The Unburdened Leader

tara@explorewhatworks.com

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EP 155: Hidden Cost of Caretaking at Work: Nilofer Merchant on Invisible Norms Limiting Your Leadership

May 22, 2026

Every system we move through runs on norms: rules and agreements that are both explicit and implicit. And nowhere are they more powerful–or more invisible–than in how we lead and how we build our businesses. In fact, sociologists have consistently found that norms don’t announce themselves. They travel through families, schools, workplaces, and entire cultures through repetition and imitation, often persisting long after the conditions that created them have changed. We absorb them before we ...

EP 154: Leading from Safety, Not Survival: Deb Dana on Co-Regulation and Leadership

May 08, 2026

It is hard to be human. And right now, it is even harder to be humane, to ourselves and to others.And so many high-achieving, deeply caring leaders are under pressure to stay regulated, calm, and adaptable, no matter what they’re facing. They look serene on the outside, but internally? They feel like a hot mess. They mask what they’re feeling and push through so they can try to be the person, friend, leader they want to be. They fake regulation at the expense of their actual wellbeing.As the ...

EP 153: Power Dynamics and Personal Power: Dr. Amanda Aguilera on the Right Use of Power

April 24, 2026

The way you relate to power is the way you relate to everything around and within you–your work, your people, your sense of what's possible. And most of us have never actually examined that relationship.And in this season we are in, when everything is changing so quickly, any unexamined beliefs we hold will quietly run the show. They will shape the risks we take, the rooms we walk into, and the moments we either step up or shrink back. If we don’t have something to ground us internally to our...