Sometimes, just sometimes, the rules are there to be broken. Because when you dare to break them, miracles and moments of beautiful humanity could be waiting just on the other side.

Rotem Kazir was trained never to let her coaching clients know anything about her. Keep distance. Stay neutral. That's professional. Until a founder she'd coached for two years said something that broke the rule for good.

She's spent 20 years working with startup founders — first in HR, then on the VC side, now as a coach — and what she keeps seeing is that the performance breaks down at the exact moment people need each other most. One founder walked into his board meeting and said he didn't know how to take the company forward. The room shifted from performance review to actual problem-solving. He went on to raise $100M. We talked about why that almost never happens, when vulnerability is strategic versus reckless, and why she now opens meetings with "What's hard?" instead of status updates.

Links to learn more about Rotem Kazir:

LinkedIn

Jon Berghoff walked into a room of C-level executives from billion-dollar companies and noticed they'd all filled the back rows first. He spent two hours debating whether to say something. Then he got on stage and asked them to move to the front. The looks he got said: nobody has ever told us where to sit. Three Fortune 50 companies in that room ended up hiring him.

Jon is the founder of Xchange and one of the most in-demand facilitators in the world. He also spent five years running global conferences in a suit on top and barefoot on the bottom. We talked about why that's not a gimmick — it's connected to something he's learned about nervous system regulation and what happens when the person holding the room is actually relaxed. We got into the inner work behind facilitation, why the moments that go sideways are the ones that build the most trust, and what it actually costs to keep performing a version of yourself the room didn't ask for.

Links to learn more about Jon Berghoff:

LinkedIn

Website

Early in her career, Tieren Scott was told she needed to sound more "bubbly" when presenting. Her manager pointed to a colleague in the room as the example. Tieren's natural voice — grounded, measured, clear — wasn't the problem. It just wasn't the default. That moment taught her something black women in America already know: professionalism was never a neutral standard.

Tieren has a doctorate in organisational leadership and a decade of experience as an instructional designer and coach. We talked about what it actually costs to mask every day — adjusting your tone, reading the room before you've even opened your mouth, teaching your kids to do the same. She was honest about the exhaustion of it, and honest about the risk that comes with stopping. This conversation changed something for me: the freedom to be "unprofessional" is itself a privilege. Not everyone gets to drop the mask and call it brave.

Links to learn more about Tieren Scott:

Website

LinkedIn

A software engineer fired a test missile and watched it cartwheel into the ocean. He looked at the code and thought: that looks like what would happen if I hadn't loaded all the microcode. Did I load the microcode? Oh God. Did he tell anyone? No. So they fired three more. Same result. He was too afraid to speak up. That, says Mike Parker, is what professionalism encodes: fear dressed up as competence.

Mike spent 35 years in consultancy before founding his liminal coaching practice, and he's been thinking about where that fear comes from — Taylorism, factory floors, a management culture that treats "I don't know" as a career threat. We talked about why daydreaming might be the most productive thing a knowledge worker can do, how asking "why" gets read as insubordination, and what his mother once told him about the word "amateur" that reframes the whole conversation.

Links to learn more about Mike Parker:

Website

LinkedIn

Substack

Jillian Reilly was young, running a multimillion-dollar AIDS programme in Zimbabwe, and supposed to give a diplomatic speech to a room of religious leaders. She sat through the procession, looked at her script, and decided she couldn't do it. What she did instead nearly sent the US government officials behind her into damage control mode.

Jill went on to write a bestselling book called The 10 Permissions, and this conversation is really about where that idea was born. We talked about the invisible rules we follow without questioning them, why "am I allowed?" is the most exhausting question to carry through a working day, and what she learned in Zimbabwe that took her decades to put into words: nobody is coming to give you permission.

Links to learn more about Jillian Reilly:

LinkedIn

The 10 Permissions Website

Welcome to Unprofessionalism! My shiny new podcast, a provocation in the making, and the place to challenge everything we’ve been taught about being professional.

Together, we’ll be peeling back the limitations of professionalism, on a mission to restore our humanness and bring joy, defiantly, back to work. You’ll hear stories from scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and true masters of their craft as we question the very construct of professionalism, its silent expectations, how we can break free, and seek to be unprofessionals in all that we do!

But first, join me from the very beginning. In episode 000, we’ll journey from the birth of professionalism to its existence in the age of AI, and why the only sustainable thing left for us to be is our real, brilliant, unfiltered selves.

Find out about:

• The history of professionalism, its construct, and why it has become such a paradox
• The wonderful guests I’ll be interviewing in the coming weeks, and the topics we’ll be exploring
• The Unprofessionalism book I am writing alongside the podcast, and the research that has led me here