Episode #132: Betsy By Herself - Launching Embodied Leadership Lab
Release Date: 04/26/2026
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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_outlineIn 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