Trailer: Mask-off Conversations with Senior Leaders

Show Notes

In high-stakes leadership, the problem is rarely that you don't know what to do. It's that you can't always see what's actually happening. When pressure rises, your perception narrows and your mind gets busy. When a leader's lens is distorted, everyone downstream pays the price.

Leading Awake is a roundtable podcast for mask-off conversations with senior leaders, founders, and executives on the inner experience of leading, the part most leadership content leaves out.

Your host, Gilan Gork, founder of PeakAwake, draws on two decades as a mentalist working with leaders in 40+ countries (clients from NATO to Fortune 500 teams) to ask the questions most interviewers don't, and hear what most leaders don't usually say.

See clearly. Connect deeply. Respond wisely.

peakawake.com

What is Leading Awake?

Leading Awake is where top executives, founders, and senior leaders drop the mask and get real about the human side of leading at the highest level. The high-pressure, high-stakes moments where leadership actually counts. The decisions, conversations, and responses that can't be taken back. Each episode brings three of them into the kind of unscripted, honest conversation that doesn't usually happen in public.

One terrible lesson I've learned to the hard way is... Top executives from leading organizations across South Africa drop the mask and reveal what is the human side of leading well today. I have constantly found myself in debates about profits and purpose. We have to get other people involved. When you're leading teams of people, there is a natural misconception that you know it all. To have two and a thousand pairs of eyes on me was like intense pressure. And I just burst into tears. He said, mommy, we need you back. And I resigned. Associating somebody's capability and intelligence with their accent. KPIs are no longer valid at an individual level. I had to own it. It was my cause. My former CEO had been charged with murder. And then I land up taking over. Why do I share the gory details of that? Maybe this is not a question that I need to answer on a public phone, ⁓ same thing that has most improved your leadership effectiveness. Is therapy the wrong answer? And I'm not a dictator at all. Well, I used to be, but I've worked on that. Leadership under uncertainty often requires courage before clarity. And then people are going to go, you know, that mouth, she knows how to manage her career instead of saying, what a bitch. These conversations are rare. So subscribe now. Don't miss any of them.