The Daily Helping

Jay Conger is the Henry Kravis Chaired Professor of Leadership Studies at Claremont McKenna College, a leading expert on leadership and persuasion, and the author of 16 books, including his newest, The Persuasive Leader. A childhood accident at age four brought him close to death and left him with a lasting belief that life is precious and should be lived as fully as possible. That belief, along with watching his father host world leaders, set him on a path toward helping people realize their potential through leading.

We explore why persuasion has a public relations...

What if the biggest obstacle in your life could become your greatest opportunity for growth? Today, we're joined by Aaron Golub, a professional speaker, entrepreneur, and the first legally blind Division I athlete to play in a college football game. From overcoming the odds at Tulane University to becoming a team captain and NFL free agent, Aaron's journey challenges everything we think we know about limitations.

Aaron shares how accepting his circumstances, changing his perspective, and committing to consistent action helped him accomplish what others believed was impossible. We explore why our past doesn't have to determine...

What separates a good leader from an exceptional one? This week, we welcome David Grossman, founder and CEO of The Grossman Group and author of The Heart Work of Modern Leadership: Six Differentiators of Exceptional Leaders. With more than 30 years of experience helping organizations improve leadership and communication, David shares why leading with both heart and head is essential for creating workplaces where people thrive.

David's research reveals a troubling disconnect: while 54% of leaders are considered good, fewer than 20% of their employees feel seen, heard, or supported in reaching their full potential. We explore the six qualities...

In this episode of The Daily Helping, we welcome Bill Blankschaen, founder and Chief Story Architect of StoryBuilders and a multiple New York Times and USA Today bestselling writer. Having collaborated with influential voices like John C. Maxwell, Lewis Howes, and Michael Hyatt, Bill helps people turn their stories into meaningful messages that create lasting impact, influence, and income.

Bill shares how leaving a successful career in education to pursue his passion for storytelling led him to discover a powerful truth: our greatest opportunities often begin with embracing who we are. We explore his five-step storytelling framework...

What if the root of burnout, loneliness, and disconnection is the feeling that we simply don't matter? Today, we're joined by John R. Miles, award-winning author, former Navy officer, Fortune 50 executive, and host of the Passion Struck podcast, which has reached over 85 million downloads. His latest book, The Mattering Effect: Creating a Life of Meaning and Worth, explores why so many people feel invisible and how we can reclaim our sense of significance.

John introduces us to the six foundations of mattering: meaning, autonomy, trust, time, energy, and reciprocity. He also shares his Matter Compass, a framework...

Jeff Westphal is an executive, entrepreneur, philanthropist, conservationist, and author of A Work Life Worth Living. After years of building and leading a successful company, Jeff realized that professional achievement alone wasn’t enough to create a fulfilling work life. That realization began a decades-long exploration of purpose, leadership, and the meaning we find in the work we do.

We explore why fulfillment doesn’t have to depend on finding the perfect job or waiting for an organization to change. Jeff shares how understanding the contribution behind our work can shift the way we experience it, even when...

Michael Clinton, former president and publishing director of Hearst Magazines and current special media advisor to the Hearst Corporation CEO, joins us to rethink what it means to live a long life. An author, photographer, adventurer, and marathoner on all seven continents, Michael explores these ideas in his new book, Longevity Nation, examining how medicine, technology, and human behavior are reshaping our healthspan and our expectations for the second half of life. Pasted text

We discuss the everyday foundations of longevity, including movement, nutrition, sleep, purpose, and meaningful relationships. Michael also shares how emerging advances in AI...

Dr. James Walsh is an Air Force veteran, retired Department of Defense civilian, educator, and author with more than four decades of leadership experience. Drawing from his military career, academic research, and years teaching leadership and management, he focuses on the practical skills leaders need to earn trust, strengthen teams, and produce meaningful results.

We explore why leadership depends less on having all the answers and more on listening, communicating effectively, and understanding the people around us. Dr. Walsh explains how collaboration, emotional intelligence, and situational leadership help leaders navigate different personalities, cultures, and challenges while keeping...

Dana Killion is an author, speaker, and trauma-informed guide whose work explores what happens after the worst moments of our lives and how we decide who we want to become next. Her newest book, Becoming Unbreakable: A Big Sister’s Guide to Trauma, grew from an eight-year period marked by betrayal, divorce, the deaths of both parents, and the devastating loss of her oldest son to fentanyl.

We explore Dana’s process for moving beyond survival toward a deeper definition of healing. Rather than measuring progress by whether the pain has simply become manageable, she asks whether we c...

Mickey Z is a writer, speaker, activist, and the founder of Cheerful Giver NYC, a grassroots effort supporting people experiencing homelessness throughout New York City. A prolific author and longtime advocate, Mickey joins us to share how his upbringing, personal losses, spirituality, and years of direct service shaped a mission centered on helping others with humility rather than assumptions.

We explore what Mickey has learned from nearly a decade of working closely with homeless and recently housed New Yorkers. His experience challenges many common beliefs about homelessness, from assumptions about addiction and employment to the idea that...

Karen Olson is the founder and CEO emeritus of Family Promise, an organization that has mobilized more than a million volunteers and helped more than a million people experiencing homelessness. Her work has earned national recognition, including the Points of Light Award and the Jefferson Award, but her path began with something far simpler: stopping to offer a sandwich and conversation to a homeless woman outside Grand Central Station.

We explore how that single act of compassion grew into a nationwide movement supporting families experiencing homelessness. Karen shares why meaningful change often begins small, how passion, planning...

Scott M. Curran is a social impact lawyer, advisor, educator, and founder and CEO of Beyond Advisers. After serving as general counsel of the Clinton Foundation, where he advised a global nonprofit operating in more than 50 countries, Scott built a career helping leaders and organizations turn good intentions into lasting impact. In his new book, Better Good: A Simple System for Creating Lasting Impact, he makes that work accessible to anyone who wants to do more good in their life or work.

We explore Scott’s framework for recognizing the influence we already have. It starts with th...

Jamison Carrier is the founder of Team NavX, a leadership advisory and recruiting firm that helps organizations build high-performing teams through clarity, accountability, and execution. He is also the co-author of Building a Championship Team: A Practical Guide to Finding, Recruiting and Developing Top Performers, which distills lessons from years of hiring, leadership, and team development into practical systems leaders can use immediately.

In our conversation, we explore why strong teams begin with clarity. Jamison introduces his MAP framework, which defines a role through its missions, actions, and performance expectations, giving leaders a clearer way to hire...

Roger Dooley is an internationally recognized author, keynote speaker, entrepreneur, and expert in neuromarketing and behavioral science. His books include Friction, Brainfluence, and The Persuasion Engine, which examines how artificial intelligence is making sophisticated behavioral science tools accessible to businesses of every size.

We explore how most human decisions happen beneath conscious awareness and why effective persuasion requires more than listing features and benefits. Roger explains how AI can analyze customer behavior, strengthen marketing messages, simulate eye-tracking research, and provide insights based on the work of leading behavioral scientists. He also shares practical ways to improve AI...

Phil Cousineau is a writer, teacher, filmmaker, storyteller, cultural historian, and the author of more than 40 books, including The Art of Pilgrimage and The Hero’s Journey. Drawing on decades of studying mythology, working with Joseph Campbell, consulting for major film studios, and leading journeys through Greece, Phil joins us to explore his newest book, The Wisdom of the Odyssey: 24 Life Lessons from Homer’s Epic.

We examine why The Odyssey has remained relevant for nearly 3,000 years and how it can serve as a map for navigating trauma, identity, relationships, and healing. Phil reframes Odysseus as a woun...

Richard Moss is an internationally respected teacher, author, and visionary thinker who has spent nearly five decades exploring human consciousness, presence, and what he calls radical aliveness. After a spontaneous state of illumination ended his career in emergency medicine, he devoted his life to helping people understand how their thoughts shape their emotional experience and how awareness can reconnect them with a deeper sense of self.

In our conversation, Richard explains the framework behind his book, The Mandala of Being: Discovering the Power of Awareness. He describes how the mind pulls us into stories about the past...

DJ DiDonna is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and the founder of The Sabbatical Project, where he studies how extended time away from routine work can reshape our health, identity, and direction. In his new book, Big Time Off: The Transformative Power of Sabbaticals and How to Take One, he draws on years of research to show why sabbaticals are far more than extended vacations.

We explore how stepping away gives us enough distance to recover from burnout, reconnect with neglected parts of ourselves, and consider what we want from the next chapter of our...

In this episode of The Daily Helping, we’re joined by Paul Ingram, the Kravis Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and author of What Do You Really Stand For? The One Question That Will Transform Your Work and Life. Paul has received Columbia’s highest recognition for teaching, along with numerous teaching awards from students at Columbia and Cornell, and his research has appeared in more than 100 articles, book chapters, and books.

Paul shares why clarity around our values is one of the most practical tools we have for improving our work, relationships, and well-being. Thro...

Kevin Dias is the founder of Ambiki, an EMR and practice management platform built for pediatric speech, occupational, and physical therapy practices. His path has taken him from investment banking to teaching English in Japan, translation technology, and healthcare software, but the thread connecting it all is a deep interest in solving real-world workflow problems.

In this episode, we explore Kevin’s book, The Problem First Method, and why teams so often rush into building solutions before they fully understand the problem. Kevin shares how customer requests, investor pressure, competitor moves, and now AI can all make it...

Dr. Alan Rozanski joins us to explore the deep connection between mindset, behavior, and long-term health. A cardiologist who has spent more than 40 years studying the mind-body relationship, Dr. Rozanski developed the six domains of health and vitality: physical, emotional, social, cognitive, purpose, and stress management. His work shows that health is not simply the absence of disease, but the active cultivation of habits that help us live longer and live better.

In our conversation, we talk about why small daily actions matter more than dramatic overhauls. Dr. Rozanski explains how movement, optimism, gratitude, meaningful relationships, purpose...

Dr. Lisa Woodruff, founder and CEO of Organize 365 and host of the top-rated Organize 365 Podcast, joins us to talk about her new book, Escaping Quicksand: 10 Steps to Overcome the Overwhelm of Modern Home Life. Lisa brings both lived experience and academic research to the conversation, helping us understand why modern home life can feel so heavy, especially as responsibilities stack up in midlife.

We explore how organization is not just about clean counters or color-coded closets. It is about reclaiming time, reducing decision fatigue, and seeing the household as a place of real economic...

Today, we’re joined by RamDev Dale Borglum, author of How to Live So You Can Die Without Fear and executive director of the Living/Dying Project. A pioneering voice in the conscious dying movement, Dale has spent decades helping people face death, grief, caregiving, and healing with greater awareness. His work has been shaped by Ram Dass, Stephen Levine, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, meditation, mathematics, and both Eastern and Western healing traditions.

In our conversation, Dale reframes death not as something separate from life, but as one of life’s greatest teachers. He reminds us that the way w...

Today, we are joined by Colin Hodge, startup founder, author, and co-owner of Down, a top 10 dating app in the U.S. Colin has led companies and growth teams responsible for more than 100 million users, and his new book, Outrageous Startup Growth, distills the hard-won lessons behind that success.

In our conversation, Colin shares how personal loss shaped his willingness to take risks, move across the world, and build companies through uncertainty. He explains why the best growth does not come from gimmicks, but from understanding user psychology, creating authentic brands, and designing environments that help people...

Today, we welcome back Melissa Swift, a leading voice on the future of work and the author of Work Here Now and her new book, Effective: How to Do Great Work in a Fast-Changing World. Melissa’s work has been featured in outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Economist, and The Washington Post, and her columns for MIT Sloan Management Review are often among their most-read articles.

In this conversation, we explore what it really takes to be effective when work feels more chaotic, emotional, and overloaded than ever. Melissa breaks ef...

In this episode of The Daily Helping, we’re joined by Brian Weisfeld, a creativity and innovation thought leader, author, and passionate advocate for youth entrepreneurship. Brian helped build billion-dollar companies including IMAX and Coupons.com, and later co-authored children’s books designed to inspire kids to start their first businesses. He is also the founder of The Startup Squad Foundation, a nonprofit teaching entrepreneurship to girls from underserved communities.

Brian shares how watching his daughter sell Girl Scout cookies sparked a deeper realization: entrepreneurship teaches confidence, resilience, creativity, and the courage to take risks. Those lessons are...

Mandy Tang is a career coach, holistic healer, and author of Heal Your Career Wounds: Navigating the Trauma of Today’s Workplace. She works with clients across big tech, startups, and the nonprofit sector, helping them bring more creativity, joy, and self-trust into their work lives. She is also the creator behind the popular TikTok account @careercoachmandy, where she has built a community around honest conversations about burnout, toxic workplaces, imposter syndrome, and career transitions.

In this conversation, we talk with Mandy about why career pain is rarely “just work.” She explains how layoffs, toxic bosses, burnout, and pr...

Ian Sandler is the co-founder of Riley’s Way Foundation, a nonprofit he created with his wife, Mackenzie, after the tragic loss of their nine-year-old daughter, Riley. Built in honor of Riley’s extraordinary gift for friendship, the foundation empowers young leaders to use kindness and empathy to create meaningful change in their communities.

In our conversation, Ian shares how Riley’s Way evolved from early school-based programming into a national movement centered on youth-led impact. Through initiatives like the Call for Kindness and the Youth Leadership Retreat, Riley’s Way gives teens and young adults funding, mentorsh...

Today, we welcome back world-renowned consciousness teacher Peter Russell, author of How to Meditate Without Even Trying, along with 11 other books including Letting Go of Nothing and From Science to God. Peter has taught meditation for more than 50 years, inspiring people around the world through his writing, retreats, talks, and online courses. In this conversation, we explore why meditation does not have to feel intimidating, rigid, or difficult.

Peter reframes meditation as “sitting quietly with yourself,” a simple practice of relaxing attention rather than forcing the mind to be still. He explains how thoughts natu...

In this episode, we speak with Roy Remer, executive director of the Zen Caregiving Project and author of Zen Caregiving: How to Care for Yourself While Caring for Others. Drawing on decades of work in end-of-life care, mindfulness education, and compassion training, Roy shares a grounded, deeply human approach to caregiving that reaches far beyond clinical settings. His message is clear: caregiving is not only for moments of crisis, but a set of life skills that can strengthen how we show up in every relationship.

Our conversation explores how mindfulness can function less like...

In this episode, we sit down with Glen Galaich, CEO of the Stupski Foundation, co-host of Break Fake Rules, and author of In Control: Why Big Giving Falls Short. Glen brings a rare insider’s perspective to modern philanthropy, shaped by years in human rights, academia, fundraising, and foundation leadership. His work challenges some of the deepest assumptions behind institutional giving and asks whether wealth is really being used in service of the public good.

Our conversation explores why so much philanthropic money remains locked up while communities face urgent needs, and how a cu...

In this episode, we sit down with Jeremie Kubicek, globally recognized speaker, author, leadership expert, and co-founder of Giant Worldwide. Jeremie has spent decades helping leaders and organizations build healthier cultures through trust, self-awareness, and practical people development. His latest book, The Voice Driven Leader, brings that mission into sharp focus by showing how better communication starts with understanding how other people are wired.

Our conversation goes far beyond leadership theory. Jeremie shares how life-altering experiences, from living through chaos in post-Soviet Russia to surviving a devastating near-fatal accident, reshaped his view of ambition...

In this episode, we sit down with Kevin Anderson, a national bestselling author, number one New York Times bestselling editor, entrepreneur, investor, and founder of Kevin Anderson & Associates. Kevin has built multiple seven and eight figure businesses across the U.S., the U.K., and the EU, but his path did not begin with a master plan. What makes his story so compelling is how curiosity, problem-solving, and a willingness to say yes to opportunity shaped a career helping others turn their ideas into books.

Our conversation explores why writing a book is far...

In this episode, we sit down with Tom Hardin, a former hedge fund analyst whose career on Wall Street unraveled after four insider trading decisions led him into an FBI cooperation agreement and public disgrace as “Tipper X.” Tom now speaks globally on ethics, compliance, and organizational culture, bringing hard-earned insight to the pressures, rationalizations, and blind spots that can push good people across dangerous lines.

Our conversation goes far beyond financial crime. We explore how ambition, status, and the need to prove ourselves can quietly distort judgment, especially in high-pressure environments where unethical behavior starts to feel...

In this episode, we sit down with Andy Weins—Army Reserve Master Sergeant, entrepreneur, and author of Stop Avoiding Your Numbers. With over two decades of military experience and a passion for helping veterans and business owners grow, Andy brings a grounded, no-nonsense perspective shaped by real-world adversity and leadership under pressure.

Our conversation explores how a pivotal moment during military service reshaped Andy’s understanding of strength, shifting him from a hardened, external mindset to one rooted in personal responsibility and growth. We dive into the power of language, how small shifts in words can rewire thou...

In this episode of The Daily Helping, we welcome two remarkable voices from very different corners of the baseball world: pediatrician and parenting expert Dr. Harley Rotbart and veteran Major League Baseball journalist Ken Davidoff. Together they bring decades of experience working with young people and covering elite athletes to their new book, *101 Lessons from the Dugout*, which explores how the game of baseball mirrors the deeper lessons of life. 

Our conversation explores how moments on the field—pop flies, curveballs, fielder’s choices, and even cleaning up the dugout—translate into powerful lessons about r...

In this episode of The Daily Helping, we sit down with workplace psychologist Dr. Benjamin Granger, Chief Workplace Psychologist at Qualtrics and author of A Leader Worth Following: How to Master Yourself, Influence Others and Create Exceptional Experiences. With more than 15 years of experience helping organizations understand employee behavior and workplace dynamics, Dr. Ben brings both research and real-world insight to the evolving conversation about leadership, human behavior, and the future of work.

Our conversation explores a powerful shift in how we think about leadership. Rather than viewing leadership as a title or role...

In this episode, we sit down with MaryCay Durrant—known as MC—a globally recognized change leadership and business performance consultant with over 30 years of experience working alongside organizations like Johnson & Johnson, Deloitte, Pepsi, Hyatt, and KPMG. After a successful corporate career left her feeling disconnected and numb, MaryCay began questioning the conventional playbook of achievement. What emerged was a radically different model of leadership rooted not in pressure and performance alone, but in presence, partnership, and the wisdom of nature.

We explore her WORK model—Wake up to wonder, Orient from the inside out, R...

In this powerful conversation, we sit down with Justin Hai, serial entrepreneur, product designer, and founder of Rebalance Health. Justin’s work spans biotechnology, health, and consumer innovation, earning recognition from Forbes, Time, NASA, and more. His bestselling book, Stress Nation, explores how modern life has rewired our biology—and what we can do about it. Inspired in part by his wife’s diagnosis with Cushing’s disease, Justin dove deeply into the science of cortisol and the hidden toll of chronic stress.

Together, we unpack the truth about cortisol as the body’s master ala...

What does it really mean to live life to your fullest potential, especially when you’re balancing career, family, and the pressure to have it all figured out? 

On this episode we sat down with David Schnurman, entrepreneur, speaker, and CEO of Lawline, to unpack that question in a deeply human way. David has spent years building companies centered on education and growth, and his newest book, 11 Suitcases, brings those ideas home, literally, through his family’s decision to move abroad.

Our conversation explored how personal development, intentional discomfort, and shared experiences shape not just indiv...

In this episode, we sat down with Dr. Izzy Justice, Chief Neuroscience Officer at Neuro580 and a pioneering sport neuroscientist who has worked with elite athletes, coaches, executives, and everyday high performers around the world. With tens of thousands of EEG-based brain scans conducted during live performance, Dr. Izzy brings a rare functional lens to understanding how the brain actually works in real moments that matter.

Our conversation centered on a deceptively simple idea: peak performance, presence, confidence, and even happiness all trace back to brain frequency. Dr. Izzy explains why the brain’s na...