This summer, millions are meeting Homer's Odyssey through Christopher Nolan's retelling. Phil Cousineau has been living inside the real story for forty years. In this conversation, he separates the myth from the movie: what Nolan's film gets right, what it leaves out, and why a 2,800-year-old poem about the long way home might be the sharpest leadership text we have.

Phil Cousineau worked with Joseph Campbell on The Hero's Journey, has consulted with Hollywood studios including Warner Bros., Pixar, and Lucasfilm on mythology, and has led pilgrimages to Homer's Greece for three decades. His new book, The Wisdom of the Odyssey, arrives in the same season as Nolan's big-screen version. In this conversation, he makes the case that real leadership isn't about willpower or hierarchy. It's about the wound you carry, and what you do with it.

Phil unpacks why every leader is "scarred, and we know them by their scar," why Odysseus doesn't get home through willpower but through six women, and why the true story here belongs to Penelope as much as her husband.

A conversation about trauma, love, memory, and the long road back to yourself.
Follow him and get the book here: https://www.philcousineau.net/works.htm

What if the biggest mistake founders make when raising capital is assuming investors know better than they do?

In this episode of The Sacred Art of Leadership, Del and Dip sit down with Ari Helgason, co-founder of Transition, the venture capital firm backing founders building the technologies that could reshape energy, AI, industry and the future of the planet.

Ari has lived on both sides of the table. He built companies before becoming an investor, and that experience gives him a blunt view of what really drives success: not hype, not perfect strategy, and not the approval of a venture capitalist—but exceptional people, strong conviction and the resilience to survive when everything starts going wrong.

The conversation tackles some of the biggest questions facing founders and investors today:

Why do brilliant investors still get it wrong?

Is venture capital actually right for your business?

Can AI growth and sustainability coexist?

What happens when founders lose confidence, investors overreach, or billion-pound opportunities slip away?

And why might indecision be more dangerous than making the wrong call?

Ari also opens up about working with his brother, managing ego, learning from failed investments, resisting market hype and backing entrepreneurs who believe they are building their life’s work.

This is a candid conversation about power, money, technology, responsibility and what it really takes to build something that matters.

https://transition.vc/

What does leadership look like when you’ve spent twenty years thinking about art before you ever tried to build something?

Tom Trevatt is a headshot and portrait photographer, a Goldsmiths PhD, a former DJ, and an accidental business leader.

In this episode, Tom talks about the sleepless night that changed his life — and his mum buying him his first camera. About spending twenty years on the outside of something before finally doing it. About building a business from values up, pricing from connection out, and refusing to scale in the way the industry expected. He talks about the panic attack in his mid-thirties that pricked open his self-awareness.

About what happens when a £200k contract arrives and you weren’t quite ready for it. About why he still teaches, why he caps his client list, and why the ROI he cares about is what he calls return on life.

Tom gives us the most original answer we’ve heard on what leadership actually is — drawn from art theory, from the concept of the avant-garde, and from the image of a sailor trusted to take an island nation to safety.

This is a different kind of leadership conversation. Part philosophy seminar, part studio session, part honest account of what it costs to build something that doesn’t compromise who you are.

Topics covered: creativity and leadership — values-based pricing — building a business from nothing — self-awareness and mental health — the relationship between art, commerce and responsibility — what AI can and can’t replace — why leaders are the first people to go first.

Find Tom here: www.tomtrevatt.com

Sam Clark: Leadership Forged in Crisis

When Sam Clark moved to Sri Lanka in 2004 to start a travel company, he didn't expect to spend his first year running a disaster relief operation instead. The Boxing Day tsunami hit weeks after he arrived — and what followed became the unlikely training ground for everything he knows about leadership.

In this conversation, Sam takes us inside the moments that actually shaped him: the motorbike rescue missions, the £150,000 charity that emerged almost by accident, and the years of crisis that followed — the 2019 Easter bombings, a pandemic that made it illegal to sell holidays, and the long, grinding rebuild that came after.

He talks candidly about the Stockdale Paradox, the difference between optimism and denial, and why meditation — found in the strange stillness of lockdown — changed not just how he runs his business, but how he parents. He shares the practical anatomy of a crisis management plan, the mantra that got his team through COVID, and the moment a billionaire's unpaid bar bill saved the company.

This is a conversation about what it really means to be entrusted with leadership — and what holds when everything else doesn't.

In this episode:

• The tsunami that turned a travel startup into a disaster relief charity
• Why "we" mattered more than "I" in Sri Lanka's darkest moment
• The Stockdale Paradox — and the rats-in-a-bucket experiment that proves it
• Building (and using) a real crisis management plan
• How grief and lockdown led Sam to meditation — and to better parenting
• The Brazilian billionaires, the private island, and the $300,000 bar bill
• Churchill vs. Attlee: the wartime leader and the peacetime leader
• What success actually looks like when it isn't about the money
  

  Find out more about The Experience Travel Group here https://www.experiencetravelgroup.com/
  

Athene Parker walks into this conversation having had three hours sleep. She's been running on empty for a long while now and she tells you that in the first five minutes, without apology or performance. What follows is one of the most honest conversations we've had on this podcast.

Athene is a 27-year advertising veteran, a CTI-trained coach, and the founder of the emPOWER Breakfast — a gathering she created for the creative industries when she realised that people were silently drowning in their private lives while the workplace looked in the opposite direction. She talks about what happened the first time she gave someone a stage to speak honestly: two companies walked out and rewrote their whole HR policy from scratch.

She talks about what it means to lead from service rather than status. About why nervous system regulation isn't a wellness trend but a leadership responsibility. About energy, frequency, and why she point-blank refuses to soften the word sacred. 

And she talks about what it took to get here. The years of not sleeping. The isolation. The moments of not knowing how much more she could hold and then holding more anyway. The slow, hard process of building a life that finally makes sense of everything she is.

This is an episode about what purpose costs. About neurodivergence, parenting and empathy. And why the leaders who move us are almost always the ones who've been through something they didn't choose but gave them a meaning and purpose greater than their own lives. 

There is a comfortable story a lot of organisations tell themselves about people-first leadership. That if you care enough, listen enough, create the right culture, the results will

follow. Kate Thrumble believes that story is only half true. And the half that's missing is where most leaders quietly fail.

Kate has spent 20 years in the rooms where the real work happens, redundancies, restructures, the difficult conversations that don't make it into leadership books. She has seen what happens when empathy becomes an excuse, when kindness tips into avoidance, and when a leader who everyone likes can't be followed anywhere meaningful.

Her argument is simple and a little uncomfortable: being human isn't enough. The best leaders hold both. They create the conditions for people to show up whole AND they still

hold the line on what the work requires. Warmth without accountability isn't leadership. It's just being popular.

But here is the harder edge of that same argument. The organisations that only reward results - that promote the highest performer without asking how they got there - are making exactly the opposite mistake. Humanity isn't soft, it is strategic. And the companies that understand

that, Kate believes, are the ones that win.
This episode gets into what it actually takes to lead in that balance; the courage to tell someone their numbers are great but their people don't trust them, the discipline to measure

output over presence, and the reckoning Kate herself had to face when she got it wrong in one of the worst ways possible.

Because being good at your job and being fit to lead people are not the same thing. And no amount of niceness changes that.

Barny Wright co-founded No.8 London and is seven and a half years sober. In this episode he talks about what sobriety actually revealed, what it cost him to get there and so much more about founding and operating a business from the heart.

Episode Summary

Barny has built award-winning businesses, run marathons, and made bold creative bets for over two decades. He's also spent the last 2,682 Days sober (accurate at the time of publishing)

In this episode, Barny talks about what sobriety revealed: not triumph, but the removal of everything he'd been using to avoid himself. 

The grief that cracked him open. 

The emotions he'd been numbing for twenty years that suddenly had nowhere to go. 

The year he describes as the hardest since he got clean. 

And the slow, ongoing process of finally figuring out who he is, including the parts he's only just beginning to name and understand.

There's real honesty here about leadership too. About what it costs to always be the one who grafts hardest. About the moment he had to stop controlling everything and trust the people around him. About why admitting I don't know is a skill, not a weakness. And about what he believes every leader in every industry needs to hear: that you can be strong and empathetic. 

By the end, this stops feeling like a leadership conversation and starts feeling like a reminder that the most important work any of us will ever do happens on the inside and that the leaders brave enough to do it tend to change everything around them, not just themselves.

Jane Gomez has spent 25 years in the room where it actually happens. Not on the stage — in the circle. Chairing forums, steadying founders, asking the question nobody else thought to ask.

In this conversation, Jane brings something rare: a view of leadership from the inside out. Why the best leaders are often the ones who say "I don't know" — and mean it. And what happens when an entrepreneur won't get out of the way of the very team they hired to help them grow.

She also turns the lens on herself. The loud voice and big personality that belies the self-doubt underneath. The three personal values that finally gave her a compass. And the quiet realisation that she gets more from helping others than almost anything else — which might be why she's so good at it.

Honest, warm, and full of the kind of wisdom that only comes from being in the circle of trust for eighteen years.

Before interviewing their first guests, Dip & Del reflect on the first few episodes and answer some audience questions, including "how do you spot a poor leader", "what do you do if you're promoted before you are ready", and "what's one thing that you've never spoken about that made you the leader you are today?".
They also delve into the sensitive topics of mental health in leadership, imposterism and self-love.

Links:
Awareness - Anthony De Mello
https://www.amazon.com/Awareness-Opportunities-Reality-Anthony-Mello/dp/0385249373
Clan Mothers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakoyaner

Dip & Del discussing what the show is all about.