Ready for Beyond

What if moving forward isn’t always about finding the next thing? What if some of the possibilities are already around us, and we simply haven’t learned to see them yet?

In this special Season 1 wrap-up of Ready for Beyond, Gina Hudel looks back at six conversations and the very different ways her guests have navigated change, identity, work, purpose, and what comes next.

Rather than offering six instructions for moving forward, the season reveals six possibilities. Wanda Deschamps challenges us to consider when the system, not just the individual, needs to change. Patrick McCaully shows how experience that doesn’t seem to fit can become a differentiator in the right context. Richelle Flint reminds us to pay attention to the quiet signals that accumulate over time. Jodi Armit explores the grief that can accompany change. Dave Inglis makes the case for creating enough quiet to hear what we already know. And Tsering Namgyal demonstrates that moving forward doesn’t always mean moving away. Sometimes it means looking again at something you’ve already built and choosing it again.


Together, these Season 1 conversations explore:
00:00: What if there isn’t one way forward?
01:16: Season 1: Six different ways of navigating change
02:27: Wanda Deschamps: When the system needs to change, too
03:43: Patrick McCaully: When experience that doesn’t “fit” becomes your advantage
07:41: Richelle Flint: Listening to the quiet signals
08:45: Jodi Armit: Why change also means grief
09:47: Dave Inglis: Creating enough quiet to hear yourself
11:15: Tsering Namgyal: When moving forward doesn’t mean moving away
12:55: Six possibilities and the thinking behind BEYOND
15:25: What possibility haven’t you considered yet?

The episode also offers a deeper introduction to BEYOND, a collection of ideas Gina has been working with for close to a decade and that has quietly shaped the questions behind the conversations in this first season.

Developed through research and reading, professional practice, teaching, observation, and countless conversations, BEYOND isn’t about providing one right answer. At its heart, it’s a way of widening the conversation, whether we’re thinking about ourselves, the people around us, or the organizations and communities we’re part of.

As Season 1 closes, Gina invites listeners to turn these possibilities toward themselves, their teams, organizations, communities, or someone they care about. Is there something you’ve been trying too hard to fit into? Experience you may be undervaluing? A data point you’ve been ignoring? An ending you haven’t quite acknowledged? Something you need enough quiet to hear? Or something that deserves recommitment rather than reinvention?

You don’t need an answer today. Just notice which one stays with you.

And perhaps there’s one more question worth asking:

What possibility haven’t I considered yet?

Season 1 Guests

Wanda Deschamps: On self-awareness, neuroinclusion, and why meaningful change also requires change within the systems around us.

Patrick McCaully: On taking experience that didn’t fit neatly into a conventional career path and turning it into his “special sauce.”

Richelle Flint: On listening to the quiet inner voice and recognizing when it becomes loud enough that it’s time to make a decision.

Jodi Armit: On change, grief, and why acknowledging what has gone away can be necessary before embracing what comes next.

Dave Inglis: On strategic solitude as a practice for catching up with ourselves and creating space to hear what matters.

Tsering Namgyal: On stepping away from financial journalism, returning to it, and recognizing that moving forward doesn’t always mean moving away from something you’ve already built.

About the Host: Gina Hudel

I’m Gina Hudel, a transformation leader who has worked with teams across more than 40 countries. Much of my career has been spent helping organizations navigate complex change, make difficult decisions, and turn strategy into action.

I’m also deeply committed to volunteer leadership and community work, which keep me grounded in what matters most: people, connection, and contribution. Whether the setting is global or local, my focus is the same: creating space for people to find their footing, focus on what matters, and make steady, sustainable progress.

Ready for Beyond brings that perspective to the mic. These conversations are grounded and human, shaped by a reminder I hold close: the future matters, but so does today. Each episode offers a moment to pause, reflect, and take the next step with confidence and intention, while staying present to the day you’re in.

What Is Ready for Beyond?

What you do today shapes what comes next, and navigating change doesn’t have to feel overwhelming.

Ready for Beyond is a podcast about growth, purpose, and finding your way in a world that’s shifting fast. Through candid conversations, thoughtful questions, and different perspectives, host Gina Hudel helps listeners move forward with clarity and courage, while still making space to enjoy the day they’re in.

From personal pivots to leadership transitions, career shifts to community impact, the show explores how people make meaningful progress while staying grounded in what matters now. Whether you’re leading a team, rethinking success, or opening the door to something new, this is a space to learn, reflect, and feel supported along the way.

Let’s go beyond.

Contact Gina Hudel

Website: CanCannot.com
LinkedIn: Gina Hudel | linkedin.com/in/ginahudel



Creators and Guests

Host
Gina Hudel
Gina Hudel is a global transformation and governance leader, operating in Kitchener-Waterloo in Waterloo Region along Canada's Innovation Corridor. She is passionate about supporting businesses, institutions & community growth. Whether helping a board navigate transformation, an entrepreneur flourish, a non-profit group evolve, or students master new concepts, she takes a systematic, collaborative approach to her work. Gina’s focus is on sustainable results and meaningful impact.
DI
Guest
Dave Inglis
JA
Guest
Jodi Armit
PM
Guest
Patrick McCaully
RF
Guest
Richelle Flint
TN
Guest
Tsering Namgyal
WD
Guest
Wanda Deschamps

What is Ready for Beyond?

What you do today shapes what comes next—and navigating change doesn’t have to feel overwhelming.

Ready for Beyond is a podcast about growth, purpose, and finding your way in a world that’s shifting fast. Host Gina Hudel shares real conversations and practical tools to help you move forward with clarity, courage, and a little more ease—while still making space to enjoy the day you’re in.

From personal pivots to leadership transitions, career shifts to social impact, this show is for people ready to make meaningful progress while staying grounded in what matters now.

Whether you're leading a team, rethinking success, or simply opening the door to something new—you’re in the right place.

Let’s go beyond.

Gina Huddel: [00:00:00] We spend a lot of time asking, what's next? A new job, a new chapter, a different direction? But after six conversations this season, I've been thinking about a different question. What if there isn't one way forward? What if some of the possibilities are already around us, but we simply haven't learned to see them yet? I'm Gina Huddel, and welcome to Ready for Beyond. Ready for Beyond explores how we move forward in a world that's changing fast. From AI to global dynamics, it looks at how the lives we build lead us to shape our future. We'll examine growth and personal fulfillment with practical takeaways and candid conversations that open the door to possibility. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss any episode of this journey. Let's go beyond.

Gina Huddel: [00:01:16] When I started Ready for Beyond, I wasn't looking for six versions of the same story. I was interested in how people navigate change and not only the big, obvious moments. Sometimes we're doing just fine. We like our work, we like our lives, but things around us are moving. Our organizations change. Technology changes. Families change. The people we care about are navigating futures that may look very different from our own. And sometimes something really does stop fitting. What stayed with me from season one was how differently six people responded when that happened. Wanda made me think about something we don't talk about enough. We spend a lot of time learning how to adapt. But what if we're not the only thing that needs to change? Wanda's autism diagnosis helped her understand experiences she'd had for years, but understanding herself wasn't enough. Wanda put it this way.

Wanda Deschamps: [00:02:27] I changed in so many ways, and I just became happier and more self-aware. And I remember thinking, this is what life can be. This is really it. I don't have to live my life doubting myself. And so what happened, Gina, was wonderful. And I began looking at life through a new prism. But then over the course of that year, if you can imagine a split screen on the other side, I realized I can change and change and change. I can address my mental health issues. I can begin a journey of self-awareness. However, if the systems do not change, if the people within those systems do not change, if they do not become aware of neuro inclusion, if they do not commit to the idea as you just described it, inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility. It doesn't matter how self-aware I become, it doesn't matter how much I address my own issues. If they're not going to address the biases in these frameworks in our organizations, then it's only going to be me making the effort and not on the other side. And therefore, we're not going to bring about the change that we truly need.

Gina Huddel: [00:03:43] Sometimes moving forward isn't about becoming better at fitting into the system. Sometimes the system needs to move, too. Patrick offers a very different possibility. He went through 104 job interviews. His experience didn't fit neatly into what employers were looking for. He came from the newsroom, not the conventional PR path. Eventually, the thing employers struggled to place became one of the things that differentiated his business.

Patrick McCaully: [00:04:16] So I started off in broadcast journalism, working at three of the four national broadcast outlets and worked really, did all the things you're supposed to do, went to journalism school, worked really hard to get a job, ended up being an assignment editor, which is the unfortunate guy that has to take really bad pitches from big PR agencies and decide not to do them or to do them in some rare cases. And I think that I had an epiphanal moment where I realized that it would be much better to be the person that's sending out the pitches, that probably gets paid a lot more, sees the sunlight, has more of a life, doesn't have to know about and see and do horrible stories and that, you know, there was even 25 years ago, it didn't feel like there was a lot of upward mobility in in broadcast news. It's only gotten worse since then. So I think had the epiphanal moment decided I needed to get into public relations and it would be a better sort of best destiny. And went on that journey of trying to get a job and eventually got one and then decided, hey, you know, I should just do my own thing because maybe I can do it better. The arrogance of youth, right? I think I was about 28 when I started the company, the Point Man News Creation, but I was probably 25 or so when I left the assignment desk job at the major network.

Patrick McCaully: [00:05:46] And newsrooms are not happy places, generally speaking, because a lot of people got into journalism because they want to be a reporter or they want to be a director, or they want to be a producer or a news director. But there's a lot of other jobs, The majority of the jobs are not fun. There's people who are tape operators. There's people who are assignment editors, right? And the vast majority of people in a newsroom are probably doing a job they didn't think they'd get stuck with. So it was obvious that I wasn't going to get where I wanted to get to be a reporter and do that job. So I just started looking somewhere else to put the energy and the, and the creativity. And, you know, when I was 25 and fearless, I was just like, well, I've had enough of this. I'm going to get a job in PR. And then I marched off and did that and had, incidentally, probably about 104 job interviews because no one knew what to do with me because I had all this experience working in a newsroom, but I didn't have PR experience, which is what they value. So I was difficult to put in a box.

Gina Huddel: [00:06:51] You ended up in a delightful box, a new career and maybe it was hard landing there, but truly, I would anticipate that that experience makes you better and more effective and more efficient and the world that you're in now. If you look back at the newsroom, is there something in particular that you feel that you learned about how stories actually get attention, that maybe even today, the modern, everyday person working in PR may not appreciate? And truly you got it because you were there living and breathing and drinking the water.

Patrick McCaully: [00:07:27] I mean, absolutely. It's absolutely the special sauce because the majority of PR people just haven't worked in a newsroom. And I think there's this odd, I'm going to say, fear that most PR people have of the media.

Gina Huddel: [00:07:41] Same experience, different context, completely different value. That made me wonder how often we assume something in our background doesn't fit. Perhaps the better question is: doesn't fit where? Richelle's story is easy to summarize. Chef becomes acupuncturist. Except it wasn't anything like that simple. There were health experiences, physical strain, different jobs, conversations, curiosity, small things that didn't necessarily mean much on their own. And there was something else. A quiet voice that became harder to ignore.

Richelle Flint: [00:08:25] I listened to the little voice inside me that said that I could, but it wasn't loud. It was pretty quiet. But when that voice kept getting louder, like to start, it was quiet. But like once it got louder, it was time to like, make a decision.

Gina Huddel: [00:08:45] Listening to Richelle, I started thinking about those experiences as data points. Most of us probably have some of our own things we enjoy more than we expected, things that repeatedly frustrate us, subjects we keep coming back to, changes around us that seem small until suddenly they don't. They don't necessarily mean we should change anything, but perhaps they're worth noticing. And Jodi. Jodi gave us one of the simplest ideas of the season. We celebrate beginnings, and we're less comfortable talking about endings. On the Camino Trail, Jodi found herself thinking about change differently. She said it more simply than I ever could.

Jodi Armit: [00:09:32] I think the biggest thing with change for anybody experiencing it, is what we don't acknowledge enough, is that change equals grief, because you need to grieve the loss of what has gone away. And until you've done that, you can't embrace going forward.

Gina Huddel: [00:09:47] I've thought about that a lot since we recorded, because even a change we choose can involve loss. A good ending is still an ending. Sometimes moving forward requires looking back long enough to acknowledge what we're actually leaving. Dave took us somewhere different again. Strategic solitude can sound like advice to slow down, put away the phone, spend some time alone. But that isn't really what stayed with me. Dave uses quiet deliberately to notice regret, to think about where his time is going. To recognize the conversation he knows he needs to have, but he keeps postponing. The quiet isn't the destination. It's where some things become easier to hear.

Dave Inglis: [00:10:42] It's a practice, right? It's. It's really, the way you get to this space is for different reasons. But when I think about solitude, I mean, fundamentally, all of us, we are going to experience regret in our life. And in this day and age, one of my favorite poets, David Whyte, jokingly refers to regret as something that we espouse that we shouldn't have. Right? Like you only live once, have no regrets. But truthfully, we all do have regrets. And solitude is a really great place to be able to catch up with ourselves.

Gina Huddel: [00:11:15] Maybe the answer isn't missing at all, we simply haven't made enough room to hear it. And then there's Tsering. His story complicates this whole conversation in a way I really like. Because sometimes the answer isn't to change direction. The world around sharing his work has changed enormously. Finance, technology, blockchain, artificial intelligence. And he also writes fiction. At one point, he considered leaving financial journalism to become a novelist full time. He left, he wrote the novel, and then he came back.

Tsering Namgyal: [00:11:55] When I was covering traditional finance on a few occasions, I've been very disillusioned with how the markets worked, and how the global finance world. So especially it favored the elite and it came at a huge cost to the common people, the poor people. So especially with the policies by these big institutions, by the big powers. So that was very disillusioned, I think, because as a Buddhist, I was very idealistic. So that's when I thought of stepping away. And I even considered being a full time novelist. I went away and I wrote a novel and then I came back. The novel has been critically acclaimed. But I came back into financial journalism because I think it grounds me. You know, it's who I am.

Gina Huddel: [00:12:55] Sometimes moving forward isn't about moving away. Sometimes it's looking again at something you've already built and deciding it still matters. Not because you're afraid to change, because you've chosen it again. Listening back, I don't hear six instructions, I hear possibilities. Sometimes we need to look at the system around us. Sometimes we need to reconsider the value of what we already know. Sometimes the clues have been accumulating for a while. Sometimes we need to make room for what we're leaving behind. Sometimes we need enough quiet to hear ourselves. And sometimes we don't need a new direction at all. None of those is the answer. And that's the point. Most of us know the paths we've taken, the possibilities we've encountered, and the choices we've seen other people make. Another person's story doesn't have to give us an answer. Sometimes it simply lets us see another possibility. There's something I haven't really talked about this season. For close to ten years, I've been working with a collection of ideas that I call Beyond. They've grown through research and reading, certainly, but also through professional practice, teaching, observation, and countless conversations. Some were with people making enormous changes, and many weren't. They were working, they were raising families, building businesses, leading teams and organizations, helping parents, thinking about their children and their communities. Often, they were perfectly happy with what they were doing, while they also watching the world around them change remarkably quickly. And despite very different circumstances, many of the questions were very familiar. What should we hold on to? What might we need to let go? What's changing around us? What aren't we seeing? What possibilities haven't we considered? And what deserves more attention, not less? Beyond has never been about providing one right answer.

Gina Huddel: [00:15:25] At its heart, it's a way of widening the conversation. Whether we're thinking about ourselves, the people around us, or the organizations and the communities we're part of. And if you listen through season one, you may have noticed some of that thinking quietly, sitting behind the questions I've been asking. That was intentional. I wanted these stories to stand on their own. I wanted you to meet these six remarkable people before I told you much about the thinking behind the conversations. Perhaps you've already met Beyond. So before season two, perhaps take one of these possibilities and turn it toward yourself, your team, your organization, your community, or someone you care about. Is there something you've been trying too hard to fit into? Experience you may be undervaluing? A data point you've been ignoring? An ending you haven't quite acknowledged? Something you need enough quiet to hear, or something that deserves recommitment rather than reinvention? You don't need an answer today. Just notice which one stays with you. And perhaps there's one more question worth asking. Not simply what's next, but what possibility haven't I considered yet? Maybe one of these six conversations has already made you think differently about that. If it has, I genuinely love to hear which one and why. To Wanda, Patrick, Richelle, Jodi, Dave, and Tsering. Thank you for trusting me with your stories. And to everyone who listened, shared an episode, sent a note, or simply took one of these conversations along on a walk or a drive. Thank you for being part of our first season. We'll be back with season two, and perhaps this time you'll recognize a few more of the questions behind the questions. I'm Gina Huddel. This is Ready for Beyond.