About the Hosts:

Lee Povey and Steve Mellor are leadership coaches and hosts of The Founders Catalyst, a podcast dedicated to helping founders, executives, and rising leaders navigate the complexities of personal and professional growth. With decades of combined experience in elite sports, executive coaching, and team development, Lee and Steve offer real-world insights, sharp coaching tools, and thought-provoking conversations for the modern leader.

About the Episode:

In this episode of The Founders Catalyst, Steve and Lee dive deep into what they believe is the most important leadership skill of all: self-awareness. They unpack why so many leaders think they’re self-aware (but aren’t), what self-awareness actually involves, and how to begin doing the real work.

The conversation spans everything from childhood programming and cultural influences to emotional intelligence, dyslexia, burnout, and building sustainable leadership habits. Expect powerful personal insights, practical frameworks, and a few laughs along the way.

If you're a founder or leader looking to improve your emotional intelligence, decision-making, and relationships with your team... this one’s for you.

Takeaways:

• Why self-awareness is the foundation of effective leadership
• The emotional work of leadership: noticing vs. reacting
• How upbringing, trauma, and culture shape our responses
• Emotional intelligence (EQ) vs. intellectual intelligence (IQ)
• Why most people think they’re self-aware, and are wrong
• Emotions as data: understanding anger, sadness, fear, joy, interest, and disgust
• The importance of "noting" emotions in real time
• Building sustainable leadership practices: rest, boundaries, and balance
• Leading while tired, triggered, or overwhelmed and how to prepare for it
• Feedback loops, reflection, and what it really means to “do the work”

“You don’t become self-aware just by deciding to be. It’s a journey, a practice, one you get wrong, again and again, until slowly, you don’t.” – Steve Mellor

“Emotions are data. If we learn to listen, they tell us exactly what’s happening within us, and what we might need to change.” – Lee Povey

Links & Resources Mentioned:

• Daniel Kahneman's research on decision-making and self-assessment
• Brené Brown’s research on emotional language (83 emotions)
• The six core emotions model: Fear, Joy, Anger, Sadness, Interest, Disgust
• Lee Povey’s men’s group (mentioned during emotional awareness segment)
• The Founders Catalyst LinkedIn Community: Join here
• Contact the hosts directly for feedback or coaching inquiries

Thank you for tuning in! If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our podcast. Stay tuned for more insights and discussions to help you thrive in both your personal and professional life.

Join Our LinkedIn Group!
Become a part of The Founders Catalyst, a free community for founders, start-up executives, and high achievers. Network, ask questions, and participate in our free monthly Zoom meetings. Connect with like-minded individuals and expand your professional circle. Join here.

Lee Povey and Steve Mellor are leadership coaches and hosts of The Founders Catalyst, a podcast dedicated to helping founders, executives, and rising leaders navigate the complexities of personal and professional growth. With decades of combined experience in elite sports, executive coaching, and team development, Lee and Steve offer real-world insights, sharp coaching tools, and thought-provoking conversations for the modern leader.

📝 Episode Summary:

As Q2 wraps and the second half of the year begins, many leaders find themselves questioning: Are we still on track? In this timely and thought-provoking episode, Steve and Lee dive into why mid-year is the perfect moment to step back, reassess your goals, and ask the all-important question: Are these goals still relevant? They explore how to shift from reactive busyness to intentional leadership by focusing on what truly matters, your behaviors, your mindset, and how you use your time.

You’ll learn how to redefine success, eliminate the fluff, and make strategic adjustments that honor both your vision and your current reality. This isn't about doing more, it's about doing what actually moves the needle.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

• Why being "busy" doesn't equal being effective, and what to do about it
• The difference between goals and commitments, and why commitments drive results
• How to determine if a goal is still relevant mid-year (and what to change if it’s not)
• The “optimal vs. perfect” mindset shift that helps you make better decisions
• Why leadership without trust, of yourself and others, leads to stagnation
• How to involve your team in goal setting so they actually buy in
• A practical strategy for organizing your priorities using the “rocks, sand, and water” analogy
• What it means to lead from privilege, not pressure

🔗 Links & Resources Mentioned:

• Traction by Gino Wickman (Rocks metaphor)
• Simon Sinek & Adam Grant podcast references (on creativity & meeting design)
• Join the Founder’s Catalyst LinkedIn Community
• Lee Povey's Leadership Coaching
• Steve Mellor's Executive Coaching

Thank you for tuning in! If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our podcast. Stay tuned for more insights and discussions to help you thrive in both your personal and professional life.

Join Our LinkedIn Group!
Become a part of The Founders Catalyst, a free community for founders, start-up executives, and high achievers. Network, ask questions, and participate in our free monthly Zoom meetings. Connect with like-minded individuals and expand your professional circle. Join here.

Lee Povey and Steve Mellor are leadership coaches and hosts of The Founders Catalyst, a podcast dedicated to helping founders, executives, and rising leaders navigate the complexities of personal and professional growth. With decades of combined experience in elite sports, executive coaching, and team development, Lee and Steve offer real-world insights, sharp coaching tools, and thought-provoking conversations for the modern leader.

📝 Episode Summary: In this insightful and candid conversation, co-hosts Steve Mellor and Lee Povey unpack the hidden struggles of being a high performer in leadership. Drawing on personal stories, from elite sports to startup boardrooms, they reveal how their own perfectionism, drive, and “abnormal” standards shaped both their successes and their blind spots. Together, they explore the emotional disconnect many leaders feel when their vision isn’t shared, their intensity isn’t understood, and their expectations aren’t met.

If you've ever felt alone at the top, frustrated that others “just don’t get it,” or caught between your future self and your current reality, this one’s for you.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

• Why high performers often create a warped sense of “normal” that others can’t relate to
• The emotional cost of resilience, from pushing through injury to avoiding support
• How leadership can feel incredibly lonely, even in successful, growing organizations
• The danger of measuring yourself against an idealized future version of you
• Why your team doesn’t “get it” yet, and how to help them catch the vision
• How to balance big-picture ambition with clear communication and compassion
• What to ask yourself when you feel misunderstood or disconnected as a leader

🔗 Resources & Mentions:

💬 Join the Founders Catalyst Community on LinkedIn

🌐 Lee Povey’s Coaching & Leadership Work

🌐 Steve Mellor's Executive Coaching 

If you found this episode relatable or valuable, share it with another leader or founder in your circle. Be sure to follow The Founder’s Catalyst on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode. And if this hit home for you, leave us a quick review, it means the world and helps us reach more high-performers navigating the same challenges.

Thank you for tuning in! If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our podcast. Stay tuned for more insights and discussions to help you thrive in both your personal and professional life.

Join Our LinkedIn Group!
Become a part of The Founders Catalyst, a free community for founders, start-up executives, and high achievers. Network, ask questions, and participate in our free monthly Zoom meetings. Connect with like-minded individuals and expand your professional circle. Join here.

Lee Povey and Steve Mellor are leadership coaches and hosts of The Founders Catalyst, a podcast dedicated to helping founders, executives, and rising leaders navigate the complexities of personal and professional growth. With decades of combined experience in elite sports, executive coaching, and team development, Lee and Steve offer real-world insights, sharp coaching tools, and thought-provoking conversations for the modern leader.

📝 Episode Summary:

In this milestone 20th episode of The Founders Catalyst, hosts Steve Mellor and Lee Povey dive deep into the power and necessity of emotional regulation for leaders. Building on themes from the previous episode about ego, this conversation explores how unregulated emotions can derail communication, relationships, and business outcomes, and how curiosity, awareness, and conscious choice can lead to more effective leadership.

Lee and Steve share personal stories, coaching insights, and practical tools that help leaders move from reactivity to responsibility. You’ll learn how our evolutionary psychology wires us to react, and how you can rewire those instinctual responses to lead with clarity, compassion, and confidence.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

•  Emotional regulation is a leadership superpower, it's not about suppressing emotion, but understanding and channeling it.
• The fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response is hardwired, but not destiny, you can reprogram your reaction.
• Understand your triggers: texts like “We need to talk” often prompt fear or assumption, but rarely mean what we expect.
• Replacing assumption with curiosity is critical for clear communication and relational trust.
• Leaders must recognize both internal (self-awareness) and external (others’ behavior) influences on emotional responses.
• Emotional regulation is best practiced in community, not in isolation, vulnerability builds trust.
• Coaching provides a powerful container for developing this regulation and improving team dynamics.

Resources & Mentions:

• Lee Povey Coaching
• Steve Mellor – Growth Ready Coaching
• Above and Below the Line model – The Conscious Leadership Group

Thank you for tuning in! If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our podcast. Stay tuned for more insights and discussions to help you thrive in both your personal and professional life.

Join Our LinkedIn Group!
Become a part of The Founders Catalyst, a free community for founders, start-up executives, and high achievers. Network, ask questions, and participate in our free monthly Zoom meetings. Connect with like-minded individuals and expand your professional circle. Join here.

In this deeply personal and thought-provoking episode, Lee and Steve dive into the elusive and complex nature of ego... what it really is, how it forms, and why understanding it is essential for great leadership. 

They explore how ego shapes our perception of ourselves and others, its conscious vs. unconscious effects, and the journey from defensiveness to authenticity. With real-life stories, candid admissions, and practical insights, this episode unpacks how ego can either hinder or help leadership depending on how well we understand it.

Listeners will walk away with a framework for greater self-awareness, emotional regulation, and authentic leadership, plus a few laughs along the way. 

Key Takeaways:

• The ego isn’t just arrogance, it's your self-identity, both conscious and unconscious.
• Leadership starts with self-awareness: know, understand, and then own who you are.
• How “the shadow” (unacknowledged traits) can shape how we lead and relate.
• The power of curiosity as a tool to diffuse ego and invite growth.
• Authenticity builds trust, trying too hard often does the opposite.
• Parallels between elite sports and leadership: the pursuit of self-improvement.
• Personal anecdotes on how unresolved ego issues can show up in coaching, communication, and conflict.
• “Leadership is an act of service”, how humility and vulnerability increase your influence.

Thank you for tuning in! If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our podcast. Stay tuned for more insights and discussions to help you thrive in both your personal and professional life.

Join Our LinkedIn Group!
Become a part of The Founders Catalyst, a free community for founders, start-up executives, and high achievers. Network, ask questions, and participate in our free monthly Zoom meetings. Connect with like-minded individuals and expand your professional circle. Join here.

What happens when two high-performance coaches admit they're not walking their own talk? This raw and revealing episode is an honest look into the burnout cycle that even the most disciplined leaders can fall into.

Steve and Lee unpack how their carefully curated schedules have spiraled into overwhelm, despite their best intentions, and what that says about the challenges leaders face in protecting time and energy. 

They reflect on personal experiences, cognitive fatigue, perfectionism, and the sneaky belief that high capacity means endless availability. If you've ever felt stretched thin or caught in the trap of productivity guilt, this one will hit home.

Whether you're a founder, coach, or creative, you'll walk away with powerful insights on setting boundaries, embracing rest, and finding the courage to adjust your plans, even when you're the one who made them.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

• Why high-performing leaders are especially vulnerable to burnout
• The cognitive cost of constant context-switching
• “Borrowing from the future”,  the hidden danger of postponing rest
• The difference between time management and energy protection
• How emotional awareness can help you break reactive patterns
• Practical ways to reset, audit your energy, and say “no” with integrity
• Vulnerability as a strength: why sharing struggles helps normalize them

🔗 Resources & Mentions:

• Conscious Leadership Group – The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
• Lee’s famous smoothie recipe (coming soon in a future episode! 😉)
• Upcoming episode teaser: A follow-up conversation on how Steve and Lee implemented change and restructured their time

Feeling like you're stuck in the overwhelm trap? This episode is a must-listen. 🎧

👉 Tune in now to hear two leadership coaches get radically honest about burnout and recovery
 👉 Share this episode with a friend or fellow founder who needs to hear it
 👉 Rate & review the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to help others discover The Founders Catalyst

Thank you for tuning in! If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our podcast. Stay tuned for more insights and discussions to help you thrive in both your personal and professional life.

Join Our LinkedIn Group!
Become a part of The Founders Catalyst, a free community for founders, start-up executives, and high achievers. Network, ask questions, and participate in our free monthly Zoom meetings. Connect with like-minded individuals and expand your professional circle. Join here.

In this real and relatable chat, Steve Mellor and Lee Povey get into one of the trickiest, but most important, parts of being a strong leader: giving feedback that actually helps people grow.

They talk about how to share hard truths without breaking trust, and why the relationship behind the message matters just as much as the message itself. 

Whether you're leading a team, coaching others, or just trying to communicate better, this episode is packed with down-to-earth advice on how to be more effective, not just more direct.

💡 Key Takeaways:

• Feedback is love. Telling someone what they need to hear—when done well—is one of the most powerful gifts you can give.
• Delivery matters as much as the message. Even the most truthful feedback will fall flat without the right tone, timing, and trust.
• Rapport is the foundation. Build the relationship first. Without it, feedback may feel like an attack, not a gift.
• Ask before you advise. A simple “Are you open to feedback?” can unlock a more productive, respectful exchange.
• Be effective, not just right. Choose the right time and the right words to ensure the feedback can actually be received and acted upon.
• Focus on growth, not ego. Feedback should invite someone into their potential—not trap them in their current limits.
• Zone of Genius vs. Zone of Comfort. Great leadership invites others to take the leap into their true potential.

🔗 Links & Resources:

• 🧠 Free Feedback Guide by Lee Povey: www.leepovey.com (Scroll to the bottom of the homepage to download)
• 💼 Connect with Lee: www.leepovey.com
• 📣 Learn more about Steve: www.growthready.com

Thank you for tuning in! If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our podcast. Stay tuned for more insights and discussions to help you thrive in both your personal and professional life.

Join Our LinkedIn Group!
Become a part of The Founders Catalyst, a free community for founders, start-up executives, and high achievers. Network, ask questions, and participate in our free monthly Zoom meetings. Connect with like-minded individuals and expand your professional circle. Join here.

About the Episode

In this raw and insightful conversation, hosts Steve Mellor and Lee Povey unpack the deeply personal and professional journey of understanding the true value of coaching. 

Whether you're a seasoned founder, an emerging leader, or someone curious about personal development, this episode dives into the why, when, and how of finding the right coach for your journey. 

From breaking down internal resistance to practical strategies for choosing a coach, Steve and Lee challenge the common misconceptions and highlight how transformative coaching can be when approached with curiosity and intention.

Key Takeaways

• The coaching mindset shift: Coaching isn't just for "fixing problems"—it's about optimizing your potential, like athletes do.
• You need to want it: Coaching only works when there's internal recognition that support is needed or desired.
• Start with your network: Before Googling, reflect on who in your life has grown with coaching and why it worked for them.
• Safety and challenge matter: A good coach helps you feel secure, but also pushes you into uncomfortable (yet essential) growth zones.
• Interview multiple coaches: Chemistry is key, but don’t just go with the nicest coach—choose the one who’s best equipped to serve your goals.
• Resistance is normal: Doubts about coaching often stem from fear of the unknown or past bad experiences. The opportunity cost of not exploring coaching can be significant.
• The coach's role: More than advice-givers, coaches are curious partners who help uncover what you don't know you don't know.

Links & Resources

• 🧠 Episode on the Nine Box Exercise 
• 📖 Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers – A foundational personal development book mentioned by Lee.
• 🎯 Learn more about Steve Mellor
• 🧭 Learn more about Lee Povey

Thank you for tuning in! If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our podcast. Stay tuned for more insights and discussions to help you thrive in both your personal and professional life.

Join Our LinkedIn Group!
Become a part of The Founders Catalyst, a free community for founders, start-up executives, and high achievers. Network, ask questions, and participate in our free monthly Zoom meetings. Connect with like-minded individuals and expand your professional circle. Join here.

In this episode, Steve and Lee dive deep into the key differences between consultants, mentors, and coaches—three very distinct roles that often get confused. 

They explore when and why you might need each, how they can complement one another, and the importance of understanding what kind of support best serves your business, leadership, and personal growth journey.

Key Takeaways:

✅ Consultants: The Problem Solvers

• Hired to identify and fix specific business issues.
• Typically offer a short-term engagement with a clear deliverable (e.g., a report or training).
• Their biggest challenge? Organizations often know the problem but struggle to implement the solution.

✅ Mentors: The Guides & Advisors

• Mentors share their own experiences to help you navigate your journey.
• Often a long-term, relationship-based dynamic that evolves over time.
• Mentorship can be reciprocal, where both people learn from the relationship.
• Not always a formal or paid engagement - many successful professionals mentor to give back.

✅ Coaches: The True Growth Partners

• Coaches don’t tell you what to do - they help you uncover your own answers.
• Focused on personal development, mindset, and leadership.
• Coaching is the most vulnerable and introspective process - it requires honesty and self-reflection.
• A coach doesn’t need to be an industry expert - their expertise is in human behavior and performance.

Most successful people combine all three - they bring in a consultant for expertise, seek out mentors for wisdom, and work with a coach for ongoing personal and professional growth. 

The key is knowing when and where each is needed.

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Next Episode Preview: Steve & Lee will break down how to find the right consultant, mentor, or coach—including what to look for, red flags to avoid, and how to maximize the value of these relationships.

Thank you for tuning in! If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our podcast. Stay tuned for more insights and discussions to help you thrive in both your personal and professional life.

Join Our LinkedIn Group!
Become a part of The Founders Catalyst, a free community for founders, start-up executives, and high achievers. Network, ask questions, and participate in our free monthly Zoom meetings. Connect with like-minded individuals and expand your professional circle. Join here.

In this episode of The Founders Catalyst, hosts Steve Mellor and Lee Povey take on a seemingly massive topic - how to live a complete and fulfilling life by breaking it down into a simple yet powerful exercise: the Nine Box Life Framework.

Lee introduces this life-changing tool, inspired by Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, and explains how it helps individuals create clarity, intentionality, and structure in their personal and professional lives. 

Steve and Lee discuss the importance of prioritization, protection, and process over results, sharing personal stories and actionable insights for listeners to start applying immediately.

Key Takeaways:

• Life is a process, not a result. Fulfillment isn’t a destination—it’s the byproduct of intentionality.
• The Nine Box Framework: Draw a 3x3 grid and assign each box to a key area of your life (e.g., relationships, career, health, personal growth, community, etc.).
• Prioritize and protect. It’s not enough to set goals—schedule and safeguard time for what truly matters.
• Boxes evolve over time. Life changes, and so should your priorities. Reassess your nine boxes every few months.
• Measure through alignment, not achievement. Success is about living in alignment with your values, not checking off boxes.

Try the Nine Box Life Framework for yourself! Sketch your 3x3 grid and start defining what matters most.

Share your insights and progress with usb- what did you learn from this exercise?

Follow the podcast to stay inspired and gain more actionable strategies for intentional living.

Thank you for tuning in! If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our podcast. Stay tuned for more insights and discussions to help you thrive in both your personal and professional life.

Join Our LinkedIn Group!
Become a part of The Founders Catalyst, a free community for founders, start-up executives, and high achievers. Network, ask questions, and participate in our free monthly Zoom meetings. Connect with like-minded individuals and expand your professional circle. Join here.