150 episodes listed below
Clearer leaders, harder truths, better teams.
The Self Aware Leader with Jason Rigby treats leadership as an inner discipline before it becomes a management system. Episodes move between blunt solo coaching and guest conversations about focus, trust, emotional resilience, economic pressure, and purpose.
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The Self Aware Leader with Jason Rigby is a leadership show with a clear point of view: people rarely fail as leaders because they lack information. They fail because they avoid clarity. Across solo episodes and interviews, the show returns to the same pressure points from different angles. A new manager becomes the nice boss and loses respect. A leader asks AI for help and receives a confident answer that mostly reflects the premise already loaded into the prompt. A leader checks Slack, Teams, email, and the phone so often that reaction starts to feel like purpose. The show is direct about those traps. It treats people-pleasing, overwork, urgency, and avoidance as leadership liabilities, not personality quirks. The solo episodes often work like coaching sessions. They start with a familiar scene, sharpen the stakes, and then land on a practical move: hold the line, audit the distraction, pause before responding, or ask better questions before accepting an answer. The pace is conversational but insistent. It favors concrete workplace examples over abstract leadership theory. Guest episodes bring a broader emotional and social range. Michael Shaw connects trauma, resilience, gratitude, and personal alignment to the way leaders operate. Paul Masson brings a financial and policy lens to wealth, housing, and generational strain. Raphael McMaster’s story moves from creative success and emotional bankruptcy toward art, mindfulness, youth, and purpose. William Davis emphasizes personal contact, ethics, loyalty, and trust in an age of technology-mediated work. Jones Loflin brings focus, chaos, and practical growth strategies through the frame of his bee-inspired work. The show’s center remains consistent even when the subject changes. Leadership is treated as a relationship between inner awareness and outward standards. It asks leaders to stop hiding behind busyness, tools, niceness, or ambition. Then it asks what truth they already know but have not acted on yet.
Made for: For new managers, executives, entrepreneurs, and team leads who want direct leadership coaching with a personal edge. It especially suits listeners wrestling with clarity, trust, focus, burnout, AI decision-making, and difficult standards conversations.
What sets it apart: The show blends blunt solo management coaching with reflective guest stories, keeping the focus on where leadership behavior actually breaks down. Its strongest lane is the space between self-awareness and operational standards.
Discover the transformative power of Evolving Leadership with the Self Aware Leader Podcast, hosted by Jason Rigby. Embark on a life-changing journey and empower yourself with cutting-edge insights, strategies, and wisdom from the world's most influential and forward-thinking leaders. Learn how to cultivate self-awareness, foster growth, and unlock your full potential with thought-provoking discussions and actionable advice. Tune in to the Self-Aware Leader Podcast and take the first step towards becoming the exceptional leader you were destined to be.
The boardroom and the scared child share a calendar here, and somehow both belong to you.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Michael Shaw connects trauma, fear-driven achievement, and emotional resilience to leadership.
Michael Shaw makes a business case for trauma as a leadership resource, starting with a violent childhood and his father's suicide before tracing a 30-year effort to train emotional resilience with the same discipline he once applied to his body.
Raphael McMaster turns outward success into a grounded lesson on purpose, culture, and shared leadership.
Raphael McMaster's career has all the outward markers of arrival: creative executive work, A-list clients, and global brands. The episode is sharpest when it lets that success sit beside his sense of emotional bankruptcy, because it makes the usual talk about purpose feel less…
A grounded conversation about testing assumptions and making clearer decisions when business conditions become unstable.
Economic uncertainty is treated here less as a headline problem than as a leadership and management test. In a conversation with Carl Meyer, CFO, business advisor, founder of Abundant, and author of Surfing Economic Chaos, the discussion moves through inflation, labor shortages,…
AI can make a leader feel clearer while reinforcing the decision already hiding inside the question.
The episode frames AI's leadership risk as a problem of false clarity. Its point is not that the tool simply gets things wrong, but that it can make an uncertain call feel more settled than it deserves.
Jones Loflin discusses bee-inspired strategies for leaders to turn chaos into growth and focus on what matters most.
CFO Carl Meyer discusses his book 'Surfing Economic Chaos' and argues that globalization is collapsing due to shifting demographics and security changes.
Jason Rigby discusses a Harvard Business Review study where 300 executives using AI for stock predictions became more confident but significantly less accurate.
Jason Rigby explains why new managers often fall into people-pleasing and lose their team's respect, using the example of Sarah to illustrate the problem and hint at solutions.
A Harvard study reveals that AI tools like ChatGPT make leaders more confident but less accurate in their predictions, due to a phenomenon called psychophency where AI learns to agree with users.
Jason Rigby argues that constant digital interruptions are rewiring leaders' brains with the same dopamine-cortisol loops as teenage social media addiction, destroying their ability to think deeply.
["Michael Shaw tells Jason Rigby on The Self-Aware Leader that he is \"literally the happiest person on earth\" after building a leadership practice from childhood trauma.", "He links that claim to a 30-year effort to train emotional resilience, using his violent childhood and his father's suicide as the starting point for the Mastery Mindset Library.", "Shaw says fear-based drive creates a ceiling and burn-out, even when someone has businesses, a strong body, and public praise.", "He also walks through a 30-day belief audit, an I am declaration, and a June 12 living-kidney-donor decision as examples of living in alignment instead of survival."]
Paul Masson, a former Bay Street investment executive who managed more than $15 billion, argues that central-bank policy created a “fake wealth effect” through low rates, quantitative easing, and housing inflation.
Raphael McMaster tells Jason Rigby how a career designing for A-list celebrities and global brands ended with the feeling that he had climbed "the wrong building." He says "art is the language of the soul," and extends that idea to washing dishes, texting, sports, and any repeated action done with presence.
Chris Miles tells Jason Rigby that Wall Street's investment model shifts risk to workers while financial companies collect fees, and he challenges the value of a 401k match advertised as a 100% return.
The Self Aware Leader with Jason Rigby features Angie Lyon explaining how emotional intelligence, transitional intelligence, and resilience shape leadership during rapid change.
William Davis discusses how technology has eroded personal relationships in leadership and offers insights on building trust and ethical leadership.
Jones Loflin discusses bee-inspired strategies for leaders to turn chaotic moments into opportunities for growth and focus.
Eric Chiron discusses strategies for surviving and thriving under toxic bosses, drawing from his 25 years of corporate experience.
Interview with Dr.