Practical leadership for the next turn.
A New Direction is a business and personal growth interview show built around practical change. Jay Izzo talks with authors and working leaders about comfort zones, AI-assisted sales, smarter networking, promotion, entrepreneurship, faith, and finding direction later in life.
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A New Direction is an interview-driven business and personal growth show centered on leadership, change, and the habits behind durable success. Jay Izzo brings an animated, conversational presence to discussions with authors and working leaders. The show has a clear preference for material that can be acted on. Books are often the starting point, but the episodes move quickly toward choices, behaviors, and the uncomfortable moments where growth has to happen. In conversations with Art Turok, comfort zones become a practical problem of commitment, volition, fear, and hidden limitations. The tone is direct. Change is described as difficult because people resist it, yet the show keeps returning to the idea that effort and response remain within a person’s control. Sales episodes look at technology without reducing sales to software. The discussion of Tim Burrell’s The AI Negotiator frames AI as a tool for real estate and broader sales work, while still insisting that the human element matters. Networking gets a similar treatment. The show challenges transactional habits and pushes relationship-building as the real work behind useful contacts. Leadership episodes focus on what happens after ambition pays off. Promotions, new authority, ego, employee perception, and day-one credibility are treated as practical tests, not ceremonial milestones. Conversations with Jim Allen and Bob Winstead broaden that lens into entrepreneurship, purpose, faith, resilience, and the challenge of bringing startup energy into established systems. The show is also comfortable with personal reinvention. Ed Hajim’s career-map episode gives late change, values, passions, and experimentation serious attention. Across episodes, the recurring closing themes are effort, excellence, getting back up, and staying useful to the team. A New Direction works best for listeners who like coaching delivered through interviews, personal stories, and blunt business reflection. It is polished enough for professional development, but informal enough to feel like a working conversation rather than a seminar.
Made for: A New Direction is for business owners, salespeople, managers, emerging leaders, career changers, and growth-minded professionals who want direct guidance they can apply. It also fits listeners drawn to purpose, resilience, and values-based success.
What sets it apart: The show combines author interviews with Jay Izzo’s own candid business and life stories, turning leadership ideas into concrete behavior. Its edge comes from the mix of practical workplace advice, personal challenge, and repeated attention to effort, resilience, and choice.
Interviewing Best Selling Authors from around the world for success and leadership in business, life and career.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Jay Izzo makes leadership advice tangible by connecting authority, delegation, commitment, and workplace culture to the behavior of the person in charge.
A New Direction turns leadership theory into practical questions about how people behave when responsibility lands on them. Jay Izzo alternates between guest interviews and direct coaching, pressing on the difference between holding authority and earning trust.
A CEO with a plunger: your leadership pep talk just got less abstract.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Izzo's farm story asks whether commitment can begin while fear is still there.
Jay Izzo brings Art Turok back to discuss the six practices in Demolish Your Comfort Zones. Their conversation turns on the difference between interest and commitment. Izzo recalls his first job as a farmhand, when he was told to help restrain a hog during castration.
A plane ride story opens a conversation about fixed self-descriptions and room for choice.
"I'm not creative" sounds like a settled fact, but Jay Izzo and Art Turok treat it as a description someone might choose to change. Izzo asks why volition matters so much to Turok.
A new title brings everyday conduct under closer scrutiny.
A new supervisor gets noticed before saying much at all. Host Jay Izzo and author Noel Massey talk about what happens when someone takes charge of people who may not yet see themselves as part of that supervisor's team.
Winstead brings leadership down to earth with a broken toilet and a plunger.
On A New Direction, Jay Izzo asks Bob Winstead about entrepreneurship and leadership. Winstead's example is a broken toilet: even a CEO may need to put on gloves and reach for a plunger. It makes his view of responsibility easy to grasp.
Jay Izzo asks how a leader's need for control shapes the business and the team.
Jay Izzo asks leaders to look at the habits they bring to work. A leader who believes the business cannot run without them, or that nobody else will do the job properly, may have what he calls "hero syndrome." Feeling essential can make it hard to let go.
Practical tools for clearer, steadier management.
Art Turok says 'ready-made goals' fail because they are not individualized, and he uses Andy Teisler at Deschutes Brewery to show a manager reinventing his role around development instead of just numbers.
Author Tim Burrell discusses how AI tools like ChatGPT can enhance human negotiation in sales and real estate.
Jay Izzo argues that most people fail at networking because they focus on transactions instead of building relationships.
Jay Izzo introduces a new series of live interviews, starting with friend and top real estate agent Jim Allen, discussing leadership, purpose, and success through faith.
Host Jay Izzo introduces a book by Ed Hajim about discovering your life and career map, emphasizing that it's never too late to change careers and find new passions.
"Liberty is the right to choose. Freedom is the ability to make a choice."
Jay Izzo opens A New Direction live in studio for the first time in the show's 10-year run and frames the conversation around leadership, entrepreneurship, success, and purpose.
Jay Izzo and Noel Massey frame Congrats, You’ve Been Promoted around the first managerial step, not CEO-level strategy, and Massey says frontline leaders are judged by the people they lead.
Jay Izzo interviews Bob Winstead, a serial entrepreneur and mentor, about his journey and philosophy on success, leadership, and purpose.
Jay Izzo uses A New Direction to argue that "there are no business problems" and that personal stress becomes business damage.
Jay Izzo introduces the book 'Lead with Hospitality' and argues that every business is fundamentally in the hospitality business, emphasizing the need to connect, serve, and inspire people.
Jay Iso introduces the book 'Leader is Not a Title' by David W.
Jay Izzo introduces a discussion on workplace culture with Dr.