.png)
Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa
What happens when a behavioral scientist with two decades of experience studying how meaning gets lost — between doctors and patients, between research and real life, between who we are and who we perform — turns that lens inward?
Soul to Soul is a weekly podcast hosted by Lisa Carter-Bawa, PhD, MPH, APRN, ANP-C, FAAN, a researcher, leader, and advocate who has spent her career at the intersection of health equity, communication, and human behavior. Each episode is an invitation to slow down, reflect, and reconnect with the parts of yourself that institutions and expectations have tried to edit out.
The show features three kinds of episodes. Soul Reflections are weekly meditations on leadership, identity, and what it means to stay whole in a world that wants to fragment you. Lost in Translation episodes unpack the moments where meaning breaks down in healthcare, communication, and everyday life. The Return brings conversations with people who found their way back to themselves after years of performing someone they weren’t.
Grounded in the philosophy that you don’t need reinvention — you need a return — Soul to Soul is for leaders, scientists, healthcare professionals, and anyone who suspects that the most powerful version of themselves isn’t the one they’ve been projecting.
New episodes every Monday.
Episodes
21 episodes
The First Time You Heard Your Own Voice
THE FIRST TIME YOU HEARD YOUR OWN VOICEThere is a voice you have been using for years. In meetings. In presentations. In every room that ever asked you to prove you belong. It is articulate, strategic, effective. And it was assemb...
.png)
The Room After You Leave It
Think about the last meeting you were in. Not the agenda. Not what was decided. Think about what happened after you walked out.Did the room exhale? Did people finally say the thing they had been holding? Did the conversation get more hon...
The Weight of Holding It All
There's this thing that happens when you're carrying a lot. People ask how you're doing, and you say "I'm good." Not because you're lying — but because the truth would take longer than anyone has time for.In this episode, Lisa gets hones...
What Nobody Tells You About Getting What You Wanted
There is a thing nobody tells you about getting what you wanted. The flatness that arrives the morning after. The strange quiet hum of an interior question that the promotion, the credential, the title, the milestone was supposed to answer — an...
The Language the Women Inherited
What happens when the leadership vocabulary you inherited from the women before you includes everything except the hardest sentences? In this episode, Lisa reflects on watching a senior woman in a meeting redirect a difficult conversation towar...
The Apology That Wasn't Mine (On the coat I was handed, and the work of returning it)
I was in a meeting last week, and I caught myself doing it again. Someone asked me a real question, and before I gave the answer — before the answer — I said the words. Sorry, I just want to add real quick. Sorry for what.This e...
The Weight We Carry Quietly
What happens when the weight you’re carrying doesn’t have a name? In this episode, Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa gets personal about the exhaustion that hides behind high performance—the low hum of too much, for too long, with no clear endpoint. Drawing...
Leading From the Middle of It
Yesterday I found out that two grant applications I submitted were not selected for funding. Two in the same cycle. Both I believed in. Both designed to serve communities I care deeply about.This episode is what happened next.It i...
What the Vase Knew Before I Did
In the middle of packing for a move to a smaller space, Lisa opens a box that's been sealed for four years — and finds beautiful pottery she forgot she owned. When a vase shatters on the floor by accident, it cracks open a deeper question: why ...
What You Tolerate, You Teach
Here's something no one tells you when you step into leadership: your team is not listening to your words. They're watching your tolerance.Every time you let something slide — the disrespect you didn't address, the credit that was taken,...
You Don't Need Permission to Lead
Most of us were taught to wait — wait for the title, the invitation, the tap on the shoulder that says now it's your turn. But leadership doesn't work that way. The people who change things aren't the ones who waited for permission. Th...
Lead Like Your Leaving
Most leaders operate like their role is permanent. And that assumption is quietly destroying the best parts of their leadership.In this episode, Lisa challenges a belief most of us have never examined: that there’s always more time. More...
The Return You Weren't Expecting
What happens when you stop performing and start saying what you actually think? Not a dramatic reinvention — just one honest sentence at a time. In this episode, Lisa names the tired that sleep doesn't fix: the invisible exhaustion of translati...
Many Hands: The Leadership Practice Nobody Teaches and The Tradition That Already Knew
There is a tradition from St. Lucia called Koudmen — a practice where the community comes together to carry what one person cannot carry alone. No payment. No contract. Just hands. In this episode, Lisa names the loneliness that lives inside le...
The Armor You Earned
When is the last time someone asked how you were doing — and you told the truth? Every high achiever has armor: the perfectionism, the people-pleasing, the relentless performance of being fine. It kept you safe once. It got you into the room. B...
The Slowest Person in the Room (Not What You Think)
There is a question nobody in leadership is saying out loud right now: What if the thing that makes me valuable is the thing the machine does not need? In this episode, Lisa names the quiet fear that leaders, researchers, clinicians, and anyone...
The Woman at Gate B6
There is a woman sitting at Gate B6 at 6:14 in the morning, staring at a flight she has no reason to take — to a city with no meeting, no obligation, no one expecting her to perform. She does not take it. She gives the keynote. People clap. She...
The Lie of Fine
THE LIE OF FINE What Nobody Will Say About What's Really Happening Right NowYou know the feeling. Someone asks how you're doing and you say "great" — not because it's true, but because that's what the moment calls for. Yo...
The Grief Nobody Warned You About
THE GRIEF NOBODY WARNED YOU ABOUT When Growth Means Grieving People Who Are Still AliveThere's a kind of grief nobody prepares you for.Not the kind that comes with a funeral. The kind that comes quietly, in the mid...