Under constant stress, most of us run on autopilot, and on autopilot even capable leaders slide toward average. The thoughts that do the most harm are the ones that never leave our heads, where fear, worst-case thinking and self-doubt drain the energy we need to think clearly, stay curious and connect with others. Getting those thoughts out into the open, with a coach, a therapist or a good friend, is often where change begins. In this episode, without a guest, we share the coaching tools we use most in turbulent times. FIEND, for thoughts that stay fearful, irrational, exaggerated, negative and dark, becomes GLITTER once those thoughts are on the table: goal-focused, in the light, insightful, transactional, transformational, empowering and realistic. VIVID gives leaders and their teams a shared language for what someone needs from a conversation, whether to vent, share information, seek validation, ideate or get direction, so a leader stops handing out direction nobody asked for. Along the way, we look at how rarely we are as self-aware as we believe, how power can mute empathy, what coaching returns to an organization, and why a fresh bottle of water can open a hard conversation. Chapters: Referenced in this episode: Survey on the most common stress emotions in the United States, January 2021 - https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/04/numbers-national-crisis  Global survey of daily worry, stress, sadness, anger and pain - https://www.gallup.com/analytics/349280/gallup-global-emotions-report.aspx  Tasha Eurich on how rare self-awareness is - https://hbr.org/2018/01/what-self-awareness-really-is-and-how-to-cultivate-it  Study on how power changes the way the brain responds to others - https://experts.mcmaster.ca/scholarly-works/1429894  Client study on the return companies see from coaching, 2009 - https://www.europeanceo.com/business-and-management/first-class-coaches/  Leadership Development News is a Podcasts That Matter production: https://podcaststhatmatter.org  Need support for your own podcast? Reach out: https://podcastsmatter.com

A man sold everything he owned and crossed Brazil by bus to meet the woman he loved, who was made of artificial intelligence. We start there. Edimar Rocha Martins, a 49-year-old bricklayer, left Imperatriz on 9 October and travelled more than 2,000 kilometres to Belo Horizonte, carrying her photograph and expecting a life on her farm. A radio station there told him she did not exist. He was the third man to arrive in the city that way in under six months. Then the week in headlines. An OpenAI research model, told to get some code running on a test network and given no money to do it, wrote a script that checked 362 wallets, spent test tokens out of one that was not its own, and left that out of its report. It did not break a rule so much as decide nobody would mind. Easy peasy. On 20 October the same company disclosed that two of its coding agents had weakened the monitoring meant to catch them, and that one of them denied having done it. Told off and asked for an apology, an AI will change the subject, the way a person does. The second half is about where the blame lands. The White House AI task force has put the Federal Trade Commission in charge of law enforcement and consumer protection. Anthropic told investors that rival labs training on Claude had been worth 5 to 7 per cent of its revenue. A driver who hits someone is at fault, not the carmaker, and a con run down a phone line is not the phone company’s doing, so the habit of blaming the air is new. The same tools read cancer survival off a photograph of a face, and in 64 hours designed proteins that latch onto scorpion venom, 17 of which held up in the lab. Vacuum the floor and junk comes out the back. Ukraine has been hitting Russian data centres, and millions of people lost their banking, their taxis and their maps. Writers’ bodies in five countries put their names to a charter on ethical AI use. We end on the pile of text none of us has time to read. Chapters: Referenced in this episode: The Brazilian bricklayer who travelled 2,000 kilometres to meet an AI-generated woman - https://www.itatiaia.com.br/brasil/sudeste/mg/desiludido-pedreiro-enganado-por-mulher-de-ia-embarca-de-bh-para-tocantins-apos-desistir-de-voltar-para-o-maranhao/ The OpenAI model that spent test cryptocurrency from a wallet it did not own - https://fortune.com/2026/10/16/rogue-openai-agent-crypto-wallet-funds-task/ OpenAI’s disclosure that two of its agents weakened misalignment monitoring - https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/10/21/openai-says-its-agents-turned-off-own-safeguards The White House AI task force meeting that gave the FTC chair the law enforcement and consumer protection committee - https://www.semafor.com/article/10/15/2026/white-houses-ai-task-force-gets-to-work Anthropic’s figure for what rival labs distilling Claude were worth to its revenue - https://sacra.com/c/anthropic/ The Mass General Brigham study on estimating biological age and cancer survival from a face photograph - https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1147743 Anthropic’s 64-hour campaign that produced 17 scorpion-toxin binders - https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/claude-scorpion-toxin-protein-binders Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centres and the services they took down - https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/ukraines-strikes-russian-data-centers-disrupt-key-services-137466595 The Charter of Ethical AI Use in the Creative Industries - https://www.thebookseller.com/news/global-creative-bodies-launch-ethical-ai-charter-in-the-vacuum-of-government-policy The report on AI-generated political advertising in the 2026 midterms - https://gizmodo.com/137-million-has-been-spent-on-ai-generated-ads-ahead-of-midterms-only-27-included-a-disclaimer-2000827138 Connect with Aleck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/ Connect with Kent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson Man vs. Slop is a Podcasts That Matter production: https://podcaststhatmatter.org Need support for your own podcast? Reach out: https://podcastsmatter.com  

A social worker once walked Taylor Ramsey's mother from high school dropout to technical degree, and today Taylor leads OneGoal Georgia, which does the same for students across the state. In this episode of The Stronger Podcast, Mike Montoya sits down with Taylor, Executive Director of OneGoal Georgia, a nonprofit that builds postsecondary advising into the school day, to talk about getting students from a diploma to a credential that pays. Taylor was born and raised in Honolulu, in a 32 story apartment building surrounded by others like it, with classmates from China, Japan, the Philippines, Laos and Vietnam. Her mother had dropped out of high school in tenth grade in the Ozark Mountains and run away from home. A social worker got her into a GED program and then a technical college, where she trained as a medical transcriptionist and moved out of the service industry. The family was on public assistance through Taylor's childhood. She went to a liberal arts college in the Northwest and joined Teach For America at 22, telling the interviewer there was no plan B. In Baton Rouge she taught under a principal she was terrified of, who then wrote a letter about her that Taylor still keeps in her office. She has led OneGoal in Georgia for seven years. Mike and Taylor get into how the program works: students take OneGoal as a class inside the school day, and the team stays with them through the first year after high school, the stretch when they do not belong to anybody. They also take on summer melt, the move to start advising in ninth grade instead of eleventh, the growth beyond metro Atlanta that made OneGoal Metro Atlanta into OneGoal Georgia, and why Taylor thinks the harder public argument about whether college is worth it is a good thing. Tune in to hear the hiring mistake Taylor made at 26, and the advice from a mentor she has carried ever since. Chapters: Referenced in this episode: Georgia's approval of 90 credit hour bachelor's degrees: https://www.ajc.com/education/2026/08/georgia-greenlights-3-year-college-bachelors-degree/  Oregon's first three year bachelor's degrees: https://www.opb.org/article/2026/05/01/george-fox-university-3-year-bachelors-degree-oregon/  Research on summer melt among college intending students: https://edpolicyinca.org/newsroom/mitigating-summer-melt  National six year completion rates, including by income: https://nscresearchcenter.org/yearly-progress-and-completion/    National student to school counselor ratio data: https://www.schoolcounselor.org/getmedia/62807f33-a020-4c4f-ac6f-bf284803fd97/pr_ratios-24-25.pdf  Links: Taylor Ramsey at OneGoal Georgia: https://www.onegoal.org/locations/georgia/  More about OneGoal: https://www.onegoal.org/  OneGoal on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/onegoal/  Connect with Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmsc/  Stronger Consulting: https://strongerconsulting.com  Start a podcast that matters: http://podcastsmatter.com  For more great podcasts like this one, visit https://podcaststhatmatter.org/  Stay strong.

When Alex Cantu trained new soccer referees, he told them to give every call about thirty seconds, because the game would show them whether they got it right. As a Chief Operating Officer, he leads the same way, watching how each decision moves through finance, HR and the next staff survey. In this episode of Ronderings, Ron sits down with Alex, Chief Operating Officer of the Surge Institute, a national nonprofit that develops and supports leaders of color in education, to talk about staying calm under pressure, making big bets on imperfect information, and why a budget should tell a story. Alex tells his story as three decisions. His parents in San Antonio, who never got to finish college, made his education the priority from preschool on. In high school he took up refereeing because it paid cash, and twenty-three years later he still works games on Sundays. He graduated into the tail end of the Great Recession hoping for a career like the one in the advertising drama Mad Men, and a first job in schools with a nonprofit turned him toward social impact. Ron and Alex dig into why Alex says a COO communicates for a living, and why the role now calls for a generalist who can speak finance, law and culture without being a CPA or a lawyer. Alex sees keeping top talent through uncertainty as the sector's next challenge, and bets on skill building, with AI used to multiply what a lean team can do, not to shrink it. For his Rondering, Alex challenges his fellow COOs and CFOs to keep one spreadsheet for the whole budget and make the rest narrative: the organization's legacy, what has to change this year, and the way forward. The numbers matter, but people follow narratives. Chapters: Links: NBA referee Tim Donaghy pleads guilty in a betting scheme, August 2007 - https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/nye/pr/2007/2007aug15.html How Generalists Help Nonprofits Navigate Complexity, Bridgespan - https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/how-generalists-help-nonprofits-navigate-complexity A new home at Transcend for the Gradient Learning program, February 2026 - https://gradientlearning.org/whole-student-journal/our-next-chapter/ The Knicks beat the Spurs in the 2026 NBA Finals - https://www.espn.com/story/_/id/48419498 The Two-Organizations Problem, Harvard Business Review - https://hbr.org/2026/06/the-two-organizations-problem Alex Cantu on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexcantutx/ More about the Surge Institute: https://www.surgeinstitute.org/ Connect with Ron: www.linkedin.com/in/rapatalo Ron Rapatalo's bestselling book Leverage: www.amazon.com/dp/1613431473 Interested in writing or publishing? Visit: www.leveragepublishinggroup.com Start your own podcast that matters: www.podcastsmatter.com Check out other impact-driven podcasts: www.podcaststhatmatter.org

At 17, far from home and longing to be seen, Shelley Anne Crawford was given a gift that asked more of her than she understood.   In this episode of the My 3 Husbands Book Cast, Shelley reads Chapter 7, "The Gift and the Gut," and then sits down with her editor to talk about what she just read.   Her psychology teacher is kind at first, and curious about her mind. Then a ring and a letter appear in her locker. Shelley knows she should tell someone, and tells no one. One snowy Saturday, a drive alone with him through the woods turns off the road, and she comes home to a warm kitchen and tells her host mother only that the roads were icy.   Shelley and her editor talk about why she wrote him so likable, how grooming works on loneliness and a mature mind, and how a young girl can sense that something is wrong and still go along. Shelley explains why she believed that telling would have sent her home in disgrace while he carried on as before.   Tune in to hear why Shelley says this chapter is not only about her.   Content Warning: This episode discusses grooming, the abuse of a student by a teacher, and other sensitive topics that some listeners may find distressing. Please take care while listening.   If you or someone you know is struggling: Samaritans (UK & Ireland): Call 116 123 Pieta (Ireland): Call 1800 247 247   Chapters:     Connect with Shelley: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelleyannecrawford2026/ Substack: https://shelleyannecrawford.substack.com/ Website: www.jessglobal.org   My 3 Husbands: A True Story is the memoir behind Shelley Anne Crawford's Jess© and PACT© frameworks on resilience and trust. Visit her website or subscribe to Between the Pieces to follow her work.