Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa

Send us Fan Mail There is someone in your life you have not spoken to in weeks. Maybe months. And if something cracked you open tonight, they are the first person you would call. Not because you talk every day. Because they know your silences. We have an entire vocabulary for the courage it takes to leave. We have almost none for the courage it takes to stay — to watch someone you love become a pe...

Send us Fan Mail THE FIRST TIME YOU HEARD YOUR OWN VOICE There is a voice you have been using for years. In meetings. In presentations. In every room that ever asked you to prove you belong. It is articulate, strategic, effective. And it was assembled, carefully, over time, from every mentor you admired, every institution you wanted to impress, every expectation you were trying to meet. Then one d...

Send us Fan Mail Think about the last meeting you were in. Not the agenda. Not what was decided. Think about what happened after you walked out. Did the room exhale? Did people finally say the thing they had been holding? Did the conversation get more honest — or less? You will never be in the room after you leave it. And that room is where your leadership actually lives. In this episode, Lisa dra...

Send us Fan Mail There's this thing that happens when you're carrying a lot. People ask how you're doing, and you say "I'm good." Not because you're lying — but because the truth would take longer than anyone has time for. In this episode, Lisa gets honest about what her last two weeks actually looked like: two R01 deadlines, fifty resumes, a staffing transition,...

Send us Fan Mail There is a thing nobody tells you about getting what you wanted. The flatness that arrives the morning after. The strange quiet hum of an interior question that the promotion, the credential, the title, the milestone was supposed to answer — and somehow didn't. Most people, when they feel it, look away. They start chasing the next thing, hoping it will be bigger, brighter, mo...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when the leadership vocabulary you inherited from the women before you includes everything except the hardest sentences? In this episode, Lisa reflects on watching a senior woman in a meeting redirect a difficult conversation toward an operational follow-up — a move she recognized instantly, because she'd learned it too. Not from a textbook, but from years of wat...

Send us Fan Mail I was in a meeting last week, and I caught myself doing it again. Someone asked me a real question, and before I gave the answer — before the answer — I said the words. Sorry, I just want to add real quick. Sorry for what. This episode is about the apologies that aren't really apologies. The ones doing some other job entirely — asking permission to take up the space we were a...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when the weight you’re carrying doesn’t have a name? In this episode, Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa gets personal about the exhaustion that hides behind high performance—the low hum of too much, for too long, with no clear endpoint. Drawing on her work as a behavioral scientist and her own experience navigating an impossible spring, Lisa explores why we stigmatize our own dist...

Send us Fan Mail Yesterday I found out that two grant applications I submitted were not selected for funding. Two in the same cycle. Both I believed in. Both designed to serve communities I care deeply about. This episode is what happened next. It is not a framework. It is not a reframe. It is not a story I have already extracted the lesson from. It is the middle — the 48 hours of silence after th...

Send us Fan Mail In the middle of packing for a move to a smaller space, Lisa opens a box that's been sealed for four years — and finds beautiful pottery she forgot she owned. When a vase shatters on the floor by accident, it cracks open a deeper question: why do we hold onto things long after they've stopped serving us? This episode is a meditation on the boxes we keep sealed — not just...

Send us Fan Mail Here's something no one tells you when you step into leadership: your team is not listening to your words. They're watching your tolerance. Every time you let something slide — the disrespect you didn't address, the credit that was taken, the standard that quietly dropped — you just taught your team what's actually acceptable here. Not what you said was accepta...

Send us Fan Mail Most of us were taught to wait — wait for the title, the invitation, the tap on the shoulder that says now it's your turn. But leadership doesn't work that way. The people who change things aren't the ones who waited for permission. They're the ones who started before they felt ready. In this episode, Lisa explores the quiet lie that keeps smart, capable people...

Send us Fan Mail Most leaders operate like their role is permanent. And that assumption is quietly destroying the best parts of their leadership. In this episode, Lisa challenges a belief most of us have never examined: that there’s always more time. More time to have the conversation, to champion the idea, to lead the way we actually want to. She introduces the concept of finite urgency — and ask...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when you stop performing and start saying what you actually think? Not a dramatic reinvention — just one honest sentence at a time. In this episode, Lisa names the tired that sleep doesn't fix: the invisible exhaustion of translating yourself into a safer, smaller version for every room you enter. She traces what it cost her, what surprised her when she stopped,...

Send us Fan Mail There is a tradition from St. Lucia called Koudmen — a practice where the community comes together to carry what one person cannot carry alone. No payment. No contract. Just hands. In this episode, Lisa names the loneliness that lives inside leadership, shares a message from a team member that stopped her in her tracks, and asks the question most leaders are afraid to ask: what if...

Send us Fan Mail When is the last time someone asked how you were doing — and you told the truth? Every high achiever has armor: the perfectionism, the people-pleasing, the relentless performance of being fine. It kept you safe once. It got you into the room. But somewhere along the way, the armor stopped being something you wore and became something you are. In this episode, Lisa traces the origi...

Send us Fan Mail There is a question nobody in leadership is saying out loud right now: What if the thing that makes me valuable is the thing the machine does not need? In this episode, Lisa names the quiet fear that leaders, researchers, clinicians, and anyone in a people-centered profession are carrying — that empathy, presence, and trust-building are becoming obsolete in a world obsessed with s...

Send us Fan Mail There is a woman sitting at Gate B6 at 6:14 in the morning, staring at a flight she has no reason to take — to a city with no meeting, no obligation, no one expecting her to perform. She does not take it. She gives the keynote. People clap. She flies home. And she tells no one about the seven minutes when she almost chose herself. This episode is built differently — it moves like...

Send us Fan Mail THE GRIEF NOBODY WARNED YOU ABOUT When Growth Means Grieving People Who Are Still Alive There's a kind of grief nobody prepares you for. Not the kind that comes with a funeral. The kind that comes quietly, in the middle of becoming someone new — when you look up and realize the life you've outgrown no longer fits, and some of the people in it don't either. No one te...

Send us Fan Mail THE LIE OF FINE What Nobody Will Say About What's Really Happening Right Now You know the feeling. Someone asks how you're doing and you say "great" — not because it's true, but because that's what the moment calls for. You write the updates, show up to the meetings, wear the face. And somewhere underneath all of it, a quiet voice keeps asking a quest...

Send us Fan Mail What if the restlessness you're feeling isn't burnout — it's your soul asking a question you've been too busy to hear? In this Soul Reflection, Lisa explores the difference between drift and burnout, what behavioral science reveals about the shadow side of adaptation, and why the most radical act of leadership might be a series of small, honest reckonings with...

Send us Fan Mail I've spent almost twenty years studying what gets lost between the message and the meaning. Today, I'm trying something I've never done before — no citations, no methodology section, no peer review. Just me, a microphone, and the truth about what it actually costs to lead, to hold multiple identities, and to realize the version of yourself that earned the credential...