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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.
Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa
Leading From the Middle of It
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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 is not a framework. It is not a reframe. It is not a story I have already extracted the lesson from. It is the middle — the 48 hours of silence after the news, the loneliness of being the person who holds space for everyone else, and what it costs to keep teaching while you are still in the rawness of your own no.
If you are carrying something right now — a grant that didn't get funded, a paper that got rejected, a position you didn't get — this one is for you.
Soul to Soul, Lisa.
Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.
New episodes drop every Monday.
Follow the journey: 📍 Instagram: @lisacarterbawa 📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacarterbawa/ 📍 Website: www.lisacarterbawa.com
Follow me on Substack: https://soultosoulleadership.substack.com/
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Not role to role. Soul to soul.
You're listening to Soul to Soul with Lisa Carter Bawa, where science meets soul. I almost didn't record this episode. Not because I didn't have something to say, because what I have to say today doesn't come with a resolution. And I am a person who likes to show up with something to offer you: a framework, a reframe, something you can hold. Today I'm showing up without that. And I want to be honest about how uncomfortable that is for me. 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. Both gone. And I know the funding climate right now is brutal. I know the numbers. I know that even strong science doesn't guarantee support. I know all of the rational things. But knowing and feeling are two different languages. And right now my body is speaking the one that doesn't translate to logic. I want to tell you something I have never said out loud, not on this podcast, not in a keynote, not in any of the spaces where I show up as a leader. I am almost always the person in the room holding space after a setback. I'm the one reviewing someone's AIMS page at midnight, the night before their granddad line. I'm the one sitting across from a junior investigator who just got triaged for the second time, watching them try to hold it together and saying, this is not a verdict on your science. This is not a verdict on your worth. You revise, you resubmit, I'm right here. And I mean it every single time. That is not a performance. That is who I am. But nobody says that to me. And I want to be careful with that sentence because I am not asking for sympathy. I am naming something that I think a lot of leaders recognize but never say out loud. There is a loneliness in being the encourager who rarely gets encouraged. There is a weight in being the person who steadies the room while quietly absorbing their own losses in real time. There is something that happens when you become so good at holding others that people forget, genuinely forget, that you might need holding too. And you forget too. That's the part that gets you. You forget that you're allowed to need it. This week reminded me that I am not exempt from needing what I give. I want to talk about a moment that I think every investigator, every scholar, every person who has ever put their work in someone else's hands knows, but nobody talks about. It's the silence after the news. Not the resubmission plan, not the call with your program officer, and not the debrief with your co-investigators. Before all of that, the silence. It's the 48 hours where you haven't opened the feedback yet. Not because you don't know how, because you're not ready to let someone else's assessment sit on top of what you're already feeling. And in that silence, a story starts writing itself. You know the one. It sounds like maybe the science wasn't strong enough. Maybe I'm not strong enough. Maybe the years I've spent building this, the late nights, the revisions, the teams I've assembled, the communities I've partnered with, maybe it's all been leading somewhere, or maybe it's just been accumulating. That silence is the most dangerous part of this work. Not the writing, not the budget justification, not the study section, the silence. Because in the silence, you are alone with a version of yourself who is not your best interpreter of the evidence. I teach people how to write grants. I've built a whole curriculum around helping scientists translate their work into language a reviewer can fight for. And I will tell you the truth. There is nothing in any curriculum, mine included, that teaches you what to do with that silence. Because it's not a skills gap, it's a soul gap. And that's why this podcast exists. Let me tell you what my day looked like today, because I think it matters. This morning I wrote publicly about what I'm feeling. I told the truth about the Picori rejections. I told the truth about the loneliness of being the person who holds everyone else. I put it out into the world with my chest open and my credentials nowhere in sight. And then tonight, the same day, the same hours, I published a teaching post. Week eight of a 10-week countdown I'm writing for investigators heading toward the June 5th NIH deadline. A tactical specific piece about how to rewrite the first paragraph of your significance section so your reviewer engages instead of endures. Somebody is going to look at that and wonder how I did both on the same day. And the answer is that is the work. Both of those things at once. That's what leadership actually looks like. We don't get to stop teaching because we're in pain. We don't get to stop being human because there's a deadline. The life we've chosen asks us to hold both. Not one, then the other, not the professional version during the day and the real version at night. Both at the same time, in the same body. That is not compartmentalization, that is integration. And I think it might be the hardest thing we do. I have been building a research program for nearly 20 years. And I want you to hear me when I say this. I have heard no far more often than I have heard yes. Far more. And every single funded grant in my career, everyone, sits on top of applications that were not funded. They are built on the bones of proposals that someone somewhere decided were not enough. Not this time, not this cycle, not this climate. That is not a failure record. That is a funding record. They are the same document. You just only ever see the final version. And I think we do real damage in this work, in academia, in science, in any field that runs on external validation by only celebrating the wins, by only showing the funded grants and the accepted manuscripts and the invited talks, by making it look like the path from idea to impact is a clean, straight line, when the truth is that the line is jagged and full of silence and full of mornings where you're not sure you want to open your email. I promised myself a long time ago that I would not be that kind of leader, that if I was going to talk about the work, I was going to talk about the whole work, not just the highlight reel, the human experience of it. Today is part of the human experience of it. So if you're listening to this and you're carrying something right now, a grant that didn't get funded, a paper that got rejected, a position you didn't get, a dream that someone looked at and said, Not yet, not you, not now. I want you to hear what I needed to hear myself today. The sting is real, it is not the whole story, and you do not have to carry it alone. I will recalibrate, I always do. That was never the question. The question is whether we let ourselves be seen in the middle, not after the lesson that has been extracted, not once we've turned the pain into a keynote or a curriculum or a blog post with a call to action at the bottom, but here in the raw, unfinished, unresolved middle of it. I believe, and I have always believed, that you don't need reinvention, you need a return. To the scientist you already are, to the leader you already are, to the person who was doing this work before anyone was watching, and who will still be doing it long after this particular no has become a line on a CV that nobody reads. That's the work. We show up anyway, even when nobody's clapping. Thank you for letting me be in the middle with you today. This is Dr. Lisa Carter Bawall with Soul to Soul. I'll see you next week.