The Honest Mic

Most people think leadership is about titles. About being in charge. About having the corner office and the team that reports to you. But Dr. Kevin Wayne Johnson has spent more than three decades learning that leadership isn't about any of that. It's about service. Kevin spent 34 years in the federal government and private industry as a frontline, mid-level, and senior-level leader. He led...

You can be smart, capable, and completely overwhelmed. Not because you lack skill or drive. Because your brain is running patterns that made sense once and now work against you. That's the pattern Dr. Marcia Ruben has spent more than three decades helping leaders untangle. She's an executive coach, organizational consultant, and graduate leadership professor emerita with a doctorate and a...

You can be the most knowledgeable person in your field. You can have years of expertise. You can be the one everyone comes to for answers. And still feel like the spotlight was meant for someone else. That's the internal hurdle Kelly Schuknecht has spent over twenty years helping professionals overcome. She's a marketing strategist and thought leadership expert who helps professionals move...

In 2000, Mick Wienholt was climbing alone on a 14,000-foot peak in Colorado. He caused an avalanche. It would have killed him. His skull was fractured in three places. His scalp was split open to the bone. He was losing significant blood. And he was alone. He hiked three miles back to his truck. By the time he got there, he was so weak he couldn't get his jacket off or get into his truck. And...

Most self-help tells you to flip a switch. Find the right system, the right mindset, the right morning routine, and everything changes. But if healing actually worked like a light switch, none of us would still be struggling with the same things we've been struggling with for years. Kerisma Vere knows that the light switch myth is one of the most damaging stories we tell ourselves about change...

At two years old, Bradley Gabbert was struck by a car and spent two weeks in a coma. He came home having lost the ability to walk and speak. He relearned both. And from the outside, he built a remarkably normal life. But there was another part of the recovery he wouldn't recognize for decades. He grew up becoming what he calls the agreeable child. Easygoing. Accommodating. Conflict-avoidant. W...

Phil Cohen is the CEO and co-founder of Simplifyber, a North Carolina-based advanced materials company that has raised $20 million to commercialize a proprietary liquid fiber molding platform. They form bio-based, shaped parts directly from natural cellulose fibers. And this isn't his first rodeo. Phil is a serial entrepreneur, a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate, a combat veteran, and an MIT Sl...

Most people are not living. They're surviving. They're getting up, going to work, paying bills, handling the next crisis, going to bed, and doing it all over again. And somewhere along the way, they stop asking whether there's another way. Paul Padgett knows that pattern. He's spent decades in leadership, business development, and personal transformation, and he's built his ent...

Most people who understand the finance side of a deal have never had to run the operation day to day. And most people who run the operation have never had to evaluate a business from the outside as an investor. Christopher Swing has done both. He's been a CFO. He's done private equity deals. He's served as an Adjunct Professor at Eastern Illinois University. And he's spent over a d...

Most of your life is being run on autopilot. Automatic responses. Conditioned patterns. Reactions you didn't consciously choose. The question isn't whether you have a self-driving system underneath your awareness. It's whether you're ever going to take the wheel. Alan Bodnar has spent the past decade researching over 500 books on neuroscience, behavior, AI, and mindfulness. That le...

Gaylen Wilson's life has not been one comeback. It has been a series of forced reinventions. Farm failure. A collapsed stockbroker career. Years of alcoholism. Twenty years sober. 9/11 wiping out an industry. A Walmart cashier job. Rebuilding as a computer repairman. Rebuilding again as a field-service technician. Then, in 2014, a virus attacked his heart. For the next three and a half years,...

Estelle Gibson is a CPA. She spent 40 years in accounting and finance. She knew money. She understood numbers. She understood the rules. And she still handed over her financial power during her marriage. After her divorce, she had to rebuild her life financially and emotionally from the ground up. That experience became the catalyst for everything she does now. Because what she discovered was that...

You'll spend hours at the gym. You'll watch what you eat. You'll track your steps. And then you'll spend zero minutes thinking about the organ that runs everything — the one that determines how you think, feel, and relate to every person and every situation in your life. Arnold Beekes is on a mission to change that. To make brain training as normal as going to the gym. He's spe...

Why do some teams thrive while others struggle? Even when they have talented people. Even when they have good intentions. Even when they have plenty of resources. That question has been David Lengyel's obsession for more than 40 years. As the founder of Venture Up, he's designed and facilitated team-building and leadership development programs for organizations across North America and in...

The more clients, conversations, and AI tools you manage, the harder it becomes to keep important context from getting lost. Your AI forgets. You forget. And the decisions, commitments, and client history that actually matter end up scattered across a dozen tools that don't talk to each other. Ben Finklea is the founder of ArmBrain, an AI memory platform built for fractional executives. A long...

Sam Shargo started his first company at thirteen. Entered college at sixteen. Joined the military at seventeen. And then spent two decades building, scaling, and selling multiple companies, including a technology and cybersecurity firm. By every external measure, he had figured it out. And then he experienced a collapse at the height of his own success. Not a business failure. A personal reckoning...

Stagnant careers shouldn't happen to good people. But they do. You're doing the work. You're hitting the targets. You're the one everyone relies on. And somehow, the promotion goes to someone else. The meeting moves on before you finish your thought. Your ideas get repeated back to you five minutes later — and suddenly they're brilliant. Most people assume that's a confiden...

Gloria Vanderhorst started her practice as a psychologist working with preschool children — mainly boys. Female teachers saw their exuberance and physical energy as problematic. They were labeled hyperactive or attention-deficient. Her work with those boys resulted in their fathers coming to therapy to explore their own emotional angst. And over fifty years, she's watched how our culture robs...

Nancy Ensley has spent decades in professions that demand empathy and discernment. Nurse. Hospice specialist. Legal nurse consultant. Coding specialist. Teacher. Supervisor. Helping people navigate life's most critical moments. She's learned that every story, no matter the genre, carries lessons worth sharing. Now she writes across memoirs, fiction, science fiction, mystery, thriller, acti...

Tammy Corwin was abandoned at the age of two. Later adopted. At twenty-two, she was convicted and sentenced to sixty years in prison for a crime she did not commit. She entered prison as a young woman and did not walk back into the free world until she was fifty-two. Thirty years passed while life continued outside those walls. And yet — within twelve months of her release, she built her flagship...

Liz Coleman works with women who look successful and steady from the outside but can't remember the last time they truly relaxed. The ones stuck overthinking every decision, always on, unable to switch off even when nothing is wrong. She's a certified transformational life coach with a degree in psychology, and she built her approach the hard way. After years of chasing answers across ther...

Dave Letterfly Knoderer started on the circus as a teenager. He spent three decades training horses to the Haute École level. He became an award-winning performer on dancing horses. He recovered from alcoholism. He became the most prolific motorhome airbrush mural artist in the RV industry. And now he spends seven months a year pinstriping at Harley-Davidson dealerships east of the Mississippi. Th...

Roy Osing took a startup to a billion dollars in annual sales. Not a company he joined after it was already winning. A startup he helped build from its early stages to a billion. He's a former president and CMO with over 40 years of executive leadership experience. He's the author of the no-nonsense book series BE DiFFERENT or be dead, with The Audacious Unheard-of Ways I Took a Startup to...

Hogan Shrum loves what AI can make possible. And he really hates the way a lot of the industry has decided to get there. The pressure on agencies, brands, content studios, and creators to make more work, in more formats, faster than ever has become completely feral. AI can help with that. But it shouldn't require artists, photographers, directors, and illustrators to get scraped, copied, ignor...

Todd Krause spent two decades in institutional finance — building a $2B fund administration firm from scratch and helping launch a $14B Bank of America business unit — before buying a struggling cleaning company in 2020. Days before the COVID-19 shutdown. Everyone expected it to fail. Instead, he grew it from $1.6M to $4M in revenue in two years. Not by cutting costs. By treating his team with dig...