GRACE Works

Paula Jones spent twenty years in human development before a horse taught her how little of it she had lived in her body. This is a conversation about softness as strength: meeting your work, your people, and yourself with only the effort the moment actually needs. Try the cup exercise while you listen. You will feel the argument before you can explain it.

In this conversation

Paula came to horses thinking she was learning to ride, and found a mirror instead: how fearful she was, how reactive, how absent, despite all the training. Out of that came the practice she now teaches to leaders. We get into why a felt experience changes people when information cannot, why a spooked herd goes back to grazing while we run our stories for years, and the harder problem of making change stick once someone returns to an organisation that will happily digest them. Paula's answer is not motivation. It is structure and practice. You will leave with one small, physical thing to try, and a question worth sitting with: where are you using far more effort than the moment requires?

About Paula Jones

Paula Jones is co-founder, with Ellen Coomber, of The Softness Revolution, where she helps leaders, founders, and creatives trade striving for a softer, more sustainable way of working. Her path runs through more than twenty years in coaching and human development, an academic background in language and behaviour, years in Japan studying budo, and a deep apprenticeship with horses, including equine bodywork and ongoing study with master horseman Mark Rashid. She is co-writing a book, The Power of Softness.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• The Softness Revolution — softnessrevolution.com
• The Power of Softness (book and 6-week online programme) — thepowerofsoftness.com and softnessrevolution.com/book
• Contact Paula — [email protected]
• Instagram — instagram.com/softnessrevolution
• Mark Rashid, horseman and martial artist (“Softness Bootcamp” clinics)
• Happy Dog Ranch, Colorado (horse sanctuary)
• The Masterson Method (equine bodywork)
• Brené Brown — “Knowledge is rumour until it lives in the bones”

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

Most people are taught that business exists to make money. John Hibbs spent years proving the order is backwards. In this conversation, he traces the line from a Guernsey childhood and a failed personal training studio to a model where people come first and money comes last, and makes a quietly radical case that love, not fear, is the better basis for building a company.

In this conversation

John tells the story of the client who told him, to his face, that he was no good at running a business, and the two ideas that changed everything after: measure what matters, and treat business as humans helping humans. He walks through The Monergy Flow, the model he drew on his kitchen blackboard. He names the decision gap, where leaders know what is wrong and still do nothing. And through CoEfficient’s work with Mind, he shows why mental health at work is set by conditions, not by support services added at the bottom of the cliff. It ends where the best conversations do, with a question he still cannot answer.

About John Hibbs

John Hibbs is an entrepreneur, certified company director and co-founder of CoEfficient, a data platform that helps organisations measure leadership, culture and workplace mental health. He is the creator of The Monergy Flow, works alongside Mind through the Workplace Partnership, and lives in Guernsey, next to the beach.

Resources

• CoEfficient — John’s data platform (coefficient-solutions.com)
• The Monergy Flow by John Hibbs
• John Hibbs on LinkedIn 
• Mind — the mental health charity, and the Workplace Partnership originated by Guernsey Mind
• Alan Mulally — former CEO of Boeing Commercial Aeroplanes and Ford Motor Company r
• Corporate Rebels — referenced by Paul on autonomy and “square pegs in square holes”

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

Most of us treat uncertainty as something to endure — a gap to get through on the way to solid ground. Ana Bugalete has spent her adult life arguing the opposite. Raised in post-communist Romania on a single rule — stay safe — she left at 23 and never really stopped moving. This is a conversation about what she found in the space between: not a void, but fertile ground.

In this conversation

Ana traces a line from a Romanian childhood, where the only sanctioned path was a diploma and a job you held for life, to a way of living built almost entirely on trusting the next step without seeing the whole staircase. We talk about intuition as a form of intelligence rather than a party trick; about why scaling a business so often kills the essence that made it worth building; and about the costume your own success can harden into. She finishes on the question she’s genuinely sitting with: in the age of AI, what is the human edge — the part of us that can’t be codified or replaced? You’ll leave with a different relationship to not knowing.

About Ana Bugalete

Ana is a brand and culture strategist and the founder of Intooit. She helps founders find and articulate the essence of why their business exists — the work beneath the logo. Romanian by origin, she has built her life and practice across Jordan, Amsterdam, Bali and, now, the coast of Oaxaca, writing in real time about the questions she’s living through in her series The Space Between.

Resources mentioned

• Intooit — Ana’s studio (intooit.co)
• The Space Between — Ana’s essays
• Ana on LinkedIn 
• Ana on Instagram
• Ana’s Substack

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

Rich Strilowich spent more than forty years in corporate technology before retiring and writing The Corporate Sage. In this conversation, he traces the long, unplanned arc from IBM punch cards to the Trappist monks and mystic saints who eventually convinced him that his career was never separate from his spiritual development — it was the terrain on which it happened. A quiet, honest conversation about what it actually takes to stop living two lives.

Rich describes himself as a lifelong seeker of truth — someone who was always asking what was underneath the surface, long before he had language for it. What started as an introverted engineer's desire to get over his fear of public speaking became, over thirty years, a full immersion in energy healing, somatic therapy, Eastern and Western contemplative traditions, and eventually the question that became his book: Is your corporate career your spiritual path?

About Rich Strilowich

Rich Strilowich is a former IBM executive and the author of The Corporate Sage: Gracefully Integrating Spirituality for Authentic Leadership. After more than forty years in corporate technology — spanning software development, programme management, P&L leadership, and HR. He now coaches others navigating the intersection of their professional and spiritual lives. He is based in the United States.

Resources

• Website: stillpointcoach.com
• Book: The Corporate Sage — available via his website
• LinkedIn: Rich Strilowich

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

A former attorney who gave away her suits and moved into a school bus. A decade of writing grant proposals that slowly buried her own voice. A TEDx talk built on a grandfather's refusal to just answer the question. Erica Holthausen has taken a winding road to her work — and that's exactly what makes her good at it.

In this conversation, Erica helps independent consultants find what she calls their bold, insightful, galvanising idea — the perspective that makes their work genuinely irreplaceable rather than competently interchangeable. This episode traces how she got there: the New England farmer who taught her to sit with not knowing, the two years defending securities clients when she'd wanted to save the world, the jump into the Audubon Expedition Institute with everything she owned on her back. We talk about what years of persuasive writing does to your own voice, why the content treadmill is mostly a sophisticated avoidance strategy, and why AI — paradoxically — makes a genuine human point of view more valuable, not less. One of the sharper conversations we've had on this podcast about what it actually means to say something

About Erica Holthausen Erica Holthausen is the founder of Catchline Communications. She works with independent consultants to help them articulate the one perspective that makes them irreplaceable — and then build a body of writing that actually serves their business. Before any of that, she was an attorney, an environmental studies student living on a school bus, and a grant writer. She gave a TEDx talk on the power of not knowing.

Resources mentioned:

• Catchline Communications
• Erica on LinkedIn
• A Man for All Seasons — Robert Bolt (the play that sent Erica to law school)
• The Brethren — Bob Woodward (the book that almost made her a journalist instead)
• Finding the Mother Tree — Dr. Suzanne Simard

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

Jennifer Hamady found her voice before she remembered finding it. Her first word was sung. So when she lost it at music college — not through illness but through instruction — it wasn't just a professional setback. It was the loss of the oldest companion she'd ever had. This conversation follows the thread back.

In this conversation:

Jennifer and Paul explore what it means to rediscover something that was always there — in the voice, in the body, and in the self. This is a conversation about the damage that instruction can do when it

displaces intuition; about the kind of witnessing that sees things fixing can never find; and about what it might mean to arrive at your own sufficiency without needing to earn it first. Jennifer's forthcoming

fourth book argues that the hunger to be special is the very thing that keeps us from recognising we already are.

About Jennifer Hamady:

Jennifer Hamady is a voice coach, psychotherapist, and author working at the intersection of performance and psychology. Her company, Finding Your Voice, works with singers, speakers, and

professionals across industries. She is the author of three books, with a fourth currently in progress.

Resources mentioned:

• Finding Your Voice — Jennifer's work and books:

• The Art of Singing

• The Art of Singing Onstage & In The Studio

• Learning To Sing

T.S. Eliot — 'Little Gidding' from Four Quartets: 'And know the place for the first time'

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

Dr Julia Phelan has spent twenty-five years studying why learning fails — in schools, in companies, in the leadership workshops we keep running and the leadership behaviours that keep not changing. This is a conversation about the knowing-doing gap: what creates it, what sustains it, and what it would actually take to close it. Expect less comfort than you arrived with.

In this conversation:

Julia grew up in England, born in the US, the youngest sibling in an academically accomplished family who found her own way by zigging. She ended up at UCLA, doing a PhD in educational psychology, and has spent the decades since building a body of work — and a company, To Eleven — dedicated to applying learning science where it's most needed and least applied: in the organisations that spend the most on training and get the least back.

What makes this conversation distinctive is that Julia doesn't deal in abstractions. Every argument comes with an example — the zoo trip, the ice cream shop, the 16-year-old forced to watch conference etiquette videos while bagging groceries. The critique of learning styles isn't a debunking for debunking's sake: it's a redirect toward what the evidence actually supports. And her final reflection — that teaching is a discipline that doesn't get the same deference we give to medicine or engineering — is one of those observations that's easy to agree with and hard to sit comfortably with.

About Dr Julia Phelan

Dr Julia Phelan is an educational psychologist, learning scientist, and founder of To Eleven, a consultancy that applies evidence-based learning design to corporate training, leadership development, and educational technology. She holds a PhD from UCLA, where she spent over a decade as a researcher. She writes on Substack and is most easily found on LinkedIn.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• To Eleven: To Eleven website
• LinkedIn: Dr Julia Phelan on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/juliaphelan [TO VERIFY — confirm LinkedIn slug]
• Book: The Learning Gap — James Stigler & Harold Stevenson (book referenced by Julia as formative)
• Book: The Teaching Gap — James Stigler & James Hiebert (companion volume)

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

A man is given the care of a young falcon.

He has never seen a falcon before. He has only ever known pigeons.

So when he looks at this strange bird, with its long curved talons and its hooked beak and its broad, restless wings, something in him is troubled.

The bird looks wrong.

The bird looks as though no one has been caring for it properly.

He thinks for a while. Then he goes to find a pair of scissors.

He works carefully.

He is not cruel.

He is, in his own mind, helping.

He trims the long talons back.

He clips the wide wings short. He files the hooked beak down to a small, sensible point.

The bird is quiet and subdued under his hands.

When he is finished, he stands back and looks.

“There,” he says softly. “Now you look like a proper bird.”

Question: As you read the story, what do you begin to notice?

These are my retellings of the parable by Anthony de Mello, “The Royal Pigeon” from The Song of the Bird (1982).

What if the people changing the most are the ones making the least noise about it? Sue Heatherington has spent the last seven years carrying a phrase — quiet disruptor — and watching what it does to people who've never thought of themselves that way. This conversation goes beneath the phrase, into the formation that produced it, and into the question Sue is still sitting with at this stage of her life.

Sue Heatherington traces the line from a hillside farm in Kent, through a decade as an NHS chief executive, to the rewilded valley in South West Wales where she now lives and writes. We talk about being marked by difference, the limits of single-disciplinary thinking, what she means by “be more poet,” why she thinks our current lenses on work and leadership are bankrupt, and the question she's sitting with right now that has no answer yet.

Sue is the writer of Quiet Disruptors: Creating Change Without Shouting. After more than a decade as an NHS chief executive and a career that crossed health, education, and consultancy, she now lives in a forty-acre rewilded valley in South West Wales with her husband Steve. She's the host of the Be More Poet podcast and the co-founder of Waterside Voices.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Sue's personal site: https://sueheatherington.com
• Quiet Disruptors site: https://quietdisruptors.com
• Quiet Disruptors: Creating Change Without Shouting (Sue Heatherington, 2021)
• Be More Poet podcast: https://sueheatherington.com/be-more-poet/
• Waterside Voices https://watersidevoices.com/
• Bernadette Jiwa — founder of the business community Sue joined in 2018
• David Whyte, poet, is referenced as a longstanding influence
• Iain McGilchrist — The Master and His Emissary; The Matter with Things
• Ram Dass — referenced for “walking your mother home”

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.