Step Wise

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.

A kid with asthma and allergies growing up in Saint Louis is not the profile you'd guess for someone who ends up standing on the summit of Everest six times. Luis Benitez did exactly that, and along the way became the guide who led Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind climber, to the top of the world.

Luis has spent his career at the intersection of extreme adventure and public policy. He went on to serve as Colorado's first director of outdoor recreation (the first such position in the nation), and now works nationally to advance the outdoor recreation industry. His book, Higher Ground: How the Outdoor Recreation Industry Can Save the World, makes the case that getting people outside is not a nice-to-have. It's core to public health, local economies, and how we lead.

In this episode, Foster and Luis talk about:

• What it actually feels like to stand on the summit of Everest, six times over
• The physical and mental preparation behind guiding a non-sighted climber up the world's tallest mountain
• How Luis talked his way onto that expedition team in the first place
• Why climbing is one of the purest examples of teamwork available, and what it teaches about giving people room to use their strengths
• What it looks like when someone can't surrender their ego for the good of the team, on a mountain or in a boardroom
• How today's workforce, like a rope team, needs leaders who guide rather than control
• The case for why the outdoor recreation industry matters to the economy and to public health
• What policy changes Luis would make if he could wave a magic wand for the outdoors
• Luis's lightning round: his proudest accomplishment, the lesson he keeps having to relearn, and what he would tell his younger self
  
  Find Luis's book , Higher Ground, at: https://amzn.to/4g2TbeK
  
  

To find out more visit: https://www.highergroundbook.com/

To find out more, visit our website: Mountain-mule.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.

Half of all CEOs say they feel lonely in their role. Sixty-one percent say it actively hurts their performance. So why don't more leaders talk about it?

In this episode, Foster sits down across the table for an unusually candid conversation about his own experience with loneliness, the moment that started separating his ego from his identity, and what it actually took to build relationships he didn't have to perform for. He gets into the role executive coaches often play as a "safe place" for leaders who can't be vulnerable anywhere else, the slow and sometimes painful process of stepping out of a 35-year identity as CEO, and a book that reframed how he thinks about connection altogether: Mattering by Jennifer Breheny Wallace.

Foster and host Jana Devan talk about:

• Why loneliness in leadership often isn't about being alone, it's about not feeling fully known
• The moment with his son that began breaking down years of inflated ego
• How a five-year, deliberate succession process with Matt Brubaker became a case study in doing transitions right
• Why so many leadership and CEO transitions go badly, and the bad assumption behind it
• The difference in how men and women report loneliness, and what that gap is actually hiding
• What Foster's twice-monthly men's group around a Bozeman campfire taught him about community
• One true thing Foster wants every leader to hear if they recognize themselves in this conversation

For more on the themes in this episode, check out two earlier Step Wise conversations: Jen Fisher in Season 1 and Matt Brubaker in Season 2.

This episode was hosted by Jana Devan of Zettist.

Resources: 
https://www.harvardbusiness.org/insight/new-to-leadership-heres-how-to-address-loneliness/
https://www.lgt.com/global-en/market-assessments/insights/entrepreneurship/lonely-at-the-top-the-high-price-of-success-285466
https://hbr.org/2024/12/ceos-often-feel-lonely-heres-how-they-can-cope

To find out more visit: https://www.highergroundbook.com/

To find out more, visit our website: Mountain-mule.com

Go to ourwholenessatwork.com to learn more.

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.

Benjamin Smith was a high school quarterback who could hit every throw in practice and none of them under pressure. That gap between what he could do alone and what he could do with everyone watching became the question that's driven his entire career: where does steady confidence actually come from, and why does it disappear the moment it matters most?

Benjamin is a performance and wellness coach with experience at Yale University, Fairfield University, and Canyon Ranch. He works with athletes, executives, and high performing leaders, but his path there wasn't a straight line. He started in sports psychology, found the standard toolkit (breathing, visualization, imagery) useful but incomplete, and ended up at Yale Divinity School chasing the deeper question underneath it: who am I when the performance doesn't go well? Now he runs his own practice and a weekly newsletter, A Life Well Lived, where he blends performance science with contemplative practice for people trying to do both at once: perform and stay whole. I suggest you subscribe.

In this episode, Foster and Benjamin talk about:

• Why "what's wrong and how do we fix it" is the wrong starting question for coaching, and what to ask instead
• The high school football moment that sent Benjamin from sports psychology into divinity school
• His four core values (courage, connection, compassion, joy) and how he actually uses them
• Why elite performance spaces (sports, the military, the boardroom) tend to surface the same deep fears
• What it means to perform as "an artistic expression of your deepest sense of self" instead of a defense of your self-worth
• A favorite definition of contemplation from theologian Walter Burghardt: "a long, loving look at the real"
• Three practical starting points for anyone considering a similar career pivot

Find Benjamin's weekly newsletter, A Life Well Lived, at innerlifeofsport.com.

To find out more visit: https://www.highergroundbook.com/

To find out more, visit our website: Mountain-mule.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.