Episode 5: The raw truths from inside CEO forums, with Jane Gomez

Episode 10 "Putting the Art in The Sacred Art of Leadership" with Tom Trevatt.

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 [https://www.tomtrevatt.com/]

Episode 9 "Leading Through Crises, Plural!" with Sam Clark.

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/ [https://www.experiencetravelgroup.com/]

Episode 8 "You Can Only Meet Someone As Deeply As You've Met Yourself" with Athene Parker.

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.

Episode 7 "Nice Isn't Enough - The Leadership Truth Nobody Wants to Hear" with Kate Thrumble.

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.

Episode 6 "Strong Enough to Break" with Barny Wright.

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.