In this solo episode of The Discomfort Practice, Betsy reflects on the deeply inconvenient timing of becoming wildly, viscerally alive in the middle of grappling with mortality.

A few months after a cancer diagnosis and before chemotherapy has even begun, she finds herself blindsided by something she genuinely did not expect: a crush. Not a sensible attraction. A full nervous-system hijack. The kind that turns a self-aware adult woman into a fluttery teenage disaster because someone walks into a room.

But beneath the humour is something deeper.

This episode explores what happens when the body you've suddenly begun relating to through fear, uncertainty and medical language unexpectedly remembers desire, curiosity, embodiment and aliveness. It's about eros as life force. About mortality sharpening beauty. About the absurdity and sacredness of still being emotionally movable in the middle of the unknown.

It's definitely existential, ya'll.

In this episode, Betsy explores:

• Why a crush feels strangely healing during a cancer diagnosis

• Mortality, identity and the fear of becoming untethered from yourself

• Erotic aliveness as animating life force

• The nervous system's refusal to become purely practical

• Why being deeply affected is sometimes evidence of being deeply alive

The Discomfort Practice explores the uncomfortable edges where personal growth, leadership, embodiment and systems change intersect.

Follow Betsy for more reflections on reinvention, eros, uncertainty and building a life that feels vividly alive.

Follow Betsy on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thebetsyreed
Subscribe to The Discomfort Practice wherever you listen to podcasts
Join her on Substack at The Betsy Reed: substack.com/thebetsyreed
Work with Betsy: www.embodiedleadershiplab.com

In this solo episode of The Discomfort Practice, Betsy reflects on what happens when life blows apart the illusion of linearity, and why that rupture may be the beginning of something far more honest.

A few weeks after unexpectedly being diagnosed with cancer and undergoing surgery, Betsy finds herself in a strange in-between space: giving keynote speeches and being invited into rooms of influence, while simultaneously asking for financial grace, facing chemotherapy and confronting the uncomfortable realities of building an unconventional life.

This is an episode about the collision between external accomplishment and internal uncertainty. About the shame that emerges when you compare your real life to an imaginary timeline. And about what becomes possible when you stop treating your life like it's late.

Betsy explores the myth of the "correct" life path - marriage, stability, financial security, certainty - and what it means to consciously choose freedom, creativity, reinvention, and impact instead. She speaks candidly about the sharper edges of that choice: ageing alone, financial precarity, mortality, identity and the fear that maybe none of it adds up the way you thought it would.

But she also asks a different question:
What if life is not a ladder, but a series of eras, chapters, and initiations?
What if this moment is not failure, but intermission before the next becoming?

In this episode, Betsy explores:

• Why cancer shattered the illusion of "later"
• The shame that comes from comparing human lives to linear timelines
• The difference between external achievement and internal alignment
• Choosing freedom over safety and the costs and gifts of that path
• What ageing, uncertainty, and mortality reveal about what actually matters
• Why this chapter may be less about proving herself and more about becoming fully herself
• Embodied Leadership Lab as work born from lived experience, not polished theory
• How to stop treating your life as though it's somehow behind schedule

The Discomfort Practice explores the uncomfortable edges where personal growth, leadership, culture, and systems change intersect. If this episode landed for you, follow Betsy for more reflections on embodiment, reinvention, and building a life that is fully your own.

Follow Betsy on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thebetsyreed
Subscribe to The Discomfort Practice wherever you listen to podcasts - and leave a five-star review (it genuinely helps)
Join her on Substack at The Betsy Reed for (Voice) Notes from the Edge: substack.com/thebetsyreed
Work with Betsy - coaching, consulting, speaking, embodied leadership sessions, and Embodied Leadership Lab: www.betsy-reed.com

In this solo episode of The Discomfort Practice, Betsy shares the origin story of Embodied Leadership Lab, why the launch didn't go to plan and what it is.

It was supposed to happen on April 7th. Instead, Betsy was in surgery. And she's here to tell you: that was the launch.

Because here's the thing at the centre of everything she's building: Leadership is not what you say in the room. It's the state you are in when you enter the room. When you're in the room.

What happens when the body overrides the timeline you 'should' follow? When life says "not that way" - and you actually listen? When the plan falls apart and you're left with a choice: hustle through it, or live what you teach?

Betsy chose to live it. To embody leadership 'in the wild.'

Drawing on the ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna/Ishtar, queen of heaven and earth who descends into the underworld, stripped of everything at every gate, Betsy maps what it means to go down into the hard thing, rather than push past it.

And why that descent is exactly where leadership capacity gets built. Not on the way up. On the way down.

This episode is both origin story of Embodied Leadership Lab and embodiment in real time. It's what her work is actually about: the leadership development that most spaces skip entirely; the moment when the nervous system is telling you something strategy can't see or embody.

In this episode, Betsy explores:

• Why leadership is not a cognitive skill; it's the state you bring into the room
• What a hard health diagnosis strips away, and what it leaves behind
• The myth of Inanna, and why descent is not failure; it's initiation
• A three-day post-surgery ritual for honouring the threshold between who she was and who she's becoming
• Why you don't build leadership capacity on the way up; you build it on the way down
• What it actually means to embody your work, in the most inconvenient and unscripted way possible

The Discomfort Practice explores the uncomfortable edges where personal growth, leadership, culture, and systems change intersect. If this episode landed for you, follow Betsy for more reflections on integrity, embodiment, and the quiet courage it takes to lead from somewhere real:

• Follow Betsy on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thebetsyreed
• Subscribe to The Discomfort Practice wherever you listen to podcasts - and leave a five-star review (it truly helps)
• Join her on Substack at The Betsy Reed for (Voice) Notes from the Edge - some public, some subscriber-only: substack.com/thebetsyreed
• Work with Betsy - coaching, consulting, speaking, embodied leadership sessions, and the newly launched Embodied Leadership Lab: www.betsy-reed.com

In this solo episode of The Discomfort Practice, Betsy explores a slightly amusing and powerful idea:

What if blasphemy is exactly what we need right now?

Drawing from the line "Every great idea starts out as a blasphemy," Betsy looks at the beliefs, systems, and assumptions we treat as sacred… and asks a simple but disruptive question:

Does this actually serve?

From workplace norms to wellness culture, politics to personal identity, many of the stories we defend most fiercely are simply habits we stopped questioning. When something becomes sacred, curiosity disappears… and systems can get stuck.

This episode is an invitation to bring curiosity back.

Not through rage or rebellion, but through a small, playful practice Betsy calls "writing blasphemy": noticing the things everyone treats as untouchable and daring to question them.

Blasphemy, in this sense, isn't about disrespect. It's about interrupting the spell of stories that no longer serve - whether that looks like questioning a belief, leaving a job, redefining a relationship, or simply pausing long enough to reconsider something you once took for granted.

In this episode, Betsy explores:

• Why sacred beliefs can quietly become barriers to change

• How certainty replaces curiosity in cultures, organisations, and identities

• The surprising power of writing "the sentence you're not supposed to write"

• Why questioning the sacred is often the first step in systemic or personal transformation

• A simple practice for spotting your own sacred cows

The experiment for this week is simple: Notice something you treat as sacred - a belief, habit, identity, or system - and pause long enough to ask:

Does this serve… or is it just sacred?

If the answer surprises you, you may have just written your first line of blasphemy.

And every great idea starts there.

The Discomfort Practice explores the uncomfortable edges where personal growth, leadership, culture, and systems change intersect.

If this episode landed for you, follow Betsy for more reflections on integrity, discomfort, and the quiet courage it takes to question what everyone else takes for granted:

• Follow Betsy on Instagram @thebetsyreed

• Subscribe to The Discomfort Practice wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a five-star review (it truly helps)

• Join her on Substack at The Betsy Reed for (Voice) Notes from the Edge - some public, some subscriber-only: substack.com/thebetsyreed

• Work with Betsy: coaching, consulting, speaking, embodied leadership sessions, upcoming community circles, and People Like Us dinners across Europe: www.betsy-reed.com

In this solo episode, Betsy explores a provocative idea for strange times:

Joy might be a form of anarchy.

We are living in an era saturated with catastrophe, outrage cycles, environmental grief, economic anxiety, and a constant sense that the world is tilting toward something darker. In that atmosphere, many of us quietly absorb an unspoken rule: if you care about the world, you should feel bad about it all the time.

But what if that equation is wrong?

What if joy is not denial or privilege or distraction, but a form of resistance?

In this episode, Betsy explores how fear-driven systems rely on exhausted, anxious populations, and why choosing joy in the midst of uncertainty can be a deeply rebellious act.

This conversation moves beyond superficial "positive thinking" to something much more embodied: joy as life force, sovereignty, and refusal.

Because being fully alive - cooking beautiful food, laughing with friends, falling in love, creating, resting, noticing beauty - is not frivolous.

It's a refusal to let the world shrink your life.

And in a culture that increasingly demands despair as proof of moral seriousness, enjoying your life might be one of the most subversive things you can do.

• Why modern culture subtly equates misery with moral seriousness

• The "purity culture" that has crept into activism and social awareness

• Why systems of control benefit from populations that are fearful and exhausted

• Joy as embodied life force rather than denial or avoidance

• The small, everyday acts that quietly reclaim sovereignty over your inner life

• Why you can feel anxiety about the world and still insist on joy

• The invitation to become what Betsy calls a "Joy Anarchist"

This episode is an invitation to protect your aliveness — even, and especially, in strange times.

Because joy is not naïveté. Sometimes it's defiance.

The Discomfort Practice explores the uncomfortable edges of being human - the places where growth, truth, and aliveness live.

You can find the book Pleasure Activism, by Adrienne Maree Brown here on her website. It's a highly recommended read / approach that might very well change your approach to life.

If this episode landed for you, consider sharing it with someone who might need the reminder.

Follow Betsy for more reflections on integrity, discomfort, and the quiet courage it takes to question what everyone else takes for granted:

• Betsy's on Instagram @thebetsyreed

• Subscribe to The Discomfort Practice wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a five-star review (it truly helps)
  
  

• Join her on Substack at The Betsy Reed for (Voice) Notes from the Edge - some public, some subscriber-only: substack.com/thebetsyreed

• Work with Betsy: coaching, consulting, speaking, embodied leadership sessions, upcoming community circles, and People Like Us dinners across Europe: www.betsy-reed.com

What do you do when the people you most need to work with are the ones you most fundamentally disagree with?

In this episode of The Discomfort Practice, Betsy sits down with renowned facilitator and systems thinker Adam Kahane, whose work has brought together politicians, activists, CEOs, guerrilla fighters and community leaders in some of the most polarized environments in the world.

From South Africa's transition out of apartheid to complex global conflicts today, Adam has spent decades working in the uncomfortable middle: helping people collaborate across profound differences without pretending those differences don't exist.

This conversation explores what it actually takes to move forward together when trust is low, stakes are high, and nobody is getting exactly what they want.

In this episode, Betsy and Adam explore:

• Why collaboration doesn't require agreement

• The difference between controlling systems and participating in them

• How conflict can become a generative force instead of a dead end

• What it means to act when outcomes are uncertain

• Why real change often emerges from experimentation rather than certainty

This is not a conversation about neat solutions. It's about learning how to work inside the mess, with curiosity, humility, and courage.

About Adam Kahane

Adam Kahane is a director of Reos Partners and a leading facilitator of complex change processes around the world. He has worked with leaders from business, government, and civil society to address some of the toughest systemic challenges - from democratic transitions to climate change and economic inequality.

He is the author of several influential books including Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems: The Catalytic Power of Radical Engagement and Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don't Agree with or Like or Trust).

Learn more about Adam's work:

• https://www.reospartners.com

• https://www.adamkahane.com

If this episode landed for you:

• Follow and message Betsy on Instagram @thebetsyreed

• Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a five-star review (it truly helps)

• Join her on Substack at The Betsy Reed for (Voice) Notes from the Edge — some public, some subscriber-only:
  https://substack.com/thebetsyreed

• Work with Betsy: coaching, consulting, speaking, embodied leadership sessions, upcoming community circles, and People Like Us dinners across Europe:
  https://www.betsy-reed.com

"The world doesn't need us to be perfect; it just needs us to be present."

Betsy has been a meditation teacher for 10 years, and in that time, her own practice has changed. Before leading a 'Senses Meditation,' she swears a bit, she quotes singer Billy Bragg and invites you to meditate.

The answer to 'crunchy times' is not to escape them, to seek to 'ascend' and get away from the very real discomfort happening to you. The answer is sometimes to just be human in the midst of it, to realise that a regulated nervous system doesn't necessarily mean you're calm.

So step into your body, set aside 10 minutes or so to do this meditation - whether walking, driving, in the gym or sitting in your bed - and enjoy being with yourself. Whatever that feels like right now.

If you'd like more:

• Betsy records bespoke meditations, so if you'd like to commission some to accompany you through life right now, get in touch.

• Follow and message Betsy on Instagram @thebetsyreed

• Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a five-star review (it truly helps)

• Join her on Substack at The Betsy Reed for (Voice) Notes from the Edge - some public, some subscriber-only: substack.com/thebetsyreed

What happens when you revisit something you once said with conviction… and realise you'd express it differently today?

In this solo episode of The Discomfort Practice, Betsy reflects on the strange experience of discovering that one of her older episodes, The World Is Evolving. Are You?, has quietly become the most downloaded episode in the 5 years this podcast has been produced.

So she went back and listened. And cringed.

This episode is about the discomfort of encountering your past thinking in public, and the quiet, ongoing work of evolving how we speak about the world and our place in it.

In this episode, Betsy explores:

• Revisiting past ideas and noticing what has changed
• The gap between what we believe and how we express it
• How privilege can show up subtly in tone and framing
• The tension between personal agency narratives and structural realities
• What it means to evolve in public rather than in private
• This is an episode for anyone who has ever revisited their own work and realised they might say things differently today.

If this landed for you:

• Follow and message Betsy on Instagram @thebetsyreed
• Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a five-star review (it truly helps)
• Join her on Substack at The Betsy Reed for (Voice) Notes from the Edge — some public, some subscriber-only: substack.com/thebetsyreed
• Work with Betsy: coaching, consulting, speaking, embodied leadership sessions, upcoming community circles, and People Like Us dinners across Europe: www.betsy-reed.com