The Quiet Warrior Podcast with Serena Low

Irene Chan spent her childhood not quite fitting in — too different for the kids in LA's Chinatown, too different for the church her single mother relied on, too different for the neighbourhood her mother worked so hard to protect her within. She carried that feeling of being "othered" into an aerospace engineering degree she nearly didn't achieve, and into NASA meeting rooms where she assumed the loudest voice always won. 

In this episode, Irene — a flight planning engineer supporting NASA's International Space Station and Artemis programs — traces the path from an outsider kid with a stack o...

After 24 years of marriage, Bernice McDonald left with no template for who she was outside the roles she'd been performing since childhood. She grew up in a rules-based home where being "good" felt impossible to achieve, and where that constant falling-short curdled into a lifelong sense of not being enough. 

In this episode of The Quiet Warrior Podcast, Bernice shares how she moved from that place into what she now calls the Tiny Brave Steps method — a way of taking action on fear without needing to feel fearless first. She and Serena Low talk about the...

A woman describes what she feels in her own body to a doctor and is told she isn't a reliable narrator of her own experience. It happens so often that she stops noticing, and she carries that same distrust into every decision after. Executive coach Stephanie Peirolo has watched this pattern in her clients for a decade and named it in her book The Saint and the Drunk: A Guide to Making the Big Decisions in Your Life. On this episode of The Quiet Warrior Podcast, Peirolo joins Serena Low to unpack discernment...

A Marine Corps ambulance driver is pinned in a burning car, his heart stopped, watching from the ceiling as three doctors walk away. He is seventeen years past a farm accident that nearly took his leg, and decades away from a swimming pool dive that will break his neck in four places and leave him paralyzed from the shoulders down. Jay Setchell — Marine Corps veteran, serial entrepreneur, inventor, and author of The Strength Within You: It's Always Too Soon to Quit — has now survived 73 surgeries. In this episode of The Quiet Warrior Podcast, he tells Serena Low how a chil...

What happens when we expect our workplace to meet emotional needs that it was never designed to meet?

In this episode of The Quiet Warrior Podcast, I speak with Katie Jean Hadiaris, founder of Work Is Not Family, about the hidden expectations we bring into our careers—and how those expectations can leave us vulnerable to burnout, overwork and workplace harm.

Many of us were taught that being a good worker means being productive, helpful, agreeable and willing to go the extra mile. For women especially, childhood conditioning around being the “good...

There is a particular kind of dread that shows up around a first performance review, a first networking event, a first job where nobody hands you a manual. For introverted professional women who spent years being praised for grades and credentials, the workplace often demands a different currency entirely — people skills, self-advocacy, the ability to connect without performing extroversion. Nobody taught this. It was never on the syllabus.

That is the gap Rob Heller has spent two decades trying to close. After a 40-year business career and selling his insurance firm for eight figures to a publicly he...

For twenty-nine years, Mia Hanks believed that if she just held on a little longer, things would eventually get better. They never did. Behind a marriage that looked, to the outside world, like a life with a charming, generous man was a quieter reality: a husband who grew angry when she was sick, controlled every dollar she touched, and slowly convinced her that she was the one who was too sensitive, too much, too wrong.

That is covert narcissism, and Mia Hanks understands its texture better than most. A survivor of narcissistic abuse and author...

Joel Bein still remembers the exact feeling of trying to control something he could never control: standing in front of an orchestra, arms raised, believing the gesture had to look right rather than simply be true in the moment. Letting go of that grip, he says, was the same letting go he later had to learn in his own healing work. 

In this episode of The Quiet Warrior Podcast, host Serena Low talks with Joel Bein, founder of Human Liberation and host of The Joel Bein Show, about being an INFJ in leadership, the concept o...

At nine years old, Laura Bratton was told she would go blind. The diagnosis landed softly at first — the way impossibly hard truths sometimes do with children, held at a distance by the mercy of a young mind that couldn't yet process what was coming. The real reckoning came in eighth grade, when the sight loss accelerated and the grief hit with full force: panic attacks, debilitating depression, and the particular ache of becoming invisible to the people around her — not through cruelty, but through the silence of others who simply didn't know what to say.

In...

Can hypnotherapy help heal childhood trauma? Does it work for anxiety? Can it change your personality—or simply help you understand yourself more deeply?

In this episode of The Quiet Warrior Podcast, Serena Low speaks with clinical hypnotherapist Craig Meriwether about the science, misconceptions and practical applications of hypnotherapy.

Craig explains how subconscious beliefs formed in childhood can continue influencing confidence, relationships, anxiety and emotional wellbeing long into adulthood. He also addresses common myths about hypnosis, including whether people lose control, whether everyone can be hypnotised and how hypnotherapy differs from stage hypnosis.

If...

There is a particular grief that comes with outgrowing the people who once matched your pace, and no one tells you it is allowed to hurt and be right at the same time. In this conversation, Serena Low sits down with executive coach and author Steve Barton, creator of the Game of Ten framework, to explore what happens when old friendships fall away, old certainties dissolve, and the question underneath it resurfaces — am I enough as I am, right now, before I fix any thing? Barton, who built a family flower business from $200,000 to $2 million before a mental health aw...

There is a particular kind of stiffness that comes from believing your intellect is the only thing that will get you through. You put forward the version of yourself that has the answers, the version that never lets the mask slip, because somewhere along the way you learned that being seen as capable was the same thing as being safe. Then life takes the choice out of your hands. A cancer diagnosis. A five-year survival window. A 925-kilometer walk across France and Spain with nothing but a change of clothes and a set of questions you thought you had...

Jennifer Kornoely didn't choose to leave corporate. The choice was made for her.

She was meeting every goal, delivering every metric — and her manager let her go anyway. Because he could. A single mum with no severance, no safety net, and suddenly no income.

What she did next wasn't a triumphant pivot. It was a survival decision that slowly became something she chose.

In this episode, Jennifer shares how she went from real estate photographer who didn't know what she didn't know, to the founder of She Reads She Leads — an online book club...

What does it look like to build a life and a business  with purpose - when time is finite?

James Lang is the Managing Partner of OverLang Venture Partners, a venture firm building proprietary AI infrastructure that accelerates company growth while protecting the human capital inside each organisation. Before that, James served as COO of a medtech startup where he grew revenue past $20 million and built a team of 60 from the ground up. He's a self-described introvert, a late-diagnosed autistic, and someone navigating a serious health condition — with remarkable clarity and candour about what truly matters.

T...

If you've ever been told to "be more strategic" with no explanation of what that actually means — this episode is for you.

Limor Bergman Gross spent 20+ years leading engineering organisations across continents before making the leap to executive leadership herself. Now she coaches ambitious women in tech to do the same. In this conversation, she gets real about the patterns that keep talented women stuck — people-pleasing, hiding achievements, staying rigidly inside their job description — and shares the practical strategies that actually work.

We also dig into what it looks like to expand (not just "break out of...

What if being overlooked at work had nothing to do with your performance — and everything to do with a bias so embedded in workplace culture that most people don't even recognise it as bias at all?

David Boroughs spent 30 years navigating corporate America as an introvert. He received top performance rankings and was still told, repeatedly, that he wasn't visible enough. Near the end of his career, that contradiction became an epiphany: it wasn't him that was broken. It was the culture.

Now retired, David is an author and advocate for personality type in...

What do you do when life hands you a diagnosis — and you're the person everyone else depends on?

Deb Krier was a “good patient” kind of person. Annual physical. Mammogram. Did everything right. And still didn't make it home from the hospital before the phone rang.

What followed over the next decade was 34 surgeries under general anaesthesia, a stage zero diagnosis that leapt to stage four almost overnight, septic shock with a 75% fatality rate — and a surgeon who told her husband she would be dead by midnight.

Her response? Excuse me. I get to...

⚠️ Content note: This episode contains references to suicide. Please take care of yourself as you listen.

What does it really mean to be happy — and why do so many high-achieving, outwardly successful people struggle to feel it? In this deeply honest and practical conversation, happiness coach Todd Patkin joins host Serena to explore the hidden cost of perfectionism, the systemic roots of burnout, and the 12 steps he developed to help people move from surviving to genuinely thriving.

After growing a family auto parts business by 20% year-on-year and working 70–80 hours a week, Todd hit a wall a...

⚠️ Content Note: This episode includes discussion of suicide and suicide loss. Please take care while listening.

What happens when a confident communicator suddenly loses her voice?

In this deeply moving conversation, Serena Low sits down with psychotherapist, author, and communication expert Dr. Patricia Timerman Barbosa da Silva (“Dr. T”) to explore the life-changing experience that shaped her work: immigrating to the United States at 14 without knowing English and finding herself unable to express herself.

Together, they unpack the complexities of communication, grief, cultural identity, boundaries, and self-advocacy. Drawing...

What happens when you've built a successful career, ticked every box on the list society gave you - and you're still miserable?

That's where Mike Wood found himself at 45. A former COO who helped scale Jarrett Companies from $2.5 million to over $100 million in revenue, Mike had achieved everything he was supposed to want. Yet beneath the success, 30 years of anxiety and depression were still screaming.

In this deeply honest conversation, Mike shares the five-year inner journey that led him to become a consciousness coach — and why he now takes those same tools into ma...

What if the career that looked right on paper was quietly draining you — and the one you almost overlooked turned out to be exactly where you were meant to be?

Family mediator and restorative justice practitioner Rosemary Gattuso joins Serena to share the pivotal moment she walked away from legal practice and into mediation — not out of failure, but out of a growing self-awareness that law amplified her weaknesses, while mediation brought her natural strengths to life.

This conversation is for anyone who has ever felt slightly out of place in their career, stru...

Serena Low sits down with leadership expert Megumi Miki to explore what it means to be a quietly powerful leader — and why organisations in Australia and beyond can no longer afford to overlook quiet talent.

Megumi is the award-winning author of Quietly Powerful: How Your Quiet Nature is Your Hidden Leadership Strength and a leadership, culture, and diversity consultant with over 20 years of experience. In this episode, she challenges the outdated “hero leader” model and reveals how spaciousness, presence, and humility are reshaping what effective leadership looks like in today’s uncertain world.

W...