Leadership, agency, and attention under pressure.
Play Your Position pairs solo essays with guest conversations about leadership, business, and personal responsibility. Mary Lou Kayser keeps the frame practical, moving from lived stories into questions about agency, communication, resilience, and what people do when familiar systems stop working.
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Play Your Position is a leadership show with a strong interest in what people do when pressure exposes their patterns. It is not only about business. It is also about attention, courage, resilience, self-awareness, and the private work behind public performance. Mary Lou Kayser appears in the excerpts as the host, alternating between solo reflections and conversations with named guests. The solo episodes focus on modern distraction, AI agreeableness, algorithmic overwhelm, and the cost of letting tools, feeds, and pings decide where attention goes. Those episodes are plainspoken and thesis-led. They keep returning to agency. The guest conversations bring the same question into different settings. Matt Potts connects leadership, renewal, and purpose to time in wild places. Rob Kalwarowsky talks about chaos, human-centered leadership, fulfillment, and the ways uncertainty can push people into destructive leadership patterns. Michelle LaBrosse challenges shallow uses of AI for content and points toward more useful applications such as data parsing. John Miller argues for marketing built around trust and the right decision makers rather than chasing empty traffic. Tim Fortescue focuses on authenticity in communication, especially the difference between dry logic and the story, emotion, and connection that make people listen. Krista Ryan brings a much heavier story of surviving the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting into a conversation about mental strengthening and continuing through hardship. The show can sound upbeat, but its best moments are grounded rather than glossy. It takes leadership language seriously without letting it float away into jargon. Stories matter here because they create the evidence for the principle. A lost phone at an airport becomes a lesson about dependence, panic, asking strangers for help, and rebuilding attention. A conversation about AI becomes less about machines and more about the human appetite for agreement. Play Your Position suits people who want leadership advice tied to lived examples, especially founders, professionals, coaches, and operators trying to stay clear-headed while work and technology keep changing.
Made for: For founders, executives, coaches, and working professionals who want leadership conversations that connect business choices with personal responsibility. It especially fits listeners thinking about attention, resilience, communication, and how to lead through uncertainty.
What sets it apart: The show mixes solo essays and guest conversations without losing its central thread: people are responsible for how they respond. Its strongest episodes turn everyday disruptions, workplace habits, AI behavior, and traumatic experience into practical reflections on leadership and self-mastery.
Many of us receive the call to leadership at some point in our lives. It can happen when we are young, and it can happen later. Sometimes it happens more than once. Regardless of its timing, saying yes to that call fundamentally changes us and the direction of our lives. The Play Your Position Podcast explores what happens when we answer the call -- and why it matters.
Based on 4 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Play Your Position connects business execution with the psychological pressures that shape leadership, judgment and team performance.
Play Your Position treats leadership as work done under pressure, where project deadlines, workplace uncertainty and personal strain can expose how decisions are really made.
Cheetah-speed projects meet nervous-system resets when your leadership playbook needs both urgency and brakes.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A lost-phone scramble turns attention, agency, and leadership into something concrete.
Play Your Position frames a solo leadership episode around attention and agency, with Mary Lou Kayser tying current tech shifts, the pandemic, and rapid AI adoption to the pressure people are living through now.
A clear look at how uncertainty can distort leadership and why human-centric work matters now.
The piece frames chaos as a pressure test for leadership, showing how uncertainty can pull people toward poor habits, narrowed judgment, and harmful behavior.
Mandy Morris traces the private cost of looking capable while a nervous system stays stuck in overdrive.
High achievement can look like stability from the outside, especially when praise keeps rewarding the very habits that wear someone down. Mandy Morris, drawing on 15 years as a mental health therapist specializing in trauma therapy and her work with leaders, entrepreneurs, and…
Michelle LaBrosse frames AI as a practical project tool best used with focused delivery and strengths-based leadership.
Michelle LaBrosse gives AI a practical reality check, separating busywork automation from work that can actually help teams understand large amounts of business data.
Rob Walling on bootstrapped SaaS growth, plateaus, and exits — with founders who lived them.
Abbey Ashley's playbook for turning your job skills into a virtual assistant business.
SaaS operators on scaling, pricing and AI, metrics included.
Alex Blumberg interviews guests like Megan Phelps-Roper and Shane McAnally about failure and reinvention.
Richard Newman shares his personal journey from childhood communication struggles and autism diagnosis to founding Body Talk, emphasizing how embracing leadership and growth can improve impact through better communication.
Krista Ryan shares her harrowing experience during the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting and how it shaped her mindset on resilience and survival.
Mandy examines why high achievers can look steady on the outside while struggling underneath.
Mary Lou Kayser speaks with Michelle about using AI where it can handle data parsing and speed up project work.
Mandy Morris discusses why high achievers often appear successful externally while silently struggling with burnout, anxiety, and internal pressure based on her 15-year career as a therapist and executive coach.
Chris Clinard discusses how providing the right book at the right time can positively impact young men's lives, emphasizing personal development through reading and alternative educational paths.
Wayne Mullins discusses the importance of prioritizing human connection and authentic leadership over AI tools in business and leadership contexts.
Matt Potts discusses how wilderness experiences foster leadership, renewal, and purpose, emphasizing that outdoor activities are not just for men and highlighting the success of women-led trips.
This solo episode explores why AI models like ChatGPT are so agreeable with users and what this says about human tendencies toward distraction and the need to be right.
Mary Lou Kayser opens by naming the forces that have been on her mind.
Chaos is making bad leadership easier.
Michelle LaBrosse discusses the misuse of AI for content creation and shares her excitement about using AI for data parsing in business, as part of an episode focused on project management and productivity.
John Miller discusses how businesses, especially in professional services, should focus on targeted marketing and building trust with key decision-makers rather than chasing high website traffic.
This episode explores how to overcome self-doubt and improve leadership communication by balancing logical left-brain details with emotional right-brain storytelling for more authentic and engaging interactions.