The Honest Mic

Jenna Udenberg was diagnosed with Juvenile Arthritis at just seven years old. By age eight, she was using a manual wheelchair. What followed wasn't a story defined by limitation, but one shaped by resilience, advocacy, and the people who chose to see possibility instead of barriers. Jenna is the founder of Above & Beyond With U, a nonprofit dedicated to creating more inclusive and accessible commu...

Jay Setchell is a multi-time death and near-death survivor. Over six dozen surgeries. SCI, TBI, PTSD, ADHD. A U.S. Marine. A serial entrepreneur who built projects from nothing to six, seven, and eight figures. At 76 years old, mostly paralyzed, living in chronic spinal pain, raising twin eight-year-olds with his wife. He grew up on a working farm, was a farm kid who became a Marine, an entreprene...

Thane Bellomo says most organizations run on thousands of small, tolerated lies. Not the big scandals. The quiet ones. The uncomfortable truth nobody says out loud. The feedback you avoid giving. The decision you know is wrong but you go along with anyway. He's spent over 25 years inside Fortune 500 companies and high-stakes environments like the nuclear industry and healthcare. He's seen...

Patricia Grenelle spent 40 years as a forensic psychologist helping others process trauma. She built a career understanding the dynamics of abuse, silence, and recovery from the inside out. And then, at 74 years old, she wrote a memoir about her own childhood sexual abuse. The title of that memoir is We Were a Nice Normal Family. That is not just a book title. That is the sentence that keeps abuse...

The medical establishment has spent decades mapping the human genome. But they've largely ignored the thing we interact with every single second — the air we breathe. That gap is costing people their health. Eric Klos is the founder and CEO of DailyBreath. He's spent 10,000 hours in environmental health, building a SaaS platform and mobile app that helps people track symptoms, pinpoint the...

For two decades, Suneet Bhatt looked like a success. He helped organizations fight back from the brink, raise millions, survive acquisitions and spinoffs, even natural disasters and cyberattacks. And every 18 to 24 months, right after the win, he'd feel bored and empty. He'd start self-sabotaging. Resign, quit, or get fired. Then go chase the next honeymoon. He told himself it was the job....

Two divorces. Two bankruptcies. Failed businesses. Near death. Two bouts of cancer. That's not a highlight reel. That's a life that kept breaking. And Sue Paulson kept getting back up. Sue is a best-selling author of two books, Magnificent Misery and The Healing Call of Cancer. She's a Magnificence Mentor who helps others awaken to and embrace their own magnificence. But she didn't...

When Nancy Dunham was a kid, she wanted to be anyone but herself. She spent years interviewing musicians to get at 'the truth' while avoiding her own. And then life forced her to stop running. Nancy is a writer, an interviewer, and the author of Bonus Tracks. She's interviewed hundreds of musicians and artists and collected their wisdom. But the real story is what happened when she fin...

Most organizations talk about diversity and inclusion the way they talk about the weather — a lot of concern, very little action. They hire a consultant, check a box, and move on. Real cultural change takes something different. It takes someone who can actually bridge the gap between intention and impact. Mathias Lemos Castillo is a cultural bridge builder and community engagement consultant. Born...

Six words changed everything for Luke Mickelson. 'No kid sleeps on the floor in our town.' In 2012, Luke was a farm kid from Kimberly, Idaho. He had a successful career in business. But something was missing. So he took one simple act of kindness — building a bed for a child who didn't have one — and turned it into a global movement. Today, Sleep in Heavenly Peace has over 400 chapters...

Most professional networking advice has it almost exactly backwards. We're told to grow our networks, collect connections, optimize for reach. But after twenty years of leading engineering teams across startups and large companies, Gary Gitelson watched something else play out. The work that mattered most, the careers that compounded, the opportunities that actually arrived — they were almost...

Before anyone becomes a leader, they're first influenced by someone else. In this episode of The Honest Mic, Fortune sits down with U.S. Marine Officer, author, mentor, and founder of Parent-Child-Connect, Olaolu Ogunyemi, for a conversation about leadership, fatherhood, mentorship, and the quiet power of influence. Olaolu reflects on growing up believing he "had every opportunity to become a stat...

Most people think leadership begins at work. Mylena Sutton believes it begins long before you step into the office. In this episode of The Honest Mic, Fortune sits down with leadership consultant, speaker, and host of The Leadership Drives to explore why leadership isn't a title, a promotion, or a corner office. It's a reflection of who you already are. From driving across 24 states interviewing l...

What if the biggest thing holding you back isn't your circumstances... but the story you've been telling yourself? In this episode of The Honest Mic, Fortune sits down with transformational coach and author Lynda Leonce to explore how our beliefs, emotional patterns, and sense of identity quietly shape every decision we make. Lynda shares her own journey from searching for something she couldn't q...

You can look successful from the outside and feel completely wrong on the inside. The title, the money, the respect — it's all there. And somehow, something is still off. Chris Woods knows that feeling intimately. He rose from a tough upbringing in Boston to become a four-time global C-suite executive and former Google sales leader. From the outside, everything looked like success. Then, at 40 yea...

You can be doing everything right and still not land the way you think you are. You can work harder than everyone else. You can have the skills. And somehow, the promotions don't come, the trust isn't there, and you can't figure out why. Leslie Ferry hit that wall at the top of her career. She was leading a function. Excited. Eager. And then she found herself driving home one night thinking, "I've...

Most people think writing a book is about becoming an author. Danielle Hutchinson argues it's about becoming an authority. In this episode of The Honest Mic, bestselling ghostwriter and editor Danielle shares what she's learned after helping more than 1,100 entrepreneurs turn their ideas into published books that create opportunities far beyond Amazon. We talk about why so many people never finish...

When most people were still dismissing Bitcoin as fake internet money, Andrew Melnychuk was already paying attention. An early Bitcoin investor, angel investor, and founder of an AI agent firm, Andrew has built his career around understanding where technological revolutions are heading and what they mean for the people and businesses caught in their path. But being early isn't the same thing as be...

Most companies treat technology like a cost to manage rather than an advantage to build. They buy software, hire developers, and hope everything works out. When it doesn't, they're often left guessing why. Rob Broadhead has spent more than three decades helping organizations navigate exactly those problems. As a developer, architect, director, consultant, and founder of RB Consulting, he's seen th...

Failed relationships cost American businesses eight trillion dollars per year. Disengaged workers have 37 percent higher absenteeism and are 63 percent more likely to quit abruptly. And yet most leadership training completely ignores how humans actually work. Tom Hagerty is a retired corporate executive and business fixer with over 45 years of experience. He's written a book called The Busines...

Joe Edgar grew up poor on a Native American reservation in Chiloquin, Oregon. One of thirteen children. He bought his first investment property at fourteen years old. Since then, he's built companies worth nine figures. He has over a thousand rental doors in his real estate portfolio. He worked under Governor Rick Perry. He worked under the Obama administration running a venture capital progra...

About a year ago, Ryan Drumheller unexpectedly lost a leadership role that had become a huge part of his identity. Not because he was bad at his job. Not because he failed. Just because that's how corporate life works sometimes. In this episode of The Honest Mic, Ryan, an extroverted IT leader, Fractional CIO, and host of the Decline Invite Podcast, gets honest about what that loss felt like in re...

For over a decade, Mitesh Jani wrote constantly. Reflections, observations, philosophies about life and achievement. And he never showed any of it to anyone. Not even his family. It all sat in a folder on his computer called "New Folder." Then he hit a low point, business, physical health, and mental health all crashing at once. When he finally opened that folder, he was overwhelmed by what he fou...

Tom Fox has done two major business pivots since 2010. The first came when he was laid up from a bicycle accident and built an entire international consulting business in anti corruption compliance from his bedroom while on a walker. The second came during the pandemic and led him to create a whole new business model as a podcast network guru. Today, Tom is the Compliance Evangelist. He's won 33 a...

Most businesses say people matter. But what happens when profits become the priority and people become an afterthought? In this episode of The Honest Mic, Fortune sits down with Glenn Bostock, founder of SnapCab and author of A Human Business, to explore why traditional management often fails, what leaders misunderstand about motivation, and how businesses can grow without sacrificing their humani...