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.

What They Don't Train You For

This is a conversation about the gap between how we manage people and how we actually care for them. Richard Andrews has spent decades in recruitment and coaching — and this is not an episode about talent pipelines or competency frameworks. It is about what happens when someone treats you like a person. And why that turns out to be the most effective thing of all.

Richard brings a perspective shaped by thirty years at the uncomfortable intersection of business incentives and human welfare. He has watched recruitment reduce people to CVs, seen high-performing leaders destroy their teams with unchecked anger, and coached executives through the slow discovery that self-compassion is not a weakness — it is a working condition.

He also raises a question that stopped me short: we train people extensively for their careers. We give them almost nothing for retirement. For a third of their lives, they are on their own. In this conversation, we explore what changes when organisations — and coaches — decide to take that seriously.

ABOUT RICHARD ANDREWS

Richard Andrews is a coach and outplacement specialist with three decades of experience in recruitment and career transition. He has worked with individuals at every level — from executives facing redundancy to young professionals navigating their first roles — with a particular focus on the behavioural patterns that create lasting change. He is based in the UK and can be reached at [email protected]. He also writes on Substack.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Viktor Frankl — Man's Search for Meaning (the 'space between stimulus and response')
• Patrick Lencioni — The Advantage (humble, hungry, smart)
• Ethan Cross — Chatter (4,000 words per minute of self-talk)
• Brené Brown — self-compassion and 'you can't love anybody more than you love yourself'
• Jonathan Haidt — The Anxious Generation (social media and young people)
• Simon Sinek — Leaders Eat Last (the leader who speaks last)
• Richard's Substack
• Contact [email protected]

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.

There is a kind of voice that doesn’t just speak, it holds.

In this episode of GRACEWorks, Paul Crick is joined by award-winning British voice artist and storyteller Sara Starling for a spacious, reflective conversation about voice, silence, and grace as lived experience.

Sara traces her journey from early childhood encounters with sound, through her formative years as a BBC sound engineer and announcer, to building an international voiceover career and, more recently, creating Bubbling Toad Stories — a storytelling project born from a dream, friendship, and a deep desire to bring light and safety into a heavy world.

Together, Paul and Sara explore:

• The emotional labour of voice and why silence matters
• How stories become “medicine” when we meet them at the right time
• The difference between performance and presence
• Creativity as an act of listening rather than pushing
• Grace as acceptance, embodiment, and inhabiting the moment fully

This is a conversation about attention, imagination, and what it means to become more fully yourself, without force.

• Voice as an embodied, emotional instrument
• Silence as craft and emotional intelligence
• Storytelling as service and connection
• Grace as acceptance, letting go, and presence

Sara Starling is an award-winning British voice artist whose work spans television, radio, animation, commercial and corporate narration for global brands. She is also the creator and narrator of Bubbling Toad Stories, a magical audio storytelling world for children and families.

🔗 Voiceover work: https://sarastarling.co.uk

🔗 Bubbling Toad Stories: https://sarastarling.co.uk/bubbling-toad-stories/

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/britishfemalevoiceover/

🎙️ Leave Paul a voice message for the GRACEWorks Podcast

Share a question, reflection, or story. Your message may appear in a future episode.

👉 Speak your message here:

https://www.speakpipe.com/GraceWorksPodcast

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.

In this episode of the GRACEWorks Podcast, Paul Crick is joined by leadership coach Alice Bea Crozier for a deeply grounded conversation about leadership, presence, and what Alice calls the spirituality of business.

Together, they explore how high-achieving leaders can integrate ambition with awareness — without abandoning performance, rigour, or commercial reality. Alice shares her own journey from fast-paced corporate life to a more integrated leadership approach that honours both drive and depth.

This is a practical, secular conversation about nervous system awareness, values-led leadership, and why grace is less about softness — and more about presence under pressure.

• What “the spirituality of leadership” really means (and what it doesn’t)
• Integrating ambition and awareness without rejecting success
• Why high performers struggle when pace suddenly slows
• Leadership under stress: fight, flight, freeze and reset
• Grace as presence, patience, and a learnable leadership skill
• Values-led decision making in real organisational contexts
• Why self-development isn’t a tick-box exercise
• Small, practical practices that create real change over time

Alice Bea Crozier is a leadership coach working at the intersection of performance, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness. She supports leaders and teams to integrate ambition with alignment helping them lead with clarity, presence, and humanity, even under pressure.

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alicebea-crozier
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imalicebea

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.

What happens when effort gives way to presence?

In this episode of the GRACEWorks Podcast, Paul Crick is joined by Jayne Storey, performance practice specialist, author, and founder of Chi Performance, for a deep, reflective conversation on grace, embodiment, and the limits of striving.

Drawing on nearly four decades of Zen meditation, Tai Chi, martial arts, and applied performance practice, Jayne explores why many high performers struggle precisely because they are trying too hard — and how the body, when trusted, knows how to move us back into coherence, flow, and quiet confidence. This is a conversation about performance not as force, but as alignment; not as control, but as receptivity.

• Why trying harder often undermines performance
• The difference between striving and sincere aspiration
• What the body knows before the mind does
• Grounding, hara/dantien, and embodied awareness
• Grace as something received, not achieved
• Why silence and inner quietude are essential to creativity and leadership
• The limits of mindset-only approaches to performance
• Awe, wonder, and the deeper layers of “flow”
• What sports, music, and leadership reveal about human potential

Jayne Storey is a UK-based performance practice specialist whose work integrates Eastern contemplative disciplines with modern performance demands. She has worked with golfers, swimmers, tennis players, musicians, and business leaders to help them access more natural, embodied states of excellence.

She is the author of:

• The Athlete’s Ascent
• Breathe Golf
• Connected Golf

• Jayne Storey (Speaker & Author): 🔗 https://jaynestorey.com
• Chi Performance (Coaching & Practice): 🔗 https://chipractice.com
• Jayne Storey on LinkedIn: 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayne-storey-6a0b3519/

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.

What if growth mindset wasn’t about doing more—but about where you’re standing when you act?

In this episode of the GRACEWorks Podcast, Paul Crick is joined by Leigh Ashton, a sales and leadership coach whose work bridges growth mindset, mindfulness, embodiment, and grace. Together, they explore how presence changes not only performance at work, but the way we live our lives.

Leigh shares how mindset work inevitably spills beyond the workplace—shaping how we relate to failure, ambition, boundaries, creativity, and rest. Drawing on decades of experience in sales leadership, NLP, and embodied practice, she offers a grounded, practical view of mindfulness that even the most hardened “alpha hustlers” can relate to.

This is a conversation about slowing down without losing edge—and about how grace emerges when head, heart, and gut begin to work together.

• Why a growth mindset is not a technique, but a place you operate from
• The deep overlap between growth mindset, mindfulness, and presence
• How fear of failure quietly limits both work and life ambitions
• “Emptying out” as a leadership practice: creating space to truly listen
• Why relentless hustle creates chaos—and undermines decision-making
• Practical, micro-practices for grounding in high-pressure environments
• Setting boundaries as an act of leadership, not rebellion
• Grace as openness, receptivity, and intention—not perfection

About Leigh

Leigh Ashton works with sales professionals and leaders to develop growth mindset, presence, and psychologically grounded leadership. Her work integrates mindset principles, NLP, embodiment, and real-world leadership experience—always with an emphasis on practical application rather than theory.

Find Leigh:

🔗 LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/leighashton1/

🔗 https://www.sales-consultancy.com/

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.

In this wide-ranging and deeply human conversation, Paul Crick is joined by Patrick Boylan—musician, educator, and co-founder of MuseFlow—to explore why so many talented people become “recovering classical musicians,” and what it takes to reclaim creativity, flow, and joy.

Together they unpack the hidden costs of perfectionism in classical pedagogy, why learning by rote often fails to compound real skill, and how failure—when designed into the process—is not a bug but the engine of mastery.

From music and martial arts to leadership, consulting culture, and embodied learning, this episode explores how we learn best when we feel safe enough to experiment, imperfect enough to grow, and grounded enough to stay present.

This is a conversation about music but also about leadership, identity, and what it means to become fully human again through practice.

Key Themes

• Why perfectionism undermines creativity and learning
• The difference between repetition and the right reps
• Flow state as a bridge between pressure and presence
• Learning through failure, iteration, and just-in-time practice
• Music as meditation, embodiment, and human connection
• What leadership can learn from musicians, athletes, and artists

About the Guest

Patrick Boylan is a professional musician and educator based in Los Angeles, performing regularly as an accompanist, jazz pianist, and piano-bar artist. He is the co-founder of MuseFlow, a music-learning platform designed to invert traditional pedagogy by putting sight-reading, flow, and learning through doing first.

Links

• MuseFlow: https://www.museflow.ai
• MuseFlow Blog & Research: https://www.museflow.ai/blog

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.