What Do You Know To Be True?

Why do leaders miss what everyone else sees? Kristine Frost explores how leadership blind spots keep teams from effective decision-making. Identifying your own leadership blind spots is the first step toward better inclusion and more accurate decision-making. By learning to recognize the signals your team is sending, you can move from performing as a static authority to becoming a responsive partn...

This is the trap of high achiever burnout: the more you deliver, the more the same work gets handed to you. And if it's not aligned with your superpower and purpose, it's the path to burnout. In this conversation, host Roger Kastner sits with Inner Authority coach Emily Fanjoy to unpack the "competence cage" when we're prisoner to our own success, and how to reclaim inner...

Many high achievers look successful on paper yet carry a quiet sense of unworthiness. Steve Sapourn, founder of The Neuro's Journey, argues trauma is not an identity but a nervous system injury, old survival adaptations that once kept you safe and now keep you braced. In this conversation we cover the pause that moves you from reaction to response, why courage plus self trust open reinvention...

Lisa Hallett, CEO of Wear Blue: Run to Remember, an endurance athlete, and a Gold Star spouse, explains why she believes "ordinary" is a superpower, and not a limitation. She shares how running became the way she processed grief after her husband’s, Captain John Hallett, death in Afghanistan, why community is where our strengths get reflected back to us, and why she's about to run 2...

To mark the third anniversary of What Do You Know To Be True?, host Roger Kastner answers the three questions he's asked most often: what his 80+ guests have in common, how to find your superpower, and how to reinvent yourself to align with your purpose.  Drawing on a conversation with leadership coach Joel Monk, Roger explains why most superpowers begin as an unmet need, then lays out a seve...

Career strategist Sam Alvita explains why traditional career ladders no longer work for career reinvention. Job skills now last as little as six months to two and a half years, and what works when you want to reinvent yourself instead: a "web" of diversified skills, side projects, and personal brand rather than a single job title. She and host Roger Kastner cover the learn-unlearn-relear...

Leadership coach and former Army Lieutenant Colonel Croft Edwards explains why psychological safety isn't built with words, it's built with your nervous system. Your body broadcasts signals long before you speak, and your team reads every one of them. Croft and host Roger Kastner cover the moment his military training collided with a room full of dancing people, why somatic leadership st...

Master voice coach, singer, and TEDx speaker Barbara McAfee explains why your imposter syndrome and your most authentic self are running through the exact same instrument, your voice, and why the truth always lives in your belly rather than your head. Barbara walks host Roger Kastner through the five elements of vocal expression (earth, fire, water, metal, air), how internal family systems work ap...

In the workplace, Sharon Podobnik Peterson said a trauma response looks like patterns of connection turned into patterns of protection. That one sentence is the spine of trauma informed leadership and what can happen without nervous system regulation. It names why you can walk into a meeting perfectly prepared and still feel your nervous system hijack the room. It explains why defensiveness isn&ap...

What if the midlife reinvention you keep postponing isn't waiting for more data or a better plan, it's waiting for you to trust your gut again? For many professionals like you, career reinvention feels too big to trust your intuition and instead let the big decisions be made by spreadsheets, pros-and-cons lists, and taking the safe route of certainty. Sylvia Taylor calls that inner signa...

In this episode, psychotherapist, author, and TEDx speaker, Kerry-Lyn Stanton-Downes, returns to be relational and answer real questions about applying relational capacity to difficult conversations, provide respectful candor in ways that heals not harms, and create emotional co-regulation in the moments that matter most. In the original conversation, Kerry-Lyn shared the 8 principles of relationa...

Most leaders know when something is off with their team but they steer clear of the difficult conversation. They sense the tension and the confusion, but they lack the courageous leadership and emotional intelligence to say the thing that everyone wants to hear. building. And the team and results suffer. Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel DeDe Halfhill says that silence is the single most expensive ha...

You know when you are overthinking and second guessing a decision, and then once you make the decision you realize your first instinct was right all along? And then there are the other times when you realize gut was dead wrong. That's the paradox of intuition: it's powerful, but it's not always right. And most advice about it falls into one of two camps: "always trust your gut&...

That feeling of it being lonely at the top, it's not a leadership job requirement. It's a signal that you're going against your nature. And yet most leadership development doesn't talk about the impact of loneliness on performance, burnout, and well-being. Not enough at least. Psychologist, TEDx speaker, and author Kerry-Lyn Stanton-Downes makes a bold case: our brains are rela...

Burnout starts when we're operate outside of our zone of genius, out of alignment with our values, and when we've lost touch with our joy. Sheryl Raphael Whitaker has spent the majority of her career making a case most leadership conversations are afraid to make. Joy is not a reward. It's an operating system. As a leadership coach, talent strategist, author of “It Starts with Joy,”...

If you are thinking about becoming a leadership coach, you probably have a lot of questions, such as am I ready? Do I have the skills and experience? What do I have to offer? Do I have the right mindset for leadership development? Executive Coach, Dan Freehling has worked with hundreds of leaders through their most defining career moments, and he believes you may be more ready than you think. But...

You already have everything you need to build the life you want. The only thing standing between you and it?  Your beliefs haven't caught up…yet. And the limiting beliefs you do have are impacting your personal development. Our guest, Brooklyn Dicent, reveals why high-achievers stay stuck on their personal growth path even when they know exactly what they want. What they need is a shift in th...

Curious about nervous system regulation, stress relief, and having more control over your emotional state? You're going want to listen to Ashley Douglas. Do you ever feel like your brain is conspiring against you? Whether it's anxiety about an upcoming event, or in the moment, someone says something and your stress and fears levels overtake your thinking. That's not a character flaw...

What if you could stop waiting for the “perfect plan” and start building your next chapter one smart experiment at a time? For a lot of proven leaders, coaches, and consultants, that constant need to “get it right” turns into overthinking and the feeling of being stuck. This conversation offers a practical way to move from overthinking to intentional trying without blowing up the life you’ve alrea...

If you have been trying to build resilience by "toughening up" and isolating yourself, you are likely feeling more exhausted than empowered. For many in leadership, the path of personal development and the transition from climbing the corporate ladder to living in alignment with your values and purpose brings a unique kind of fatigue. We often feel we have to hide our struggles to mainta...

What's holding us back from discovering our true selves is usually permission...the permission we need to give ourselves to act when we don't have the answers. In this conversation on What Do You Know To Be True?, we explore why growth, meaning, and motivation are only possible when we give ourselves permission to engage with the world and with other people. If you’re asking questions li...

Are you a leader who struggles with personal branding, or maybe you’re unsure how to create a personal brand that actually feels like you? Many leadership coaches and small business owners struggle with a personal brand strategy and self-promotion because it feels inauthentic or overwhelming. But in today’s digital world, having a defined personal brand strategy isn’t just about vanity, it’s a min...

Do you feel successful on paper but stuck in reality? High achievers often self-sabotage not because they lack discipline, but because they're challenged to break the patterns that get in the way of their personal development. And then there's imposter syndrome that rears its head. Janet Livingstone reveals exactly how to use Internal Family Systems to break this cycle and reverse impost...

Exhausted and out of balance? Feeling burnout? You’ve hit the metrics. You’ve secured the title. You’ve done everything 'right.' So why does winning feel so draining? If you feel like life is rushing by while you're stuck on a hamster wheel of productivity, you aren't broken—you're just out of rhythm.  In this conversation, Ayurvedic Doctor and Corporate Wellness Expert, S...

As a leader or coach, you are trained to have a plan. You drive the agenda, you solve the problem, you move the ball forward. But what if your leadership or coaching need to "drive" is actually causing you to miss the most important thing in the room? In this "What Do You Know To Be True?" conversation with Joel Monk, co-founder of Coaches Rising, we explore his superpower: &qu...