The Aaxelera Podcast

What do you do when you're surrounded by 1.4 million colleagues and still feel underutilized?

Jennifer Speciale's path runs from neuroscience research (four published papers) through executive recruiting at Amazon, Google, McKinsey, and Indeed, where she was employee number 86. Then came the realization that her favorite part of the job, coaching brilliant candidates to actually land the role, could BE the job. Today she runs Special Executive Leadership from Florence, Italy, coaching design and tech leaders around the world.

In this episode we get into:

• Why she walked away from Big Tech instead of cashing in on the CV
• "Hire the rhombus, not the square peg": why the candidate missing a skill is often your best hire
• Her Articulating Impact framework, and why leaders need to "decompress the story" instead of compressing their wins into one modest line
• What recruiters see in your LinkedIn profile that hiring managers never will
• Building a business on midnight calls between Florence and Silicon Valley
• How she uses AI to never miss a detail across her client base, and why design still deserves its seat at the table

Her parting wisdom: as far as we know, we live once, so do it well.

Find Jennifer on LinkedIn or at jenniferspeciale.com

What if the real reason your team can't communicate has nothing to do with skill, and everything to do with what's driving each person underneath?

Monty sits down with Lori Palm, founder and CEO of Core Passion and creator of the Core Passion Assessment, a valid and reliable tool that measures the twelve core drivers (she calls them codes) behind your decisions, behaviors, and communication. Lori helps leaders, teams, and entrepreneurs answer the two hardest questions there are: Who am I? And what do I want?

In this conversation:

• The twelve Core Passion codes, and why your top five explain why you do what you do
• Why your greatest gift is also your greatest challenge, and how a strength like research becomes a trust problem with people
• The Passion, Vision, Action triangle: why busyness isn't accomplishment
• How to spot when you or someone on your team is "out of balance," and what it costs in productivity when nobody names it
• Code Talking: how to get through to someone whose drivers are completely different from yours
• Why culture change fails unless leadership is willing to change too
• The four areas of life (health, relationships, career and money, spirit) and why imbalance in any one of them shows up in your business

Lori's philosophy fits in one line: when you know who you are, you know what to do.

Learn more and take the Core Passion Assessment at corepassion.com. As Lori puts it: we solve the people puzzles.

Warren Fiihr has spent a career watching markets reinvent themselves and helping teams survive the shift. He ran radio and television ad sales, took over a toxic NBC affiliate as GM at 39, steered a newsroom through the Virginia Tech tragedy and the analog-to-digital transition, and later led Comcast's advertising sales across the Houston Gulf Coast. Today he's the owner and certified business coach at ActionCOACH Sugar Land.

In this episode, Warren and host Montgomery Pruss trade stories from the front lines of disrupted industries. Classified ads collapsing overnight. Blockbuster missing the moment Netflix seized. The 2008 layoffs Warren had to carry out himself. And they connect all of it to the disruption everyone's living through now: AI reshaping who and what a business actually needs.

But the heart of the conversation is what Warren does every day: helping owners escape the 60-hour grind and build something that runs without them. You'll hear his take on why small and medium businesses (not corporations) are what really move the world forward, why your business is a vehicle and not your identity, and the practical habits that separate owners who scale from owners who spin in circles.

In this episode:

• Why "the market moved and you didn't" kills more businesses than bad products
• The four-quadrant time trap every owner falls into, and how to break it
• BFOs (blinding flashes of the obvious) and why accountability beats advice
• Don't start a business, buy one. The counterintuitive case for acquisition
• Hiring: why the best day is the interview, and why you wait for the right person
• How Warren is folding AI into his own practice, and where he thinks it's headed

A candid, funny, occasionally irreverent conversation about doing the work that actually compounds.

• Website: warrenfiihr.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/warren-fiihr

From People-Pleaser to Miracle-Maker: Gary Acevedo on the Inner Game of Leadership

What if the "hangups" you criticize yourself for are actually your greatest gifts? In this episode of the Aaxelera Podcast, Montgomery Pruss sits down with Gary Acevedo, founder of Rise Leadership Group in Salt Lake City, for a conversation more than 40 years in the making.

At 19, Gary spent three years living in a community led by a mentor he calls "an unrecognizable genius," an experience that rewired his understanding of human potential and set him on a path through more than 30 disciplines, from hypnosis to NLP. What he found was that none of them matched the transformational power of what he'd learned at the very beginning.

Gary shares the philosophy behind the breakthroughs he's guided for decades: that there are no true weaknesses, only gifts we haven't learned to own; that defensiveness is simply the flip side of self-criticism; and that the single greatest predictor of how fast someone grows isn't talent or intelligence, but their willingness to stop getting in their own way.

Along the way, Gary explains the "moment of choice" that keeps high performers trapped in overwhelm, why the future of corporate training is experiential rather than intellectual, how a "clunk" signals the exact instant a sale is made, and what it means to lead every conversation with the intent to empower.

For the founders, CEOs, and leaders who feel like they're busting their ass just to keep their head above water, this one is about learning to move to the center of the river, where the current carries you instead.

Guest: Gary Acevedo, Founder, Rise Leadership Group
Connect: riselg.com | [email protected]

Jo Self, founder of Practical Strengths and author of the Practical Strengths book series, joins Monty for a conversation about CliftonStrengths as a second language and the gap between knowing your strengths and actually living them. We cover her path from Yum! Brands to entrepreneurship in Peru, the cancer scare that pointed her toward CliftonStrengths as a full-time calling, why "Communication" as a talent doesn't mean what you think it means, the stories that make the framework click (the kindergarten research debate, empathy in prison populations, toilet paper), and her mission to build a strengths-based generation through the Practical Strengths Foundation.

Connect with Jo:
Website: https://practicalstrengths.org
Beginner's intro: https://discoverjoself.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joself

The Aaxelera podcast with Deb Beroset, Founder of It's Time for Moxie.

Deb is an identity-level coach, neuroscience-informed practitioner, and the creator of what she calls Imaginal Intelligence. Her path runs from journalism (personality profiles for Ladies' Home Journal's "How America Lives" series), to leading Hallmark's internal innovation think tank (the Collaboratory), through twelve years heading public relations for a large company, into the coaching practice she's now run for ten years. She's currently Director of Coaching Content & Client Experience at Aligned Wealth Management, where she's helping fuse financial advisory with deep human coaching.

In this conversation we get into:
• Identity-level coaching, and why shifting the story you tell yourself changes everything downstream (thoughts, decisions, leadership)
• Imaginal Intelligence as the missing piece for leaders who have insight but can't seem to move on it
• Emotional contagion, and why a leader's interior state quietly sets the ceiling on what the whole organization can do
• The skill of being unbothered, and how to cultivate a calm center in the middle of chaos
• How she's using Claude as a pattern-recognition partner in her coaching practice, including her "living portrait" client artifact
• Why AI, used right, may actually restore the human connection we've been losing rather than erase it

Connect with Deb:
Website: https://itstimeformoxie.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deborahberoset/

Dr. Sage Breslin, Ph.D., is the founder of the Sage Wisdom Institute and creator of The ROSE System (Restoring Old Soul Empowerment). Known as America's Narcissist Recovery Expert, she joins Monty for a conversation about the intersection of clinical psychology, spiritual practice, and recovery from narcissistic relationships. We cover her path from trauma psychologist to women's empowerment specialist, the bone marrow cancer diagnosis that became her "divine two-by-four," what soul retrieval actually looks like in practice, her pro bono work with veterans through Give an Hour, and her core message to any woman recognizing herself in this story: you are not alone, and it is not your fault.

Connect with Sage:

Website: https://sagewisdominstitute.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sage-breslin-phd/

Sage Wisdom Institute on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sagewisdominstitute

Tom Scarda, CEO of The Franchise Academy and author of The Magic of Choosing Uncertainty, joins Monty to talk about franchise matchmaking and the mindset shift from employee to owner. We cover how he assesses fit, why he turns away 40% of prospects, the difference between mastering a category and inventing one, the lessons from his own franchise journey (from running multiple Maui Wowi locations to losing nearly everything on a meal-prep concept that was years too early), what's actually hot in franchising right now, and his 3 Seconds of Guts challenge for anyone stuck in the comfort zone.

Connect with Tom:
Website: https://tomscarda.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/findafranchise/

Shelley D. Smith is the Founder & CEO of Premier Rapport, Inc.  an internationally recognized workplace culture consultancy specializing in helping organizations detect cultural dysfunction and build high-performing teams from the inside out. With over 35 years of executive leadership experience, six published books, guidance spanning 58+ companies, and certifications from Cornell Business School, Predictive Index, and Emotional Intelligence (EQi), Shelley has earned her reputation as the Creator of the Culture Inquiry and developer of the proprietary IMPACT® Model.

In this conversation, Shelley traces her journey from the formative lessons learned at her parents' auction house, through 14 years at Marriott International where "treat your employees right and everything else falls into place" became her operating philosophy, to the burnout and disengagement she experienced as COO of a hotel franchise, the catalyst that led her to launch Premier Rapport in 2009, in the heart of the recession.

She walks us through her Hydration Framework for diagnosing and restoring workplace culture, how she conducts listening tours at every level of an organization, and why converting your most resistant employees into cultural champions is the key to lasting transformation. Shelley also shares the story of a five-year manufacturing engagement that turned around safety records, retention, and employee engagement across 200+ employees and all shifts.

We close with a forward-looking discussion on how COVID permanently elevated the conversation around culture, why AI, when implemented correctly, may actually restore the human connection we've been losing, and what the workforce will look like as we approach 2030.

Connect with Shelley D. Smith:

Website: https://premierrapport.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelleydsmithpremierrapport/

Latest Book: THIRSTY: Restoring Organizational Flow When Relationship-Culture Runs Dry in the Workplace — available on Amazon

All Books: https://premierrapport.com/shelleys-books/

Keynote Speaking: https://premierrapport.com/services/keynote-speaker/

What happens when you co-found a cold fusion research lab funded by DARPA, get hand-selected by Bill Gates to lead a team of physicists and electrochemists, and then lose your voice behind a 5-year NDA?

Alison Godfrey has lived one of the most extraordinary careers you've never heard of. From co-founding Energetics Technologies in Israel with Sidney Kimmel, to running cold fustion experiments that produced 25x excess energy output, to building a stealth research lab in a converted Air Force parachute repair facility in Lubbock, Texas — her story sounds like science fiction. But it's real.

Now a PCC-certified executive coach and lecturer at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Alison works with biotech startups, Fortune 500 leaders, and PhD founders making the leap to CEO. In this episode, we talk about cold fusion breakthroughs, imposter syndrome at the Gates Foundation boardroom table, why you should stop trying to fix people, and what it means to walk the edge between vision and reality.

This is the conversation that made me rethink how I approach leadership, energy, and the future.

Connect with Alison:
LinkedIn: Alison Godfrey
Email: [email protected]