The Data Shaman Podcast - Quant Mind, Shaman Soul

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A friend asked me to review his CV. Twenty-five years in banking, senior roles, a career people point at. I read it from top to bottom and could not remember a single thing about him.

He had not written a bad CV. He had written a well-rounded one. In this episode, Jordan and I take apart the well-rounded trap: why smoothing out every gap makes very good people forgettable, what a hiring panel actually remembers after the interviews (including the candidate who hunted for treasure in shipwrecks), and why the trap costs more if your brain is spiky. Jordan pushes back on real weaknesses, applicant tracking systems and whether leaders need breadth. Then we rework a sample CV live with four steps: Start, Spot, Shape, Scale.

Your ten minutes this week: write down three times someone came to you because you were the person for it, name what they have in common in one sentence, and make that sentence the first line of your CV.

Jordan is an AI co-host with an AI-generated voice.

Free CV prompt: https://squirrelcoach.com/tools/cv-mega-prompt

If you want to find your spike together, book a free 30-minute call: https://www.danieleforni.com/book

More episodes: https://www.danieleforni.com/podcast

If you want to know more about Daniele Forni, go to www.danieleforni.com

Send us Fan Mail

A friend asked me to review his CV. Twenty-five years in banking, senior roles, a career people point at. I read it from top to bottom and could not remember a single thing about him.

He had not written a bad CV. He had written a well-rounded one. In this episode, Jordan and I take apart the well-rounded trap: why smoothing out every gap makes very good people forgettable, what a hiring panel actually remembers after the interviews (including the candidate who hunted for treasure in shipwrecks), and why the trap costs more if your brain is spiky. Jordan pushes back on real weaknesses, applicant tracking systems and whether leaders need breadth. Then we rework a sample CV live with four steps: Start, Spot, Shape, Scale.

Your ten minutes this week: write down three times someone came to you because you were the person for it, name what they have in common in one sentence, and make that sentence the first line of your CV.

Jordan is an AI co-host with an AI-generated voice.

Free CV prompt: https://squirrelcoach.com/tools/cv-mega-prompt

If you want to find your spike together, book a free 30-minute call: https://www.danieleforni.com/book

More episodes: https://www.danieleforni.com/podcast

If you want to know more about Daniele Forni, go to www.danieleforni.com

Send us Fan Mail

Some books people carry around like a dare. Moby-Dick is the biggest dare of all: long, slow, and with whole chapters about rope. If your brain moves fast, it is a wall.

So I turned it into a conversation. Professor Clara Benedict, who has loved this novel for a lifetime, walks Dr. Theo Marsh, a clinical psychologist who has never read a page of it, through the whole story. A sea captain, a white whale, and an obsession big enough to pull a ship down with it. Underneath the adventure: what happens when a person builds an entire identity around a single wound, and what the one survivor does differently.

No need to have read the book. You will have the story by the end.

Clara and Theo are imagined guests, and their voices are AI-generated.

If you want a way of working that fits your brain at work too, not only with books, book a free 30-minute call: https://www.danieleforni.com/book

More episodes: https://www.danieleforni.com/podcast

If you want to know more about Daniele Forni, go to www.danieleforni.com

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A newly-minted MD calls me three weeks into the job he’d chased for fifteen years and says, “Daniele, I think they’re going to find out.” Not that he can’t do the work — he can. That he isn’t really this person. That he’s been doing a very good impression of him.

This episode is about the thing underneath impostor syndrome: identity. Who you think you are — how much of it is real, how much you inherited without ever agreeing to it, and how much you could actually change if you decided to. Because most of the hardest problems my clients bring me aren’t strategy problems. They’re identity problems wearing a strategy costume.

In this episode:
• The “floor” you didn’t choose — temperament, and why the anxious babies don’t become the anxious adults you’d expect
• The “ceiling” you built yourself — the limits you treat as physics that are really just belief
• The self you inherited from your family and your industry
• “I did a bad thing” vs. “I am a bad thing” — why guilt heals and shame corrodes
• Why you cling to an old version of yourself, and how to actually update it
• “When you’re a manager, every whisper is a shout” — why the trait that got you promoted can wreck your team
• The one practice to start building a different case about who you are

Mentioned / further reading: Jerome Kagan’s temperament research; Quiet (Susan Cain); Option B (Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant); Wild Courage (Jenny Wood).

If you want to know more about Daniele Forni, go to www.danieleforni.com

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Hi Guys, 

this is a new experiment - I have been reading lots of self-help books, and I wanted to share them. But, I was not sure how. 

So, I partnered up with an text-to-speech voice to ask me questions (let's call her Jordan). 

I hope you will enjoy this one, and learn something.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Everyone treats confidence like a feeling you wait to arrive. Sit in the waiting room long enough, the thinking goes, and one day you’ll feel ready — ready to ask for the raise, pitch the idea, send the steak back. It never comes. In this first episode of The Misfit Executive, we make the case that confidence isn’t a feeling at all. It’s a verb — something you do, badly, until it gets less bad.

We get into why we confuse confidence with competence (and keep promoting the loudest person in the room), why self-compassion beats self-esteem when things fall apart, the two-minute ritual that makes you less defensive before a hard meeting, and the five-second window where most of our courage quietly dies. Practical, a little contrarian, and built for anyone who’s tired of waiting to feel ready.

In this episode:
• Why action builds confidence — not the other way around
• Confidence vs. competence, and the “send the steak back” test
• How belief changes the outcome (yes, really — the sham-surgery study)
• Self-compassion over self-esteem, and Seligman’s “three P’s”
• The two-minute values check before high-stakes moments
• “If you’re hitting the bullseye every time, you’re standing too close to the target”
• The five-second rule for beating hesitation

Mentioned / further reading: Confidence Hacks (Barrie Davenport), The Motivation Hacker (Nick Winter), Quiet (Susan Cain), Life in Half a Second (Matthew Michalewicz), Stop Saying You’re Fine (Mel Robbins), Option B (Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant), What We Value (Emily Falk), How to Keep People from Pushing Your Buttons (Albert Ellis), Wild Courage (Jenny Wood).

⏱️ Chapters below. 🎧 New episodes coming soon — follow the show so you don’t miss Episode 2 on identity.

If you want to know more about Daniele Forni, go to www.danieleforni.com

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Ming Chan became the top biller of his recruitment firm in Hong Kong. Then he quit. Not for a better offer, but because the pain of not changing had become greater than the change.

Recorded at Soho House Hong Kong for the "F*ck It, I Quit" season, this conversation follows the whole arc: New York real estate, six years in actuarial search, the moment the achievement arrived and meant nothing, two and a half years of resetting an entire life, and the dark first months he does not gloss over. Ming is now building MKC, the Manhood and Kinship Circle: a space where men in Hong Kong can say the things they have been facing alone.

We talk about killing the ego to be reborn, why willpower alone never breaks a pattern, fight-flight-freeze as a career strategy, and the breadcrumbs in your past that point to what you were always meant to do.

If any part of this conversation lands close to home, please do not carry it alone. Talk to someone you trust, or reach out to a local helpline.

Full transcript: danieleforni.com/post/fck-it-i-quit-ming-chan
The story behind the season: Why I Quit
My door is open on Mondays and Thursdays: book a free discovery session

If you want to know more about Daniele Forni, go to www.danieleforni.com

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Neil Potts sat next to Daniele on the trading floor at HSBC. He was also getting up at 4am to buy fresh produce at wholesale markets, running vegan pop-ups in Shoreditch after work, and telling almost no one, because he was scared of getting in trouble for not being his full self at work.

That side project became The Vurger Co.: four restaurants, products in supermarkets across the UK, UAE and US, and a real shot at something big. Then COVID arrived, and Neil and his partner Rachel made a decision most of the industry refused to make: they closed completely rather than send their staff across London on the tube to make burgers. What followed was the hardest chapter of their lives, an insurance policy that paid nothing, hundreds of thousands of pounds lost, and debt taken on in desperation.

This conversation is about what happens after. Why the fear never fully left until the worst had already happened. Why paper valuations mean nothing. Why doing it for money is the wrong reason. And how a man who lost everything he built now says there is basically nothing left that scares him.

Neil today runs Silverwood Rose, a consulting practice in Los Angeles helping food and drink founders navigate what he survived: silverwoodrose.com

If you want to know more about Daniele Forni, go to www.danieleforni.com

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Belfast-born, Brian Henderson did everything the corporate deal asked of him. He trained as a lawyer, took an MBA, and spent decades running global law firms as Chief Operating Officer across London, Paris and Hong Kong. He also learned, early, that the job came with a price: be strong, be certain, tell people what to do, and keep the softer, more sensitive part of yourself well out of sight.

Then the bill arrived. Social unrest in Hong Kong brought back the hypervigilance of growing up in the Troubles, the hours stopped adding up, and he found himself sleeping two and a half hours a night. A visit to his doctor turned into a diagnosis of depression and anxiety and, in his words, a strange sense of relief. So he quit.

In this Season 2 conversation on The Data Shaman, Brian and Daniele talk about the bargain so many leaders quietly make, the grief of losing touch with the ten-year-old you used to be, why most of the C-suite privately want out, and the mind-body work he now does through The Movement to help men feel the emotions corporate life trained out of them.

In this episode:

• Growing up in Belfast, and a nervous system built for threat
• The corporate bargain, and its slow cost
• Burnout, insomnia, and the diagnosis that brought relief
• Why men are allowed to be angry but not soft
• Mudita, and finding meaning in the happiness of others
• What he would tell his younger self about quitting

Find Brian: brianhenderson.hk, movemen.hk, and Brian Henderson on LinkedIn.

If you want to know more about Daniele Forni, go to www.danieleforni.com

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For fifteen years I hid my tattoos under a suit. Then one morning, measuring my own blood pressure in front of the mirror, I asked what the hell I was doing, and I quit.

This is the opener of Season 2, Fuck It, I Quit. No guest, just me on why I left a Director role in global banking after fifteen years: the HSBC lions photo, the family script, the masking, my diagnosis of depression, ADHD and autism at forty-five, the panic attacks, and turning down a safe job in London. And what I found instead, an executive coaching practice, a meditation book, and becoming a Reiki master.

If you left the safe thing and built something truer, come on the show. All episodes and transcripts: https://www.danieleforni.com/podcast

If you want to know more about Daniele Forni, go to www.danieleforni.com

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After 30 years as a barrister in Hong Kong, Winnie Chan's second career began at her father's bedside. Caring for him through cancer taught her that even the closest families fall into conflict over treatment, money, accommodation and, hardest of all, where a parent will die. She became an elder mediator to help families have those conversations before a crisis forces them.

She is joined by Lizzie Chan, the first Asian elder mediator qualified by EMIN and a trained end-of-life doula. Together we explore why families do not really know each other until a crisis, Hong Kong's fragmented households, the sandwich generation, why peers matter more than children in later life, and why a good death starts with living well today.

All episodes and transcripts: https://www.danieleforni.com/podcast

If you want to know more about Daniele Forni, go to www.danieleforni.com