We’re Back: Desire, Discomfort, and the Courage to Begin Again

After a year away, Conversations in Courage is back. In this relaunch episode, Ashley and Mark reflect on what’s changed since the podcast began five years ago, and what it means to return with deeper clarity and purpose.

They talk about:

• The tension between desire and infrastructure (and why we almost didn’t come back)
• Mark’s new Substack, Leaders Are Human and why he’s challenging performance-driven leadership
• Ashley’s own year of friction, growth, and the launch of her solo podcast Further Forward
• Why nuance, empathy, and difficult conversations matter more than ever in a polarized world

This episode is about returning, recommitting, and finding the courage to keep asking hard questions — about ourselves, each other, and the communities we’re building.

Conversations in Courage is where we lean into transformation, leadership, and social justice. If this episode moved you, share it with a friend and leave a review so more people can join us. 

For more reflections, join us on Substack! 

https://substack.com/@mindandmotion

https://substack.com/@leadersarehuman

 Until next time—be well, be courageous.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:03

Wow. Welcome back to Conversations in Courage.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Welcome.

SPEAKER_03 0:20

Let's go. Yes. It's

SPEAKER_01 0:21

been a while.

SPEAKER_03 0:25

I did not think we would relaunch this pod.

SPEAKER_02 0:31

I, I felt that. Yeah. There

SPEAKER_03 0:35

was a long time where I was like, you know, we're not going to be able to get it together. We're not going to be able to find, you know, the time, the resources, whatever, whatever we need to keep this going. It's just not there. But yeah. the desire was always there, right? I guess it's the desire versus the infrastructure, the systems.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

I think that's true, and I think it's true for Pod, and I think it's true for so much of life, right? I mean,

SPEAKER_01 1:09

if

SPEAKER_02 1:10

there's a calling, if there's a passion, if there's a desire, you tend to find a way. And, you know, clearly a lot has happened, right, since our last episode. And I think having space to talk through those things and unpack them and all of it. It's just a thread that kept pulling us back.

SPEAKER_03 1:31

Agree. I'm just thinking back. Our last episode was the episode with Jesse during our Bold Moves fundraiser last year for the Courage campaign, which was last September.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 1:48

One year since our last episode and five years since we began It's so

SPEAKER_01 2:00

crazy.

SPEAKER_03 2:24

middle school, high school era, like maybe somewhere like eighth grade, ninth grade, 10th grade, something like that, right? You know, this, this next, this next phase. But in one year, you know, who are you? Who have you become? What's changed for you? For the people who already know you and love listening to you? You know, what, what What perhaps new insights will you be bringing to them? And then for the people who are just meeting you, who are you in the world? And why should they care about this pod and what we have to say?

SPEAKER_02 3:10

Yeah, I think that's such a foundational question that I think both of us, right, have an opportunity to answer, you know, today and beyond. But, you know, I was reflecting on that a lot. And, you know, while I think everything is a journey, right, nothing is kind of ever fully attained. When I think of personally kind of where my headspace is at, right, I've been, you know this, right, I've been thinking a lot about, you know, a lot about how to just embrace the aspects of our humanity a little bit more in all of the spaces, right? I think about leadership a lot. And a lot of leadership is about performance. And I don't think that's the way forward, especially in this time and place, right? It is about moving away from performance and embracing more of humanity. And both can coexist in a real foundational way So that has just occupied a lot of my brain. It's been occupying a lot of my writing. I've been trying to put it to practice.

SPEAKER_03 4:20

What's your writing, my dear? Because you've just launched a publication.

SPEAKER_02 4:27

Feeders are human. Yes, thank you. On Substack, as a matter of fact. And I'm having just a ball putting my thoughts out there and collaborating and interacting with people with a whole new community of people, people that don't know me from anything. And it's been really cool. And I've learned about myself. I think I've gotten challenged by the community out there. And as a result, I think I've been able to teach them things as well. So it's kind of exciting.

SPEAKER_03 5:04

And for people who aren't super familiar with Substack, I'll just say very simply, it's a social media-esque platform that centers writing and writers. It feels very safe. It is nothing like any other social media platform that either of us have ever been on. It's not work-centered like LinkedIn, and it's not all pictures and videos like Instagram. It is truly... in a creativity art artist based written word it could be long form it could be shorter form platform so if you like reading and if you like reading people's work it's a wonderful place to to uh sort of be a i guess i'll call it client but it's also a wonderful place to be a practitioner a writer to test out your writing um right

SPEAKER_02 6:12

and Yeah, yeah. I think that's a great explanation. I will probably add one thing to it when I think about Substack because if we think about where people kind of put their lives out there today, whether it's Instagram or TikTok or whatever, people put them out in written form, in picture form, in video form, but there's a bunch of people that aren't writers that participate in this thing we call social media.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 6:40

Right? And as a result of that, for me, I think they fall into the pattern of the performative piece that we just always talked about, right? It is about getting the likes, right? Basically showcasing the curated view of anything.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

And

SPEAKER_02 7:00

what I would say about Substack is yes, it's foundationally about writers, but even if you aren't a writer, if you truly are looking for a place where there's just more intentionality, there's more vulnerability, there's more people... sharing their reality, not curated, but raw reality. That's what Substack is. I mean, there are people who have very opposing views there, but even how those views get discussed is very different, right? It is about Discord versus this polarized world that I think Instagram and TikTok and other social media, even Facebook, right, can kind of feed into. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:42

And then just give us a, you know, you did say, you know, sort of rejecting this aspect of performance and clearly you don't mean performance. you know, not meeting metrics and things like that, you literally mean sort of not being the truest version of yourself or not being the most human centered version of yourself. So give people an idea of what leaders are human is, what it's about and how you hope to change the narrative around leadership because you are an executive and have been one for a long time and corporate space are dynamic, but also very slow to change and very slow to, I think, embrace people as whole humans in a lot of cases. So what does this mean for you and for your work?

SPEAKER_02 8:40

Yeah, it's a great question. And really at its core, it is about centering empathy as a trait, as a muscle within the spaces that we exist. And it doesn't mean that the normal KPIs, the normal processes, the normal leadership aspects go away, but without infusing it with a degree of empathy where you can create a sense of psychological safety, where you can bring a level of trust that really helps activate innovation and activate collaboration in ways that, again, we need it more now than I think ever, and not to overplay the virtual piece, but the virtual world has added a level of difficulty, right? Being able to connect with people is just, it's different, and it requires us to show up in different ways. It's very easy to make leadership very transactional, and I think we see that playing out in society right now, right? We've lost these elements, these almost ancestral elements, right, of kind of what allowed us to coexist and elevate ourselves as a human race. Leaders, whether you are by title or by function or in your family or in a coach, you are setting daily examples for people to follow. And those have a ripple effect. So at its core, that is what it is. And I love just finding lessons in everyday life that have intersections with how it applies in the workplace and things in the workplace that apply to life. And that's really what it's all about.

SPEAKER_03 10:18

And as a final question for you, because now this has turned into an interview with Mark Bernardo um What would you say to our listeners? What are you excited about for this return to podcasting? What do you hope to bring to people? Is it the same? Is it different? How are you viewing Conversations and Courage right now?

SPEAKER_02 10:47

So I think at its core, I think the aspect that was foundational to begin with is it is about having conversations that are not always comfortable. I think that through line will always apply. period. I think there's a level of depth now to how I think about discomfort that is a little bit different. And I guess the way that I would put it is all of us have these habits where we avoid things. And if you avoid things for long enough, they end up finding you in ways that you may or may not want. And I think there's a discovery process there that that is really needed in order to uh to accelerate that process and and again not to not to overplay this one but society right now is immensely polarized and if we can't create a space where where people can have conversations that they don't really want to have but we have them anyway to hopefully move things forward that's really what the space is about and then the other thing i'm really excited about is the guests right um you know bring a whole new community of people here where we can learn from them and really create some awesome dialogue.

SPEAKER_03 12:05

Agreed. Thank you. How

SPEAKER_02 12:06

about you?

SPEAKER_03 12:08

What about me? What would you like to know?

SPEAKER_02 12:10

So, like, talk to me about your last year. I mean, you know, where are you in place and time? How do you think about your evolution? And how you want to, you know, use this forum to kind of advance what we just talked about?

SPEAKER_03 12:28

Thank you for asking. I, you know, like you, yeah, I think that... from where we started to where we are now, I think that I understand a little bit better what behavior change looks like and how difficult it is. And And I am interested in having conversations, yes, that are difficult, yes, that challenge us, yes, that change us. And I'm also just a little bit more interested in... how people got to be

SPEAKER_01 13:13

who they

SPEAKER_03 13:15

are, where they are, and what might be needed to shift the needle 1%. And what I've realized, you know, because over these past five years, I've done a lot more corporate work. I mean, I was not doing any corporate work before 2020. And there's a lot of great people, right? Liberal people, people who have the same politics as I do, but who come at it from vastly different ways and who give weight to different things based on their own lived experience and ideas. And so it's like even within the same sort of like the comfort of, hey, we kind of care about social justice and we care about other people, but we are not the same.

SPEAKER_01 14:10

And

SPEAKER_03 14:12

we might, you know, we might be overall liberal, but have conservative views about certain things. Or we might be, you know, like, I don't know, maybe you think that the climate is more important than abortion. You never know. And so I guess I'm just interested in digging into that a little bit more, just kind of understanding because we all have this. And I think that what I didn't know, what I couldn't have known is when the... when the crowd is really loud one way or the other you know it's really easy to mask the parts that don't really match the energy of the whole

SPEAKER_01 15:04

yeah

SPEAKER_03 15:05

when we all have biases we all look at certain things like you know sideways we all weight some issues differently than others we all have things about other identities that we don't understand or we don't see what the big deal is or we don't. So I kind of am really excited about doing a deeper dive of that or like holding space for more nuance or because it's not like any of the things don't exist you know it's not like racism went away but it's I think how we're talking about these things and how we talk about allyship and how we talk about what moving forward looks like is what I'm most interested in right now but for me for the past year this has been this has been a really A really, in many ways, a tough year. There's been a lot of growth. There's been a lot of... to not to overuse the word, but discomfort and pain in the growth, looking at myself, looking at my relationships, looking at how I work, how I mother, how I am as a wife, all of these things that color how I move through the world. And I've been asking myself, you know, what do I really want? Who do I really want to be? Who do I really want to be around? And what I've found for me is that a lot has changed and that those changes are terrifying because it's not just when things change or when you change or when you make new choices or set new boundaries, it's not just you, right? It affects everyone that's connected to you. And I overemphasize that. other people's comfort. And, and I allow myself to shrink more than I should, which may come as a shock to people, because I think that people still see me as like, you know, outspoken and, and this and that. But whatever you see is nowhere near 100% of my potential. Right. And so I'm, I'm there are always systems at play. There are larger things like I am a black mother in America. Those things exist, but so much of this is on me. So much of this is like the work that I need to do for myself to get myself to where I want to be and to be okay with whatever falls away. So that's kind of where I am right now. I've started my my own podcast.

SPEAKER_02 18:25

Really?

SPEAKER_03 18:26

What's it called, Ash? It is called Further Forward, Honest Conversations on the Art of Becoming. I

SPEAKER_01 18:35

love this.

SPEAKER_03 18:36

I love this too. This is a part of my courage, my courageous act. It launches September 4th, so it will launch before this launches. I'm excited about that. I too am a writer on Substack. My publications is called Mind and Motion. And so I'm just, yeah, I'm finding my way to myself and then going deeper. That's this year.

SPEAKER_02 19:08

I love that. I think we have just talked to somebody or spoken to someone who was talking about friction, right? And just listening to you talk, I think the interesting thing that we all forget is without friction, there isn't movement, right? Your vehicle doesn't have friction. If the wheels are not touching the ground, you aren't moving forward. You're in a vacuum.

SPEAKER_03 19:30

You're

SPEAKER_02 19:30

right. And I think what we all do at times and it's been especially now is when we feel such a level of discomfort in our daily lives right even if we're showing up in a way that looks kind of courageous and strong

SPEAKER_01 19:42

if

SPEAKER_02 19:44

we can't openly talk about and share ideas and be curious about the sources of the friction i think two things happen either we seek out echo chambers

SPEAKER_01 19:55

so we

SPEAKER_02 19:55

don't have to live in discomfort or we seek out vices right one of the two things happen right and neither one of those are healthy And neither one of those are going to progress us or progress, you know, society or, you know, the world around us. So I really do believe it's such important work. And I see clearly, right, I see how hard you work at it on a daily basis. And like how you're truly, right, showing up at the level of vulnerability, I think is just such a cool thing to watch. So I am looking forward to, you know, where we go from here.

SPEAKER_03 20:30

I appreciate you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 20:32

Same.

SPEAKER_03 20:33

So I guess I would say to everyone, one, we are back. Two, we are so happy to reconnect with you. We're just looking forward to finding our edge with this podcast and seeing how far we can go. I think that's the energy that we're coming back with. So I will... you know, implore you to follow along, to subscribe, to like, to leave a review, to follow us on Instagram, you know, and be a part of how this podcast is evolving. We know that you've evolved, especially if you've been rocking with us since 2020. We know that you've changed too. And so hopefully we can just sort of be in this, I'm going to call it elevated alignment and integrity

SPEAKER_01 21:38

together.

SPEAKER_02 21:40

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great way to put it. Great way to put it.

SPEAKER_03 21:45

So I guess we'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_02 21:46

Yes. Can't wait. Welcome

SPEAKER_03 21:49

back. We're back. We're back. We're back. All right. Love you, Markies.

SPEAKER_02 21:54

Love you, baby.

SPEAKER_03 21:55

Bye, everyone.

SPEAKER_02 21:56

Bye, everyone.