A World of Difference

What happens when you spend 18 years building a company to $5 million in revenue across 80 countries, finally sell it, and then wake up with no idea who you are without it? Fiona Macaulay knows that moment intimately, and what she built from it is changing how thousands of accomplished women think about what comes next.

In this episode, Lori Adams-Brown sits down with Fiona Macaulay, founder of The Wild Network, co-author of Aim High and Bounce Back, and creator of the Next Chapter Accelerator, to explore the real terrain of midlife reinvention: identity loss after success, the shame women carry around failure, and the practical tools that make starting over less lonely and more intentional.

What you will hear in this episode:

Why selling a thriving company felt like "perceived failure" and what that reveals about how we define success

What being "stuck" actually looks like for accomplished mid-to-senior career women, and how to tell the difference between needing a rest and needing genuine change

The three things every woman in transition needs: process, community, and a new chapter network

Why Fiona takes women on a walking retreat on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, and what movement unlocks that a boardroom simply cannot

The Leadership Fail Lab that sparked a book: what happened when successful women from across the globe started sharing their biggest failures on stage

Four types of failure (including "circumstantial failure" and "perceived failure") and how naming the right one changes your recovery

Why the biggest failure of all is the one you never attempted

About Fiona Macaulay:

Fiona Macaulay is a three-time entrepreneur, global leadership expert, and founder of The Wild Network, a community of 25,000 purpose-driven leaders across 115 countries. She is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business and co-author of Aim High and Bounce Back: A Successful Woman's Guide to Rethinking and Rising Up from Failure.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Introduction: building $5M across 80 countries, then waking up lost

0:38 - Selling Making Sense and the reality of perceived failure

3:25 - What "stuck" looks like for accomplished mid-career women

7:59 - Why walking the Camino de Santiago unlocks what workshops cannot

11:06 - Follow your fascinations: building a new chapter network

13:21 - Experimentation over planning: taking small steps toward big goals

15:57 - Why failure hits women harder: the social science behind the shame

18:00 - The Leadership Fail Lab and the origin of Aim High and Bounce Back

20:22 - Four types of failure and how to name what you are experiencing

22:46 - What successful leaders do differently with failure

24:29 - Where to find Fiona and her work

Find Fiona Macaulay at:

Website: fionamacaulay.com

The Wild Network: thewildnetwork.org

Leadership for Social Impact Forum: wildleadershipforum.org

Next Chapter Accelerator (Camino retreat, 4 spots remaining for late September 2026): nextchapteraccelerator.com

Book: Aim High and Bounce Back, available online and at your local bookstore

If this conversation stayed with you, here are two ways to go deeper:

Become a Difference Maker on Patreon: patreon.com/aworldofdifference $7/month for bonus conversations and community. $25/month to join me live every quarter.

Read the full essays and join the monthly live on Substack: loriadamsbrown.substack.com

Or support the show with a coffee: buymeacoffee.com/loriadamsbr

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What does it mean when the only HR professional in a room of 6,000 AI innovators refuses to stay silent? Anju Choudhary attended HumanX in San Francisco, looked around, and decided that was not a coincidence. It was a calling.

In this live conference conversation recorded at HumanX, Lori Adams-Brown sits down with Anju Choudhary, a seasoned Chief Human Resources Officer, to talk about what it really means to keep humans at the center of one of the most consequential shifts in how we work. Anju's message is clear: people leaders do not belong on the sidelines of the AI conversation. They belong at the head of the table.

In this episode, you'll hear:

About Anju Choudhary:

Find Anju Choudhary at:

Timestamps:

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What if the life you have been imagining could actually begin somewhere else?

At Move Abroad Con in San Diego, at the Hard Rock Hotel, Lori Adams-Brown stepped onto the conference floor to have three honest conversations with people living and breathing the conference about the expat life. Each one brought a different perspective. All three pointed to the same truth: the world is more open than most people think.

Why people from all walks of life, and all stages of life, are reconsidering where they call home

What Shasta Townsend has learned after nearly five years in Puerto Vallarta, and the one mistake she sees people make when they try to go it alone

How Mischa Mannix-Opie reframes New Zealand's location from a limitation into a genuine advantage

The surprising education opportunities opening up for people who believed that chapter of their life had closed

How to approach the expat journey as an adventure, even when the process feels overwhelming

Mischa Mannix-Opie is Director of Client Experience at Greener Pastures New Zealand, a full-service firm helping global citizens gain permanent residency through investment, lifestyle transition, and immigration support.

Shasta Townsend is a real estate and relocation expert based in Puerto Vallarta, helping individuals and families make the leap to expat life in Mexico with confidence.

Kelsey Morgan served as Events Coordinator for Move Abroad Con, helping bring together a remarkable community of explorers at every stage of the expat journey.

Move Abroad Con is produced by Expatsi, founded by CEO Jen Barnett.

Introduction

Kelsey Morgan: What Move Abroad Con Revealed About Why People Move

Shasta Townsend: The Truth About Moving to Mexico

Mischa Mannix-Opie: Reframing New Zealand as a Global Hub

Find Mischa Mannix-Opie at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mischamannix-opie/ | Greener Pastures New Zealand: www.greenerpastures.nz

Find Shasta Townsend at: https://www.instagram.com/shasta.townsend/

Learn more about Move Abroad Con and Expatsi at: https://expatsi.com/mac-tickets

Subscribe, leave a review at https://www.aworldofdifferencepodcast.com/reviews/new/, and share this episode.

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Timestamps:

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What if executive presence has nothing to do with how you look in a room and everything to do with how aware you are in your own body? Presence-based leadership coach Bradley McDevitt joins Lori Adams-Brown to explore why trust is built somatically, not just strategically, and why the discomfort you feel in a meeting might be pointing you directly toward your greatest growth.

In This Episode:

Why executive presence has shifted from gravitas to availability and agency

How trust is built through felt experience in the body, not through logic alone

What theater and embodied play can teach leaders about navigating uncertainty

Why imposter syndrome might actually be your most powerful leadership asset

How to reclaim attention and agency in the middle of a modern meaning crisis

About Bradley McDevitt:

Bradley McDevitt is the founder of Carolina Commons Coaching and a coach with the Center for Creative Leadership. He is adjunct faculty in depth psychology and creativity at the Pacifica Graduate Institute and brings more than 30 years of experience in professional theater, somatic practice, and leadership development.

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

00:46 What executive presence really means today

04:15 Why trust is built somatically, not cognitively

08:17 How theater shaped Bradley's understanding of leadership and power

13:23 Omnidirectional awareness and what it opens up for leaders

19:14 Reframing imposter syndrome as a leadership asset, not a liability

23:22 The modern meaning crisis and how leaders can respond

33:05 The non-anxious presence and what it costs a team when leaders lack it

34:42 How to connect with Bradley and Carolina Commons

For an exclusive with our Difference Makers, join Lori as she goes deeper into the conversation with Bradley McDevitt at in our Patreon exclusive here.

Find Bradley McDevitt at: carolinacommons.org

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What happens to your identity when the system that formed you was built to erase it? In this deeply personal and clear-eyed conversation, New York Times bestselling author Tia Levings returns to A World of Difference with her new book, a survivor's guide that meets you wherever you are on the road to recovery. Whether you were raised in high-control religion, are navigating the aftermath of leaving, or are simply trying to understand why you still silence yourself in rooms where it feels unsafe to speak, this episode is for you.

In This Episode:

Why personhood itself becomes the problem inside high-control religious systems, and what it costs to live there

How "quiet is good, quiet is safe" becomes a form of self-policing that follows you long after you leave

What relearning "no" looks like for someone who had consent conditioned out of them

Why recovery isn't a tidy upward arc, and the danger of skipping the transition period

The pull to cult-hop and how healing your sense of internal belonging makes you less vulnerable to manipulation

The moment Tia first knew, truly knew, that she belonged to herself

About Tia Levings:

Tia Levings is the New York Times bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife and her new book I Belong to Me: A Survivor's Guide to Recovery and Hope After Religious Trauma. Her work decodes the fundamentalist influences in news and culture, and has appeared in Teen Vogue, Salon, Newsweek, and the Huffington Post. She appeared in the hit Amazon docu-series Shiny Happy People and is based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Timestamps:

00:00 — Introduction & Cold Open

01:07 — How Tia showed up differently writing I Belong to Me

03:22 — Living in a framework where your personhood is the problem

06:25 — "Quiet is good, quiet is safe" — two kinds of silencing

08:27 — Relearning "no" after having it conditioned out of you

11:30 — Suffer well: how doctrine functions as a control mechanism

14:20 — Die to self, the JOY acronym, and reclaiming a disappeared self

17:20 — Why leaving isn't as simple as just leaving

20:01 — What recovery actually looks like — the swamp, the crash, the transition

23:55 — Cult-hopping, fawning, and staying wary of gurus

31:23 — "I had no self" — building identity and belonging to yourself

37:49 — Outro and final reflections

Find Tia Levings at:

Pre-order I Belong to Me and get Tia's thank-you gifts

Social media: @TiaLevingsWriter (all platforms)

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What if the resistance you're seeing in your organization isn't defiance, it's information? What if the way you're talking about change is the very thing blocking it?

Episode Summary

In this episode of A World of Difference, host Lori Adams-Brown sits down with Jeff Wetherhold, founder of the Sustainable Change System and MI for Health, to unpack why 88% of organizational changes produce no lasting results, and what evidence-based leaders can do differently. Drawing on more than 20 years of experience and the robust science of motivational interviewing (MI), Jeff offers a radically practical reframe: your team isn't resistant. They're ambivalent. And that ambivalence is something you can actually work with.

What You'll Learn

Why traditional change management frameworks often fail — and what survey data reveals people actually need

How to hear the difference between 'change talk' and 'sustain talk,' and why reflecting the wrong one can derail an entire initiative

The evidence behind motivational interviewing: 2,000+ randomized control trials, 200+ meta-analyses, and applications across fields from healthcare to organizational transformation

Why resistance is a 'blanket term' that blinds leaders to actionable insight — and what to ask instead

The critical difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and why leaders who rely on extrinsic shortcuts exhaust themselves

What makes change stick: the role of practice, systems, and sustained organizational support — not just training

Guest Bio

Jeff Wetherhold is the founder of the Sustainable Change System and MI for Health, where he equips leaders and organizations with evidence-based communication skills for navigating change. He is a faculty member with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT), and a Prosci-Certified Change Practitioner, with clients including the State of Illinois, MIT, and the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Timestamps

00:00

Introduction — what if resistance is information?

02:30

Jeff's background: behavioral science, adult learning & change management

04:00

What the data says: 88% of organizational changes produce no lasting results

07:00

The 'why' problem — why leaders think they've communicated, but haven't

09:30

Cross-cultural dimensions of change communication (Erin Meyer, The Culture Map)

11:30

Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation — why shortcuts backfire

14:30

What Jeff does differently: skills + practice vs. frameworks alone

18:00

What is motivational interviewing? Origins, evidence, and applications

21:50

Reframing resistance: change talk, sustain talk, and the 19x rule

28:40

Champions for change — why volunteering someone into a title isn't enough

34:40

Real stories: one manager's shift, and a holiday table breakthrough

38:55

How to work with Jeff + Patreon preview

Check out the Patreon exclusive with Jeff on how he would advise a leader on talent strategy here.

Connect with Jeff

Website: jeffwetherhold.com

LinkedIn: Jeff Wetherhold

Sustainable Change System + MI for Health: jeffwetherhold.com

Connect with the Show

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You were trained for almost everything. Nobody trained you for this.

In this solo episode, Lori Adams-Brown draws on her extraordinary career of working in civil war zones, surviving riots targeting American citizens, leading evacuations, and navigating genuine life-or-death threats across multiple countries to name the one threat most leaders are completely unprepared for: the workplace bully.

Research tells us these individuals spend approximately 80% of their time watching, planning, and strategizing how to take down the people they perceive as threats. Not because those people did anything wrong — but because they are competent, empathetic, and influential. They charm publicly and destroy privately. And they use the same psychological tactics as hostage-takers: isolation, gaslighting, intermittent reinforcement, and the careful, strategic destruction of a target's reality.

In this episode, Lori draws on research and the insights of seven past podcast guests, including Elaine Lin Hering (Unlearning Silence), Dr. Chuck DeGroat, Minette Norman, Catherine Matisse, Dr. Shveta Miglani, Rachel Radway, and Gary Ridge, to make the case that leaders need new skills, new protocols, and a new willingness to believe the people who speak up.

In this episode:

Why workplace bullies use the same psychological tactics as hostage situations, and why organizations are structurally unprepared

The predictable bully playbook: how they charm publicly, control the narrative, and isolate targets before anyone knows what happened

Three red flags every leader needs to be able to spot, and why silence in your organization is not a green light

What real protection looks like beyond HR departments and policy documents that collapse the moment someone actually reports abuse

Lori's direct challenge to leaders, and a free framework to help you detect internal threats before you lose your best people

About Lori Adams-Brown:

Lori Adams-Brown is a Strategic Transformation Executive, founder of Brava Global Advisory, and host of A World of Difference podcast with 153,000+ downloads, 285+ episodes, and listeners across 100+ countries. She has worked across six continents in six languages and spent over two decades helping organizations build psychologically safe, high-performing, and globally minded cultures.

Timestamps:

[00:00] Cold Open — Real crisis training and what was missing from it

[03:00] The threat from within: what nobody prepared us for

[05:00] The bully playbook, charm publicly, destroy privately

[07:00] Silicon Valley offices, nonprofits, and the mission statement contradiction

[09:00] The painful irony: the strengths that made Lori effective also made her a target

[11:00] Three red flags every leader must learn to recognize

[13:30] What real organizational protection requires

[15:30] Trauma-informed leadership: believing the target

[17:00] Lori's challenge to leaders and a free resource

Free Resource:

Download the SAFE Framework at: loriadamsbrown.com/safe

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What if the blueprint for thriving in the AI era has been buried for centuries, inside the civilization that built the pyramids? Organizational psychologist Christine Mikhail joins Lori Adams-Brown live from the Transform Conference in Las Vegas to unpack one of the most urgent (and under-discussed) challenges in the modern workplace: we're racing to implement AI, but we're forgetting the humans doing the work.

In this episode, you'll discover:

Why Christine coined "compounded change" and why your workforce is carrying more layers of transformation than anyone is acknowledging

The ancient Egyptian precedent: when women held positions of finance, governance, and pharaonic leadership and what modern society lost when that changed

The critical AI adoption gap: organizations are deploying new technology without addressing the psychological and emotional responses of their people

How change resilience workshops create unexpected catharsis and build communities people didn't know they needed

How to frame AI as a tool that elevates human capability, and why that framing is the difference between adoption success and workforce anxiety

Christine Mikhail is a master's-level industrial-organizational psychologist and founder of Mikhail Consulting Group, a consultancy specializing in work design and change management. With roots tracing to ancient Egypt, she brings a uniquely global lens to how humans navigate transformation at work.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 – Welcome from the Transform Conference, Las Vegas

02:17 – Egypt, cultural identity, and a heartbreaking lesson in gender inequality

05:00 – Ancient Egypt's golden era: when women were pharaohs, financiers, and leaders

08:59 – What excites Christine about the future of work and the human-AI relationship

10:59 – The overlooked gap in AI adoption: where is the human change strategy?

13:24 – Upskilling in the AI era: we promise humans will be needed — but for what?

15:49 – "Compounded change" — why this moment feels like a tsunami, earthquake, and ripple at once

18:09 – How change resilience workshops are building community and catharsis

20:27 – AI adoption success: framing technology as "for" people, not a replacement

22:40 – Where to find Christine and Mikhail Consulting Group

Find Christine Mikhail at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-mikhail-odconsultant | Mikhail Consulting Group on LinkedIn

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What if the reason you're exhausted isn't because you're doing it wrong — but because you're doing too much? Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey (Nell3D) is here to challenge the most dangerous assumption in modern leadership: that progress always comes from piling more on.

In this episode, we unpack:

Why high-capacity, values-driven leaders are drowning in ambition — not lack of it

The Leading in 3D Framework: aligning Me, We, and World as a stable, sustainable triad — not a trade-off

What Nell learned the hard way — from frontline work in the West Bank to a head-on collision with a 10-ton truck — about the cost of doing too much

The three-step subtraction process: Stop (gather real data), Drop (minimum effort for desired results), Roll (connect to the system)

What horses can teach corporate leaders about energy conservation, minimal communication, and detecting inauthenticity

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey, known as Nell3D, is a Harvard-trained subtraction strategist, author, and speaker. Based in Montana, she blends systems thinking, equine wisdom, and two decades of global leadership development to help difference-makers lead with more impact, not more effort.

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00] Introduction — why exhausted leaders are struggling with too much, not too little

[01:26] Interview begins

[00:49] From the West Bank of Palestine to Manhattan: making a difference in different contexts

[04:42] The upstream metaphor — who's throwing babies in the river?

[07:45] The Leading in 3D Framework: aligning Me, We, and World

[11:19] Personal sacrifice, loss, and what Nell learned the hard way

[13:05] A head-on collision and the birth of systematic subtraction

[16:34] Subtraction is not minimalism — it's a systems approach

[21:41] Step 1 — Stop: the most important step most leaders skip

[25:35] For difference-makers: why helpers are the worst at helping themselves

[28:24] What horses teach us about leadership, energy, and inauthenticity

[33:53] Predator-prey dynamics in corporate environments

[36:08] Navigating bullies: energy conservation in practice

[40:25] How to find Nell and access her Substack

Join us for an exclusive episode with Nell here on Patreon.

Find Nell at: nell3d.com | Free Mini Course + 90-Day Guest Pass: nell3d.kit.com/stopdroproll

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Live from the Transform 2026 conference floor in Las Vegas, Lori sat down with Daria Maneche, founder of The Working Optimist, for a candid, neuroscience-backed conversation about what it actually takes to build human connection at work, and why the stakes for getting this right have never been higher.

Daria brings a deeply personal why to her work: after years of her own struggles and many forms of support that fell short, it was understanding the neuroscience of the brain that finally changed how she walks through the world. That shift became the foundation of the Working Optimist Mindset Method, and now she is bringing it to teams and leaders across the globe.

In this episode, you will hear:

Why high-quality connections (HQC) at work are not a "nice to have" but a core performance and retention strategy

How a raging amygdala physically blocks access to the prefrontal cortex, and why this matters for every decision your team makes under pressure

The hidden burnout accelerator: working in a remote or hybrid environment without intentional space for human connection

Why globalizing a workforce without cultural consideration is a recipe for disconnection and disengagement

What the Working Optimist Mindset Method is, and how metacognition can help individuals and teams change the way they think about thinking

Guest Bio

Daria Maneche is the founder of The Working Optimist, where she brings neuroscience-backed tools rooted in positive psychology into workplace settings to help individuals and teams connect, think more clearly, and perform with greater resilience. She is also an executive and transformational coach.

Timestamps

[00:00] — Welcome from Transform 2026, Las Vegas

[01:30] — Daria introduces the Working Optimist Mindset Method

[03:00] — What leaders can be optimistic about: EQ, connection, and the age of digital transformation

[05:30] — The HQC gap: what we are not investing in and why it matters

[07:30] — Burnout is accelerating, and disengagement is part of it

[08:30] — The amygdala, the prefrontal cortex, and why stress blocks problem-solving

[10:00] — Daria's personal why: how neuroscience changed everything for her

[12:00] — Where to find Daria and The Working Optimist

Find Daria Maneche at: workingoptimist.com | and linkedin.com/in/daria-maneche-87331418

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