone & Make Every Interacti...

Kwame Christian sits down with psychologist, marriage and family therapist, and founder of Growing Self Counseling & Coaching, Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby, and it quickly turns into two high achievers comparing notes on the hidden cost of always chasing the next win. Kwame opens up about skipping the celebration of his own graduations, walking away from a national competition award because it wasn't the...

If you've been pushing hard but feeling empty, this episode will challenge everything you believe about high performance. DJ Vanas — Air Force veteran, member of the Ottawa Nation, and author of The Warrior Within (Penguin Random House) — brings centuries of tribal wisdom into a single, urgent message: you cannot be of service to anyone when you are falling apart. DJ has spoken at Fuqua School of...

Nidhi explains why the biggest mistake leaders make is rushing from empathy into problem-solving, and why she never gives advice unless someone asks for it. She also asks a question worth sitting with: when we fix, share our own stories, or offer platitudes, whose comfort are we really prioritizing? If you want to connect more deeply with the people in your life and at work, this one's for you. Co...

You already know resilience matters. But what if everything you think about it is incomplete? In this episode, Kwame Christian sits down with Dr. Marie-Hélène Pelletier — psychologist, executive coach, and author of The Resilience Plan — to break down why resilience isn't just a trait you either have or don't, and it's not just a muscle you build through grit alone. It's a strategy. One you can ac...

Fired at 43 with an 18-month non-compete, Heather Monahan had to rebuild her career from scratch — and it led her to her real purpose. In this episode, she and Kwame break down why confidence is a learnable skill, why "done" beats "perfect," and why firing the "energy vampires" in your life can change everything. You'll learn: Why arrogance is actually rooted in insecurity How to turn goals into d...

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You've been listening to the wrong voice in your head for years — and it's cost you more than you realize. Shirzad Chamine spent the first 30 years of his life in clinical depression — despite building a venture-backed company, attracting Silicon Valley's top investors, and landing Hewlett-Packard as his first customer. Then, at the height of his success, his own leadership team staged a coup and...

Great leaders don't avoid pressure — they know how to think clearly inside it. In this episode, Kwame Christian sits down with Dr. Tracey Marks, a board-certified psychiatrist and one of the most trusted mental health educators on YouTube (with over 2 million followers), to break down what's actually happening in a leader's brain during a high-stakes conversation — and how to stay in control of it...

Right now, someone is telling a chatbot about the guy she went on a third date with — and it's giving her a pretty good answer. That should worry you. Stefanos Sifandos has spent 25 years coaching people through relationships face-to-face, in the room. In this episode, he explains why AI can make you feel self-aware without ever making you change — and why that satiation is quietly keeping people...

Scott Stirrett left a prestigious career at Goldman Sachs to build something from nothing — and it changed everything he understood about growth. In this episode, Scott (founder of Venture for Canada, author of The Uncertainty Advantage) breaks down why comfort is actually the biggest threat to your growth, and how uncertainty — the thing most of us run from — is a skill you can systematically bui...

David JP Phillips reveals how to hack your internal chemistry—on demand—to show up with confidence, presence, and power when it matters most. Drawing from his best-selling book High on Life, David breaks down the six key neurochemicals that control your behavior (dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphin, testosterone, and cortisol), and shows you how to intentionally trigger the right “emotional c...

What if reading people wasn't a gift, but a skill you could actually learn? Dr. Sabine Charles has one of the most unusual resumes you'll hear on this show — she's a former chief audit executive and fraud investigator turned hypnotherapist, and the founder of a leadership framework called MeQ (Mindset, Emotional Intelligence, and Leadership Qualities). As an auditor, her job was to walk into a roo...

What if the biggest thing standing between you and your next opportunity is the decision to reject yourself before anyone else can? Leadership expert and bestselling author Selena Rezvani joins Kwame Christian to explore what it really takes to advocate for yourself, take bigger swings, and keep moving when fear, perfectionism, or self-doubt tells you to play it safe. Selena shares the bold ask th...

Everybody knows ChatGPT. Almost no one knows the person who took it to market. In this episode of Big Swings Only, Kwame Christian sits down with Zack Kass, who spent over a decade at the center of the AI industry and led go-to-market strategy at OpenAI — bringing the technology to hundreds of millions of professionals worldwide. Zack walked away from that career at its peak, driven by a hard trut...

Your best ideas won’t go anywhere if you don’t know how to build the influence to make them happen. In this episode of Big Swings Only, Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill and innovation leader Jason Wild, co-authors of Genius at Scale, reveal what it really takes to turn ambitious ideas into meaningful change. Their research shows that breakthrough innovation isn’t just about having the...

Why do some people seem addicted to conflict — and what can we actually do about it? In this powerful episode, conflict resolution expert Bill Eddy breaks down the four key traits of high-conflict personalities and teaches us how to deal with them — without losing our minds. -Learn Bill Eddy’s “BIFF” Response Formula-Discover the 4 types of high-conflict people-Understand why society is becoming m...

Travel doesn’t just show you the world — it shows you yourself. And sometimes, what you discover is not what you expected. In this powerful conversation, journalist and travel creator Nicole Phillip joins Kwame to explore the intersection of identity, race, storytelling, and courage. She opens up about her life-changing study abroad experience in Italy — the joy she imagined, the racism she didn’t...

Lisa Bilyeu shares the raw truth behind her journey — from shipping protein bars out of her living room to leading one of the most influential wellness brands in the world. Together with Kwame Christian, she unpacks what it really means to face failure, reprogram your inner critic, and choose your mission over your ego. If you’ve ever struggled with fear, insecurity, or the pressure to be perfect,...

Your brain runs a persuasion campaign on you every single day — manufacturing certainty, defending beliefs that stopped being true years ago, and keeping you loyal to a version of yourself you never actually chose. Owen Fitzpatrick has spent 25+ years studying how minds get changed — as a filmmaker, an NLP co-author with Dr. Richard Bandler, a persuasion consultant for companies like Google and Co...

He couldn't keep a job at Chick-fil-A. Then the founder personally hired him — and 44 years later, he retired as one of the company's top executives. Mark Miller started as a teenager who kept getting laid off, until a strange twist of fate put him face-to-face with Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, for a job interview in the company's warehouse. In this episode, Mark shares how that unlik...

She was an Ivy League lawyer with the perfect résumé. Then she became a convicted felon — and says losing her freedom is what finally set her free. Rashmi Airan built a career as an attorney, entrepreneur, and Wall Street banker — until one bad decision, made under pressure to succeed, led to an FBI investigation and a year in federal prison. In this episode, she opens up about the moment everythi...

How do you build a personal brand without quitting your day job? In this episode, former SWAT hostage negotiator Ryan Dunlap and sitting HR Vice President Njsane Courtney reveal how they each built massive, trusted personal brands while holding full-time careers. Ryan shares the real story behind his viral balloon video — a TikTok post with zero followers that hit 100,000+ views overnight — and th...