The voice in your head has been talking since before you finished this sentence. For most leaders it is the least managed instrument they own, and the most consequential.
Ethan Kross is the psychologist and author who has spent over two decades studying that inner voice. He directs the Emotion & Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan, advises Fortune 500 leaders and Navy SEALs, and wrote the international bestsellers Chatter and Shift. He also discovered his single most-cited tool by using it on himself, at 3am, mid-spiral, when he caught himself typing "bodyguards for academics" into a search bar and said out loud: "Ethan, what are you doing?"
I came to this conversation with my own history with that voice. I spent my career in high-pressure rooms where the most important conversation was often the one running inside my own head, and nobody ever handed me the manual for it. Ethan has spent twenty-five years writing that manual, and he makes it practical: self-talk you can actually change, anxiety you can read instead of fear, emotions that become information. And as a new grandfather, I did not expect a conversation about the brain to end up teaching me so much about grace.
In our conversation, we explore:
→ Why your emotions are information to read, not problems to delete, and what changes the moment you believe that
→ Distanced self-talk: how the simple shift of using your own name reroutes the way your brain handles pressure
→ Why self-awareness is only step one, and the mental tools that have to follow it
→ The business case for mental fitness: how unmanaged emotion quietly consumes the attention your organisation is paying for
→ How a leader gives hard feedback from a secure base, and why leadership falters when we shy away from it
"This brain over here does not come with a user's manual." Ethan Kross, psychologist and author
If you have ever read to the end of a page and realised you absorbed none of it because your mind was somewhere else, this episode hands you the beginning of that missing manual.
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