Work From The Inside Out

Charlotte Japp grew up in a tight-knit family, the oldest of three kids, on the upper west side of New York City. They moved to the US from France when she was two years old. She describes having had a colorful New York cultural upbringing with a lot of museum visits, watching old movies as a family, dining in New York City restaurants, as well as opportunities to travel back to France and other d...

Growing up in Billings, Montana, Michael Leckie was one of those kids that everyone would seek out when they needed to talk about important issues. This sparked his interest in psychology and he thought he would eventually become a psychotherapist. In college, he prepared for that path, but for reasons he cannot explain he lost interest in it. Upon graduation, Michael got what he called the “worst...

The moment I met Simone Knego, I was in awe of her. We were in an intensive public speaking class together earlier in 2021. One of our first assignments was to craft a ‘big idea’ for the speech we would be scripting early in the course. Simone is a walking example of her big idea: We do not need to change who we are, we need to change the way we see ourselves . I discovered that Simone is a best-s...

Ellen Snee grew up outside of New York City, the oldest of five kids in an Irish Catholic family. On Wednesday nights their parish priest, who was a family friend, would join their family for hot dogs and play cards. One night, Ellen’s devout father asked the priest to bless his children. They all closed their eyes, and he said some prayers. As they were praying, and all was calm, twelve-year-old...

Strategic messaging consultant Elaine Bennett never thought of writing as a career even though she had a teacher in high school who ushered her toward an extracurricular class on writing stating, “You're going to be a writer”. Elaine had no intention of becoming a writer. She went off to college, majored in theater with the goal of moving to New York and becoming a director. Arriving in New Yo...

When Amii Barnard-Bahn graduated from college with an English degree, she didn’t know what she wanted. So she applied to law school. Amii said, “It was kind of a crazy, interesting thing to do.” Attending Georgetown Law School, she tapped the advocate within wanting to impact social change. She worked as an ACLU fellow and took the first LGBT sexual orientation class ever taught at a law school. A...

When Dr. Jeffrey Hull was a little kid he wanted to be Elton John but he realized he could not play the piano well enough. In high school, he took a class called the history of ideas and fell in love with looking at how Western thought and Buddhist Eastern thought had developed. Jeff went on to college, continuing his interest in different worldviews, what is also known as the perennial philosophy...

At age 9, Dave Fano started collecting comic books because his big brother was into them. Then, he discovered that different editions and collections had value. By 14, he got a job at a comic book store where he also bought and traded his own comic books. For Dave, it was mostly about having fun, and of course, he enjoyed making money. The son of Cuban immigrants, Dave grew up in Miami. In high sc...

As the founder and CEO of Outfield Leadership, Dave McKeown speaks, coaches, and trains organizations to build cultures of authentic, results-driven leadership, moving from execution to excellence. When I heard the name of Dave’s business, I immediately thought of baseball, but then I wondered what would the outfield have to do with leadership? So, of course, I asked him. The first thing you need...

In his twenties, Jeff Gothelf wanted to be a rock star. After college, he spent a year as a sound and lighting tech for the Clyde Beatty Cole Bros. Circus. Then he started a band and he worked as a touring musician, playing the piano. For the next few years, he formed and managed several bands. Once he realized that his music career was not going to cover his bills, Jeff, then 26, migrated into th...

Rebecca Seal is a recovering people pleaser. In her teens and early twenties, she made choices that were based on what she thought other people expected of her. Whether those perceptions were true or not, Rebecca had no idea, but she did feel pressured to get into a prestigious university. She was an excellent student which enabled her to land a spot at the London School of Economics (LSE) to stud...

Early in her career, Dr. Dawn Graham experienced her first wake-up call (and it wasn’t a friendly voice calling from the front desk). Working for the large management consulting company, Arthur Andersen, equipped with her master's degree, she had just taken a new role when the Enron scandal erupted. Dawn was doing everything right but still got laid off along with tens of thousands of others....

Scott Sonnenschein, Ph. D. is the Henry Gardner Simmons Professor of Management at Rice University, and a New York Times best-selling author whose books are translated into over 20 languages. Last year, he co-authored Joy at Work: Managing Your Professional Life w ith Marie Kondo. In this week’s podcast, we discuss his book, Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less and Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined...

Michele Lamoureux has always had a love for people and a deep curiosity about their stories. As a kid, she loved to watch Merv Griffin, Phil Donahue, and later Oprah, thinking she wanted to be a talk show host. Michele knew she wanted to help people and once in college, thought a career in law would meet that goal. She ‘tried it on’ as a paralegal in a major law firm in Boston. She loved it, the p...

John Baldoni is a globally recognized leadership educator, a highly sought-after executive coach, and author of fifteen books that have been translated into ten languages. Impressive, right? John grew up in Perrysburg, Ohio where his mother served as Mayor and today at 92 remains very involved in the community. His maternal grandfather was a Detroit-based news photographer who fueled John’s lifelo...

Gen Georget grew up as an only child of a single mother learning that work was a means to an end. After earning her degree in communications, she’d taken a job at an ice cream shop on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. One day a young woman came into the shop and she recognized Gen from high school. She told her she was leaving her job with one of the members of Parliament and suggested that Gen apply for...

When Alison Arnoff was in fifth grade her teacher called home to discuss an issue with her parents. Apparently, Alison was making the boys angry because she was always raising her hand in math class before them. Her mother responded by suggesting that she be placed in the advanced class. The teacher said Alison is already there. Her mother had nothing more to offer. Alison shared with me, “ ...how...

Prina Shah was born in Kenya and started her education at a school there that primarily focused on the Indian community as that was how people maintained their safety. At home, however, there were other issues. Prina’s father was an alcoholic and there were traumatic circumstances that caused her mother to move her and her sister to the UK. Prina reflects on that time as her younger self, noting t...

Michael Freedman told me, “I didn't know what I wanted to do until I was 55. I was walking through life. I'm a reasonably intelligent, hardworking guy. ...nothing special. Right? I was good at communicating, collaborating. I was a project manager as an operational manager. None of that really challenged me or fed my soul. I liked the interaction and being productive. All that was good. Tha...

When she was 13 years old, EB Sanders worked her first job as a swim instructor. She enjoyed it so much she claimed that the teaching bug bit her. Her parents, who were not college-educated, were very supportive of her aspirations. She wanted to go to college and teach in higher education. She journeyed her way through a maze of several schools, eventually accomplishing her goal to become a teache...

Fawn Germer is the irreverent, beloved best-selling author of nine books including the Oprah book, Hard Won Wisdom . She has been a keynote speaker for more than 80 Fortune 500 companies and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize four times for her work as an investigative reporter. Fawn’s first book was rejected by every major publisher in the United States, but Fawn would not give up until it was...

Dean Wegner attended West Point because he was recruited to play Div I Hockey. Once there, he realized there was much more to it and began to have aspirations about becoming a high-ranking officer. In order to make that happen, he had to make the right choices upon his graduation in 1993. He opted to go the aviation route, even though the typical choice was infantry. Then a once-in-a-lifetime oppo...

From an engineering degree at Princeton to his first job at GE under Jack Welch to a Stanford MBA to the worldwide director of finance at Apple, Rusty Gaillard had walked the traditional path of success. Along the way, he learned that traditional success is not the same as being successful in life. Rusty left his finance role at Apple when he got more interested in developing his own InnerTech™ ra...

When Laura Gassner Otting was in fourth grade, her teacher said, “you’re pretty argumentative… you should become a lawyer.” Laura says she was a serious young person. At only nine years old, she would watch the news every night and with righteous indignation, make a mark on a pad each day the hostages were still in Iran. Determined, she decided that she would have to solve all the problems. Laura...

Jennifer Fondrevay told me something that I have never before heard from a guest. As a young child, she wanted to become the Ambassador to France and even more remarkably she continued to have that goal throughout her college years into graduate school. Jennifer’s father is French and her grandmother lived with them until she was three years old, so she learned French first, English second. She ma...