In Episode #113 of The Executive Commute, Jayson Krause is joined by Level 52 coach and facilitator Lara Koretsky for an honest exploration of resilience, adversity, and growth.

Resilience is often described as the ability to bounce back or keep pushing when life becomes difficult. Lara challenges that definition. True resilience is not about returning to who you were before adversity or ignoring the toll it has taken. It is the ability to learn, adapt, recover, and create something stronger from the experience.

Drawing from profound personal loss, family challenges, burnout, career transitions, and years of developing leaders, Lara explains why resilience is not a fixed personality trait. It is a capacity that can be strengthened.

Jayson and Lara explore the five pillars of resilience, the difference between grit and grind, why workplaces often reward the wrong behaviours, and how perseverance can become toxic when it causes people to tolerate the intolerable.

They also examine an important leadership tension: how do you challenge people to grow without rescuing them, overwhelming them, or carrying their backpack for them?

Episode timestamps:

00:00 What resilience really is

00:40 Lara's experience with adversity

01:51 Resilience is a muscle

02:23 Lessons from Lara's father

03:24 Medical assistance in dying

04:21 Creativity through grief

06:21 Lara's career journey

08:58 Feeling least resilient

10:10 Learning from rejected feedback

11:19 The kintsugi metaphor

13:35 Moving beyond "bouncing back"

15:19 Owning your role in adversity

16:35 Defining resilience

16:45 Why grinding through is not resilience

17:31 Choosing where to persist

19:30 Recovery creates growth

20:13 Myths about resilience

21:09 When organizations reward burnout

23:28 Why leaders wait until it is too late

25:22 Building resilience proactively

25:31 The five pillars of resilience

29:09 Humour versus avoidance

30:29 Stealing opportunities for growth

31:38 Do not carry someone else's backpack

34:04 Choosing hope

35:22 Choice within resilience

35:57 The downside of resilience

37:47 Can resilience prevent growth?

40:58 Toxic perseverance

42:18 Grit versus grind

43:11 Knowing when to keep going

44:24 Strategic quitting

45:22 Organizational responsibility for resilience

46:08 Expanding people's capacity

47:50 Workload and real priorities

49:03 Why recovery is essential

49:29 Resilience and stress exposure

50:58 Training adaptability

51:50 How organizations create fragility

53:37 Hiring for resilience

54:48 Where leaders should begin

56:29 The worst resilience advice

56:45 The key lesson

57:09 Writing your resilience story

59:03 Stepping into the real work

60:00 Closing reflections Follow Jayson Krause

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Voc2qOmcqGKfqy6CDiZOw

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayson-krause/

In Episode #112 of The Executive Commute, Jayson Krause is joined by experienced entrepreneur, former CEO, and TEC Canada Chair Mark Terrill for a candid conversation about transparency in leadership.

They explore why transparency is essential for building trust, particularly during difficult periods, and why employees create their own explanations when leaders fail to communicate clearly.

Mark also explains why effective transparency does not mean sharing everything. Leaders must balance openness with confidentiality, timing, focus, and empathy. When handled poorly, transparency can become oversharing, venting, or an overload of information that creates more fear than alignment.

This episode will challenge you to consider what your team needs to hear, what you may be withholding, and how more intentional communication could strengthen your leadership.

Episode timestamps:

00:00 Can a leader become more transparent? 01:13 The cost of holding back 06:43 Why transparency builds trust 09:45 Transparency versus full disclosure 11:47 Mark's leadership journey 22:14 What transparency really means 26:22 Why openness is mistaken for weakness 31:04 What breaks when transparency is missing 31:54 Leading transparently through tough times 34:04 The illusion of transparency 36:55 Becoming a more transparent leader 37:48 Mark's greatest moment of self-doubt 42:10 Spotting a lack of transparency 44:42 Advanced transparency 49:03 The dark side of transparency 52:00 Transparency versus venting 54:04 The transparency paradox 56:01 When total transparency becomes harmful 58:21 Getting transparency right 61:37 Can transparency reduce honesty? 64:09 Damaging transparency advice 65:37 Can transparent leaders fail? 66:43 The importance of pivoting quickly 68:38 Final takeaway Follow Jayson Krause YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Voc2qOmcqGKfqy6CDiZOw LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayson-krause/

A 360-degree review told Tyler Chisholm exactly what was wrong with his leadership: he filled every room, jumped to conclusions, and never let his team finish a sentence. His team had stopped contributing. They were just waiting to be told what to do.

In this episode of The Executive Commute, Jayson Krause talks with Tyler Chisholm, CEO and author of Curious as Hell, about the moment that feedback forced him to rebuild how he leads. Tyler unpacks the difference between the leader he was in the boardroom and the host he'd become on his own podcast, and how closing that gap turned curiosity from a personality trait into a daily discipline. They get into where curiosity actually helps, where it gets weaponized into control, and what it takes to build a team that feels safe enough to think out loud.

They cover:

• The feedback that forced a leadership reset
• Curiosity as a practice, not a trait: self, relational, and strategic curiosity
• How questions get weaponized to control instead of learning
• Where curiosity fails (and command and control takes over)
• A simple tool for pausing before you react
• What actually predicts whether a leader succeeds or fails

If your meetings go quiet the moment you start talking, this one's worth the full hour.

Follow Jayson Krause:

YouTube: / @jaysonkrauseleadership LinkedIn: / jayson-krause

0:00 - Introduction 0:41 - The 360 Review That Changed His Leadership 3:43 - What Changed When "Podcast Tyler" Led Meetings 6:00 - Tracking Fixed vs. Growth Mindset After Every Call 8:41 - From Playful Trait to Deliberate Practice 10:05 - Why Tyler Wrote Curious as Hell 13:21 - Writing in Flow: AI as Collaborator 15:50 - The Self Curiosity the Book Forced to the Surface 17:31 - Defining Curiosity as a Leadership Practice 19:16 - The "No Time to Be Curious" Myth 22:03 - The Latin Root of Curiosity 28:44 - Weaponizing Curiosity 29:39 - Isn't a Leader's Job to Manipulate? 37:18 - Self Curiosity Comes First 39:19 - When Curiosity Isn't the Right Tool 42:17 - The Tactical Sigh 45:08 - Would You Rather: Curious vs. Safe to Be Curious Around 46:34 - Creating the Conditions for Curiosity 49:13 - The Nuclear Button 52:06 - The Cost of Reacting Instead of Leading 53:00 - True or False: Questions and Culture Health 56:02 - The Worst Advice About Curiosity 57:31 - "Tell Me More": Curious vs. Diagnostic Questions 59:38 - How to Know Curiosity Is Missing 1:02:42 - Know When to Call a Coach 1:04:51 - The Invisible Force Behind Leadership Success 1:06:26 - Closing Thoughts

Empathy gets treated like a personality trait: you either have it or you don't. Roxana Radulescu, Level 52 coach and facilitator, argues that's wrong. It's a muscle, and most leaders are either overusing it, avoiding it, or using it to avoid the hard conversation instead of having it.

In this episode of The Executive Commute, Jayson Krause talks with Roxana about what empathy actually is (her definition: care plus trust), what it isn't (sympathy, agreement, an excuse to skip feedback), and where it goes wrong at the top of organizations. They dig into a Yale psychologist's argument that empathy fuels bias and tribalism, why holding more power tends to erode it, and whether "care first" leadership is a real strategy or just a nicer way to describe layoffs.

They cover:

- Empathy defined: care plus trust, not sympathy - The line between empathy and judgment - The case against empathy: bias, favoritism, and in-group tribalism - Why power erodes empathy (and what that means for executives) - Empathy's role in high-stakes, high-performance teams - A simple starting point for building the empathy muscle

If you've ever held back a hard conversation because you "didn't want to make it worse," or wondered whether empathy and high standards can coexist, this conversation will change how you think about both.

Follow Jayson Krause

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Voc2qOmcqGKfqy6CDiZOw LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayson-krause/

0:00 - Introduction 0:34 - How Roxana Became a Coach 1:28 - Coaching a Room Full of Experts 2:39 - What Qualifies Someone to Talk About Empathy 4:55 - Defining Empathy: Care Plus Trust 7:39 - Empathy Mapping and the Right Use of Empathy 10:07 - The Opposite of Empathy: Arrogance and Judgment 11:06 - Judgment vs. Appraisal 12:25 - The Case Against Empathy (Paul Bloom) 13:56 - When a Leader Has Too Much Empathy 16:09 - Balancing Empathy With Getting Things Done 21:08 - Naming the Emotion in the Room 23:52 - What Matters More Than Empathy: Feedback 27:14 - What Is Self-Empathy? 28:06 - True or False: Does Promoting Empathetic Leaders Spread Empathy? 29:00 - Power and the Erosion of Empathy 31:08 - "Care First" Leadership vs. Corporate Doublespeak 32:16 - Empathy in the Face of Layoffs 35:02 - The Real Roots of the Word Empathy 36:09 - True or False: Are Women Wired to Be More Empathetic? 38:10 - True or False: Does Empathy Lead to Fairer Decisions? 41:20 - Empathy in High-Performance Environments 42:53 - Can You Have Connection Without Empathy? 45:02 - Would You Rather: Deep Empathy for Your Circle vs. Moderate Empathy for All 49:09 - The Cost of Carrying Empathy 50:40 - A Real Example: Giving Feedback With Empathy 52:16 - Empathy as a Muscle: Where to Start 54:24 - The Worst Advice About Bringing Empathy to Leadership 56:26 - Closing Thought

A 360-degree review told Tyler Chisholm exactly what was wrong with his leadership: he filled every room, jumped to conclusions, and never let his team finish a sentence. His team had stopped contributing. They were just waiting to be told what to do. In this episode of The Executive Commute, Jayson Krause talks with Tyler Chisholm, CEO and author of Curious as Hell, about the moment that feedback forced him to rebuild how he leads. Tyler unpacks the difference between the leader he was in the boardroom and the host he'd become on his own podcast, and how closing that gap turned curiosity from a personality trait into a daily discipline. They get into where curiosity actually helps, where it gets weaponized into control, and what it takes to build a team that feels safe enough to think out loud. They cover:

• The feedback that forced a leadership reset
• Curiosity as a practice, not a trait: self, relational, and strategic curiosity
• How questions get weaponized to control instead of learning
• Where curiosity fails (and command and control takes over)
• A simple tool for pausing before you react
• What actually predicts whether a leader succeeds or fails

If your meetings go quiet the moment you start talking, this one's worth the full hour. Follow Jayson Krause YouTube: / @jaysonkrauseleadership LinkedIn: / jayson-krause 0:00 - Introduction 0:41 - The 360 Review That Changed His Leadership 3:43 - What Changed When "Podcast Tyler" Led Meetings 6:00 - Tracking Fixed vs. Growth Mindset After Every Call 8:41 - From Playful Trait to Deliberate Practice 10:05 - Why Tyler Wrote Curious as Hell 13:21 - Writing in Flow: AI as Collaborator 15:50 - The Self Curiosity the Book Forced to the Surface 17:31 - Defining Curiosity as a Leadership Practice 19:16 - The "No Time to Be Curious" Myth 22:03 - The Latin Root of Curiosity 28:44 - Weaponizing Curiosity 29:39 - Isn't a Leader's Job to Manipulate? 37:18 - Self Curiosity Comes First 39:19 - When Curiosity Isn't the Right Tool 42:17 - The Tactical Sigh 45:08 - Would You Rather: Curious vs. Safe to Be Curious Around 46:34 - Creating the Conditions for Curiosity 49:13 - The Nuclear Button 52:06 - The Cost of Reacting Instead of Leading 53:00 - True or False: Questions and Culture Health 56:02 - The Worst Advice About Curiosity 57:31 - "Tell Me More": Curious vs. Diagnostic Questions 59:38 - How to Know Curiosity Is Missing 1:02:42 - Know When to Call a Coach 1:04:51 - The Invisible Force Behind Leadership Success 1:06:26 - Closing Thoughts

Empathy gets treated like a personality trait: you either have it or you don't. Roxana Radulescu, Level 52 coach and facilitator, argues that's wrong. It's a muscle, and most leaders are either overusing it, avoiding it, or using it to avoid the hard conversation instead of having it. In this episode of The Executive Commute, Jayson Krause talks with Roxana about what empathy actually is (her definition: care plus trust), what it isn't (sympathy, agreement, an excuse to skip feedback), and where it goes wrong at the top of organizations. They dig into a Yale psychologist's argument that empathy fuels bias and tribalism, why holding more power tends to erode it, and whether "care first" leadership is a real strategy or just a nicer way to describe layoffs. They cover:

• Empathy defined: care plus trust, not sympathy
• The line between empathy and judgment
• The case against empathy: bias, favoritism, and in-group tribalism
• Why power erodes empathy (and what that means for executives)
• Empathy's role in high-stakes, high-performance teams
• A simple starting point for building the empathy muscle

If you've ever held back a hard conversation because you "didn't want to make it worse," or wondered whether empathy and high standards can coexist, this conversation will change how you think about both. Follow Jayson Krause YouTube: / @jaysonkrauseleadership LinkedIn: / jayson-krause

0:00 - Introduction

0:34 - How Roxana Became a Coach

1:28 - Coaching a Room Full of Experts

2:39 - What Qualifies Someone to Talk About Empathy

4:55 - Defining Empathy: Care Plus Trust

7:39 - Empathy Mapping and the Right Use of Empathy

10:07 - The Opposite of Empathy: Arrogance and Judgment

11:06 - Judgment vs. Appraisal

12:25 - The Case Against Empathy (Paul Bloom)

13:56 - When a Leader Has Too Much Empathy

16:09 - Balancing Empathy With Getting Things Done

21:08 - Naming the Emotion in the Room

23:52 - What Matters More Than Empathy: Feedback

27:14 - What Is Self-Empathy?

28:06 - True or False: Does Promoting Empathetic Leaders Spread Empathy?

29:00 - Power and the Erosion of Empathy

31:08 - "Care First" Leadership vs. Corporate Doublespeak

32:16 - Empathy in the Face of Layoffs

35:02 - The Real Roots of the Word Empathy

36:09 - True or False: Are Women Wired to Be More Empathetic?

38:10 - True or False: Does Empathy Lead to Fairer Decisions?

41:20 - Empathy in High-Performance Environments

42:53 - Can You Have Connection Without Empathy?

45:02 - Would You Rather: Deep Empathy for Your Circle vs. Moderate Empathy for All

49:09 - The Cost of Carrying Empathy

50:40 - A Real Example: Giving Feedback With Empathy

52:16 - Empathy as a Muscle: Where to Start

54:24 - The Worst Advice About Bringing Empathy to Leadership

56:26 - Closing Thought

Welcome to The Meaningful Leader — July Edition.

This month, we're looking at the invisible forces that shape how leaders and teams actually perform: the standards we fail to define, the belonging we misunderstand, the thinking environments we create, and the warning lights we ignore.

Three of this month's sections were sparked by great conversations I had on The Executive Commute with Level 52 coach and facilitator - Jessica Heafey, Flow state advisor - Dr. Murray Heber, and author of Reality Check - Dr. Tianne Foster. Links to each full discussion are below.

https://www.level52.ca/podcast-linktree

But the thread running through all of them is simple: meaningful leadership is not built by using better words. It's built by confronting what those words actually require.

High performance. Belonging. Flow. Burnout.

We throw these terms around like their meanings are obvious. They're not. And when leaders don't define them clearly, teams are left guessing, pretending, protecting, or quietly drifting.

Let's get into it.

Most leaders think burnout comes from too much work. So they respond with wellness programs, lighter workloads, and lunch hour yoga. Then nothing changes.

In this episode of The Executive Commute, Jayson Krause sits down with Dr. Tianne Foster, physician, burnout researcher, and author of Reality Check, to unpack what actually drives burnout and why most organizations are solving the wrong problem.

Trained across Canada, the US, and the UK, Dr. Foster became obsessed with burnout after a senior physician told her entire class to get out of medicine while they still could. Her conclusion: burnout isn't an individual weakness. It's a mismatch between people and the environment they work in, and it starts with leadership.

In this episode:

• The six workplace factors that drive burnout (workload is only one of them)
• Why nurses turn down pay raises in toxic workplaces, and what that means for retention
• How to tell the difference between burnout, depression, and a hard season
• Why treating burnout as an individual problem lets organizations off the hook
• The Yale finding that high engagement scores can be an early warning, not a win
• The petri dish question every leader should ask about their culture

If your best people are running on fumes and your wellness budget isn't moving the needle, this conversation explains what's actually happening and where to intervene.

Follow Jayson Krause

YouTube: / @jaysonkrauseleadership LinkedIn: / jayson-krause

0:00 - "Get Out While You Still Can": The Story That Started It All 3:15 - Why Trust Dr. Foster on Burnout 7:38 - The Six Workplace Factors That Drive Burnout 10:16 - Compensation, Fairness, and Why Raises Don't Fix Toxic Workplaces 13:38 - Defining Burnout (and How It Differs From Depression) 15:25 - Stress vs. Burnout: What People Get Wrong 17:28 - The Noonday Demon: Burnout as a Collapse of Meaning 19:51 - The Petri Dish: How Burnout Spreads Through Organizations 22:15 - Growth Requires Stress: The Weight Room Analogy 25:32 - Should Burnout Be a Medical Diagnosis? 28:31 - Jayson's Own Brush With Burnout 31:53 - The Superhero Persona (and Its Kryptonite) 34:53 - Why Wellness Programs Fail 37:40 - Would You Rather: $1M Wellness Budget or Fire One Leader? 39:27 - True or False: Burnout Myths (and a Yale Surprise) 44:48 - High Achievement Without Sacrifice: Know Your Values 48:13 - First Signs of Burnout and the Simplest Way Back

Belonging gets mistaken for everyone getting along. But what if a team with no conflict is the clearest sign that belonging is missing? In this episode of The Executive Commute, Jayson Krause sits down with Level 52 coach and facilitator Jessica Heafey to explore belonging, what it is, what it isn't, and the mistakes leaders make trying to create it. Drawing on a career that began in professional theatre, Jessica explains why being hired is not the same as belonging, why the difference between kind and nice matters more than most leaders realize, and why real belonging asks for discomfort rather than comfort. She and Jayson dig into the business case behind loneliness and disengagement, whether belonging has to be earned every day, what cults get structurally right and dangerously wrong, and the smallest first move any leader can make to turn things around.

Most leaders think better performance comes from working harder.

Dr. Murray Heber argues that mindset may be a much bigger factor than effort.

In this episode of The Executive Commute, Jayson Krause and Dr. Murray Heber explore the science of flow state, why high performers burn out, and how leaders can create the conditions for peak performance without relying on constant pressure.

They discuss the difference between playing to win and playing not to lose, why curiosity is one of the most powerful tools available to leaders, and how confusion can sometimes be the pattern interrupt needed to break cycles of stress, anxiety, and overthinking.

This conversation explores:

• what flow state actually is
• why grinding eventually stops working
• how leaders unintentionally block performance
• the relationship between curiosity and creativity
• why urgency can undermine innovation
• how to create the conditions for team flow

Follow Jayson Krause

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JaysonKrauseLeadership File lives here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v0QiTchc7WibsnSKcihDx2cEDBhhku5_/view?usp=drive_link