The Lesley Hawkins Podcast

She was climbing the corporate ladder, working all hours of the day and night, but one question kept surfacing: Is this all there is? So she did something radical by stepping away from everything, sold her house, left her career, and spent a year at a monastery learning about ancient wisdom. What she found in that silence was the emotions she had carried for decades, rooted in an unimaginable chil...

Our guest built a career she loved, working freelance across entertainment, sports, and news media. Then the pandemic arrived. And like so many in her industry, everything went quiet overnight. So she did what felt natural. She went into hyper-drive. Lots of calls, emails. More and more outreach. Chasing every opening, knocking on every door. And every rejection hit harder than the last. So she ma...

We tell ourselves it doesn't happen here. Not in our neighbourhood. Not behind those doors. Not to someone like her. But domestic abuse doesn't announce itself. And for our guest, it wasn't just her own story, it was a pattern that had quietly shaped the generations before her. Until she chose to make it stop. Finding herself in a domestic abuse situation with children to protect, s...

Hockey was never just a game for our guest. It was in his blood. Growing up, he had one dream: to one day be the voice on Hockey Night in Canada. But life had a different play in mind. He found himself in sales, comfortable but restless, knowing he wanted something different. Then an unlikely opportunity appeared: to buy a bankrupt hockey stick manufacturer. And despite not having any experience i...

As a teenager, our guest was a high-performance athlete. Her body was strong, capable, built for competition. Then it started to change and what followed was a battle with an eating disorder that reshaped not just her relationship with her body, but her understanding of the forces working against young people every single day. Because this isn't just a personal story. It's a much bigger...

Some people wait for the perfect moment to pursue an idea. Our guest decided that maternity leave was hers. While most people use that time to simply survive the newborn stage, she used it to quietly build a two-sided marketplace gig platform that had been living in her mind, waiting for its moment. But having an idea and actually making the leap are two very different things. So she returned to c...

Our guest was a business owner. Driven, entrepreneurial, building her own social media company. Then she met a client and what started as a business relationship led to a vacation in the Caribbean. But when she returned to Canada, she was arrested with 2kg of cocaine strapped to her body. What followed was a period of her life she never anticipated: a 4-year prison sentence. Behind those walls, wi...

From the outside, our guest was living the life. A beautiful family, a career as an executive in the public sector with upward momentum. She had the kind of résumé that screamed success, prestige, power. But something was off. A persistent, uncomfortable feeling that the life she had built wasn't quite the life she was meant to live. So she did something that took equal parts clarity and conv...

His father opened a sports store in Toronto, and from an early age, the family business wasn't just where he worked, but where he grew up. But not everything built with love is easy to sustain. So he walked away, not from the work, but to save the relationship that mattered most.  He forged his own path in entrepreneurship, until his father called him back. This time, not to run the business,...

When our guest was in university, her family faced two crises at the same time. Her mother, a business owner, fell seriously ill. And without proper financial planning in place, a health crisis quickly became a financial one too. That experience lit a fire that would shape the entire direction of her life. She became a wealth advisor on a mission to make sure other families never face what hers di...

At 28 years old, our guest received a diagnosis that stopped her life in its tracks. Breast cancer. And with it, medically induced menopause that no one her age expects to navigate. So she did what many high-achievers do when life becomes unmanageable. She threw herself into work. A demanding career in marketing became both her anchor and her escape.  But the body keeps score. And eventually, hers...

She built her dream life. A beautiful home. Three gorgeous daughters. A marriage that checked all the boxes. But inside, something didn’t fit. There was a quiet whisper she couldn’t ignore. A growing realization that nothing would ever be enough for her until she was enough for herself. No house, no role, no relationship could fill a space that required her own self-worth. Listening to that voice...

Sometimes the path you’re meant to follow starts in the most unlikely place. For today’s guest, it began on Christmas Day, watching football games on TV while the rest of the world celebrated the holiday. That quiet tradition sparked a love for the game that would shape the course of his life. His career started in university sports communications. It was steady, predictable, comfortable. Until a...

At 37 years old, life was moving exactly as planned. A growing real estate business, his first child on the way, the future was bright. Until the diagnosis. What followed was a year defined by radiation, chemotherapy, surgery, and plenty of uncertainty. While fighting for his health, he was also running his business. And somehow, in the middle of it all, he had the best year of his real estate car...

With a degree in civil engineering, she was set for a future of stability and success, and yet her passion lay elsewhere. So she returned to school to learn the world of sports broadcasting, and has since become a leader in the space, appearing every evening as co-host of Sportsnet Central.  After years of covering hockey, she made an unexpected move at 41: lacing up her own hockey skates, joining...

She was successful with a big sales role in the pharmaceutical industry. She had climbed the mountain and enjoyed all the perks that came with it, but something felt off. The view from the top wasn’t what she thought it would be. So she made the decision to walk away and start again from scratch in a completely different world. The world of fashion, style, and identity. What followed wasn’t just a...

From a young age, our guest understood what it meant to be seen through a label. Born with cerebral palsy, he could have allowed the diagnosis to define the boundaries of his life. Instead, he chose something different.  At just eight years old, he became involved with Easter Seals, an organization dedicated to supporting children and youth with disabilities in carving their own paths. What began...

There are moments in life that redefine you. And for our guest today, two such moments changed everything about her and her life.  Diagnosed with a bone disorder at just five years old, her disability shaped her identity, her personal limitation. Until one person challenged that narrative and it has led her to work advocating for those who are often excluded from society. Her story took a tragic t...

It started as a few harmless pints in high school, but for our guest today, one early habit slowly became part of his identity. It shaped how he showed up, how he coped.  Until one mistake changed his course. A moment that forced him to confront the gap between who he was and who he wanted to be. That moment set him on a long, uncomfortable journey to reclaim his life. This is a conversation about...

Some pivotal moments only reveal themselves in hindsight. For our guest today, what once felt like a career sidebar slowly revealed itself as something much bigger, a calling rooted in service, impact, and meaning. It began with teaching children with cancer how to waterski. And what followed was a realization that helping others wasn’t a side project, it was the work. She went on to combine her l...

For our guest today, two pivotal moments reshaped everything, one professional, one deeply personal, and both were sparked by the same choice: to lean into fear and discomfort and say “yes” to opportunity.   The first began in a Starbucks, talking to a friend and a stranger nearby who couldn’t help but listen, gave an unexpected offer to help. What started as a single golf clinic became a passion...

Maternity leave created a pause; a moment to reassess, to ask a hard question “ what do I actually want my life to feel like at the end of the day?” What started as a passion project, just five hours a week, became a process of career rediscovery, of listening inward. Passion became her internal compass, a way to evaluate decisions, block out the noise, and recognize a true “whole-body yes.” Today...

For a long time, our guest’s identity was tied to one thing: performance in sport. Then a shoulder injury changed everything. What followed wasn’t just physical pain, but the mental and emotional toll of losing the role that defined who she was. She struggled to find new ways to contribute to her team, while quietly battling negative self-talk and a growing sense of isolation that lasted years. On...

A 2023 study by the Workforce Institute at UKG found that leaders have as much impact on an employee’s mental health as their spouse or partner. Let that sink in for a moment. For our guest today, leadership became personal early in her career. She started as a micromanager, focused on telling her team what to do, how to do it, and when. But experiencing the mental and physical toll of working und...

Sometimes life doesn’t whisper that something needs to change, it stops you cold.  Our guest was returning from a routine business trip when everything unraveled. What started as feeling unwell quickly became a hospital visit, a scary diagnosis, and emergency surgery.   Three weeks in the ICU. Three months of recovery at home. During that stillness, everything came into focus. What matters. What d...