There’s a sentence John Hibbs said to me that I haven’t been able to put down.

“When you really peel back to the core reasons why we do anything, they’re all based around love or fear.”

It sounds like the kind of thing you’d find on a poster, and I’ll admit I braced for it.

But John isn’t a poster person. He’s an entrepreneur who failed at his first business, got told to his face that he was no good at running one, and rebuilt his entire approach from the ground up.

When he talks about love in business, he’s not being sentimental. He’s being precise.

Here’s the model he eventually drew on his kitchen blackboard, the one he calls The Monergy Flow™️.

Most people think a business exists to make money, so they start there.

John starts at the other end.

Money comes from selling. Selling comes from telling people who you are. That comes from a brand, and a brand isn’t built by a company; it’s built by the humans inside it.

So if you want the money, you begin with the people. And once the money’s coming in, you reinvest it back into those same people.

Happy humans go home and make happier families, and happier families make better communities.

The business and the community turn out to be the same circle, not two.

I pushed him a little harder because I see it constantly in my coaching work. Organisations almost always know what’s wrong. They have known for years. And still nothing moves.

John calls this the decision gap, and he’s clear it isn’t a failure of intelligence. It’s a failure of nerve.

“You don’t want to be seen to make a mistake. No-one ever got sacked for using IBM.”

The part that will stay with me longest came from his work with Mind through CoEfficient. When they looked at the data, mental health at work turned out to have very little to do with the support services on offer, and almost everything to do with the conditions themselves.

We keep parking an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. The cliff is the problem.

Where the GRACE framework meets all this is at Acceptance, which I think is the most misunderstood of the five.

It’s the willingness to see a person, or a system, exactly as it is, and then to find the resolve to change the conditions rather than keep treating the casualties.

The full conversation is live now. Have a listen, and then sit with the question John left me with:

“What is the one thing you already know is wrong, that you haven’t yet found the. nerve to change?

John Hibbs is an entrepreneur, co-founder of CoEfficient and creator of The Monergy Flow. Find him at CoEfficient and on LinkedIn.

Listen to this episode here

📣 Quick Plug 📣

You're in a place where your team isn’t scaling with the business, and what got you to here isn’t working like it used to.

And you don’t know why.

You can’t tell if the problem is them or you, and you can’t afford to be wrong.

The Leadership Circle Profile^® (LCP) provides a detailed snapshot in time, enabling you to answer the question:

“Are my behaviours and patterns of thinking accelerating or limiting my intended leadership impact and our business performance?”

If you want to see your own leadership patterns, how they're showing up in your business today, and the specific actions you can take to get better results, I'll do the Leadership Circle Profile with you at no cost, and we'll debrief it together.

Here are three ‘no fluff’ steps to help put you, your team and your business on a path to better outcomes:

1. Register to take your Leadership Circle profile here

2. Complete the profile questionnaire and review your results

3. Book your 30-minute debrief call here

Click on the button below to get started.

Register for your free profile here

In this conversation

John tells the story of the client who told him, to his face, that he was no good at running a business, and the two ideas that changed everything after: measure what matters, and treat business as humans helping humans. He walks through The Monergy Flow, the model he drew on his kitchen blackboard. He names the decision gap, where leaders know what is wrong and still do nothing. And through CoEfficient’s work with Mind, he shows why mental health at work is set by conditions, not by support services added at the bottom of the cliff. It ends where the best conversations do, with a question he still cannot answer.

About John Hibbs

John Hibbs is an entrepreneur, certified company director and co-founder of CoEfficient, a data platform that helps organisations measure leadership, culture and workplace mental health. He is the creator of The Monergy Flow, works alongside Mind through the Workplace Partnership, and lives in Guernsey, next to the beach.

Resources

• CoEfficient — John’s data platform (coefficient-solutions.com)

• The Monergy Flow by John Hibbs

• John Hibbs on LinkedIn 

• Mind — the mental health charity, and the Workplace Partnership originated by Guernsey Mind

• Alan Mulally — former CEO of Boeing Commercial Aeroplanes and Ford Motor Company r

• Corporate Rebels — referenced by Paul on autonomy and “square pegs in square holes”

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

There’s a question I ask the people I coach more than almost any other. Where are you right now? Not geographically. I mean in the arc of whatever you’re going through.

A lot of the time, the honest answer is: in between. The old version of you doesn’t fit anymore, and the new one hasn’t shown up yet. It’s uncomfortable. Most of us treat it as a corridor to hurry through.

My guest this episode has built a whole life on the opposite idea.

Ana Bugalete grew up in communist Romania in the ’80s and ’90s, where the formula for a safe life had three parts: get a diploma, get a well-paid job, and hold on to it until you’re too tired to enjoy whatever comes after.

She left at 23. First Jordan, then Amsterdam, then Bali, and now a small community on the coast of Oaxaca. Along the way, she stopped seeing uncertainty as a threat and started treating it as fertile ground. She calls it the space between.

A few things from our conversation I keep coming back to:

On intuition. She doesn’t dress it up as a gift or anything mystical. “Intuition is perception we haven’t yet become aware of,” she says. It’s a capacity you can train, sitting underneath reason rather than against it.

On collapse. Ana reads tarot, and she used the Tower card to describe what happens when the structure you built your security on falls down. What’s left, she says, are the bricks. And you get to rebuild in a shape that actually fits you.

On belonging. I asked what she’s no longer willing to do to belong somewhere. The answer came back without a pause. “I am no longer willing to be someone else.”

And the big one: in a world of AI, what is the human edge? Her answer has nothing to do with processing power. It’s about being here, in a body, paying attention.

You can listen now: [LINK]

If it lands for you, forward it to someone who’s standing in their own space between.

They’ll know who they are.

I always write these emails hoping something lands at just the right moment. Did anything hit home for you today?

Hit reply and tell me. Even two sentences helps me understand what you need most right now. And I genuinely read every one.

Leave a comment

In this conversation

Ana traces a line from a Romanian childhood, where the only sanctioned path was a diploma and a job you held for life, to a way of living built almost entirely on trusting the next step without seeing the whole staircase. We talk about intuition as a form of intelligence rather than a party trick; about why scaling a business so often kills the essence that made it worth building; and about the costume your own success can harden into. She finishes on the question she’s genuinely sitting with: in the age of AI, what is the human edge — the part of us that can’t be codified or replaced? You’ll leave with a different relationship to not knowing.

About Ana Bugalete

Ana is a brand and culture strategist and the founder of Intooit. She helps founders find and articulate the essence of why their business exists — the work beneath the logo. Romanian by origin, she has built her life and practice across Jordan, Amsterdam, Bali and, now, the coast of Oaxaca, writing in real time about the questions she’s living through in her series The Space Between.

Resources mentioned

• Intooit — Ana’s studio (intooit.co)

• The Space Between — Ana’s essays

• Ana on LinkedIn 

• Ana on Instagram

• Ana’s Substack

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

The question Rich Strilowich carries into every coaching conversation is a quiet one: what’s the foundational truth underneath all of this?

He first started asking it as a child. He didn’t have language for it then — just a sensitivity to the gap between what things appeared to be and what they actually were.

That question followed him through a computer science degree, forty years at IBM, and a parallel immersion in every form of inner development he could find.

His new book is called The Corporate Sage.

The central claim, that your corporate career is your spiritual path, not a detour from it, sounds, as I put it to him, like something some people will find consoling and others will want to throw across the room. We spent time on both reactions.

What shifted for me in this conversation was the precision of Rich's meaning of grace. He quotes a definition from Cheryl Richardson:

“Over time you recognise that a benevolent force or energy has been available to guide and direct your life all along... Grace leads us to the exact events and experiences we need, exactly at the right time.”

In Rich’s reading, that includes the boss who made your life miserable, the redundancy you didn’t see coming, the project that collapsed.

The invitation is not to feel good about those things. It’s about stopping treating them as interruptions and starting to ask what they’re here to teach.

I’m not sure that’s always the right move. But I know from my own coaching work that some of the most costly things senior leaders do is fight reality, burning energy trying to make things other than they are, rather than meeting what’s actually in front of them. Rich is pointing at something real there, and in the GRACE Framework®️, this is ‘A’ for Acceptance.

Listen to the full episode by clicking the button below:

Listen To The Episode

If this lands for you, share it with someone who’s been splitting themselves in two between the job and the rest of their life.

Rich describes himself as a lifelong seeker of truth — someone who was always asking what was underneath the surface, long before he had language for it. What started as an introverted engineer's desire to get over his fear of public speaking became, over thirty years, a full immersion in energy healing, somatic therapy, Eastern and Western contemplative traditions, and eventually the question that became his book: Is your corporate career your spiritual path?

About Rich Strilowich

Rich Strilowich is a former IBM executive and the author of The Corporate Sage: Gracefully Integrating Spirituality for Authentic Leadership. After more than forty years in corporate technology — spanning software development, programme management, P&L leadership, and HR. He now coaches others navigating the intersection of their professional and spiritual lives. He is based in the United States.

Resources

• Website: stillpointcoach.com

• Book: The Corporate Sage — available via his website

• LinkedIn: Rich Strilowich

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

Management consulting trained me to think about eminence as a goal: build the profile, increase visibility, get quoted in the right places. I did some of that. I’ve also watched people chase it until they couldn’t remember what they were actually trying to say.

Erica Holthausen has a more useful frame

After leaving law — she calls it jumping out of the plane, not pivoting — and a decade in nonprofits and advertising writing in everyone’s voice but her own, she now helps independent consultants find their bold, insightful, galvanising idea. The perspective that’s genuinely theirs and genuinely useful. The one that’s true.

This conversation covers a lot of ground: a New England grandfather who refused to answer questions directly, two years defending securities clients when she’d gone to law school to save the world, what it costs to spend years being a skilled mimic, and why the content treadmill — however exhausting — is often just a more sophisticated way of avoiding actual conversations.

“Visibility and authority — nowhere near the same thing.”

“Don’t disappoint yourself, but don’t worry about disappointing others.”

The AI section at the end is worth listening to on its own. It’s not a panic about technology but rather a calm, grounded argument for what remains irreplaceable about a point of view that’s genuinely formed and genuinely human.

You can listen to Erica’s episode here.

About Erica Holthausen: Founder of Catchline Communications. She works with independent consultants on the writing that actually builds authority. Before that: attorney, school bus, grant proposals, advertising. TEDx speaker on the power of not knowing. Find her at catchlinecommunications.com

One of my clients wrote me a WhatsApp message last week. I wanted to know how he describes how I work to others. He said…

Paul has spent decades building relationships with world-class teachers, practitioners and thinkers across the full breadth of human development: psychology, neuroscience, embodied practice, systemic coaching, culture change, performance science. He does not present this as a menu of services. He holds it more like a painter holds a palette, knowing instinctively which colour is needed, in which combination, at which moment. When he brings in a collaborator or points you toward a particular teacher or tool, it is never random and never generic. It is surgical. The timing is almost always better than you could have chosen for yourself.

So today, I’m getting my palette out and offering you the many colours that are Erica.

She is offering a 3-hour Masterclass called The Authority Intensive

Her feedback is kind but razor-sharp. She takes vague, woolly thinking and shows you how to connect it to your voice and speak directly to the heart of your ideal client.

And honestly? If there’s one skill worth improving in business to attract more clients, it’s writing in your own voice.

Listening to her has made me a better writer.

She has this incredible energy; it’s like every time you work with her feels like a really useful hug.

So today, I just wanted to shout her out. I’m not being paid to say this or anything. I just think more people should experience her magic.

So if you want three hours with Erica Holthausen and to be able to leave the workshop with a real first draft and a clear plan for using it.

Sign up by clicking on the button below.

Sign me up to The Authority Intensive

In this conversation, Erica helps independent consultants find what she calls their bold, insightful, galvanising idea — the perspective that makes their work genuinely irreplaceable rather than competently interchangeable. This episode traces how she got there: the New England farmer who taught her to sit with not knowing, the two years defending securities clients when she'd wanted to save the world, the jump into the Audubon Expedition Institute with everything she owned on her back. We talk about what years of persuasive writing does to your own voice, why the content treadmill is mostly a sophisticated avoidance strategy, and why AI — paradoxically — makes a genuine human point of view more valuable, not less. One of the sharper conversations we've had on this podcast about what it actually means to say something

About Erica Holthausen Erica Holthausen is the founder of Catchline Communications. She works with independent consultants to help them articulate the one perspective that makes them irreplaceable — and then build a body of writing that actually serves their business. Before any of that, she was an attorney, an environmental studies student living on a school bus, and a grant writer. She gave a TEDx talk on the power of not knowing.

Resources mentioned:

• Catchline Communications

• Erica on LinkedIn

• A Man for All Seasons — Robert Bolt (the play that sent Erica to law school)

• The Brethren — Bob Woodward (the book that almost made her a journalist instead)

• Finding the Mother Tree — Dr. Suzanne Simard

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

In this conversation:

Jennifer and Paul explore what it means to rediscover something that was always there — in the voice, in the body, and in the self. This is a conversation about the damage that instruction can do when it

displaces intuition; about the kind of witnessing that sees things fixing can never find; and about what it might mean to arrive at your own sufficiency without needing to earn it first. Jennifer's forthcoming

fourth book argues that the hunger to be special is the very thing that keeps us from recognising we already are.

About Jennifer Hamady:

Jennifer Hamady is a voice coach, psychotherapist, and author working at the intersection of performance and psychology. Her company, Finding Your Voice, works with singers, speakers, and

professionals across industries. She is the author of three books, with a fourth currently in progress.

Resources mentioned:

• Finding Your Voice — Jennifer's work and books:

• The Art of Singing

• The Art of Singing Onstage & In The Studio

• Learning To Sing

T.S. Eliot — 'Little Gidding' from Four Quartets: 'And know the place for the first time'

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

In this conversation:

Julia grew up in England, born in the US, the youngest sibling in an academically accomplished family who found her own way by zigging. She ended up at UCLA, doing a PhD in educational psychology, and has spent the decades since building a body of work — and a company, To Eleven — dedicated to applying learning science where it's most needed and least applied: in the organisations that spend the most on training and get the least back.

What makes this conversation distinctive is that Julia doesn't deal in abstractions. Every argument comes with an example — the zoo trip, the ice cream shop, the 16-year-old forced to watch conference etiquette videos while bagging groceries. The critique of learning styles isn't a debunking for debunking's sake: it's a redirect toward what the evidence actually supports. And her final reflection — that teaching is a discipline that doesn't get the same deference we give to medicine or engineering — is one of those observations that's easy to agree with and hard to sit comfortably with.

About Dr Julia Phelan

Dr Julia Phelan is an educational psychologist, learning scientist, and founder of To Eleven, a consultancy that applies evidence-based learning design to corporate training, leadership development, and educational technology. She holds a PhD from UCLA, where she spent over a decade as a researcher. She writes on Substack and is most easily found on LinkedIn.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• To Eleven: To Eleven website

• LinkedIn: Dr Julia Phelan on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/juliaphelan [TO VERIFY — confirm LinkedIn slug]

• Book: The Learning Gap — James Stigler & Harold Stevenson (book referenced by Julia as formative)

• Book: The Teaching Gap — James Stigler & James Hiebert (companion volume)

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

A man is given the care of a young falcon.

He has never seen a falcon before. He has only ever known pigeons.

So when he looks at this strange bird, with its long curved talons and its hooked beak and its broad, restless wings, something in him is troubled.

The bird looks wrong.

The bird looks as though no one has been caring for it properly.

He thinks for a while. Then he goes to find a pair of scissors.

He works carefully.

He is not cruel.

He is, in his own mind, helping.

He trims the long talons back.

He clips the wide wings short. He files the hooked beak down to a small, sensible point.

The bird is quiet and subdued under his hands.

When he is finished, he stands back and looks.

“There,” he says softly. “Now you look like a proper bird.”

Question: As you read the story, what do you begin to notice?

These are my retellings of the parable by Anthony de Mello, “The Royal Pigeon” from The Song of the Bird (1982).

Sue Heatherington traces the line from a hillside farm in Kent, through a decade as an NHS chief executive, to the rewilded valley in South West Wales where she now lives and writes. We talk about being marked by difference, the limits of single-disciplinary thinking, what she means by “be more poet,” why she thinks our current lenses on work and leadership are bankrupt, and the question she's sitting with right now that has no answer yet.

Sue is the writer of Quiet Disruptors: Creating Change Without Shouting. After more than a decade as an NHS chief executive and a career that crossed health, education, and consultancy, she now lives in a forty-acre rewilded valley in South West Wales with her husband Steve. She's the host of the Be More Poet podcast and the co-founder of Waterside Voices.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Sue's personal site: https://sueheatherington.com

• Quiet Disruptors site: https://quietdisruptors.com

• Quiet Disruptors: Creating Change Without Shouting (Sue Heatherington, 2021)

• Be More Poet podcast: https://sueheatherington.com/be-more-poet/

• Waterside Voices https://watersidevoices.com/

• Bernadette Jiwa — founder of the business community Sue joined in 2018

• David Whyte, poet, is referenced as a longstanding influence

• Iain McGilchrist — The Master and His Emissary; The Matter with Things

• Ram Dass — referenced for “walking your mother home”

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

And you don’t know why.

You can’t tell if the problem is them or you, and you need an answer and can’t afford to be wrong.

The Leadership Circle Profile^® (LCP) provides a detailed snapshot in time, enabling you to answer the question:

“Are my behaviours and patterns of thinking accelerating or limiting my intended leadership impact and our business performance?”

If you want to see your own patterns of leadership, how they're showing up in your business today, and the specific, meaningful courses of action you can take to get better results, I'll do the Leadership Circle Profile with you at no cost, and we'll debrief it together.

This is the first step on a practical journey to answer the “is it me or them” question with measurable results.

Here are three ‘no fluff’ steps to begin putting you, your team and your business on a path to better outcomes:

1. Register to take your Leadership Circle profile here

2. Complete the profile questionnaire and review the results emailed to you

3. Book your 30-minute debrief call here

Click on the button below to get started.

Register for your free profile here

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

This is a conversation about the gap between how we manage people and how we actually care for them. Richard Andrews has spent decades in recruitment and coaching — and this is not an episode about talent pipelines or competency frameworks. It is about what happens when someone treats you like a person. And why that turns out to be the most effective thing of all.

Richard brings a perspective shaped by thirty years at the uncomfortable intersection of business incentives and human welfare. He has watched recruitment reduce people to CVs, seen high-performing leaders destroy their teams with unchecked anger, and coached executives through the slow discovery that self-compassion is not a weakness — it is a working condition.

He also raises a question that stopped me short: we train people extensively for their careers. We give them almost nothing for retirement. For a third of their lives, they are on their own. In this conversation, we explore what changes when organisations — and coaches — decide to take that seriously.

ABOUT RICHARD ANDREWS

Richard Andrews is a coach and outplacement specialist with three decades of experience in recruitment and career transition. He has worked with individuals at every level — from executives facing redundancy to young professionals navigating their first roles — with a particular focus on the behavioural patterns that create lasting change. He is based in the UK and can be reached at ricbandrews@gmail.com. He also writes on Substack.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Viktor Frankl — Man's Search for Meaning (the 'space between stimulus and response')

• Patrick Lencioni — The Advantage (humble, hungry, smart)

• Ethan Cross — Chatter (4,000 words per minute of self-talk)

• Brené Brown — self-compassion and 'you can't love anybody more than you love yourself'

• Jonathan Haidt — The Anxious Generation (social media and young people)

• Simon Sinek — Leaders Eat Last (the leader who speaks last)

• Richard's Substack

• Contact ricbandrews@gmail.com

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

What happens when the identity that once drove your success begins to limit your freedom?

In this episode of GRACEWorks, Paul Crick is joined by Gloria Ribeiro, a sustainability consultant and former senior lawyer, to explore the hidden costs of being raised — and rewarded — as a high achiever.

Gloria shares her journey from a childhood shaped by academic pressure and external validation, through early professional success, to a profound reckoning in midlife that led her to leave everything familiar behind. Moving from Brazil to the UK became a rupture, and ultimately a liberation, forcing her to confront questions of identity, self-worth, and what it really means to live in alignment. Together, Paul and Gloria explore how achievement can quietly become a substitute for belonging, why self-acceptance is not complacency but courage, and how listening to the body, not just the intellect, can guide wiser choices in life and leadership.

This is a conversation for anyone who has succeeded on paper, yet sensed that something essential was missing.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• Growing up in a culture where achievement equals approval

• How being labelled “gifted” can shape identity for life

• The quiet cost of abandoning early dreams in favour of safety

• What it means to start again — emotionally and practically — in midlife

• Why alignment matters more than achievement

• Redefining success through embodiment, self-acceptance, and purpose

Gloria Ribeiro is a sustainability consultant supporting organisations across Europe to build responsible strategies that align business performance with human and environmental wellbeing. Her work integrates governance, values-led leadership, and personal alignment.

🔗 Connect with Gloria on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gloriaribeiro-/ and find out more about Procure Strategic Insight at procurestrategic.co.uk

🎙️ Leave Paul a voice message for the GRACEWorks Podcast

Share a question, reflection, or story. Your message may appear in a future episode.

👉 Speak your message here:

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GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

In this episode of the GRACEWorks Podcast, I'm joined by Nick Regan, founder of Skillful Collaboration and an experienced team coach whose work centres on dialogue as a lived practice rather than a conversational technique.

Nick’s journey into dialogue began later in life, after a 30-year career in engineering and global corporate environments where “conversation” was constant, but true dialogue was rare. What he discovered changed not only how he works with teams, but how he understands collaboration itself.

Together, Paul and Nick explore dialogue as a space where people think, listen, and learn together—and where something wiser can emerge between them.

In This Episode, We Explore

• Why dialogue is different from discussion, debate, or decision-making meetings

• How habitual conversational patterns limit collaboration in teams

• The Four-Player Model (Move, Oppose, Bystand, Follow) and how it reveals hidden dynamics

• Why “skillful conversations” are a more accessible entry point than “dialogue” in organisations

• The courage required to interrupt unhelpful patterns—including the power of saying no

• How teams can build psychological safety through shared norms

• Why collaboration is not an event, but a daily practice

• What gives hope for the future of how we work together

About Nick Regan

Nick is a team coach, facilitator, and the founder of Skillful Collaboration. Originally from Yorkshire in the UK, Nick trained as an engineer and spent nearly two decades working globally in the automotive sector before transitioning into leadership and team development work. He has lived in the Netherlands for over 20 years with his French wife and their three sons, an experience that has shaped his appreciation for multicultural ways of listening and being. Nick trained with the Academy of Professional Dialogue, a UK-based charity dedicated to bringing dialogue into schools, prisons, communities, and organisations for the benefit of society.

Links & Resources

• 🔗 Skillful Collaboration

• 🔗 Easy2Learn (ICI2Learn)

• 🔗 Nick Regan on LinkedIn

• 🔗 Academy of Professional Dialogue

🎙️ Leave Paul a voice message for the GRACEWorks Podcast

Share a question, reflection, or story. Your message may appear in a future episode.

👉 Speak your message here:

https://www.speakpipe.com/GraceWorksPodcast

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

In this episode of GRACEWorks, Paul Crick is joined by award-winning British voice artist and storyteller Sara Starling for a spacious, reflective conversation about voice, silence, and grace as lived experience.

Sara traces her journey from early childhood encounters with sound, through her formative years as a BBC sound engineer and announcer, to building an international voiceover career and, more recently, creating Bubbling Toad Stories — a storytelling project born from a dream, friendship, and a deep desire to bring light and safety into a heavy world.

Together, Paul and Sara explore:

• The emotional labour of voice and why silence matters

• How stories become “medicine” when we meet them at the right time

• The difference between performance and presence

• Creativity as an act of listening rather than pushing

• Grace as acceptance, embodiment, and inhabiting the moment fully

This is a conversation about attention, imagination, and what it means to become more fully yourself, without force.

Key Themes

• Voice as an embodied, emotional instrument

• Silence as craft and emotional intelligence

• Storytelling as service and connection

• Grace as acceptance, letting go, and presence

About Sara

Sara Starling is an award-winning British voice artist whose work spans television, radio, animation, commercial and corporate narration for global brands. She is also the creator and narrator of Bubbling Toad Stories, a magical audio storytelling world for children and families.

Explore Sara’s Work

🔗 Voiceover work: https://sarastarling.co.uk

🔗 Bubbling Toad Stories: https://sarastarling.co.uk/bubbling-toad-stories/

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/britishfemalevoiceover/

🎙️ Leave Paul a voice message for the GRACEWorks Podcast

Share a question, reflection, or story. Your message may appear in a future episode.

👉 Speak your message here:

https://www.speakpipe.com/GraceWorksPodcast

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

Together, they explore how high-achieving leaders can integrate ambition with awareness — without abandoning performance, rigour, or commercial reality. Alice shares her own journey from fast-paced corporate life to a more integrated leadership approach that honours both drive and depth.

This is a practical, secular conversation about nervous system awareness, values-led leadership, and why grace is less about softness — and more about presence under pressure.

Key Themes & Topics

• What “the spirituality of leadership” really means (and what it doesn’t)

• Integrating ambition and awareness without rejecting success

• Why high performers struggle when pace suddenly slows

• Leadership under stress: fight, flight, freeze and reset

• Grace as presence, patience, and a learnable leadership skill

• Values-led decision making in real organisational contexts

• Why self-development isn’t a tick-box exercise

• Small, practical practices that create real change over time

About the Guest

Alice Bea Crozier is a leadership coach working at the intersection of performance, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness. She supports leaders and teams to integrate ambition with alignment helping them lead with clarity, presence, and humanity, even under pressure.

Connect with Alice

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alicebea-crozier

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imalicebea

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

In this episode of the GRACEWorks Podcast, Paul Crick is joined by Jayne Storey, performance practice specialist, author, and founder of Chi Performance, for a deep, reflective conversation on grace, embodiment, and the limits of striving.

Drawing on nearly four decades of Zen meditation, Tai Chi, martial arts, and applied performance practice, Jayne explores why many high performers struggle precisely because they are trying too hard — and how the body, when trusted, knows how to move us back into coherence, flow, and quiet confidence. This is a conversation about performance not as force, but as alignment; not as control, but as receptivity.

Key Themes Explored

• Why trying harder often undermines performance

• The difference between striving and sincere aspiration

• What the body knows before the mind does

• Grounding, hara/dantien, and embodied awareness

• Grace as something received, not achieved

• Why silence and inner quietude are essential to creativity and leadership

• The limits of mindset-only approaches to performance

• Awe, wonder, and the deeper layers of “flow”

• What sports, music, and leadership reveal about human potential

About Jayne Storey

Jayne Storey is a UK-based performance practice specialist whose work integrates Eastern contemplative disciplines with modern performance demands. She has worked with golfers, swimmers, tennis players, musicians, and business leaders to help them access more natural, embodied states of excellence.

She is the author of:

• The Athlete’s Ascent

• Breathe Golf

• Connected Golf

Further Links

• Jayne Storey (Speaker & Author): 🔗 https://jaynestorey.com

• Chi Performance (Coaching & Practice): 🔗 https://chipractice.com

• Jayne Storey on LinkedIn: 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayne-storey-6a0b3519/

GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough.

Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another.

Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment.

If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it.

© 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.