One of Alessandra’s clients, a CFO who sits at the top of her field, calls the sharpest thing she does asking dumb questions. Alessandra refuses to let her keep that word.

Derrick walks into the episode holding a question of his own. He spent the afternoon pressing prompts onto cards for an event where strangers sit down and talk for no reason other than the conversation, and he opens by asking Alessandra what question she has carried since childhood and never been able to answer.

The thesis: a good question is an act of investment in another person, and the right one at the right moment can change how someone sees their own life.

In this episode:

* A CFO who calls her own gift “asking dumb questions,” and the reframe that turns it into seeing the blank spaces everyone else talks around

* Why the people who are best at asking questions are often the worst at asking them of themselves.

* Alessandra’s 3 categories of questions, from the surface ones that help you place a person, to the clarifying ones that gather data, to the ones that rearrange the furniture in someone’s mind.

* Derrick’s afternoon in a mall behind a sign that read “free water and conversations,” and the stranger who offered eight minutes and stayed forty-five.

* Questions Alessandra refuses to ask, and the lazy assumptions hiding inside them.

* Derrick’s lifelong question, and the belief underneath it that one small overlooked thing can transform a person, a company, or a life

The challenge for you: Take a beat this week with a pad or a voice recorder and answer two prompts.

* What are two questions you hate being asked?

* What are three questions you love to ask or be asked?

Notice what your answers tell you about what you value and how you want people to meet you. Then carry one of the questions you love into your next conversation and watch what it opens.

Let’s Play is a podcast for serious and not-so-serious people doing big things.

Hosted by Alessandra Wall & Derrick Yanford.

Where to find Alessandra | Where to find Derrick

Alessandra opens this episode on an endorphin high and measuring it against the low she was in that morning and the lower one the day before. The topic she brings is energy: how it swings, what swings it, and whether any of us actually get a say in the matter.

Derrick had been circling the same question through a different door all morning, thinking about frequency, vibration, and the idea that you only ever experience what you’re a vibrational match for, broadcasting whether you mean to or not.

What follows is two coaches working the same truth from opposite vocabularies, one science-grounded and skeptical, one fluent in resonance and frequency, arriving at the same place. You are not at the mercy of your energy. You have a dial, and most of us just keep turning up the volume on a channel we never actually chose.

The thesis: control is mostly an illusion, and agency is something else entirely.

In this episode:

* Alessandra on what it costs you when your sense of value rides on who says yes and who doesn’t.

* The commodity trap: On the difference between being a helper and being an authority, and why living only in the helper role quietly strips your power

* The radio dial and the three-channel TV: every channel is always broadcasting, so the only question that matters is which one you’re tuned to, and where the knob actually is

* Why Derrick threw out the word “control” entirely, and what agency gives you that control never could

* The pause as the whole game: notice, understand, then act, because insight alone feels good but doesn’t move you forward

* Alessandra’s working definition of the magic: act on what you know to be true, not on what you feel in the moment

* The science underneath the woo: heartbeats syncing within eight feet, emotions traveling on pheromones, fear as a contagion, and a nervous system that cannot distinguish a vividly imagined catastrophe from a lived one

* The dance of remembering and forgetting: why landing back in an old pattern isn’t failure, it’s proof of a preference you’d simply forgotten

Try it yourself, straight from Alessandra: Set a timer for two and a half minutes. Close your eyes and picture a genuine tragedy in full detail, who’s affected, how it feels, all of it. When it ends, name how you feel. Then stand up, shake it off, play a song. Sit back down. Two and a half minutes now picturing something wonderful in equal detail. Notice how completely your body, your energy, and what you suddenly feel capable of have shifted. Nothing in the room moved. Only the channel did.

The challenge for you:

Where in your life do you have agency, and you’re handing it away anyway? What do your emotional states actually tell you about you? And Derrick’s challenge: just observe. Skip the deciphering, the labeling, the box-checking, and look. The thing your striving won’t let you see is usually sitting right there in the looking.

Let’s Play is a podcast for serious and not-so-serious people doing big things.

Hosted by Alessandra Wall & Derrick Yanford.

Let’s Talk:

If you’d like to continue this conversation with either Derrick or Alessandra you have 3 options:

* Share a comment below

* DM either of us

* Email Derrick

* Connect with Alessandra on LinkedIn or her website

Two coaches. One question. More honesty than either of them planned for.

In Episode 3 of Let’s Play, Derrick brings the topic, and it sounds deceptively simple until it isn’t. What turns your power switch on? What turns it off? What separates showing up at full wattage from flickering at a fraction of your actual light?

What follows is one of the most personal episodes yet. Two coaches who help others reclaim their power for a living, sitting in the honest and sometimes uncomfortable territory of where their own power dims, and what it actually takes to flip it back on.

It’s rarely what you think.

In this episode:

* The “on position”: what it feels like to be fully seated in your power, and why it tends to show up somewhere you weren’t expecting

* Artistry versus technique: why the coaches with magic often can’t name it, and why that inability is precisely the point

* The light analogy: what happens when you spend your energy trying to glow at someone else’s frequency instead of your own

* Why inviting your clients to challenge you might be the single most powerful move you can make in a session

* The choreographer’s secret: how importing steps onto someone kills the dance, while drawing out their own goods sets it free

* Alessandra’s switch-off: the belief that what comes effortlessly to others simply isn’t available to her

* Derrick’s switch-off: “I don’t know how,” and the eight-year-old version of himself standing in front of a book he was certain he couldn’t read

* The parkour girls: how breaking a movement into smaller and smaller pieces changes everything about what feels possible

* South Africa: Derrick announces he’s leaving August 31st, with live Let’s Play episodes in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and what it looks like to plan the thing before you’ve sorted the logistics

Homework, self-assigned:

Derrick: Announce the South Africa plan to his men’s group Tuesday night. Ask for help with booking. Let people serve him.

Both: Plan the thing. Set it up completely. You don’t even have to follow through on the plan, just plan it.

The question for you: Where does your light go dim, and you want it so badly that you know, when it’s on, something close to magic happens? That’s the place. Plan the thing. Start there.

Let’s Play is a podcast for serious and not-so-serious people doing big things.

Hosted by Alessandra Wall & Derrick Yanford.

Where to find Alessandra | Where to find Derrick

In Episode 2 of Let’s Play, Alessandra brings the topic, and it turns out to be a deceptively personal one. She has been looking at her own schedule and she doesn’t love what she sees. The issue has nothing to do with chaos. It has everything to do with what the schedule is communicating, something she hadn’t quite named until now.

What follows is a conversation that opens on time management and arrives somewhere else entirely, in the territory of belief, scarcity, power, and what we signal about ourselves every time we open a calendar.

The thesis: your schedule is a mirror, and most of us are not looking at it directly.

In this episode:

* Why helping someone with time issues by structuring their time is often the wrong move, and what to do instead

* The distinction between managing time and managing yourself within time

* What a packed schedule full of connection calls can actually signal about scarcity

* Feet vote: the simplest and most honest indicator of where your priorities live

* Being a time billionaire: you can only spend it, you cannot save it

* The client who is chronically late and what that pattern is costing her in terms of power

* The woman who called her boss and took the morning off for a hike, and why that was the win of the week

* Why scheduling sleep might be the most radical act of self-respect most people are not taking

* The abundance mindset that looks like abundance on the surface, and what’s underneath it

Homework, self-assigned:

Alessandra: Put sleep on the calendar. Treat rest as a scheduled priority, not an afterthought, and see what that shift feels like.

Derrick: Map out non-work hours, evenings, family time, rest, with the same intentionality as coaching sessions. Report back.

The question for you: Open your schedule right now. Go in without judgment and read it as a document. What does it tell you about what you believe about yourself, your time, and whether you think there’s enough?

Let’s Talk:

If you’d like to continue this conversation with either Derrick or Alessandra you have 3 options:

* Share a comment below

* DM either of us

* Email Derrick

* Connect with Alessandra on LinkedIn or her website

Derrick Yanford and Alessandra Wall walk into the first episode of Let’s Play with no script, no intro, and no safety net, and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Alessandra opens with a question that sounds deceptively simple: What are you holding onto that has to go? What follows is a raw excavation of two identities most high achievers never name out loud:

* The struggling good guy

* The conviction that success has to be hard to count

Derrick unpacks a pattern born in a dance career where exhaustion was the proof of commitment. Alessandra traces her own version, a quiet certainty that for her, success will always require more effort than it seems to take for everyone else.

They land on something worth writing on a post-it: ease wins over effort. Not because hard work doesn’t matter. It does. Struggling and working hard are not the same thing, and confusing them costs you more than time.

In this episode:

* Why the people doing the most inner work are often the last to see it

* The binary trap: if it’s not hard, it doesn’t count

* What the “hustle” identity costs you as a leader and coach

* What it would look like to impact 100 million people without the suffering

Before the episode ends, they assign themselves homework:

* Alessandra commits to finding one area where she’s making life harder than it needs to be and simplifying it before the next episode.

* Derrick commits to asking five more people, “Hey, would you like to give me a million dollars?” and reporting back.

The question they leave you with: What identity are you more committed to than the impact you say you want to create?