Leadership Odysseys

Hosted by Kirsty Gee

Business EntrepreneurshipInterviews guests

Website RSS feed

Episodes

Latest episode

Aug 2026

Language

About the show

Leadership Odysseys is a space for people in the middle. The middle of careers. The middle of decisions. The middle of becoming. This podcast shares real leadership journeys. Not straight lines. Not highlight reels. Each conversation explores what happens behind the scenes. The fear. The doubt. The quiet discipline. The small choices that shape a life over time. Our guests are leaders who have walked their own paths. They speak honestly about what it takes to keep going. Their stories offer perspective, not instruction. Leadership Odysseys exists to make the messy middle visible. To help you embrace the journey. To think long term. To take one small step for your future self. Hosted by Kirsty Ghahramani (Kirsty Gee) If you are building something. Questioning what comes next. Or redefining what leadership and success mean to you. You belong here. Listen in. Pause. Embrace the journey.

Listen to episodes

60 recent

August 24, 2026Episode 791 hr 13 min

Ash Ghahramani: How to Build a Business That Outlasts You

Nine months to learn a new language. Eighteen months of knocking on doors before anyone called back. Twenty years building a business with the same business partner, without ever needing to be seen doing it. Ash Ghahramani didn’t learn discipline from a book. Ash Ghahramani is the co-founder and managing director of Naturally Gluten Free, one of Australia’s first purpose-built, HACCP-approved gluten-free manufacturing facilities. He arrived in Australia at eleven, having spent his early years in Iran, with almost no English. He is also my husband: 21 years married, 7 before that, which means recording this one meant asking questions I’ve never had to ask out loud in 28 years of knowing the answers. Finding the right partner in life is the most important decision you’ll ever make. I made mine at seventeen, and I’d make it again. The Highlights A new language in nine months. Ash arrived in Australia having lived through war as a child, knowing little more than hello and thank you. Nine months in an intensive language centre later, he walked into mainstream high school able to read, write and hold his own. The curriculum he’d already survived in Iran had quietly prepared him to finish a year ahead. The job that rerouted everything. University was never a question in a family of academics, until a job at McDonald’s at fifteen answered one Ash hadn’t known he was asking. He didn’t fall for the job. He fell for the people, and for the particular satisfaction of running something well. Every business he’s built since is an extension of that first instinct. One sentence. One decision. Twenty years. Retailers laughed when Ash said his bread needed refrigeration. Looking for the science to back the decision, he found one sentence: the most common bakery preservative is also used to disinfect hospital equipment. He closed the browser. No preservatives, ever. He’s never reopened that question since. Walking away from Coles. Every small food brand wants the call from a major supermarket. Ash and his business partner got it, then walked away, refusing to absorb the rebates and shrinking margins the deal demanded. The retreat became the turn. Food service relationships with chefs that, in some cases, have now outlasted entire restaurant careers. What success actually means. Not the house. Not the car. Walking down the road for a coffee on his own time. A holiday that doesn’t have to be big to count. Being present for the people he loves, rather than just providing for them. The legacy that isn’t the business. Ask Ash what he’s most proud of after two decades of building a company from nothing, and the answer isn’t the factory, the contracts, or the twenty-year partnership. It’s two kids he calls his legacy. ~~~ In His Own Words “We will never use preservatives. We’ll just have to work on the mindset that it’s okay to keep real bread in the fridge, because that’s how it was made a hundred years ago.” “Finding the right partner in life and raising two beautiful kids that are going to be our legacy, that’s probably the biggest thing I’m proud of.” ~~~ I have had the front-row seat to all of this for over twenty years. The early mornings. The long days. The pressure he carried without needing to say it out loud. The business was never a means to an end for him. It’s the thing he and his team built with their own hands, to a standard he’d feed his own kids. That care is exactly why it lasts, and exactly why it was never separate from the rest of what we built together. He’ll tell you the proudest thing he’s built is us. I believe him. Connect with Ash: LinkedIn Connect with Naturally Glutenfree: LinkedIn | Website This episode is brought to you by: Cell Wellness Co | Naturally Glutenfree Connect with Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee): LinkedIn | Instagram | Website

August 10, 2026Episode 801 hr 7 min

The Accidental Banker: Meg Bonighton on Saying Yes, Leading at Scale, and Starting Again

A career without a plan can still take you somewhere remarkable. Meg Bonighton walked into an ANZ call centre at twenty-something looking for nine-to-two work so she could finish her university degree. Sixteen years later she was still there, having led the relaunch of internet banking, built a direct banking brand through a global financial crisis, and closed that same brand with every customer and every team member placed safely on the other side. Then she left. Then she proved herself again at NAB, then Telstra, then the Commonwealth Bank. Now she is doing something that has required its own kind of courage: building something with only her own name on it. This conversation is about what it actually takes to say yes before you feel ready, lead through the moments that test everything, and know when it is time to pack up the kit bag and start again. The Guest Meg Bonighton spent more than two decades in senior executive roles across ANZ, NAB, Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank, working across governance, risk, digital transformation and customer strategy in some of the most complex and scrutinised environments in Australian business. She has led thousands of people through a global financial crisis and a pandemic, sat on boards through both, and built a reputation for creating teams that outlast the moment that made them. She is now stepping into her third arc as a non-executive director and advisor, and starting to give back what a career of saying yes has given her. Highlights The Nine-to-Two Job That Changed Everything. Meg took a part-time call centre role at ANZ to balance finishing her degree. It was meant to last a semester. On a Friday afternoon a few years in, a manager told her he had something for her on Monday and that she was going to say no, but she shouldn't. She spent the entire weekend anxious. The project was the relaunch of ANZ's internet banking. She said yes. That habit of saying yes to the things that felt too big became the thread that ran through everything that followed. When Someone Sees You Before You See Yourself. A recurring theme across Meg's career is leaders who backed her before she had backed herself. Her answer to imposter syndrome, when a senior leader told her she was offended by the very concept, reframes what self-doubt actually means: the organisation has done its due diligence. You were chosen. Get on with it. It is advice she has passed on to every person she has led since. The Day She Closed the Brand She Built. After leading a direct banking brand through the global financial crisis, Meg had to stand up in front of her team and tell them it was closing. She had not slept. She braced for questions about jobs. The first question she received was about the customers. She nearly burst into tears. Every team member was placed before she left. That moment, she says, is the clearest measure of the culture a leader actually builds. Leading Thousands Through a Pandemic, Across Three Countries, From Two States. At Telstra, Meg ran global contact centres across three countries while simultaneously sitting on the TelstraSuper board during a period of unprecedented member withdrawals, homeschooling her children in Melbourne, and sharing childcare with her partner in Sydney. She describes it as peak hat. What she took from it was clarity: that crisis strips away everything except what actually matters, and that is where people find out who they are as leaders. The Third Arc. After two decades of building inside other people's organisations, Meg is now building inside her own. She calls this her third arc, and it is not a wind-down. It is the deliberate choice to take every wicked problem, every lesson, every team she has ever led, and put it to work differently. She is learning Italian badly and relearning tennis from scratch. Both, she says, are teaching her something she keeps needing to remember: that humility is not weakness. It is the fastest way to learn. Quotes "I stood up in front of the team and told them the brand was closing. I was expecting the first question to be about jobs. Instead it was, what happens to our customers? I nearly burst into tears. That was the power of what we had built." "Say yes to something that is going to build out your kit bag, and all the more so if it is coming from someone or somewhere you trust. It is another way of feeling the fear and doing it anyway. You will create a beautiful story for yourself along the way." Reflection The kit bag is a simple idea. Every yes adds something you carry forward. Every hard season, every role that tested you, every team you had to lead through something nobody prepared you for. Meg has been packing hers for more than twenty years. Listening to this conversation, I found myself thinking about my own. What is in it. What I almost left behind. And what I am still building the courage to add. Connect with Meg Bonighton: LinkedIn This episode is brought to you by: Cell Wellness Co | Naturally Glutenfree Connect with Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee): LinkedIn | Instagram | Website

July 27, 2026Episode 7852 min

Megan Dalla-Camina on Why You Build Purpose, You Don't Find It

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not show up on a performance review. It is the exhaustion of being excellent at your job while quietly disappearing inside your own life. Megan Dalla-Camina knows that exhaustion intimately. She built an 18-year career at the highest levels of corporate leadership while doing everything else too -- and it took a phone call to her mother, sitting in a car park outside her office, for her to finally say the thing out loud. The Guest Megan Dalla-Camina spent nearly two decades inside GE, PwC, and IBM, rising to Head of Strategy for a multi-billion-dollar division before walking away to build something entirely her own. Today she is the Founder and CEO of Women Rising, a global leadership movement that has supported more than 10,000 women across 70 countries, a bestselling author, and a PhD researcher in women's spirituality and feminine wisdom. Highlights The car park moment. Megan describes the exact moment her corporate career ended -- not in a boardroom, but on a phone call to her mother from outside her office, expecting reassurance and instead hearing the truth: "Of course you can't. You have no life." Minutes later she walked into her CEO's office and said three words she had never said before: I am done. Build it, don't wait for it. Megan's reframe on purpose is one of the most useful things you will hear this year. Most of us wait to find purpose, as though it will arrive fully formed. Megan's research and her own life say otherwise -- purpose is built one breadcrumb at a time, picked up without needing to know where the path leads. The paradoxes women are asked to live inside. From the leadership paradox to the motherhood paradox, Megan unpacks the quiet, contradictory rules so many women have absorbed without ever naming them -- and why naming them is the first act of stepping outside them. Returning, not arriving. Megan's newest book, She Who Remembers, is built on a single idea: the wisdom you are looking for outside yourself was never missing. It was always there. The work is not acquiring it. The work is remembering it. A rupture is not a failure. Burnout, grief, an unraveling -- Megan reframes these not as breakdowns but as invitations. The moments that feel like falling apart are often the moments something true is finally being heard. From the Conversation "It's working externally, but it's not working internally. It's working for everybody else. Not for you." "Every no is a yes. If it's a no to this, it's creating space for it to be a yes to something else." Where This Leaves You If you have ever felt the gap between a life that looks right on paper and a life that feels true, this conversation will meet you there. Megan's invitation is not to blow anything up. It is to pick up the next breadcrumb, however small, and pay attention to where it leads. Connect with Megan Dalla-Camina: LinkedIn | Website This episode is brought to you by: Naturally Glutenfree Connect with Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee): LinkedIn | Instagram | Website

July 13, 2026Episode 771 hr 8 min

Mike Erlin on Human Capability, AI, and the Decision That Changed Everything

There is a version of every life that almost happened. The path we were on before we turned, suddenly, toward something we couldn't yet see. Most of us never talk about that fork in the road, or what it cost to walk away from the safe thing. This conversation is about exactly that moment, and what unfolds when you trust it completely. Mike Erlin is the co-founder and CEO of AbilityMap, a company built to answer a question that followed him across three countries and twenty years: why do organisations keep getting it wrong on people, and why does nobody seem able to fix it? Before any of that, he was a footballer at the University of Oregon, a stranger on a yacht club dock in San Francisco, and a young man standing at a literal crossroads in Salt Lake City. Highlights The paper route that funded a household. When Mike's parents divorced in 1975, his mother was left with two boys and no income. At nine years old, Mike was lending her money from his paper route savings — the first lesson in a belief that would define his life: there is no option but to move forward. Two worlds in one childhood. After the divorce, Mike's mother packed her sons into a Datsun station wagon and drove them to Guanajuato, Mexico, for eighteen months. He lived in a wealthy compound but crossed daily into a poorer part of town to play with friends who had dirt floors — an early, formative lesson in seeing people for who they are, not what they have. The decision at the crossroads. Mid-route delivering a boat part to Salt Lake City, Mike faced a literal fork: turn one way back to his football team at Oregon, or the other way toward an America's Cup campaign in Australia. He turned toward the unknown — and has carried the guilt of leaving his team behind for years since, even knowing it changed the entire direction of his life. The full circle nobody could have planned. Mike's America's Cup campaign brought him to Australia, where he met his wife. Decades later, he discovered that the same psychometric science used to help Australia win the Cup in 1983 had been pioneered by the man who would become his AbilityMap co-founder — a connection neither of them saw coming until it was already true. Building lean, on purpose. AbilityMap ran for four years without sending a single invoice while Mike and his co-founder tested the science. They've taken minimal outside funding, survived a fifty percent revenue drop during COVID, and twenty-one months without income — choosing to do the job right over doing it fast. Anchor Quotes "There wasn't some huge spreadsheet that I used to weigh everything. I think I just looked at it and I felt what was going to be — I tend to do this, and it's definitely not always right." "AI amplifies that which we have. If we have people who are misaligned from a capability standpoint, it's going to amplify that misalignment." What stays with me from this conversation is how rarely the biggest decisions in our lives come with certainty attached. Mike didn't have a spreadsheet at that crossroads, he had a feeling, and the willingness to live with what it cost. If you're sitting at your own fork in the road right now, I hope this conversation reminds you that clarity often comes after the turn, not before it. Connect with Mike Erlin: LinkedIn Connect with Ability Map: LinkedIn | Website Connect with Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee): LinkedIn | Instagram | Website

June 29, 2026Episode 761 hr 16 min

Jacqui Bloom: Showing Up

Most of us think reinvention happens in a single, dramatic moment. Jacqui Bloom's story proves otherwise. Hers happened in the kitchen, in hospital corridors, in a car stuck in traffic when she finally admitted she couldn't keep doing what she was doing. Across thirty years and multiple businesses, one question kept finding her: how can I help? This conversation is about what happens when you stop waiting to be ready and start answering it. Jacqui Bloom started selling shoes at a Melbourne market at eight years old and was running her family's multi-million dollar fabric business by twenty-four. She has since built and lost businesses, walked through profound personal loss, and rebuilt herself into one of the most connected investors in the Australian startup ecosystem. Today she is Head of Investment at Backable and a Non-Executive Director at NASDAQ-listed Mobilicom. Key Highlights From the market stall to the boardroom. Jacqui's entrepreneurial instincts started at eight years old, selling shoes at her local market with her cousin. By twenty, she'd turned down a graduate role at a major bank to join her parents' fabric business instead. By twenty-four, she was running it. The cost of carrying it all. At twenty-four, Bloom Fabrics went into administration. Jacqui talks candidly about what that meant for her father, the responsibility she carried as a young leader, and the perfectionism it left behind, the belief that there was no room to get things wrong. When grief became the turning point. In the space of a few years, Jacqui lost her brother-in-law to cancer and watched her mother go through the same illness while she was having her own children. She talks openly about what it cost her to keep showing up, and how that experience became the seed of The Helping Hub. Rebuilding an identity from scratch. Jacqui speaks with rare honesty about her divorce, what it meant to lose a twenty-year relationship and the version of family life she'd planned for her children, and the piece of advice from a school psychologist that changed how she carried herself through it. Backing the next generation. From founding Shepreneur to building a fund inside Startupbootcamp to her current role at Backable, Jacqui has spent the back half of her career helping founders, particularly women, get access to capital. She shares an unflinching, sometimes provocative view on what is actually holding female founders back. Two Anchor Quotes "They decided that showing up was the credential." "I couldn't ask people, can you come and wash my underwear? And that's where the idea for The Helping Hub was born." What stays with me from this conversation is how many times Jacqui's life asked her to start again, and how many times she did. Not because it was easy, but because, as she told her own son during her divorce, we always have a choice in how we meet what happens to us. That's the thread running through every chapter of her story. I hope it gives you permission to find yours. Connect with Jacqui Bloom: LinkedIn Connect with Backable: LinkedIn | Website Connect with Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee): LinkedIn | Instagram | Website

June 15, 2026Episode 7557 min

David Mann: Career Reinvention, Stewardship and Why the Path Doesn't Have to Be Linear

David Mann has never had a grand plan. What he has had is a willingness to follow the thread - to say yes to the next opportunity, trust the learning, and keep moving. From auctioneer to NSW Police Officer and court Prosecutor, to commercial lawyer, to 24 years leading billion-dollar consulting operations for Accenture across the UK, Asia Pacific and the Middle East, to CEO of Workplace Giving Australia, to now leading Tour de Cure as its CEO - David's story is one of the most compelling examples of career reinvention and non-linear leadership you will find. In this conversation, he takes us behind the decisions, the discipline, and the quiet conviction that has shaped a life built on purpose, stewardship and trusting the process. KEY HIGHLIGHTS 1. The police force was his first leadership school Before any boardroom, David Mann spent six years as an NSW Police Officer and court Prosecutor. He credits that time with teaching him the fundamentals of human behaviour - how to read a room, how to negotiate without igniting a situation, and how to understand that people do not all think the same way. He describes the best police as those who can defuse rather than escalate - a philosophy he carried directly into his leadership approach at Accenture and beyond. It is not a background most senior executives share. And it shows in how he leads. 2. He has never had a grand plan - and that was the strategy David said it plainly in this conversation: he has never had a grand plan. What drove every career decision instead was a simple filter - will this keep me learning and growing? He described his father's question that still shapes how he thinks: what is the point of working 48 weeks of the year in something you do not enjoy, just for four weeks of holiday? For anyone navigating their own non-linear career path, that question is a compass. Career reinvention, David says, is not a crisis. It is a choice. 3. Stewardship is the leadership principle he returns to again and again After 24 years at Accenture, David left deliberately - not because he had to, but because it had become routine. He recognised that a leader who has stopped being energised is a disservice to the people around them. He described stewardship as making other people successful and then getting out of their way. It is the leadership principle he applied to leaving Accenture, and the one he now applies every day at Tour de Cure. In a world that celebrates holding on, David makes a quiet case for knowing when to let go. 4. Tour de Cure - from bikes to a national cancer research force David joined the Tour de Cure board in 2014 as a volunteer, and became CEO in October 2024. When he arrived, Tour de Cure was built around one thing: riding. Bike tours were the centrepiece and the identity. Today, riding represents only about 10% of what the organisation does. Over 20,000 of its 25,000 annual participants now come through runs, walks, swims and gala events - a deliberate diversification David helped drive from the board before stepping into the CEO seat. Tour de Cure has funded over 1,300 research projects, contributed to more than 250 world-class medical breakthroughs, and currently sponsors approximately 130 PhD students. David is clear: researchers will find cures for cancer. The only thing that will stop them is lack of funding. 5. Kindness has been a thread through everything When asked where kindness had shown up across his career, David Mann did not reach for a corporate example. He talked about his parents, his friends, and the people around him who were never just in it for themselves. He describes kindness not as a soft leadership idea but as a practical force - and it is part of why he joined My Acts of Kindness alongside his work at Tour de Cure. For David, leading with kindness and leading seriously are not in tension. They are the same thing. David Mann did not set out to build an impressive career. He set out to keep learning, keep growing, and be around people who were doing the same. The titles and the scale came as a by-product of that orientation - not the other way around. What this conversation leaves you with is something quieter and more useful than career advice: the reminder that the path does not have to be linear to be right, that stewardship matters more than status, and that career reinvention is not something that happens to you. It is something you choose. Connect with David Mann: LinkedIn Tour de Cure: LinkedIn | Website My Acts of Kindness: Linkedin | Website This episode is brought to you by: Cell Wellness Co Connect with Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee): LinkedIn | Instagram | Website

June 1, 2026Episode 741 hr 1 min

Dr Kat Page: Why Fixing Work, Not People, Is the Leadership Shift We Need

Organisational psychologist Dr Kat Page has spent two decades researching workplace wellbeing and happiness at work. She is a Leadership Partner at ByMany, Adjunct Professor, and author of Good Work a book that makes the case that burnout is a design problem, not a people problem. In this episode of the Leadership Odysseys podcast, Dr Kat Page and Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee) explore what happiness actually means, how good leadership shapes the conditions people work in, and why designing better work is the most important lever any leader has. From a Goat Farm to a Life's Work Kat grew up on a 40-acre property in Benalla, Victoria, a writer from primary school age. When she landed on happiness research at Deakin University at 21, she knew immediately it was what she was meant to do. Two decades of organisational psychology research followed — and a book that needed all of it to be written properly. "I was just in my happy place, no pun intended, studying happiness." What Happiness at Work Actually Means Most people sit between a six and eight on the happiness scale regardless of what happens to them. The deeper form of happiness, flourishing comes from living in alignment with your values and feeling like your life matters. Kat's practical tip for leaders and founders: do a values card sort, rank your top three, and use them to make decisions. At any point in time, she says, there are only three values you can truly live by. "Happiness is really about having someone to love, something to do, and something to contribute towards." Why Fixing Work, Not People, Is the Answer to Burnout The central argument of Good Work is that poorly designed work not a lack of individual resilience is driving the workplace wellbeing and burnout crisis. Kat's Six Cs framework describes what good work looks like in practice: clarity, control, competence, connection, contribution, and care. Each one is a design choice. And each one, when absent, quietly depletes people who are trying to do a good job. "Work is a social determinant of mental health. Fix work, and you improve outcomes at scale." The Loneliness Nobody Talks About Kat admits she has experienced loneliness herself, despite being surrounded by people constantly. In a world of Zoom meetings, Slack messages, and back-to-back calendars, genuine human connection at work is increasingly rare. The antidote, she says drawing on researcher Zach Mercurio's work on mattering, is not more contact — it is the feeling that you matter to someone. "How rare it is to have someone say: I see you. I see how hard you have been working." The Me, We, Us Framework for Good Work Good Work is organised around three layers that every leader can act on. Me is your own energy, recovery, and non-negotiables. We is the space between people — connection, psychological safety, and how leadership is felt in the moments between conversations. Us is the organisational system: culture, work design, and the structures that either protect people or erode them. Knowing which level a problem lives at is the starting point for solving it. "Good work is not a luxury. It is a design choice and a shared responsibility." This episode of the Leadership Odysseys podcast was recorded 1 May 2025. Good Work by Dr Kat Page is available now in print and audiobook. Connect with Dr Kat Page: LinkedIn | Website ByMany: Linkedin | Website This episode is brought to you by: Naturally Glutenfree Connect with Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee): LinkedIn | Instagram | Website Mentioned in this episode: Zach Mercurio — The Power of Mattering Megan Wright — Spacious Mode Craig Hassad — Punctuating Your Day Sir Cary Cooper — Workplace wellbeing researcher and mentor Amy C. Edmondson — Harvard Business School, endorsed Good Work Life values card sort — search online for a free version

May 18, 2026Episode 7350 min

Stop managing your time. Start leading it. Mridu Parikh on intentional productivity for founders and leaders

Most leaders are good at filling their calendars. Far fewer are intentional about what goes in them. In this episode of Leadership Odysseys, Kirsty Ghahramani (Gee) sits down with Nashville-based productivity coach, speaker, and bestselling author Mridu Parikh, founder of Life Is Organized, to explore why driven, capable people still end the day feeling like they didn't do enough. Mridu shares the single question that replaces every productivity framework you have tried, why white space in your calendar is quietly deceiving you, and how to build systems that protect your focus without sacrificing the life you are building around your work. Episode Highlights The Closet Was Never the Problem Mridu began as a professional home organiser, but a pattern kept emerging. She could sort the garage and tidy the pantry, and clients would still come back overwhelmed. The real disorder was not in the spaces. It was in the calendar, the inbox, and the mental load of expectations people had never stopped to question. That shift became the foundation of everything she teaches. The physical and the organisational, she argues, operate by the same logic. If you can organise a cupboard, you can organise your priorities. You just need the right questions. The Pillow Test Mridu replaced the Eisenhower Matrix with one question asked at the start of every day: what two to three things will make me feel most successful when my head hits the pillow tonight? The phrasing is precise. It limits scope, grounds decisions in how you will feel rather than what looks urgent right now, and consistently surfaces what you have been avoiding. Those two or three things, she says, are almost always what you are procrastinating. It is also the question at the heart of her recent TEDx talk, How to Stop Feeling Like You Didn't Do Enough, which explores why we can work hard all day and still go to bed feeling like none of it mattered - and how purpose, presence, and relationships all hinge on getting honest about what we are actually working towards. The White Space Trap When we see open space between meetings, we believe we have more time than we do. Mridu calls this positivity bias, and high achievers are especially vulnerable. Her fix: schedule the work, not just the delivery. If a proposal is due Friday, Monday needs a block for the outline, Tuesday for team input, Wednesday for the draft. When you fill in those steps honestly, the calendar stops lying, and you stop overcommitting. Schedule the Distraction Willpower is not a strategy. We are wired for ease and the dopamine hit of a cleared inbox. Mridu's answer is to schedule distraction deliberately and use a timer without exception. The timer creates an external signal that breaks the pull of the scroll in a way that looking at a clock never will. She also notes that how we communicate our availability trains the people around us. Telling your group chat you will respond tonight removes the pressure, protects your focus, and costs almost nothing. Purpose Before the To-Do List When Mridu compares a client's stated priorities to their actual calendar, the gap is almost always startling. Health, strategic growth, family time. None of it on the schedule. Her point is not that people are dishonest. It is that intention without a calendar commitment stays intention. The calendar is not the last step in planning. It is the moment the plan becomes real. Mridu's work is not about optimisation for its own sake. It is about alignment between the life you say you want and the days you are actually building. Her advice for founders: protect the morning, block strategic thinking, and come to a mutual agreement with your team that internal emails and meetings don't start before 10am - so everyone can protect their highest-value hours, not just the leader. The leaders who create lasting impact, she says, are not the ones who manage their time. They are the ones who lead it. Connect with Mridu Parikh: LinkedIn Connect with Life is Organized: LinkedIn | Website This episode is brought to you by: Naturally Glutenfree Connect with Kirsty Gee: LinkedIn | Instagram | Website

May 4, 2026Episode 721 hr 14 min

Tane Hunter & Dara Simkin: What It Actually Means to Stay Human While the World Speeds Up

Leadership Podcast | Workplace Culture | Play at Work | Intelligent Optimism | Full Stack Human Book There is a question that most leaders are quietly asking but rarely say out loud: if I keep doing more, why does something still feel off? Not broken, not lazy, not wrong. Just stretched past the point where effort alone solves anything. This conversation sits right inside that tension. Two thinkers, two very different paths, and one shared conviction that the world has changed faster than the playbook we were handed, and that staying human is not a soft skill. It is the strategy. The Guests Tane Hunter grew up an outsider — a blonde-haired nerd in rural New Mexico, raised by a mathematician father and a counsellor mother, who found his footing on a mountain bike and then lost it again to a spinal injury that ended his national champion career. What followed was science, cancer research, sailing solo across the South Pacific, and eventually co-founding Future Crunch, a global platform built on intelligent optimism and the belief that the stories we tell about the world shape the world we build. Dara Simkin arrived in Australia by winning a camper van competition, fell in love with Melbourne, and built a career from the inside out: coaching, mental health workshops, a summer camp nobody came to, and then the insight that changed everything. Play is not a reward for finishing the work. It is how the work gets done well. She is the founder of Culture Hero and Australia's leading voice on play in the workplace, a late ADHD diagnosis lighting up everything she always knew about herself. Together, they wrote The Full Stack Human — a book for anyone who refuses to sacrifice their humanity for success. What We Get Into The myth of discipline and resilience Dara reframes one of leadership's most overused words. It is not that high-achievers lack discipline or resilience. It is that they are operating beyond their capacity. When you are running on empty, no amount of grit closes the gap. The real question is not how hard you push but where your energy is going and whether you are getting any of it back. What it takes to rebuild when the thing you love is taken away Tane's spinal injury did not arrive as a single moment. It arrived slowly, until he could barely walk. He talks honestly about grief, misdiagnosis, and what happens when your identity is wrapped up in something your body can no longer do. His answer was not to power through. It was to go back to his first love: science. That decision changed everything that followed. The child void, success amnesia, and the addiction to achievement Dara introduces the concept of the child void — that liminal space between achievements where high-performers feel most lost. She and Tane explore how success amnesia keeps driven people from celebrating anything before chasing the next thing, and why the messy middle is not a problem to be solved but a fertile space to be inhabited. Comprehension, they argue, is what creates compassion. Why the most dangerous leadership strategy right now is control In a world moving this fast, risk aversion is itself a risk. Tane and Dara dismantle the lie that seriousness equals success and make the case for the yes-and leader — someone who creates conditions for their people to bring their real thinking, not their polished version of it. Psychological safety is not about being nice. It is about building cultures where people can say this is not working and feel safe doing it. Play is not the reward. It is the on-ramp. The most common mistake leaders make with culture is treating play as a treat you get after the real work. Dara makes a different case entirely. Play, in its truest form — curiosity, flexibility, permission to experiment — is what expands capacity. You cannot force a frazzled nervous system to rest. But you can give it an on-ramp. Recovery and rest are not the same thing, and knowing the difference might be the most practical leadership insight in this whole conversation. Quotes From the Conversation "It's not resilience or discipline. It's capacity. When we are up to our eyeballs, we have very little capacity to navigate our lives. Where is my energy going, and am I getting it back?" — Dara Simkin "Don't treat hope as a noun or a hashtag. Treat it as a verb. Create strong pathways, your people's ability to imagine solutions. And couple it with agency — the belief that those goals can actually be obtained." — Tane Hunter A Note From Kirsty What I keep thinking about after this conversation is how much we have confused being stretched with being strong. Tane and Dara gave me a different frame: that the most human thing a leader can do right now is not grind harder, but genuinely ask where their energy is going — and whether any of it is coming back. That is not softness. That is strategy. And if you have ever crashed on a holiday because your body finally got permission to stop, this one is for you. Links & Resources Mentioned The Full Stack Human — Book Website https://www.culturehero.co/full-stack-human-book Future Crunch Tane Hunter's platform exploring the frontiers of science, technology and intelligent optimism. futurecrunch.com | LinkedIn: Future Crunch Culture Hero Dara Simkin's workplace culture and play consultancy. culturehero.co | LinkedIn: Culture Hero Connect with Dara: Linkedin Connect with Tane: LinkedIn This episode is brought to you by: Naturally Glutenfree Connect with Kirsty Gee: LinkedIn | Instagram | Website

April 20, 2026Episode 711 hr 10 min

Jeremy Senior: Building Strong Teams Through Clarity, Not Comfort

What happens when leadership is tested not in theory, but in the moments where everything is on the line? In this conversation, Jeremy Senior takes us inside the reality of leading in high-pressure, high-stakes environments. From early personal loss to navigating corporate hierarchy, retail collapse, global culture clashes, and burnout, his story is not linear. It is shaped by tension, responsibility, and the quiet decisions that define who you become as a leader. This is not a conversation about titles or outcomes. It is about clarity when others stay silent. It is about leading people through uncertainty when the system is bigger than you. And it is about what it costs to keep showing up when performance is public and pressure never switches off. Jeremy’s odyssey reveals a truth many leaders feel but rarely say. Leadership is not just about results. It is about how you hold yourself, and others, when things get hard. Key Highlights ~ Clarity is everything Across every role, culture, and company, one principle held true. If people do not understand the why, they disengage, resist, or stay silent. Leadership starts with making things clear, especially when they are uncomfortable. ~ Silence is where businesses break At Dick Smith, Jeremy saw what happens when people stop speaking up. The warning signs were there, but fear and culture suppressed them. The result was not just commercial failure, but a leadership failure in communication and trust. ~ The reality of leadership loneliness At Samsung, Jeremy experienced something many leaders never admit. Isolation. The higher you go, the fewer people you can speak to honestly. His lesson is simple. Every leader needs someone they trust. Without it, judgment suffers. ~ You cannot lead without radical candour Kindness is not about being nice. It is about being honest, with care. Avoiding hard conversations does not protect people. It limits them. The best leaders say what needs to be said and stay to help improve it. ~ Burnout does not arrive loudly It builds quietly. For Jeremy, it was only visible when everything stopped. After years of constant pressure, he found himself unable to get out of bed. Not from exhaustion, but from depletion. A reminder that recovery is not optional, it is essential. Jeremy’s story is not defined by the companies he worked for, but by how he chose to lead within them. In systems built on hierarchy, pressure, and performance, he chose clarity over politics. He chose conversation over silence. And he chose to stay human in environments that often reward the opposite. This episode is a reminder that leadership is not about having all the answers. It is about creating environments where truth can be spoken, people can grow, and clarity replaces confusion. Because in the end, the strongest leaders are not the loudest. They are the clearest. Connect with Jeremy Senior: LinkedIn Channel Axis: LinkedIn This episode is brought to you by: Naturally Glutenfree Connect with Kirsty Gee: LinkedIn | Instagram | Website