It's Me. Your Brain. | The mind behind your decisions

Performance Is a Cognitive Sport. So Where's Your Coach? Why the brain you lead with deserves the training, recovery and coaching athletes take for granted An elite athlete walks into competition with a coach on the sideline, a planned recovery and months of mental preparation behind her. A senior leader walks into a Tuesday of high-stakes decisions with a calendar, a coffee and the expectatio...

Coffee instead of breakfast. Lunch at the desk, or at four, or not at all. A late dinner, one last look at the inbox, and sleep that clocks the hours but never quite restores. Nothing on paper looks wrong. You're performing. And underneath it, a system that runs on timing is quietly falling out of sync. This episode is about the 24-hour biological clock that governs far more of your performanc...

Why the people who know the least often sound the surest - and what that costs you as a leader Picture a meeting. Someone speaks with total certainty, no hedging, no "I think," just a flat statement delivered like fact. In that same room, someone else (usually the person who's actually spent years on this exact subject) speaks far more carefully. "It depends." A pause befor...

600 investor calls. 600 no's. At some point in that stretch, most people would take any money, on any terms, just to make the calls stop. Dev didn't. He turned down a term sheet because it would have built the wrong thing, when the wrong money was the only money on offer. Dev Aditya co-founded an AI teacher that ran offline in refugee camps eighteen months before ChatGPT existed, and had to explai...

You've just sat back down at your desk. The inbox looks impossible, the calendar's already filling up, and underneath it, a quiet thought: I should be more motivated than this. That story isn't just wrong, it's costing you the exact week your brain is actually on your side. In this episode, Virginia Palm breaks down what's really happening in your brain during the return from a...

Every time your body sends a signal and you push through anyway - stay later, skip the walk, override the tiredness - you're making a quiet decision about which of you is in charge. Most people only notice that relationship when it breaks down. This episode is about what it looks like to build it deliberately, before the breakdown. Barnabás has been moving every single day for thirty years. Not to...

You've read the same email three times. The decision that should take two minutes is still sitting there at four in the afternoon. And underneath it, a quiet thought: I'm just being lazy today. That story isn't just wrong, it's making the week harder. In this episode, Virginia Palm breaks down four specific things heat does to a working brain: why it makes complex thinking so much...

Nikki Anderssen spent fifteen years running live international news, thriving on exactly the kind of pressure most people spend their careers trying to avoid. Then, without warning, her body started failing her in ways that made no sense. She followed every protocol, eliminated every trigger, saw every specialist. And got smaller, not better, until the day she reacted to a handful of blueberries,...

A mid-year audit - for your own nervous system, and for the team you lead It's July. Half the year is already gone. Maybe you're already sitting somewhere quieter than usual, the inbox further away than it normally is. Or maybe you're not there yet, still fully present in three meetings a day while mentally packing for a break that hasn't started. Either way, there's a particul...

Are you using AI - or is it using you? Every time you hand a thinking task to AI without noticing, you're making a quiet choice about which mental muscles to keep training and which to let go quiet. Most people never make that choice consciously. This episode is about what happens when you do. Dr. Pauldy Otermans is a cognitive neuroscientist and psychologist who helped build one of the first...

What's actually happening when you finally stop, and why your brain needs more than a holiday to recover from it It's day one of your time off. The out-of-office is on, the laptop is closed. And then your hand finds your phone, not because anything's wrong, just to check. You close it again, and nothing settles. That night you're lying in bed replaying something from weeks ago. You...

The strategy built in minutes. The brief drafted before the meeting ended. The answer retrieved before the question was fully formed. Everything faster. Everything smoother. And somewhere in that efficiency, something quietly shifting. This episode is about what happens to the brain when AI takes the cognitive load, what gets offloaded, what stops being encoded, and what leaders need to deliberate...

Brain Capital - The Asset Nobody's Managing. Why the Most Important Asset in Your Organisation Is the One Nobody Is Measuring Most organisations manage their buildings, their technology, their financial capital with rigour and intention. The cognitive capacity of the people doing the thinking, the brains running every meeting, every decision, every strategy, is largely unmanaged, often activel...

The apartment in front of the ocean. The titles. The recognition. Everything on paper looking exactly right. And underneath it, something slowly, quietly, falling apart. This episode is about high-functioning burnout: what it looks like from the inside before it breaks, why the people closest to you don't see it, and why the system you need to read the warning signs is the same system being qu...

You Know the Science. So Why Hasn't Anything Changed?   Why insight and behaviour change are two different neurological events, and what to do about it You've read the books. You've been in the workshops. Something clicked. And then Monday arrived, and you were exactly the same person you were before. This isn't a motivation problem. It isn't a discipline problem. It's a ne...

Sixteen episodes. One argument underneath all of them. In this Season 1 finale, Virginia Palm names what the show has been building toward, and what it means for Season 2. In this episode: Why your brain was never the problem, and what actually was The thread that ran through every solo episode without being named What Yasmina and Monika showed about what happens when you stop fighting your brain...

Your Nervous System Is the Room   Why the state of your nervous system is the most powerful - and least measured - variable in your organisation There's a kind of meeting everyone has sat in. The tension nobody names. The flatness where there should be energy. Everyone feels it and nobody says a word. Most leaders assume that's a communication problem, or a culture problem. The neuroscienc...

Brain Fog Isn't Laziness. It's Biology. What's actually happening when your thinking goes offline - and how to work with it You sit down to work. The task is in front of you. The time is there. And then... nothing. Not tiredness exactly. Something denser. You re-read the same sentence three times and it doesn't land. You're present, technically, but your thinking feels like it&...

The Execution Gap: Why Knowing Isn't Enough   What's actually happening in the gap between what you know and what you do You know what you're supposed to do. You've read the book, listened to the podcast, had the conversation with yourself on a Sunday night. And then Monday happens. By Wednesday evening you notice the gap - the quiet sigh, the small  of course , the familiar note t...

The Leader Who Runs on KPIs - and Finally Built One for Her Brain Monika Redzko-Otto is a CFO and COO working across Poland, Germany and Portugal. She runs finance and operations inside an automated industrial environment - machines moving at six metres per second, AI being introduced to teams that never had to think about cognitive load before. She tracks margins, KPIs, and operational metrics. S...

Why Your Brain Resists Change - Even When You Want It The neuroscience of why good intentions aren’t enough - and what actually is You’ve made the decision. A real one. And then, almost without noticing, you don’t follow through. Not because you forgot. Because something in you quietly steered around it. And then comes the story: I don’t have enough willpower. I know what I should do and I just do...

Why collective intelligence isn't about who's in the room, it's about what the room makes possible You've been in that meeting. The one where something clicked - where the thinking built on itself and the group arrived somewhere none of them could have reached alone. You've also been in the other kind. Same people, same agenda, completely flat. The difference wasn't talent....

The Brain That Had to Build Its Own Map - What a Diplomat's Daughter Learned About Trust, Belonging, and Leading Without a Fixed North You grew up in one place, with one culture, one set of rules for how things work. You absorbed them, and they held you. But what happens to the brain when none of that was ever stable? When the environment kept changing and you had to build your own internal refere...

The Most Expensive Brain in the Room - What Leadership Actually Costs, and How to Stop Paying for It Twice You get to the end of the day. On paper, it was a good one. You led the meeting. You navigated the difficult conversation. You kept the room steady. And you are completely, disproportionately exhausted, in a way that doesn't quite match what the day looked like from the outside. That'...

The Conditions for Your Best Thinking - A Personal Protocol for Cognitive Performance You've protected the morning. No meetings. Inbox closed. You sit down to do the work that actually matters — and nothing quite arrives. You're not tired. You're not distracted. You're just somehow not there. That's not a discipline problem. It's a conditions problem. In this episode, Virginia Palm explores what a...