The Shift

In this episode, Trisha continues her conversation with Tim Oberg, who brought Parkrun to Australia in 2011 and now leads the Healthy Kids Project and its flagship RAD Run Club.

Parkrun has a reputation for changing lives, but some people are still missing from the start line. Trisha and Tim look at who they are, what it takes for an event to reflect its local community, and where Parkrun is reaching people you might not expect. For anyone working across cultures, it raises a practical Cultural Intelligence (CQ) question: what helps people from different backgrounds feel they belong?

The conversation then moves to the school oval, where Tim has rebuilt what he learned at Parkrun for primary school kids.

If you're trying to start something, whether it's a community group or a program inside your organisation, what makes people come back week after week? Tim shares the principles he'd pass on to anyone trying to seed a movement, and why they travel well beyond running.

Connect with Tim Oberg: LinkedIn

• Learn more about his current work at RAD Run Club and the Healthy Kids Project.

Make sure you join Trisha in this journey of growth and discovery throughout the year via Substack or LinkedIn.

Resources mentioned:

• Parkrun - parkrun.com.au
• Rad Run Club - radrun.club
• Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best by Angela Duckworth
• Grit by Angela Duckworth

Referenced in this episode:

Episode 88: Tim Oberg - Part 1 - Why Parkrun Isn't Just About Running

Episode 86 — Can Sport Build Bridges - Or Burn Them?

In this episode, Trisha interviews Tim Oberg, who brought Parkrun to Australia in 2011 and grew it into one of the country's largest participation movements, and who now leads the Healthy Kids Project and its flagship RAD Run Club.

What did Tim think he was building when he stood on a sandy mound at Main Beach in front of 110 people for that very first event? And how long did it take him to realise it wasn't that at all? In this first of a two-part conversation, Tim traces the accidental origins of a global movement, unpacks the "third space" so many of us are quietly missing, and shares the organisational model — borrowed from an unlikely source — that let one Saturday morning event scale into hundreds.

It's a conversation about what people are really showing up for on a Saturday morning, and why it so rarely has much to do with running pace.

Connect with Tim Oberg: LinkedIn

• Learn more about his current work at RAD Run Club and the Healthy Kids Project.

Make sure you join Trisha in this journey of growth and discovery throughout the year via Substack or LinkedIn.

Resources mentioned:

• Parkrun - parkrun.com.au
• Rad Run Club - radrun.club
• UTS (University of Technology Sydney) social network analysis of two Australian Parkrun communities

Referenced in this episode:

Episode 86 — Can Sport Build Bridges - Or Burn Them?

In this episode, Trisha interviews Tim Buxton, founder of You Belong and a CQ Fellow who ran 100 miles across Iraqi Kurdistan, retracing a route that many of the refugee families he'd lived alongside once fled.

What happens in the body and mind when someone is pushed past everything they trained for? Tim takes Trisha inside the moment out on the course when his careful preparation stopped being enough, and the shift that let him keep moving anyway. And what does it actually feel like to reach a goal you've chased for years? Along the way, they explore the difference between cognitive and somatic memory, why our "why" needs recalibrating, and the small habits Tim calls his "one percenters" - the kind that build our capacity to connect across difference.

It's a conversation about what belonging costs, what it takes to keep going, and what's still there once you arrive.

Connect with Tim Buxton on LinkedIn and Instagram @timothykbuxton

• timothybuxton.com
• You Belong Australia
• Instagram/Facebook/LinkedIn: @youbelongorg
• Ultra Odyssey
• The One Percenters Performance Podcast
• Juste Podcast with Tim Buxton

Make sure you join Trisha in this journey of growth and discovery throughout the year via Substack or LinkedIn.

Referenced in this episode:

• Episode 86 - Can Sport Build Bridges - Or Burn Them?
• Episode 84 - Music Is Universal, Music Is Particular

In this solo episode, Trisha opens a new series on sport, and how it can both build bridges and burn them.

Every sporting event has three kinds of people: those playing, those watching, and those running it. Are they all having the same experience of connection — or is being near someone quietly different from being with them? Using Gordon Allport's contact hypothesis, Trisha tests a Saturday morning at the local park against a World Cup, asking who might be getting more out of it than we assume.

If a sporting moment has ever shifted you, or told you that you didn't belong, Trisha wants to hear it in your voice.

Make sure you join Trisha in this journey of growth and discovery throughout the year via Substack or LinkedIn.

Resources mentioned:

• "The Nature of Prejudice" by Gordon Allport
• Parkrun

Referenced in this episode:

• Episode 70 - Ned Legaspi, on storytelling and the Bamboo Framework
• Episode 75 - Chika Miyamori, on building bridges across differences
• Episode 76 - Dr. David Livermore, on Beyond CQ
• Episode 77 - Dr. David Livermore, on Prism and leadership
• Episode 82 - Mike Newton, on music and perspective
• Episode 84 - Music Is Universal, Music Is Particular.

In this solo episode, Trisha examines a shadow she left out of three episodes on music and connection: the same doors music opens for connection can just as easily be used to draw a line around who belongs.

What happens when the belonging a crowd creates turns on you mid-song? And what do you actually do when you're standing inside a circle that starts singing something you can't join? Trisha also revisits a decision to launch a series on sport, after the World Cup made clear that sport carries the same two faces as music, working through the same mechanisms.

Trisha wants your voice for the new series. Send her a voice note telling her about a sporting moment that shifted you, or a moment sport told you that you didn't belong. Either one. Both, if you've got them.

Referenced in this episode:

• Episode 84: Music Is Universal, Music Is Particular - the Listener Voices episode that prompted this reflection.

Make sure you join Trisha in this journey of growth and discovery throughout the year via Substack or LinkedIn.

In this episode, Trisha hands the microphone to her listeners. After last week's confession about the skip button, voice notes arrived from around the world - Scotland, South Africa, the USA, Guatemala, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia - sharing the songs that shifted them, the music that carries their pride, and how they use music deliberately in their work across cultures.

Is music a universal language, or thousands of particular ones?

A newly published piece of research gives a name to the answer that runs through every one of these voices - and it may reshape how you think about similarity and difference across cultures. Trisha also discovers which doorway is the hardest to catch yourself walking through, and finds an unexpected homecoming in a song she almost skipped.

With thanks to the voices in this episode:

Shirley Moana Duff - Coaching Psychologist

Hanlie van Wyk - CQ Fellow and Social Scientist - (Episode 54)

Greg Dearsley - CQ Fellow, Workplace Health and Safety - (Episode 14)

Lucy Butters - Author of "Cultural Intelligence in Practice" - (Episode 24 and Episode 67)

Lisa Liang - Intercultural Storyteller, Actor and Performer

Dr Angel S. Longino - Career Design and Cultural Intelligence, Higher Education

Resources mentioned include:

• "Universal Pluralism: Appreciating and Exploring Both Similarity and Difference Across People and Cultures" by Dr Tim Lomas
• Dr Tim Lomas' LinkedIn post
• "Luna de Xelaju" duet by Oscar Isaac and Gaby Moreno (YouTube)
• "Matariki Hunga Nui (Calling Me Home)" by Rob Ruha, Troy Kingi, and Kaylee Bell with Professor Rangi Matamua (YouTube)
• Listen along on Spotify - the songs our voices shared, followed by bonus picks spanning jazz, gospel, reggaeton, and more: The Great Equaliser - Music from The Shift Podcast

Referenced in this episode:

• Moon Joy and Cultural Intelligence
• Cultural Blindness - When Fairness Isn't Fair
• The Cost of Sameness - Voices from Three Continents
• What My Skip Button Taught Me About Bias

Make sure you join Trisha in this journey of growth and discovery throughout the year via Substack or LinkedIn.

In this solo episode, Trisha turns the CQ lens on herself, examining a habit she caught in her own listening since her conversation with Mike Newton in Episode 82.

What is your thumb actually doing when a song comes on? Trisha unpacks four different doors music uses to move us — the beat, being moved, surprise, and story — and realises she's only ever really been opening one of them. What does it mean when the same song that feels like home to one person tells another they don't belong? And what might be waiting in the very songs your thumb reaches to skip?

Trisha closes with an invitation: choose one song from a genre you usually skip, and use the PAUSE process to stay with it all the way through.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• 🎵 Listen to the episode playlist on Spotify: The Beat Beneath The Bridge - Music for The Shift Podcast Episode 82
• The PAUSE Process — first introduced in Episode 53, "Responding to Moments of Shift with PAUSE"
• Listen to Episode 82 — Mike Newton, on music, culture, and perspective

Trisha would love to hear from you — share a piece of music from another culture that shifted something in you, or tell her how you've used music deliberately in your own CQ practice, on LinkedIn.

Join Trisha in this journey of growth and discovery throughout the year via Substack or LinkedIn.

In this episode, Trisha interviews Mike Newton, CQ Fellow, certified CQ Facilitator, and Director of Organisational Health and Belonging at Young Life.

Music reaches us in ways that argument and logic simply can't — but what happens when that same power is used intentionally to shift how we see each other? Could a song be the beat beneath the bridge that connects people across cultural differences? Mike has spent over 25 years building culturally intelligent communities, and when he's not doing that, he's behind the decks. This conversation explores how music works across all four dimensions of Cultural Intelligence (CQ) — from sparking motivation and curiosity, to deepening knowledge of cultures not our own, to shifting perspective in ways that stay with us for decades.

Connect with Mike Newton on LinkedIn or on Instagram at mrnewton210

🎵 Listen to the episode playlist on Spotify: The Beat Beneath The Bridge - Music for The Shift Podcast Episode 82

Join Trisha in this journey of growth and discovery throughout the year via Substack or LinkedIn.

This week, Trisha steps back from a full episode to point you towards two conversations worth your time. She recently appeared as a guest on Victoria Rennoldson's Culture Cuppa podcast — and being on the other side of the microphone had her reflecting in ways she didn't quite expect. The episode, Leading Across Difference, is a candid conversation between two Cultural Intelligence (CQ) practitioners about the future of CQ and where hope lives within it.

Trisha also invites you to revisit Episode 28 with Sharon Gray — a Kamilaroi and Scottish woman whose wisdom is woven into the episode's very title. With National Reconciliation Week unfolding in Australia, there's no better moment to listen, or listen again.

Both links are in the show notes below.

Culture Cuppa — Leading Across Difference with Trisha Carter: https://culturecuppa.com/podcasts/leading-across-difference-with-trisha-carter/

Episode 28 — Winanga Guru: Listen Deeply, Go Slowly and Respect Everything with Sharon Gray: https://the-shift-with-trisha-carter.captivate.fm/episode/sharon-gray-winangar-guru-listen-deeply-go-slowly-and-respect-everything/

Join Trisha in this journey of growth and discovery throughout the year via Substack or LinkedIn.

In this special episode, Trisha steps back and hands the mic to three voices from three continents — each responding to the same question: what does it feel like when someone says, "We're all the same"?

What emerges is something that Cultural Intelligence (CQ) frameworks can name but can't fully capture on their own — the lived experience of cultural blindness. From South Africa, the United States, and Northern Ireland, these three perspectives share a quiet, consistent thread: the weight of being asked to make yourself smaller in the name of fairness.

This episode is both a companion to Episode 79 and a milestone — Episode 80 — and it marks the occasion the only way that feels right: by listening.

Join Trisha in this journey of growth and discovery throughout the year via Substack or LinkedIn.

Voices in this episode:

• Samkelo Blom (Episode 37) You can learn more about Samkelo and the work of his organisation here and connect with him on Linked In here.
• Dr. Kristal Walker (Episode 58) Connect with Dr Kristal Walker on LinkedIn.
• Sarah Black (Episode 9 and Episode 48) Check out Sarah Black on LinkedIn and sign up for her Newsletter.