Episode #122: From the Archives - Pilar Garrido on Leading a Country With Love During a Pandemic
Release Date: 12/21/2025
Episode #133: Betsy By Herself on
The Discomfort Practice
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...
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Episode #132: Betsy By Herself - Launching Embodied Leadership Lab
The Discomfort Practice
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...
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Episode #131: Betsy By Herself on How To Write Blasphemy (When It Serves)
The Discomfort Practice
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...
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Episode #130: Betsy By Herself on Joy as Anarchy: The Subversive Power of Enjoying Your Life
The Discomfort Practice
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...
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Episode #129: Adam Kahane on Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Like, Trust or Agree With
The Discomfort Practice
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...
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Bonus Meditation: Being Human in Crunchy Times
The Discomfort Practice
"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...
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Episode #128: Betsy By Herself - The World Is Evolving and So, Apparently, Am I
The Discomfort Practice
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...
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Episode #127: Betsy by Herself on Intentional Indifference as a Leadership Practice
The Discomfort Practice
What if indifference isn’t always apathy, but is sometimes rooted in discernment? In this solo episode of The Discomfort Practice, Betsy explores intentional indifference as a mature, regulated response to a world that constantly pulls for reaction, access, and emotional labour. Not the numb, checked-out kind, but the kind that comes from knowing where your energy actually belongs. This episode is about withdrawing attention without withdrawing integrity. About choosing not to engage - not because you can’t, but because you won’t. In this episode, Betsy explores: The difference between...
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Episode #126: Betsy by Herself on Thich Nat Hanh and Internal War Loops
The Discomfort Practice
In this solo episode of The Discomfort Practice, Betsy speaks directly into the current moment: politically, socially and somatically. Recorded in February 2026, amid rising authoritarianism, surveillance and collective nervous system overload, this episode is a grounded, unsmoothed reflection on what it means to stay human, regulated and ethically awake when the world feels volatile. Anchored by a teaching from Thích Nhất Hạnh, Betsy explores the idea of war loops: the internal patterns of fear, urgency, compliance, reactivity and self-betrayal that quietly rehearse the very dynamics we...
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Episode #125: James Murray on Climate Change, Tipping Points & Practicing Optimism
The Discomfort Practice
In this expansive and clear-eyed conversation, host Betsy Reed is joined by journalist and leading sustainability commentator James Murray, founding Editor-in-Chief of BusinessGreen. Together, they explore what it means to stay awake, human and oriented in the face of accelerating climate risk, AI and systemic uncertainty. Recorded at a moment when climate tipping points are no longer abstract projections but lived realities, their dialogue flows between science, politics, technology and psychology. Betsy and James examine how climate change has become a kind of “theory of everything”,...
info_outlineThis is a good one from the archives - back in January 2023, when memories of the COVID-19 pandemic (and the trauma) was still fresh. Betsy interviewed Pilar Garrido, who was Minister for Economic Development in Costa Rica during the pandemic and went to work every day determined to 'lead from love.'
This is posted toward the end of 2025, a year in which many of us have witnessed leadership and counter reactions that come from fear or ego, not love. It's a particularly poignant, beautiful episode to remind us that it IS possible to lead from love, and that each of us can choose to lead - whatever our sphere of influence - from love.
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A recap of the original episode:
In this episode of the Discomfort Practice, Betsy talks with political scientist and economist Pilar Garrido. They chat about her experience leading a sustainable economic development policy in Costa Rica for a green and inclusive economy, as well as designing projects to create public benefit.
Pilar has long been a key figure, using her previous role as a Government Minister to steer Costa Rica's ambition to be one of the five countries piloting the Sustainable Development Goals. SDG’s were launched by the United Nations in 2015. Their aim is to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030, all people enjoy peace and prosperity.
So, buckle yourself in for this episode and be inspired by a politician who governs with both heart and strength. She has served as Chief of Staff, Deputy Minister, Minister of Planning and Policy, Technical Secretary of the Sustainable Development Goals in Costa Rica and as Costa Rica's co-ordinator of the Economic cabinet.
Pilar has since moved on to become Director of Development Cooperation for the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), based in Paris; it's a role that allows her to bring her style of leadership-with-heart to her work on a global level.
Key Points Discussed:
- The discomfort Pilar experienced whilst becoming a politician and minister at a young age, especially during the Pandemic, as she describes as being like on the front line (5:20)
- Choosing to work from a place of love (08:20)
- Making difficult choices and creating policies to protect people during the Pandemic (12:20)
- Pilar’s journey from political scientist to advisor to politician (14:50)
- Costa Rica’s initiatives to put humanity and sustainability first, before economics (23:40)
- How to have a big impact in politics: where your job is not forever (27:00)
- Part of Pilar’s legacy: diversifying an economy that has previously heavily relied just on tourism, so that it is healthy and robust (31:00)
- The IDG framework (that Costa Rica are one of the first countries to pilot), which aims towards eradicating hunger, poverty, sustainability and ensuring human rights. The IDG’s (Inner Development Goals) consists of five dimensions: Being (relationship to self); Thinking (using your brain); Relating (and caring about others in the world); Collaborating (social skills and society) and Acting (driving change) (36:40)
- How everyone can do something small, that will collectively make a big impact (46:00)
- Pilar’s optimism for the future (51:10)
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