Handson Coaching: Inspiring Conversations

The Hidden Cost of Being Indispensable Why Leaders Who Cannot Step Away May Have Built the Wrong Kind of Success There is something curious about success. Many leaders dream of building a business that gives them freedom. Yet somewhere along the way, they become the one person the business cannot function without. What begins as commitment slowly turns into dependency. Perhaps the real measure of...

Most of us spend years becoming experts. Then we discover that expertise and influence are not the same thing. Knowing your subject does not guarantee that people will listen. Being right does not automatically create trust. And pressure has a curious way of making even highly capable people question themselves. Perhaps leadership is not tested when things are calm. Perhaps it is tested when expec...

Thinking about work lately, I keep coming back to a strange question. What if the problem is not that organisations are failing people badly? What if the bigger problem is that many organisations are functioning just well enough to never question what they are actually building in the first place? Revenue arrives. Targets get hit. Meetings happen. The machinery works. But underneath that, people q...

Most conversations about AI focus on what machines can do faster than humans. Fewer conversations ask the more uncomfortable question: what actually makes human intelligence… human? On June 18th, my guest on Inspiring Conversations will be neuroscientist and deep-tech strategist Dr. Ewelina Kurtys , whose work sits at the intersection of neuroscience, AI, biological computing, and emerging technol...

Why Happy Teams Still Leave Most organisations do not realise they have a retention problem until someone leaves. Before that, everything often looks fine. People are friendly. The culture seems positive. The perks are there. Teams laugh together on calls. Engagement scores are respectable enough to avoid panic. And yet, underneath the surface, something quieter is happening. People disconnect slo...

The Black Box at Work: Why Employees Stop Trusting How Value Is Decided Most people do not expect work to be perfect. But they do expect it to make sense. They want to understand how decisions are made. Why some people progress faster than others. Why recognition feels inconsistent. Why “people-first culture” sometimes disappears the moment compensation enters the conversation. And this is where m...

Calm Until It Isn’t: What Disaster Zones Teach Us About How Organisations Actually Function Most organisations are not in crisis. And that is exactly the problem. Work gets done. Targets are met. Meetings happen. On the surface, everything looks fine. But clarity is often assumed, not tested. Roles are loosely understood. Communication works, until it suddenly doesn’t. Nothing breaks hard enough t...

What does it actually take to be bold inside a life that was not designed for it? Most of us have been taught that boldness belongs to certain kinds of people. The ones who took the leap. The ones who walked away. The ones with the perfectly timed story of risk and reward. But Audley Stephenson spent over 30 years inside public service, one of the most cautious institutional environments imaginabl...

Funny Until It Isn’t: What Comedy Reveals About How We Actually Show Up at Work Most organisations are not short on communication. Meetings happen. Messages are sent. Presentations are delivered. Everything looks clear on paper. And yet people leave the same conversation with different interpretations, different levels of trust, and very different energy. Because communication is not just about wh...

What Is Your Body Trying to Tell You? Most professionals push through. That is what we are trained to do. The headache that will not quite leave. The tension that follows you home. The feeling of being permanently switched on, even when nothing urgent is happening. We explain it away, adjust, and keep going. And the body keeps score anyway. Ethan Reisboard, CHt knows this from the inside. In 2021,...

Owning Your Voice: How Thought Leadership Helps You Lead, Work, and Live with Clarity Kelly Schuknecht has spent almost twenty years helping entrepreneurs and professionals elevate their message and build visibility that actually means something. As the founder of Two Mile High Marketing and the host of Beyond the Bestseller, she has guided countless women to share their stories with confidence an...

The Subconscious Advantage: Why Better Thinking Doesn’t Fix Broken Communication Most organisations do not have a communication problem. That might be the problem. Conversations are happening all the time. Meetings are full. Messages are constant. Strategies are explained, repeated, documented. On the surface, everything looks aligned. And yet, something does not quite hold. People leave the same...

Awake at Work, Without the Wake-Up Call Most organisations are not in crisis. That might be the problem. They are functioning. People show up, work gets done, targets are met, and on the surface everything looks fine. And yet, something feels slightly off. The energy is lower than it should be, creativity is quieter than it used to be, and purpose often ends up living on a slide deck instead of in...

The Small Moments We Ignore… That Shape Our Leadership We tend to point to the big moments when we talk about leadership. The promotion. The pressure. The moment you realise it’s on you now. But when you look back, it’s rarely those moments that actually shaped how you lead. It’s the smaller ones. The everyday interactions you didn’t think much about at the time. How you responded in a conversatio...

Unemployable by Design? When Your Strengths Don’t Fit the System People get labelled all the time. Not ready. Not the right fit. Not what we’re looking for. Sometimes it’s said directly, sometimes it’s implied. And once that label sticks, it tends to follow. But here’s the question we rarely stop to ask. What if the issue is not the person at all, but the environment they’re being asked to succeed...

Leadership Is a Story. The Question Is Who Gets to Tell It. Thinking about how often leadership sounds correct. The strategy is clear. The values are printed. The message is polished. And yet nothing shifts. People nod. They comply. They do not move. Which raises a slightly uncomfortable question. If leadership is influence, and influence lives in story, what happens when leaders stop telling real...

We expected to talk about happiness. After all, it was the International Day of Happiness, built around this year’s theme, Caring and Sharing. But the conversation kept circling back to something else. Attention. How easily it gets pulled away. How quickly we switch. How normal it has become to be slightly distracted most of the time. And then we expect something very different from ourselves. To...

Promoted Too Soon? The Competency Trap in Leadership Succession Thinking about how often leadership begins with a promotion email. Top performer. Technically brilliant. Reliable. Safe pair of hands. So we reward competence with authority. And hope leadership appears. It usually does not. Organisations talk about succession planning. What they often practise is replacement planning. Someone leaves....

High Impact, Healthy Leadership The Biology of Sustainable Success We talk about mindset, strategy, and resilience in leadership. We rarely talk about biology. We expect clarity from exhausted people. We expect sustainable performance from leaders who ignore sleep, recovery, and metabolic health. Then we call it ambition. Amy Loden Tiffany MD MBA FACP is a physician entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, and...

When Conflict Is the Message, Not the Problem Thinking about how often workplace conflict gets treated as something to fix, smooth over, or make disappear. As if tension itself is the failure. Yet conflict usually shows up for a reason. It points to something unmet, unspoken, or misunderstood. When leaders rush to solve it, they often miss what it is trying to tell them. In this conversation, my g...

Redefining Success When the Rules Change Success is easy to describe when life follows a familiar script. Mobility, momentum, milestones. Then the rules change. Jay Setchell has lived through multiple near-death experiences, dozens of surgeries, paralysis, and relentless recovery. What emerges is not a story about loss, but about recalibration. About choosing purpose when circumstances narrow. Abo...

Confidence Before Capability Mentorship, intuition, and the human side of intelligent tools Thinking about how often leadership development focuses on skills before confidence. As if people can apply new tools or frameworks while quietly doubting themselves. As if capability comes first, and trust in oneself somehow catches up later. It rarely does. In this conversation, my guest is Stephanie Sylv...

When Life Writes the Story for You, and Why Writing What Hurts Helps Thinking about how often we talk about resilience as something we build deliberately. Skills we develop. Mindsets we choose. But life does not always wait for us to be ready. Sometimes it writes chapters we never planned to include. Loss, disruption, grief, moments that change the direction of the story without asking for permiss...

Why Networking Feels So Hard, and Why People Choose to Follow You Anywhere People talk a lot about networking. Tips, tactics, frameworks. What they talk about far less is the discomfort. Reaching out without a clear reason. Walking up to strangers. The quiet fear of sounding self-serving or unnecessary. I have been thinking about why networking feels so difficult for thoughtful, capable people, an...

The Myth of the Born Leader - and the Six Pillars That Prove Otherwise Some say leaders are born. Jim Carlough says they’re built. With over 30 years of leadership in the trenches, Jim dismantles the myth of the “natural leader” and replaces it with a practical framework: the Six Pillars of Leadership. Integrity. Focus. Empathy. Compassion. Humor. Stability. These aren’t personality quirks reserve...