In this episode, we expose the "psychological ghosts" of our past—the former managers, hyper-critical colleagues, and toxic workplace cultures we've long since left, but still unconsciously try to "win" against. When you carry that baggage into your current role, you're re-running a rigged game in your head, and it's draining your finite energy.

We break down how to stop the mental replay and start living in the present, including:

• Evicting the Ghosts: A specific journaling framework to separate the valuable lessons of the past from the lingering grudges that sabotage your current decisions.
• The Avoidance Audit: Why your "well-deserved break" might actually be a sophisticated disguise for task avoidance—and how to face complex projects head-on.
• The Goodwill Check: Are you helping people who actually want to be helped? Learn how to stop your empathy from blinding you to the reality of your team's intentions.
• From Sideline to Action: How overthinkers can stop passively complaining and start taking small, observable actions that prove their standards are real, regardless of the reward.

It's time to leave the ghosts at the door. Tune in to learn how to drop the weight of the past and reclaim your agency for the work that matters today.

Are you actually stuck, or are you just being vague? In this episode, we break down how the desire to avoid discomfort leads to unclear communication, wasted time, and fractured trust in both our professional and personal lives.

You’ll learn:

• How to define what good looks like: why the struggle to get results from your team and even AI is all a communication problem.
• Accountability vs. motive: how to own your consequences without hiding behind "I didn't mean to".
• Unblocking your manager: using targeted questions to turn a "maybe" into a definitive "yes" or "no".
• Solving task avoidance: how to differentiate procrastination from missing context.
• The cost of quitting: a simple math comparison to show that quitting costs you a lot more than sticking with it.

Tune in to discover how replacing avoidance with precision can transform your projects and your leadership.

This episode with Will goes deep into what it really means to move from overthinking into action through genuine self-discovery.

We explore how the voice in your head is not who you are, how the stories you decided were true in childhood are quietly running your adult life, and what it actually takes to strip those back and lead from a place that's real.

Whether you think of yourself as a leader or not, this conversation will challenge you to stop waiting for the conditions to be right and start showing up as the person you truly are.

Will Steel is a former Royal Air Force pilot, recipient of the Leadership Trophy at Cranwell, and international best-selling author of Free to Lead. Over two decades, he has led transformational programs for 90,000 professionals across 26 countries — from boardrooms to runways — helping people cut through the invisible performances that pass for authenticity and reconnect with who they actually are.

In Free to Lead, Will challenges the widespread assumption that we can simply "be authentic," arguing that most of what people call authenticity is just another layer of conditioning. His approach is practical, grounded, and at times deliberately uncomfortable — exactly what overthinkers ready to stop analyzing and start experimenting need.

Connect With Will

• Free to Lead — willsteel.com/freetolead.php (first chapter free to download)
• Website & coaching enquiries — willsteel.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram

Key Topics Discussed

• Why you can't think your way out of your head, and why you need to bring it into conversation
• The "committee in your head" — the difference between conscious thinking and automatic thoughts
• How to become the observer of your own mind rather than being at the mercy of it
• The concept of recreating — why most people aren't actually listening, and what real listening looks like
• The "be-with" exercise: standing face-to-face with another person in silence for 5–20 minutes, and why it's relationship-altering
• How the brain fills in 80% of what you "see" — and what that means for how we experience reality
• Limiting beliefs: how a single childhood moment can silently shape an entire life (Will shares his own story)
• The difference between toxic fuel and healthy fuel as drivers of achievement
• What leadership actually means — and why you don't need a title to exercise it
• Why information alone doesn't transform you, and why every chapter of Free to Lead ends with an exercise

Extra Resources Discussed

• The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
• Unfuck Yourself by Gary John Bishop
• Stop Doing That Shit by Gary John Bishop
• Influence by Robert Cialdini

Learn how to quiet the noise, stop reacting to the loudest distractions, and start taking intentional action.

• The trap of urgency: why treating every task equally ensures that the "loudest" problems always win
• Silencing the critics: it's easy to let the negativity bias win when a vocal minority picks apart your work
• Breaking through mental blocks: treating idea generation as something that only happens when you are in the "right mood" is a losing battle

Logan Yonavjak, Co-Founder and CEO of the Founder Readiness Institute, joins the show to break down the human side of startup success — the stuff that doesn't show up in your pitch deck but determines whether your company makes it.

Logan draws on her background in private equity and early-stage investing to explain why 65% of startups fail due to people problems, and what founders can actually do about it.

The conversation covers:

• Why solo founders can be a risk and what roles to hire first to offset that risk
• The CEO / COO dynamic and why those archetypes tend to work better together than apart
• What investor red flags actually look like in practice (hint: it involves coachability)
• Where AI agents fit in a founding team and where they still fall flat
• How to pressure-test your founder readiness before you're in the fire

Logan also shares a practical first move for anyone with a startup idea: get out and talk to prospective customers before building anything.

Connect with Logan and the Founder Readiness Institute:

• Website

• Email

• LinkedIn

Are you stuck in a loop of overthinking, operating below your potential, or letting perfectly good ideas die in your head?

We often disguise avoidance as harmless habits, like staying in bed when an empty calendar feels too heavy or endlessly researching a new project so it never has to face reality. Today, we discuss concrete behavios designed to help you take control of your time, energy, and ambition.

We explore why you need to stop fighting your natural energy dips, how to recognize when a comfortable job is actually eroding your sense of what "good" looks like, and why achieving greatness requires pushing past the plateau of "good enough".

Key topics:

• Beating the formless day: why a lack of structure makes it so easy to check out, and how building small, 10-minute morning and evening "anchors" puts you back in control of your days.
• Mastering your cortisol curve: how simple behavioral tweaks like getting early sunlight, delaying your morning coffee by 90 minutes, and embracing low-stimulation breaks can cure your afternoon crashes.
• Giving ideas their first "bruise": the perfect idea in your head needs to face the pressure of reality, and how to set a strict "commitment window" to gather real-world data without giving up early.
• Escaping the "effort gap": are you operating below your level at work because your ambition outpaces your team, and the essential factors (timeline, finances, and market) to map out before jumping ship.
• Stacking the reps: greatness doesn't magically arrive just because you care.

Steven Seidenberg joins the show to talk about what it means to perform your own writing, why confusion in a reader is a good sign, and how constraint became the engine behind everything he creates.

We get into the gap between finishing a book and publishing it, how reading aloud reveals things about a text that silent reading never does, and why he makes the audiobook of his work freely available. We also dig into his photography practice — shooting in series and finding overlooked things in plain sight: drainage valves in East Berlin, adhesive tape patterns on Tokyo subway floors, domestic spaces inside squatted buildings in Rome.

The thread running through all of it: repetition, constraint, and what happens when you stop trying to make something beautiful and start trying to make something true.

Topics covered:

• Going on tour for a book: what readings actually feel like from the inside
• Why a work "stops having an author" after publication
• Reading aloud as a compositional tool and as a performance
• The value of a confused, provoked, or even bored audience
• Wittgenstein, Pessoa, Beckett, and the literature that shaped his writing
• English as both limitation and advantage: the largest lexicon, but less syntactic subtlety
• Photography as a continuous aesthetic experience of the world
• Content creation vs. photography
• Documenting the unnoticed in Berlin, Rome, Tokyo
• Repetition and condensation as shared pillars across writing and photography

About Steven:

Steven Seidenberg's work lives in the tension between analysis and experimentation. As a writer, photographer, and poet, he explores how active engagement with the everyday — noticing overlooked corners and liminal spaces — surfaces what theory alone keeps hidden. Across disciplines, insight arrives through repeated attention and small experiments: shrinking infinite choices down to something you can actually see and test.

His writing is deliberately challenging. Circuitous syntax, recursive repetition, and a prose rhythm built to be heard as much as read — it draws from Western philosophy, poetry, and writers like Pessoa and Beckett, and it expects the reader to meet it halfway. His recent photography work follows the same logic: minimalist repetition, geometric abstraction, and patterns that only emerge when you commit to a particular way of looking. Six books in, he is still refining both the work and the performance of it.

One "no" shouldn't be enough to derail your momentum but for most people it is. This episode is about fixing that and a few other things that quietly drain you.

We get into why diversifying your options matters way beyond finances, the real cost of saying yes just to dodge a few seconds of awkwardness, and why "no" is a complete answer.

We also talk about critics. Not the useful kind. The chronic ones who show up whenever you're building something. Arguing with them is the trap. There's a better move.

And if your feed is running your mood instead of the other way around, we cover why the unfollow button is one of the most underrated tools you have right now.

Last one is the quiet killer: what happens to your standards when the environment around you stops demanding anything. Low pressure feels like relief until it starts costing you.

Are you tired of overthinking and waiting for a hero to come and fix your life?

In this episode, we discuss how to break out of a stagnant, repetitive routine by shocking your system with a difficult task, and why getting your "State, Story, and Strategy" in the correct order is the real secret to executing any plan.

Plus, learn a simple mental trick to outsmart anxiety by focusing your brain on gratitude before big moments, and discover how to build a completely unique creative voice by combining your most unrelated, weird interests instead of sanitizing them.
It's time to stop waiting and take control of your life.

Joseph Schmidt has devoted much of his life to mindfulness, meditative practice, philosophical exploration, and community service. He first became a practitioner of meditation while living in India for three years in the early 1970s, before earning his master's in Psychology. A founding member and Executive Director of New York Insight Meditation Center — where he continues to serve on the board — Joseph has spent decades building spaces for others to encounter the kind of presence he writes about. He also serves as a volunteer chaplain at Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, NJ, counseling patients and families navigating end-of-life planning and grief. Joseph and his wife Kathryn were recently honored by the regional YMCA association for their ongoing service and leadership in the community.

In this episode, José and Joseph explore what it means to live presently — not as a productivity technique, but as the natural state available to anyone willing to get out of their own way. They move through Joseph's unlikely path from a four-year-old's spiritual awakening to Wall Street to the meditation center to the wards of a hospital, and unpack what all of those experiences share: the power of showing up empty, open, and genuinely there.

• The origin of the book: How a story written in an Indian ashram fifty years ago became the seed for a full collection
• The Torchbearer: A deep reading and discussion of the collection's opening story — love, sacrifice, the gap between the individual and the unified self, and what it means to let instinct override survival
• Mindfulness as a cusp, not a practice: Why Joseph frames mindfulness not as meditation technique but as the place where consciousness and time meet
• Magic is happening right where you stand: The idea that your ordinary day-to-day life — the supermarket, the commute, the argument with your partner — is where transformation is actually available
• Showing up empty: What Joseph learned from Zen-trained hospital chaplaincy, and why having an agenda — even a kind one — is the surest way to miss the person in front of you
• Innocence as a through-line: Why Joseph's characters all carry a quality of innocence, and how that same quality lives beneath the surface of every person, even when it's buried deep
• Bereavement, grief, and the core of presence: How working with people in loss strips everything unnecessary away and leaves only what actually matters
• Light and Shadow: A reading from the collection's most cosmically ambitious story — a young boy in Kansas who wakes at midnight to a world without shadows, where everything glows from within

• The Torchbearer: and other Stories of Borderline Redemption by Joseph Schmidt — available on Amazon
• New York Insight Meditation Center — founded by Joseph, one of New York's leading community meditation centers