Flourishing Edge Podcast with Ashish Kothari

The education benefit most companies already offer, tuition reimbursement, quietly works for the people who need it least and shuts out the frontline workers who need it most. Bijal Shah, CEO of Guild, has a warning for every leader: the benefit you already pay for may be failing the very people it was meant to help.

Guild helps America’s largest employers, including Walgreens, Chipotle and Disney, upskill, reskill and redeploy their workers. In this conversation with host Ashish Kothari, you’ll discover why tuition reimbursement favors workers who could already afford school, how one health system saved $100 million by building pathways into nursing, why the only answer to some talent shortages is to build the people you cannot hire, and why the smartest move before AI and automation resize your workforce is to reskill your people first.

What You Will Learn:

1. Why tuition reimbursement, offered by ~90% of employers, "discriminates against those who probably need it the most," and the win-win-win model that removes the up-front cost
2. How to design an education benefit backward from your business problem and talent strategy, whether you offer five targeted programs or five hundred
3. How one health system raised nurse retention, cut contract labor and saved $100 million by building visible pathways into nursing
4. Why aggregating demand across employers lets colleges build programs that would otherwise never exist, from pharmacy tech to pharmacist
5. How to reskill people before you resize your workforce, so that layoffs in the age of AI come with "a parachute" instead of a push

Episode Chapters:

• 02:16 Bijal explains why she joined Guild. Her mom lost her data-entry job to automation, her dad lost his job three times, and Penn changed the course of her own life.
• 10:15 She explains why tuition reimbursement fails most workers, since they have to pay up front and wait to be repaid. She then describes Guild's "win-win-win" model, where employees pay nothing out of pocket.
• 16:17 The healthcare case study. A program built around nursing pathways improved nurse retention, cut contract-labor costs and saved one employer $100 million.
• 23:01 Two learner stories. A single mom finished her degree and was promoted to VP three weeks later, and a healthcare worker used a certificate to become a better-paid medical assistant in cardiology.
• 29:12 Bijal connects her mom's job loss to today's wave of AI and automation. She argues employers should build skills before workers leave, even if they're downsizing.
• 32:59 Ashish asks for three takeaways for leaders. Bijal's answers are to define what high performance means, show it rather than tell it, and invest in your people.

Resources:

Connect with the Guest

LinkedIn: Bijal Shah

Website: Guild

Connect with the Host

LinkedIn: Ashish Kothari

Website: Happiness Squad

Book: Hardwired For Happiness

YouTube: Happiness Squad Channel

TEDx: How to make flourishing your competitive edge

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You can hire A-players, coach them and pay them well, and still end up with a team that underperforms. Dr. Bobbi Wegner, Harvard lecturer and health psychologist speaks with Ashish Kothari and explains why team dynamics live in the space between people, why agreement is not alignment, and how AI can make you faster while quietly leaving your team behind.

You'll leave with one zero-to-ten question that shows how connected your team really is, and what to do about the number. For leaders, managers and HR teams who want team cohesion, psychological safety and retention to be more than a hope.

What You Will Learn:

1. Why a team of A-players can still underperform, and why team intelligence is not the sum of individual intelligence
2. How to read team cohesion as two dimensions, connection and alignment, and what each imbalance looks like on a real team
3. Why agreement is not alignment, and how groupthink signals low psychological safety at work
4. How to work in "the space between": noticing whether a tense moment belongs to you, the other person, or the intersection, and talking about it
5. How to use AI for speed without leaving your team behind

Episode Chapters:

• 01:35 Why even talented, well-resourced teams can underperform when the relationships between people aren’t working.
• 03:48 The difference between connection and alignment, including how teams can have one without the other.
• 06:30 Early warning signs of low cohesion, from groupthink to retention and engagement issues.
• 17:45 Practical habits teams can use to build connection, starting with a quick weekly high or low check-in.
• 23:04 How AI can boost individual speed while unintentionally making teammates feel excluded or less invested.
• 34:25 How Bobbi’s team-intelligence approach assesses team health and turns insights into coaching and stronger performance.

Resources:

Connect with the Guest

LinkedIn: Bobbi Wegner

Connect with the Host

LinkedIn: Ashish Kothari

Website: Happiness Squad

Book: Hardwired For Happiness

YouTube: Happiness Squad Channel

TEDx: How to make flourishing your competitive edge

If this conversation sparked something for you, please subscribe and leave a review, it takes 30 seconds and helps more people discover the show.

The very thing that made you successful may be the thing holding you back. Your drive, your empathy, your standards, your humility: we treat our strengths as assets, but every strength casts a shadow, and most of us can't see our own. On this episode, host Ashish Kothari talks with Thomas Droge, who has spent more than 30 years exploring what it really takes to know ourselves. He is a doctor of Chinese medicine, Chief Mindfulness Officer at TIFIN, and author of The Leader Within.

Together they explore why you can't discover your blind spots by thinking harder, how your wounds become your greatest strengths, why your brain may be editing the story of your past, and the five lived values that let you decide well when change outruns analysis. A deceptively simple question reveals the shadow you are carrying: what bothers you most in someone else, and how are you like that?

What You Will Learn:

1. You cannot know yourself alone.Blind spots show up in relationships, not reflection. Ask one person who admires you and one who finds you difficult what they notice when you are under pressure.
2. Run the shadow test.What annoys you most in others, and how are you like that? The trait that triggers you is usually the shadow of your brightest strength.
3. Go to your strengths to find your wounds.Ask of your signature strength: what made me need to be this good? Awareness does not remove the wound; it stops it running you.
4. Turn your values into precepts.Pick five. Six times a day for three months, mark whether you are in or out of alignment. Values that are not lived when it is hard are just words.

Episode Chapters:

• 00:00The core premise: the strengths that make us successful can also become the blind spots that hold us back.
• 01:42Thomas shares how giving his father’s eulogy led him to question who he was and what kind of impact he wanted to have.
• 09:38A solo experience in nature reveals how memory can foreground pain while obscuring love, joy, and care from the same period of life.
• 18:08The conversation turns to “shadows”: how strengths, wounds, and deeply held values can all create blind spots in leadership.
• 25:42Ashish reflects on perfectionism as a wound-driven strength—and the pressure it can put on the people around him.
• 41:45A guided breathing practice for settling the nervous system and returning to the present moment.
• 46:05Three practical takeaways: use breathing practice, spend reflective time in nature, and prioritize physical connection with others.

Resources:

Connect with the Guest

LinkedIn: Thomas Droge

Recommended Reading:

• The Leader Within

Connect with the Host

LinkedIn: Ashish Kothari

Website: Happiness Squad

Book: Hardwired For Happiness

YouTube: Happiness Squad Channel

TEDx: How to make flourishing your competitive edge

If this conversation sparked something for you, please subscribe and leave a review, it takes 30 seconds and helps more people discover the show.

Your boss sends a two-word message, "Can we talk?", and before you've read it twice your brain has already decided: you're in trouble, you're about to be rewarded, or it's just a conversation. That split second is the whole game. In this episode, Ashish sits down with Due Quach, founder of Calm Clarity, author of Calm Clarity, and a refugee who went from inner-city Philadelphia to Harvard, Wharton and private equity, only to discover that outward success hadn't quieted the survival mode running inside her, which set her on the path to rewiring her own brain and teaching others to do the same.

Due explains why most of us, including the leaders making decisions for thousands of people, spend our days in survival mode or chasing the next reward without realizing it, and how to train the brain's default mode network so calm, clear thinking becomes your default rather than your exception. You'll learn the three settings of the brain, the body signals that tell you which one is running the show, why you should stop trying to clear your mind, and the simple rituals that turned one stressed finance team into a high-performing one.

What You Will Learn:

1. How the default mode network, the part of your brain that "never really rests," switches between Brain 1.0 (threat), Brain 2.0 (reward) and Brain 3.0 (the calm, wise Inner Sage), and why the one you practice becomes your default
2. Why the "Can we talk?" message produces three completely different stories, and the simple write-it-down exercise that lets you choose the most helpful one
3. How to stop overthinking without trying to clear your mind: watch your default mode network, name what it is doing, and talk back to it like an inner coach
4. The body signals that tell you which brain is in charge: contraction and clenching for Brain 1.0, rigidity and impatience for Brain 2.0
5. The four neural systems that make Brain 3.0 your default (attention, meta-awareness, resilience, connection) and three team rituals that turn it into a way of working

Episode Chapters:

• 00:00A quick preview of the central idea: how love, connection, and self-awareness support flourishing and better leadership.
• 02:18Due introduces the capacity to stay engaged with dysfunctional systems without letting them shape who you become.
• 10:49The conversation breaks down the three brain states—survival, craving/reward, and the wiser, more regulated state.
• 22:19A practical workplace example: how different brain states react when your boss sends a vague “Can we talk?” message.
• 27:48Due explains the core capacities that strengthen the wiser state: attention, self-awareness, resilience, and connection.
• 39:41A real-world story of a team using these practices to improve collaboration, navigate pressure, and lead more effectively.

Resources:

Connect with the Guest

LinkedIn: Due Quach

Recommended Reading:

• Calm ClarityHow to use science to rewire your brain.

Connect with the Host

LinkedIn: Ashish Kothari

Website: Happiness Squad

Book: Hardwired For Happiness

YouTube: Happiness Squad Channel

TEDx: How to make flourishing your competitive edge

If this conversation sparked something for you, please subscribe and leave a review, it takes 30 seconds and helps more people discover the show.

Every decision you make is emotional, including the ones you are sure are logical. Most leaders never notice, react, and spend the following weeks cleaning up the consequences.

Business psychologist Dr. Robin Hills, director of Ei4Change and the teacher of more than 500,000 people across 200+ countries, joins host, Ashish Kothari, and explains why AI makes emotional intelligence more valuable rather than less, why it is a power skill and not a soft one, and how the best individual performers end up leading from fear once they are promoted.

You'll learn a simpler way to name what you feel, the 10-second move that keeps a difficult conversation from going wrong, and the one question that turned a shouting manager into a leader people came to for help. For managers, executives and anyone who has ever made a "rational" decision they later regretted.

What You Will Learn:

1. Every decision is emotional. Check before you act. Ask: pleasant or unpleasant, and is this building the relationship or damaging it?
2. Emotional intelligence is a power skill, not a soft one. Hard conversations still happen. It's not the fact that you do it, it's how you do it.
3. Swap "do it my way" for "how can I help?"Ask what the best way is and what you can unblock. Shouting gets rewarded; asking gets results.
4. Practice the 10-second move. Name the emotion out loud, take a minute, and if it's still hot, decide tomorrow.
5. Give AI the logic. Keep the choices human. Values, relationships, creativity and purpose are the part of your job it can't copy.

Episode Chapters:

• 00:00Emotional intelligence isn’t about being “soft”; it’s about doing the right thing, in the right way, for the right purpose.
• 01:37Why emotional intelligence matters even more in an AI-driven world: machines can imitate empathy, but they cannot truly feel or share human experience.
• 08:11Robin defines emotional intelligence as being smart with your feelings—combining thought and emotion to make better decisions and build authentic relationships.
• 17:29How emotions quietly shape decision-making, and a simple way to notice whether a situation feels pleasant or unpleasant before reacting.
• 28:03A more effective leadership approach: empower people, ask how you can help, and remove obstacles rather than directing every move.
• 36:37A practical response for difficult conversations: name the emotion, take a pause when needed, and create space to choose a better response.

Resources:

Connect with the Guest

LinkedIn: Doctor Robin Hills

Connect with the Host

LinkedIn: Ashish Kothari

Website: Happiness Squad

Book: Hardwired For Happiness

YouTube: Happiness Squad Channel

If this conversation sparked something for you, please subscribe and leave a review, it takes 30 seconds and helps more people discover the show.

A team of leaders is not a leadership team. Most executive groups spend their meetings sharing information silo by silo, defer every decision to the person at the head of the table, and then relitigate the whole thing in one-on-ones afterwards.

Host Ashish Kothari sits down with Alexander and Janice Caillet, co-founders of Corentus and two of the most experienced team coaches in the world. They walk through the two telltale signs that your team is really a working group, the collective work products only a true team can produce, and how one executive team cut 100 meeting hours a year while finishing its strategic plan in half the time by doing it together. What the top team does echoes through every cross-functional meeting below it.

For CEOs, executive team members, and anyone tired of drowning in meetings that decide nothing.

What You Will Learn:

1. Diagnose before you fix.

If the meeting is information sharing silo by silo, and the real problem solving happens afterwards in one-on-ones, you have a working group. Name it honestly.

2. Give the team work only the team can do.

The strategic plan, succession, board prep, culture change. Move information sharing to pre-reads and reserve the room for deciding.

3. Wear both hats at once.

Walk in as a functional leader and as a member of the organization's leadership team. Compromise stops feeling like losing when you are solving for the whole organization.

4. Have a move for the standoff.

Stop and name it, hear each side's perspective and needs, then build the solution together. Even half of that lowers the temperature.

5. How you meet is the culture.

Everyone below is watching how the top team gets along. Run one experiment this week and watch what changes.

Episode Chapters:

• 02:58The clearest signs a leadership team is really just a working group: siloed updates in meetings and real decisions happening in side conversations afterward.
• 07:20The core shift to stronger teamwork: shared goals, collective work products, intentional meeting design, and clearer decision-making.
• 14:52Why every executive needs to wear two hats: representing their function while acting as a member of the enterprise team.
• 18:09The RAFT self-awareness framework: how thinking, feelings, actions, and results shape the way leaders show up.
• 20:29A practical way to move through conflict: pause, hear each perspective, uncover needs, and work toward a shared solution.
• 32:45The strategic-planning example: how one executive team reduced ineffective meeting time and completed planning in roughly half the time by doing the hard work together.

Resources:

Connect with the Guests

LinkedIn: Alexander Cailett

LinkedIn: Janice Cailett

Company website:

• Corentus

Connect with the Host

LinkedIn: Ashish Kothari

Website: Happiness Squad

Book: Hardwired For Happiness

YouTube: Happiness Squad Channel

TEDx: How to make flourishing your competitive edge

If this conversation sparked something for you, please subscribe and leave a review, it takes 30 seconds and helps more people discover the show.

Most leadership problems cannot be solved. The harder you push, the more they slip away.

Host Ashish Kothari talks with Carolyn Coughlin, co-author of Unleash Your Complexity Genius, about why people problems are complex rather than complicated. A complicated problem has an answer you find once and use again. A complex one shifts every time you touch it. Carolyn explains why your activated nervous system is the real obstacle, and how to regulate it in under a minute. You'll discover the physical warning sign that you are grasping at something you cannot hold, why 80% of good experiments should fail, and why harmony is quietly killing your team's best thinking. Ashish brings what he sees inside large transformations, where these moves either take hold or fall apart.

What You Will Learn:

1. Some problems have answers. People problems do not.

If it involves getting people to change, no plan will solve it. Start experimenting instead.

2. Your nervous system is the first lever.

One long out breath. Shoulders down. Feet on the floor.

3. Run small experiments and expect most to miss.

Three cheap, fast probes teach you more than one big plan, because you find out what is actually true.

4. Let yourself be known.

Say "I don't know" when you don't. Say "I see this differently" when you do.

Episode Chapters:

• 00:00Why people and organizations are inherently unpredictable, and why that makes leadership a complexity challenge.
• 02:51The practical distinction between complicated problems with repeatable solutions and complex problems with shifting, interconnected dynamics.
• 07:17How leaders can recognize complexity through the feeling of efforting hard without making progress.
• 10:55The importance of noticing: reading your own nervous system and widening your attention to what is happening around you.
• 16:54Using breath, movement, and time in nature to regulate an activated nervous system before trying to solve a difficult problem.
• 24:42Why leaders need an experimental mindset: small, low-risk tests that help teams learn rather than chase certainty.
• 32:20How wonder, laughter, and playfulness build trust and create the openness needed to navigate uncertainty.
• 36:46Why love and genuine positive regard at work can create the safety and connection complexity leadership requires.

Resources:

Connect with the Guest

LinkedIn: Carolyn Coughlin

Recommended Reading:

• Unleash Your Complexity GeniusGrowing Your Inner Capacity to Lead

Connect with the Host

LinkedIn: Ashish Kothari

Website: Happiness Squad

Book: Hardwired For Happiness

YouTube: Happiness Squad Channel

TEDx: How to make flourishing your competitive edge

If this conversation sparked something for you, please subscribe and leave a review, it takes 30 seconds and helps more people discover the show.

Your most disengaged employees may not have a motivation problem. They have an identity problem. They were hired for a title, and the parts of them that don't fit the title stay switched off. After 25 years as a biotech finance and strategy executive, Tony Martignetti walked out of a boardroom to help leaders reawaken the brilliance their workplaces put to sleep.

He joins Ashish Kothari to explain why so many high performers end up outwardly successful and inwardly numb, why some people are burned out while others are simply bored, and the three questions that reveal what someone is good at but never gets asked to do.

If your team is performing but not alive, start here.

What You Will Learn:

1. Look for an identity problem before a motivation problem.

When someone checks out, ask which part of them the job stopped asking for. People rarely lose their ability. They lose the chance to use it.

2. Know the difference between burned out and bored.

Burnout is too much work. Boredom is work that stopped mattering. One needs a lighter plate, the other needs a reason to care.

3. Ask three questions that reveal what someone never gets asked to do.

When did you last feel most alive? What do you do on autopilot? What's missing in your day.

4. Don't just engage people. Enrich them.

Leave people better than you found them. Tell someone what you see in them, and swap one status question for "What surprised you this week?"

Episode Chapters:

• 00:00Reconnecting with your own light as the first step to helping others do the same.
• 05:28A personal turning point: leaving a successful career to rediscover what was missing.
• 12:55Why employee disengagement is often an identity issue, not simply a motivation problem.
• 22:02The human capabilities that matter most in an AI-driven workplace: integration, meaning-making, and better questions.
• 28:33The Illumination Framework for uncovering overlooked strengths and turning them into meaningful action.
• 38:13Three practical leadership exercises to empower others, recognize overlooked strengths, and ask better questions.

Resources:

Connect with the Guest

LinkedIn: Tony Martignetti

Recommended Reading:

• Illuminating Hidden Brilliance:The Power of Multidimensional Leadership in a One-Dimensional World

Connect with the Host

LinkedIn: Ashish Kothari

Website: Happiness Squad

Book: Hardwired For Happiness

YouTube: Happiness Squad Channel

TEDx: How to make flourishing your competitive edge

If this conversation sparked something for you, please subscribe and leave a review, it takes 30 seconds and helps more people discover the show.

Fear and shame get short-term results. They also burn people out, destroy trust, and make flourishing impossible, which is why those results rarely last. Host Ashish Kothari sits down with Laura Berland and Evan Harrel, founders of the Center for Compassionate Leadership (1,200+ leaders trained across 75 countries), to unpack why compassionate leadership matters most in the age of AI, and why it is the opposite of being nice. It means setting boundaries, delivering hard feedback, and holding people accountable while protecting their dignity.

You'll hear how a single interview question quietly reshaped an entire hospital network, and why the ripple reached the receptionist at the front door. You'll get three moves any leader can make this week without waiting for permission, starting with the boundary you've been avoiding. If you lead a team and suspect command-and-control is costing you more than it delivers, this conversation is your way out.

What You Will Learn:

1. Ask what AI can elevate, not what it can replace.

Replacement thinking stagnates. Elevation thinking compounds. Before your next AI decision, ask what human capability this tool could amplify.

2. Compassion is not niceness.

Nice avoids the hard conversation because it wants to be liked. Compassion speaks truth with dignity: "It's not okay for you to do this, and I believe you can do better, and I will help you do better."

3. Regulate before you deliver hard feedback.

Feedback given from anger arrives with a closed heart and a verdict already reached. Ground yourself first, then lead with curiosity about what's missing.

4. One small move in a role, routine, or network. Culture follows.

A hospital shifted its entire culture with a single interview question. Steal the meeting prompt: "Tell me one way you can be supported or challenged this week."

5. Go first. The ripple travels further than you think.

Compassionate acts move at least three degrees of contact. Set one boundary this week with kindness, or reach out to one person for no reason other than connection.

Episode Chapters:

• 00:00Opening framing on AI, workplace humanity, and the risk of treating people as expendable.
• 05:20Why leaders need to recognize interdependence rather than rely on individualism and control.
• 09:07Compassion versus “being nice”: accountability, hard feedback, and dignity can coexist.
• 18:19A hospital leader’s small hiring change that helped shift a culture toward compassion.
• 27:38The story of a middle manager building grassroots support during organizational burnout and resistance.
• 45:08Three practical actions leaders can take immediately: invite support, set a kind boundary, and build a new human connection.

Resources:

Connect with the Guests

LinkedIn: Laura Berland

LinkedIn: Evan Harrel

Website: Center For Compassionate Leadership

Connect with the Host

LinkedIn: Ashish Kothari

Website: Happiness Squad

Book: Hardwired For Happiness

YouTube: Happiness Squad Channel

TEDx: How to make flourishing your competitive edge

If this conversation sparked something for you, please subscribe and leave a review, it takes 30 seconds and helps more people discover the show.

Most leaders treat fear as the thing blocking them. Amy Elizabeth Fox, CEO of Mobius Executive Leadership and Nicholas Janni, both co-authors of Leading in Chaos, argue the opposite: you block fear, and that blocking is quietly costing you presence, judgment, and your team's best thinking.

Along with host Ashish Kothari, you'll discover why emotional intelligence in leadership starts in the body, the practices that ground you when everything is unpredictable, and why the times are urgent enough that we must slow down. For leaders and executives who are done white-knuckling through chaos and ready to lead from somewhere deeper.

What You Will Learn:

1. Fear isn't the block. You are. "Fear doesn't block me. The problem is I block fear." Let the wave move through you before the hard conversation. What's on the other side is presence, not paralysis.

2. Get in your body before you decide. Soften the out-breath. Feel your feet, feel your chair. Thirty seconds changes your brainwave state, and you can do it mid-meeting. You can't steady a room you haven't steadied yourself in.

3. Stop performing certainty. The picture is too big for one mind. Sit with your team in "we don't know," listen until other views actually land, and watch the periphery for early signals instead of rushing to fix.

4. Slow down because the times are urgent. When you're moving fast in ten directions, you're busy but not effective. Block out time that's unplugged and unscheduled. One well-aimed move beats a dozen rushed ones.

5. Don't shrink, don't inflate. Humility isn't making yourself small. It's owning what you're actually good at while letting go of the need to control how things turn out. Try saying: "I don't know, but together we can figure it out."

Episode Chapters:

• 02:58 Healing inherited trauma is part of leadership.
• 07:27 - Sense-making must go beyond intellect.
• 12:19 - Practical ways to become more grounded.
• 18:08 - Opening the heart strengthens teams.
• 21:23 - Emotions are meant to be felt, not suppressed.
• 31:51 - Spaciousness is a leadership discipline.
• 39:01 - Humility means occupying the right space.
• 43:29 - Intuition and “field intelligence” emerge through presence.
• 49:17 - Collective healing needs both justice and inner development.

Resources:

Connect with the Guest

LinkedIn: Amy Elizabeth Fox

LinkedIn: Nicholas Janni

Recommended Reading:

• Leading in Chaos

Connect with the Host

LinkedIn: Ashish Kothari

Website: Happiness Squad

Book: Hardwired For Happiness

YouTube: Happiness Squad Channel

TEDx: How to make flourishing your competitive edge

If this conversation sparked something for you, please subscribe and leave a review, it takes 30 seconds and helps more people discover the show.