Step Wise

This season, Foster talked with Olympians, a mountaineer who guided the first blind climber to the top of Everest, a symphony conductor, CEOs, healthcare leaders, and a friend who answered an ALS diagnosis by learning to code and building an app for others living with it. So for the finale, Jana Devan turned the mic around and asked Foster the obvious question: strip away the job titles, and what do all these people have in common?

His answer is one word. Humanity.

The rest of the conversation is about what gets in the way of it. There’s the image we perform instead of the person we are. There are the filters of judgment, bias, and fear that keep us from actually seeing someone. And there’s the very un-MBA idea that failure isn’t something to avoid. It’s something to practice.

Foster tells the story of a gymnast who kept running straight into the vault. Her body was fine; her thinking wasn’t. He also tells the story of a softball player who struck out three times in the national championship game. She wrote every panicked thought on a scrap of paper, balled it up, tossed it in the trash, and then hit the double that won the title.

Jana and Foster get into:

• Why humanity is the thread connecting every Season 3 guest
•  Moving from performative to real, and how to make space for others to drop the ego
•  What Foster’s not-a-men’s-group taught him about the power of being truly seen
•  The chain from belief to behavior to performance
•  Byron Katie’s deceptively simple question for finding your own boulder: “Is it true?”
•  Why athletes get thousands of reps and executives get almost none
•  Failure as a skill, and why the best leaders need a different relationship with it
•  What has kept Foster curious through more than four decades of coaching
•  The one thing he’d tell his 1980 self

Foster also previews Season Four, which goes deeper into honoring: honoring yourself, honoring the other person, and honoring the “we” you build together. It’s also the subject of his next book, Honoring, which goes into presale in 2027.

Books mentioned: Theo of Golden by Allen Levi and Loving What Is by Byron Katie.

Follow Step Wise wherever you listen.

Hosted by Foster Mobley
Learn more about Foster at fostermobleymt.com or follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn at Foster Mobley.
www.instagram.com/fostermobley
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fostermobley/

Produced, Edited, and Promoted by Zettist

Additional support from Amber Jillard Consulting

Music for Season 3 composed and performed by Philip Aaberg. Courtesy of Sweetgrass Music.

Fifteen years ago, Foster Mobley looked at the 277,000 leadership books already in print and decided not to write number 277,001. He wrote an allegory instead: a 114-mile walk with a grizzled wise man who keeps stopping to ask better questions. Readers loved it. Some loved it so much they got genuinely angry when they learned the wise man wasn't real. Valorie Kondos Field was one of them.

So it's fitting that Miss Val, the UCLA Athletics Hall of Famer who coached her teams to seven national titles, is the one holding the questions this time. In her living room in Pacific Grove, California, she turns the tables on Foster and walks him back through Leadershit: Rethinking the True Path to Great Leading. The book. The real man behind the wise man. And what writing it actually cost and gave him.

That last part is where it gets good. For years, when people asked Foster what he believed about leadership, he quoted other people. Michael Porter says this. Tom Peters says that. Then a friend asked what he believed, and he didn't have an answer. The book was how he found one. Its loudest lesson: his own voice mattered. Even when one of his largest clients refused to buy the book because they found the title profane. Especially then.

Stick around for the moment Val retells asking Foster whether she should become an executive coach. His answer: "Probably not for you, because you're better at telling." She wasn't offended. She listened. And she's heard his voice in her head every time she's been tempted to tell instead of ask.

Foster and Val get into:

• Who the wise man actually was (a Marlboro Man look-alike who ran a sweat lodge ceremony in Seattle)
• Why fear is the most common blockage leaders carry, and where it usually starts
• How outside noise gets loud enough to make you play it safe, and why that noise can be a gift
• The Ragu theory of leadership: listening, empathy, and presence are already "in there"
• Why Foster's answer to "how do I become a better leader?" is always "go do your work"
• How his own kids taught him more about leading than his career did
• The tale of the empty house, and why leaders under pressure are so good at making stuff up
• Advocacy versus inquiry, push versus pull, and why one fired-up direct report beats a roomful of compliant ones
• Why the soul thinks at a much slower pace than the brain

Find Leadershit at fostermobley.com/store/p/leadersh-t-book
and join the email list to hear when Foster's next book, Honoring, opens for presale in 2027: fostermobley.com/sign-up

Learn more about Miss Val and her book Life Is Short, Don't Wait to Dance: officialmissval.com/book/

Follow Step Wise wherever you listen.

Hosted by Foster Mobley
Learn more about Foster at fostermobleymt.com or follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn at Foster Mobley.
www.instagram.com/fostermobley
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fostermobley/

Produced, Edited, and Promoted by Zettist

Additional support from Amber Jillard Consulting

Music for Season 3 composed and performed by Philip Aaberg. Courtesy of Sweetgrass Music.

Jennifer Webster is the CEO of DispatchHealth, which brings complex, hospital-level care into patients’ homes. Her teams walk into living rooms on some of the hardest days of people’s lives, and they still score in the high 90s on Net Promoter. She’ll tell you that has less to do with medicine than with training, logistics, and the uncomfortable discipline of getting every small thing right.

She learned that discipline the hard way. As a new CFO, distracted by a major acquisition, she watched her largest customer file for bankruptcy and erase a full year of earnings. Her reward was a standing monthly date with the company CEO for six months. She came out of it with the strongest revenue cycle function she’d ever built and a lesson she still repeats: never lose sight of the basics.

Here’s the part that surprises people. Jennifer is an off-the-charts introvert. Showing up as a big, confident presence costs her real energy, so she prepares on the front end and recovers on the back end. Foster, a fellow introvert, connects that directly to the idea at the heart of his next book, Honoring: you can’t honor others until you’ve honored yourself.

Foster and Jennifer get into:

• Why healthcare change often stalls on hurdles like codes, not capability
• Transparency, consistency, and follow-through as her playbook for turbulent times
• Staying human with a distributed workforce, from ride-alongs to skip-level coffee chats
• Her four leadership moves: build something, fix something, take the job nobody wants, bring people along
• The colleague who told her “don’t be beige,” and why it stuck
• How to ask for a mentor, and what a “no” tells you
• What shipwreck survival stories teach about having a hard day at work

Learn more about DispatchHealth here: https://www.dispatchhealth.com
Learn more about coaching at FMGleading.com

Follow Step Wise wherever you listen.

Hosted by Foster Mobley
Learn more about Foster at fostermobleymt.com or follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn at Foster Mobley.
www.instagram.com/fostermobley
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fostermobley/

Produced, Edited, and Promoted by Zettist

Additional support from Amber Jillard Consulting

Music for Season 3 composed and performed by Philip Aaberg. Courtesy of Sweetgrass Music.

Fifteen years ago, Foster Mobley tried to trademark the title of his first book, Leadershit. The trademark office said no. Too profane. Within a few years, bookshelves were full of F-bombs, and Leadershit: Rethinking the True Path to Great Leading suddenly looked downright polite.

For the book's 15th birthday, Foster didn't throw a party. He convened a panel: an Olympic gold medalist, a private equity investor, a fashion designer turned leadership academic, a Bozeman business owner, and a 23-year-old flag football coach fresh out of grad school at UCLA. All of them have read the book, several more than once, and Foster asked them to tell him what worked and what didn't. Selfishly, he admits. He's writing the next one.

They did not hold back. Three panelists landed on the same edit without comparing notes: tell the story through a woman's eyes. Eric went a step further and called the wise mentor kind of a know-it-all. Foster took it well. He also offered to co-write that version on the spot.

Jordyn Wieber, Amy Williams, Eric Larson, Tim Baldwin, and Rob Brown get into:

• The Tale of the Stream, and the imposter syndrome boulders that show up even after enormous success
•  Why The Empty House hits harder in a divided, assumption-heavy moment
•  The Old Bull, and why wisdom has more to do with experience than age
•  Why Jordyn deleted social media at the start of every season, and how the Tale of the Storm was born in a hostile arena at the University of Utah
•  Tim's hourly stopwatch beep, a tiny practice that still pulls him back to the present
•  What "the leader must go first" means when the trail disappears
•  Whether a 15-year-old book holds up against NIL, the transfer portal, five generations at work, and AI
•  What each panelist wants in Foster's next book, from embodied leadership to the responsibility to do no harm

Then the panel turns the tables and interviews Foster: what he no longer believes about leadership, why he's never seen more leaders suffering, and whether coaching leaders is as lonely as leading them.

Foster's next book, Honoring, goes into presale in 2027. Join the email list at fostermobleymt.com to hear when it's out.

Follow Step Wise wherever you listen.

Purchase your copy of Leadershit here: https://fostermobley.com/store/p/leadersh-t-book

A special thank you to Jordyn Wieber, Eric Larson, Tim Baldwin, Amy Williams, and Robert Brown for this incredible conversation.

Hosted by Foster Mobley
Learn more about Foster at fostermobleymt.com or follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn at Foster Mobley.
www.instagram.com/fostermobley
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fostermobley/

Produced, Edited, and Promoted by Zettist

Additional support from Amber Jillard Consulting

Music for Season 3 composed and performed by Philip Aaberg. Courtesy of Sweetgrass Music.

Stephen "Shed" Shedletzky is an author, keynote speaker, and leadership expert who's spent over a decade helping leaders do the one thing most get backward: creating a culture where people actually want to speak up. After serving as chief of staff to Simon Sinek, he authored Speak Up Culture: When Leaders Truly Listen, People Step Up—a practical guide to a blind spot that affects nearly every organization today. Psychological safety isn't theoretical for Shed. It's the difference between teams that merely comply and teams that truly contribute.

There's a quadrant of psychological safety that most leaders avoid entirely. It's the space where something isn't safe, but it is worth it. That's where courageous leadership lives. That's where people connect to the stakes and become willing to put themselves at risk for something they believe in. Most leaders spend all their energy trying to make everything feel safe. Shed argues that's often the mistake.

His path to this work started with his grandfather Ben, a Holocaust survivor who led a group of seven in hiding in the Polish countryside. Ben survived on his own terms, authored his own path, and that spirit of authoring your own life shaped everything Shed does now. At 25, Shed was crystal clear on step ten (a career in leadership development) but had no idea what steps three through nine were. He quit a stable job anyway. Six months in, drowning in doubt, his dad said: "Give it two years. Consider this your MBA." That leash, that belief without understanding, gave him the space to find his own way. It's the very dynamic he teaches leaders to create for their teams.

Foster and Shed get into:

•  The four-quadrant framework of psychological safety and which one matters most
• Leadership as behavior, not as a title or position
• How his grandfather's story of leading in hiding shaped his approach to modern leadership
•  The dangerous thing about copying someone else's career path (even someone you deeply admire)
•  Why vulnerability in leadership isn't a weakness—it's the foundation
•  The role of a leader's presence and what they're broadcasting nonverbally
•  What "speak up culture" actually requires from leaders
•  His podcast Shed Some Light and the Season 2 shift to guest conversations
•  His upcoming book project: his grandfather Ben's memoir

Shed is also the author of Speak Up Culture and hosts the Shed Some Light podcast. He's unvarnished in both, which is exactly why they land.

Learn more about Shed here: https://www.shedinspires.com/

Buy his book: https://www.shedinspires.com/speakupculture

Listen to Shed Some Light: https://shedinspires.substack.com/

Follow Step Wise wherever you listen.

Resources mentioned in this episode:
Speak Up Culture: When Leaders Truly Listen, People Step Up by Stephen Shedletzky: shedinspires.com
Shed Some Light Podcast (Season 2 coming with guests like Amy Edmondson): https://shedinspires.substack.com/
Leadershit: Rethinking the True Path to Great Leading by Foster Mobley: https://fostermobley.com/store/p/leadersh-t-book
The Little Liar by Mitch Albom: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112975105-the-little-liar
Amy Poehler's Good Hang podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@Good-Hang-with-Amy-Poehler

Hosted by Foster Mobley
Learn more about Foster at fostermobleymt.com or follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn at Foster Mobley.
www.instagram.com/fostermobley
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fostermobley/

Produced, Edited, and Promoted by Zettist

Additional support from Amber Jillard Consulting

Music for Season 3 composed and performed by Philip Aaberg. Courtesy of Sweetgrass Music.

David Betts carries a contradiction most leaders never reconcile: he's living with a degenerative disease that attacks speech and movement, and he spends his days building technology so people with that same disease can tell stories.

His career path makes unexpected sense once you know it. He studied theater. Taught at Carnegie Mellon. Then shifted into consulting, where he learned something that theater had already taught him: executives only make change when they believe in something emotionally. They get there through storytelling.

When ALS changed his life, it didn't redirect him. It clarified something he already knew.

David built Talk to Me Goose—an app designed to give people with neuromuscular diseases access to communication technology they could already afford. Not fancy, not proprietary. Just consumer-grade devices that work differently. But here's what shifted everything: a family in Montana.

Darren had two kids. One of them had never heard her father tell her a bedtime story in his own voice. Maybe never would. That single fact became the reason David spent his entire 2025 vacation building storytelling capabilities into an app built for survival. He realized he'd been solving for the wrong problem. Communication without a story is just transmission. Story is where humans connect.

That insight became Story Flight Labs—not a nonprofit, not a pure business, but a company structured so its revenue engine funds its mission. The company uses classical narrative structure (Aristotle's framework married to Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey) plus AI to help people become the authors of their own stories. In 90 seconds to three minutes, people create personalized narratives they might otherwise be unable to.

The applications are staggering. Behavioral health. Workplace belonging and resilience. Reducing turnover in high-churn roles. Building the kind of organizational culture where people actually want to show up.

But underneath all of that, there's something quieter. David talks about his morning ritual: standing at the top of the stairs and taking inventory of his capabilities for the day. One day, he'll need the elevator instead. Today isn't that day. Before he goes back upstairs at night, he asks himself the same question his father asked at the dinner table decades ago: "What did you learn today?"

Not what did you do? What did you learn?

He's not waiting for a breakthrough to matter. He's not deferring his life. He's not quiet about hope—he's actively involved in ALS research advocacy, aware of the clinical trials, watching the flood of funding create actual momentum. And in September, he's headed to Japan. In November, Antarctica. Because there's a world to see.

Foster and David explore why time becomes your truest teacher, why telling your own story actually builds self-efficacy and emotional resilience, how to know when you've built something worth all that effort (his answer: a picture of a father and his kids, with a caption that says "Merlin's making him a smooth talker"), and what it means to be intentional with every moment between when you come down the stairs and when you go back up.

If you lead people. If you build products. If you want to understand what separates people who create resilient organizations from people who just manage crisis, this is the conversation.

Support David at: 
https://storyflightlabs.com/
https://talktomegoose.app/
https://fablesadventures.com/

Hosted by Foster Mobley
Learn more about Foster at fostermobleymt.com or follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn at Foster Mobley.
www.instagram.com/fostermobley
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fostermobley/

Produced, Edited, and Promoted by Zettist

Additional support from Amber Jillard Consulting

Music for Season 3 composed and performed by Philip Aaberg. Courtesy of Sweetgrass Music.

David Betts spent 22 years building teams at Deloitte, scaling their public health practice from one state to 20 during a pandemic, and getting very, very good at solving other people's problems. He's the kind of leader who walks into chaos and thinks: what's actually needed here? Then he figures out how to build it.

Last year, he got a diagnosis of ALS. The progressive neurological disease that destroys motor neurons—the kind that ends stories. Most people would take time to process. David looked at what was happening and thought: nobody's going to know if I fail at this, so I might as well try.

He taught himself to code in 80 days. Built an AI voice assistant called Talk to Me Goose that's now with more than 100 families. And did it all while coming to terms with a disease that's stealing his ability to speak—the exact ability he uses to solve problems and think and connect with the world.

But here's what makes this conversation worth your time: it's not about inspiration porn or overcoming adversity. It's about what happens to your clarity when the stakes get this real. When you can't hide behind strategy anymore. When the gap between what you think is important and what actually is gets impossible to ignore.

Foster and David explore:

• Why his background in theater—not consulting, not healthcare, theater—ended up being the thing that prepared him for everything
• What he found when he went looking for solutions for people losing their ability to speak (and why the technology was so spectacularly broken)
• The specific moment fear became something that propelled him forward
• How purpose shows up when you're paying attention versus how we talk about it in TED talks and LinkedIn posts
• What intentionality actually requires of you when your body's timeline is different from everyone else's
• How he's building a company that doesn't feel like a startup, but like a mission dressed up as a business

This is a conversation about resilience that doesn't require you to be inspired. It's about clarity. About knowing what matters and having the backbone to build it even when the fear is very real and very legitimate.

Learn more about David and Story Flight Labs: storyflightlabs.com

Follow Step Wise wherever you listen.

Hosted by Foster Mobley
Learn more about Foster at fostermobleymt.com or follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn at Foster Mobley.
www.instagram.com/fostermobley
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fostermobley/

Produced, Edited, and Promoted by Zettist

Additional support from Amber Jillard Consulting

Music for Season 3 composed and performed by Philip Aaberg. Courtesy of Sweetgrass Music.

Wisdom isn't the opposite of speed. It's what comes after.

Everyone's panicking about AI. Either you're adopting it or you're getting left behind. Speed or irrelevance. That's the choice, right?

Wrong.

Foster sits down with Jana Devan to talk about what's actually happening beneath all the noise. Leaders across every industry are asking the same question: If machines can do 85% of this, what am I actually here for?

The answer lives in the last 10-15%. The wisdom part. The human judgment part. The stuff that requires understanding not just data, but what the data means for actual people.

This isn't a "robots are coming for your job" conversation. It's a "figure out what you're uniquely good at before someone else does" conversation.

CHAPTER BREAKS:

00:00 The Setup: Why speed alone is a trap 
06:00 The biopharma company that used AI to build something new
12:00 Why the consulting model broke (and what's replacing it) 
15:00 The uncomfortable question: What are YOU uniquely good at? 
20:00 Why the youngest generations are actually the wisdom generation 
24:00 The framework: It's not wisdom vs. AI. It's wisdom filtering AI.

If you lead people, sell services, or work in a field where information used to be your competitive advantage this is for you.

Hosted by Foster Mobley
Learn more about Foster at fostermobleymt.com or follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn at Foster Mobley.
www.instagram.com/fostermobley
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fostermobley/

Produced, Edited, and Promoted by Zettist

Additional support from Amber Jillard Consulting

Music for Season 3 composed and performed by Philip Aaberg. Courtesy of Sweetgrass Music.

A 38-year-old conductor asks a single question that changes everything: "What would it sound like if we didn't shy away from that high note?"

Norman Huynh, Music Director of the Bozeman Symphony, doesn't lead like most people. He asks more than he tells. He builds competence and confidence at the same time. And at an age when most leaders are just finding their footing, he's already figured out what takes most of us decades to discover.

Foster and Norman dig into why questioning matters more than answering, what presence actually requires, and why the best leaders are often the ones quiet enough to listen.

Chapters: 

00:49 - Why a conductor matters in leadership 
06:29 - The role of a musical director 
12:10 - Clarity, presence, and the ask versus tell framework 
15:07 - The phrase that changed how he leads 
19:08 - Nonverbal communication and how you know people are getting it 
23:09 - On presence, meditation, and the noise that drowns out real leadership 
24:33 - The question nobody asks but should 
29:00 - Find more from Foster

More from Norman Huynh: 
https://www.normanconductor.com/
https://www.bozemansymphony.org/ 
https://britt.org/

More from Foster: fostermobleymt.com 
Get Leadersh*t: https://fostermobley.com/store/p/leadersh-t-book

#StepWise #Leadership #Conducting #Presence #Inquiry

Hosted by Foster Mobley
Learn more about Foster at fostermobleymt.com or follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn at Foster Mobley.
www.instagram.com/fostermobley
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fostermobley/

Produced, Edited, and Promoted by Zettist

Additional support from Amber Jillard Consulting

Music for Season 3 composed and performed by Philip Aaberg. Courtesy of Sweetgrass Music.

Marycay Durrant doesn't believe in the traditional leadership playbook. She's a vibrancy architect who works with some of the world's most successful companies—Pepsi, Deloitte, PayPal, Children's Hospital Los Angeles—to help leaders discover something they've been missing the whole time: their own presence.

Her philosophy is simple. Live from love, live from joy. But getting there requires unlearning everything that got you promoted in the first place.

For over a decade, Marycay has used an unexpected teacher to help leaders see themselves clearly: horses. Not as a gimmick. As a mirror. Horses sense emotions 1,000 times more acutely than humans. They know immediately whether you're truly present or faking it. And they won't follow a pretense—no matter how impressive your title or credentials.

In this episode, Foster and Marycay talk about:

- Why authenticity isn't about oversharing, it's about honest presence

- What technical brilliance is actually hiding

- The difference between confidence and connection

- Why ramming through results breaks down over time

- What "healthy pressure" actually looks like in practice

- How your body is already communicating what your words can't hide

- The single practice that changes how leaders show up

- Why the second-string player beat the star athlete with a horse

- What female-led herds teach us about sustainable leadership

The uncomfortable truth? You can't think your way to authentic leadership. You have to feel your way there.

Learn more about Marycay here: https://marycaydurrant.com/

Hosted by Foster Mobley
Learn more about Foster at fostermobleymt.com or follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn at Foster Mobley.
www.instagram.com/fostermobley
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fostermobley/

Produced, Edited, and Promoted by Zettist

Additional support from Amber Jillard Consulting

Music for Season 3 composed and performed by Philip Aaberg. Courtesy of Sweetgrass Music.