Leadership, Rewritten Podcast

This week’s podcast takes a more adult register to Monday morning’s child-oriented content. If the child-version asks what it feels like when the trouble starts showing, the podcast asks how those signs begin to make sense once we stop treating them as random personal failings. We’ll explore how strain appears in people, roles, teams, and systems, and why what first looks like a confidence issue,...

In this episode, I want to make a simple but important argument: a lot of leadership today feels overwhelming not just because there is too much work, but because too many different kinds of work are being pushed into the same people at the same time. So this is not really an episode about busyness in the usual sense. It is about what happens when running the current operation, responding to stake...

If you’ve been following the last two essays — The Ordinary Rhythms That Build Extraordinary Adaptability and How Real Change Travels — you’ll know we’ve spent the past few weeks in the Leadership Gym , exploring how adaptability is less about mindset and more about rhythm. Six rituals, one system: Clarity. Coherence. Collaboration. Cooperation. Curiosity. Connection. Each small, practical, repeat...

This episode is a little different. It isn’t one of the shorter essays you’ve been reading here — it’s a full, AI-narrated version of Chapter Five: Endurance Training – Holding the Thresholds of Leadership from the latest draft of Leadership, Rewritten . That means it draws from an updated manuscript , one that goes deeper than the essays I’ve shared on Substack so far. If you’ve been following th...

Welcome back to Leadership, Rewritten. In today’s episode I’m joined by Dr. Becky Andree, whose research on High-Quality Connections has had a profound impact on how we think about leadership and development in complex systems. Becky’s work explores how brief, positive interactions—moments of presence, trust, and energy—can do more than improve relationships. They can become the foundation for sys...

Welcome to episode six of the Leadership, Rewritten podcast. What you’re about to hear is an AI-generated narration of the full text of Chapter Six: Designing for Development. This chapter is longer and more detailed than the Substack essays you may already have read. It tells the full story of Maya’s turning point: how she discovered that leadership development doesn’t need to be bolted onto the...

This episode explores Chapter Five of Leadership, Rewritten in full — a piece that is two to three times longer than the paired Substack essays. Where the essays focus on the first two rules (for the self and the role) and then the next three (for the team and the system), this podcast weaves them together as one continuous arc. You’ll hear Maya’s journey in context — from her frustration at being...

Systems. Maps. Movement. Entanglement. Three essays. One arc. A turning point. This episode brings together the last three Maya Essays: * From Self to System – how to read the conditions, not just your reactions. * No Map. Just Movement – what to do when visibility drops. * The Entangled Self – a grounded alternative to the myth of the transcendent leader. It also includes insights about how to ef...

A little late this week. Blame the time zones (and dodgy train wifi). But here it is: the full chapter audio for From Self to System , now live. It’s AI-generated, using two voices to turn the content into a conversation. That won’t be everyone’s cup of tea and that’s totally fine. If synthetic narration puts you off, skip this one. No hard feelings. But if you’re curious, and comfortable with the...

If you’ve already read Chapter One, you may think you know this story. But this version, revised to match the depth, tone, and narrative rhythm of the rest of the book, lands differently. This bonus podcast reflects the reworked Chapter One: a deeper, sharper, more honest rendering of Maya’s threshold moment. It was the chapter that started it all and it deserved to be rewritten once the full shap...

This episode delves deeply into the lived complexity of modern leadership, far beyond the surface-level cheerleading that most development programs still promote. Based on the full arc of Chapter Two from the Leadership, Rewritten manuscript, this podcast brings Maya’s internal reckoning to life as she begins to dismantle the myths of self-help leadership, interrogate the contradictions of her rol...

Welcome to Leadership, Rewritten — the podcast that begins where the old playbook ends. I’m Richard Claydon. And this is the audio companion to the Maya Essays — a long-form exploration of what it means to lead in a world where complexity, contradiction, and quiet disillusionment are the norm. Each episode unpacks a pair of essays from the Maya series, which themselves form the conceptual spine of...