Humans, being. with Lael Stone

In this joyful, giggly and wise conversation, I sit down with Mia Wisinski, founder of Playful Heart Parenting, and a mum who will happily make a car seat buckle fart if it means getting a toddler in their car seat.

I've been calling Mia the queen of play for a while now... so I was surprised to hear she didn't come to mothering as a playful parent at all. She became a stepmum first, suddenly and unexpectedly, and felt she had to earn her place by being the best, most together, most perfect version of herself. It...

In this brave, tender conversation, I sit down with Tanja Lee, mindset and leadership specialist, Chief Energy Officer of The Evolution Agents, and a woman who, at six, lined up her toys in a semicircle to play teacher, something she knew, even then, she was meant to do.

Tanja shares about growing up with a parent living with alcohol addiction, and all she learnt to navigate from having that imprint in her life.

As well as discussing how living with an addict has impacted her, we talk about the moment she became a mum, and...

In this tender, honest, and quietly fierce conversation, I sit down with Taryn Brumfitt, the filmmaker behind Embrace and Embrace Kids, 2023 Australian of the Year, and a woman who’s spent more than a decade asking us to stop apologising for the bodies we live in.

I first watched Embrace in a cinema back in 2016, with my (then) 13-year-old daughter. I still remember the sadness that moved through my body that night... nobody had ever spoken to me like that when I was her age. And underneath it, this enormous joy that she was getting a different st...

In this hopeful and honest conversation, I sit down with David Bott, best-selling author and education consultant, and a man who still gets choked up about a teacher who was there for him when he was thirteen.

I'll put my hand up here... for a long time I was one of the loudest voices saying the system was broken. David gently invites me to look at the other side of that story. He's worked with over a thousand schools around the world, and what he sees is a lot of magnificence. Educators doing extraordinary things, often despite...

What if the fight in the back seat is really a red flag... and your child is waving it at you?

In this honest, practical, and gentle solo episode, I'm talking all things siblings. The squabbles over who got more ice cream, the toddler showing the new baby a little too much "love", the teens hurling spicy words down the hallway... and the parent standing in the middle of it all, muttering, why can't you just get along?

This one comes straight from my DMs. So many of you have asked how to navigate sibling...

"You've gotta walk across the bindis a bit to get to the swimming pool."

What if everything you’re hoping for is sitting on the other side of the thing you keep avoiding?

In this open, tender and surprisingly funny conversation, I sit down with Osher Günsberg, a man who has been in Australian living rooms for nearly two decades, and who spent a lot of that time doing the hardest work of his life off camera.

We talk about the version of Osher that millions of us watched on Idol and The...

"It's not the distress that hurts kids. It's being alone in the distress." Karen Young

With the noise of the world, the endless information, the sense that our nervous systems have hit the limit, I asked Karen how she's finding it, and she said it's a constant battle. Some days she wins it, some days she doesn't.

In this episode, Karen talks about wanting our kids to feel safer and do the brave things. Not one or the other. We discuss anxiety and how we've started pathologising a very normal human response, and in doing...

The loudest voice in our heads often says: “what are you waiting for?” Luke Cook has spent his whole life answering that question by just jumping in.

Underneath the million followers and the characters and the Netflix devil is a guy who shared that his ongoing battle is feeling like he falls short of everything. That rejection still stings, seventeen years in, and it stings because he still cares. We talk about what we make things mean, and how quickly we all default to our not-enoughness. We talk about his boys, and the birth pool, and the terr...

“Play is an on-ramp, not a reward” Dara Simkin says early on in our conversation. Yep, that resonates. I too have spent most of my life saving play for after the list is done. The list is never done.

Dara brings play to boardrooms and leadership days, and what she describes is a generation of adults so addicted to achievement that they have optimised themselves right out of their own lives. We talk about grief hiding inside what looks like resistance, about her redefining success as ease, and about the morning her five-year-old lost it over a Rubi...

A ninety-five-year-old told Jacinta she was the last of her tribe. Jacinta asked how that small body holds something so big, and she said she has to feel the loss but not go too far into it … when it gets close she goes outside and listens to the magpies. That is the whole human experience in one sentence.

In this episode we talk about the moment women become invisible, and how much earlier that lands than anyone admits. We talk about bodies, and about Jacinta's fierce insistence that we stop policing each other. She tells me what ch...

This week's episode is a different one.

I have been hearing that many of you are feeling overwhelmed, and I wanted to create a little break from the everyday hustle and grind to give you something you can come back to many times. This guided relaxation invites you to sit down for 30 minutes, close your eyes, take some deep breaths, calm your nervous system, and get back in touch with your centre.

We don't advise listening to this whilst driving. Instead, find a cosy spot to take a short break.

Pop your headphones...

Gina Chick was about seven when her whole class was told to walk in a circle. She stepped out of it and walked the other way, on purpose, so she had to look at every single face coming towards her. She’s been walking the other way ever since.

I’ve wanted this conversation for a long time. Gina survived 67 days alone in the Tasmanian wilderness, but that isn’t the part that undoes me. It’s her book, We Are the Stars, which I read and wailed my way through, snot-crying, completely levelled. She writes about her daug...

* There are a few F-bombs in our discussion. If you’ve little ones listening nearby, consider headphones!

Em Rusciano knows this: taking care of herself first is a radical punk act. And if you know Em from her music, book, radio, or her gloriously chaotic Instagram, you already know she's never done anything by halves.

Em talks about parenting her 6yr old son, who she describes, with so much love, as a “sixty-year-old cranky super genius”; her family… they’re a “lineage of lunatics” (in the best possible way), the 30 years of friendship with her bestie, screen...

Joe Williams told me that looking honestly at yourself can be a brutal thing, and then in the same breath he called it the best mirror we can ever hold, because that’s where generational change actually starts.

Joe and I were on the road together for nearly a month touring the doco ‘Seen’, so I got to watch him sit in front of audiences again and again and tell the truth about being a dad. There’s a line of his in the film that gets me every time: that he has to put his hand up, that...

Dr Edna Lekgabe has a name for what happens when a woman becomes a mother. She calls it matrescence, basically puberty 2.0: messy, hormonal, profound, and almost completely unnamed.

Edna’s a Melbourne perinatal psychiatrist whom I have so much respect for. We talk about the developmental earthquake none of us are warned about.

I became a mum at 25 with no idea what was happening to me… the brain rewiring, the threat system switching on. We discuss what happens when birth trauma and matrescence collide, why accepting care is so much harder than giving it. We talk...

Friendship, Bec Sparrow says, is a bumper bar on your life. It doesn't stop the hard things from happening – it cushions the impact when they do.

Bec is one of Australia's most trusted voices on teen and tween life - author of seven books, co-host of ABC's Parental as Anything with Maggie Dent, co-founder of Birds of a Feather (Australia's largest online book club for women), and a woman who has spent more than twenty years studying the science and art of friendship. She is also, by her own admission, a deeply introverted person who has had to...

I started this episode thinking about endings, the ones I'm walking towards in my own life right now, and somehow that musing turned into one of the most life-affirming, funniest conversations about death I have ever had.

I’ve spent years sitting with families through birth, and I’ve always felt that birth and death are close cousins, both thresholds, both asking something of us we rarely feel ready for. So when Dr Hannah Gould, cultural anthropologist, death studies scholar and author of How to Die in the 21st Century, sat down across from me, it felt like...

Teresa Palmer has five children, a two-decade film career, a podcast, a supplement brand, and at the time of recording, she was filming God of War in Vancouver - playing the goddess of fertility, which feels exactly right. Through all of it, she’s doing the same quiet work the rest of us are: healing the little parts of herself that didn't get what they needed, so she can show up with her heart forward for the people she loves most.

In this chat, we talk about birth and all its complexities, we talk about parts work an...

This episode starts with dreaming and ends with dreaming - and in between, Luke Bateman takes us through everything that happens when you stop letting yourself do it.

Luke played professional rugby league for the Canberra Raiders - 71 first-grade games, thousands of hours of training camps and hotel rooms and locker rooms - and in almost all of that time, he kept his love of fantasy fiction completely hidden. The shame of it, he says, was shaped by a very specific idea of what it meant to be a man. And unpacking that idea has been the...

There's something about a Missy Higgins song that lands in your chest before you've even registered the words. Somehow, she gets to the feeling first - the part of you that you haven't quite found language for yet.

Missy's music has been part of the soundtrack to my life for over twenty years, especially in my mothering years. So sitting across from her, I was a little bit in awe. Missy’s so generous in her honesty about the hard stuff: the writer's block that made her question her whole identity, the divorce that undid the story sh...

Amantha calls her AI 'Sunny'. She talks to it on the drive to the gym, like she's chatting to a friend. And it has quietly changed how she works, how she writes, and how she gets the thinking out of her own head.

Dr. Amantha Imber is one of the sharpest, most generous humans I know. An organisational psychologist, the founder of Inventium, host of How I Work, the first Australian to win a Thinkers50 Innovation Award, the author of four bestselling books, and her brand new one, The Energy Game, lands in July.

In...

The question I get asked the most by parents is, "Does this work?" So this week I sat down with two of the people most qualified to answer it.

For the better part of two decades, I have been teaching parents to parent differently. To skip the punishments and the rewards. To look behind the behaviour. To make space for big feelings instead of shutting them down. And the whole time, in the back of my mind, has been the quiet question every parent asks themselves... am I getting this right?

My answer was always...

There's a version of strength the world rewards – capable, tireless, always fine. And then there's the cost.

Gorgi Coghlan is someone I've adored from the moment we met. She's formidable, warm, wildly accomplished, and the kind of person who makes you feel seen immediately.

We talk about the imprints that drive us – the little girl who worked hard to be seen by a father whose love came through providing, not presence.

We explore:

"What am I making this mean?" That question might change how you move through conflict with your partner. Because the real work isn't making your partner wrong…it's getting curious about yourself.

I wanted to talk about what makes relationships tricky and what makes them actually work, and in this episode, I share my own story; how I went from completely collapsing whenever Mike got upset, to finally learning how to hold my centre. How we survived the brutal early parenting years when we were both drowning and how post-traumatic stress cracked me open and forced me to...

There's a strange kind of comfort in staying exactly where you are – even when that is hurting you. In this episode, I’m talking with clinical psychologist Dr Emily Musgrove, and we discuss why the familiar feels safe even when it isn't, and what it actually takes to find our way back to ourselves.

An imprint I have - from watching the busy women in my family – was that if you're not doing three things at once, you're lazy. That's the thread Emily and I pulled on together. We both grew up watching women just go, go, go – a...

Libby Trickett surfaced from the pool at the Beijing Olympics, saw the number one next to her name, and waited for the feeling of being enough. It didn't come.

Libby is mum to five children, including baby Archie, who was snuggled on her chest throughout our entire conversation. She opens up about postnatal depression after her first daughter, Poppy, about the Father wound that quietly drove her to the pool every single day, and about the moment she realised that winning gold wasn't going to make her whole. We also explore her passionate advocacy for keeping girls...

There are conversations that feel like they're about one thing, but they're actually about something else entirely. This one starts with laughter… and ends up in a tender place.

Ryan Shelton is such an excellent human. He's one third of The Imperfects alongside Hugh and Josh van Cuylenburg, and a face on Australian screens for the better part of two decades, from Rove to Hamish & Andy. I knew going into this chat that it'd be warm and funny and real.

We talk about what it costs to keep seeking approval, the psychology behind why so ma...

I grew up with Ali Daddo on my wall. And like so many of us, I looked at that image and thought - that's it. That's what it means to arrive. What I didn't know - what none of us knew - was that even being the ‘it’ girl comes with challenges.

This beautiful conversation really opens up about the pressures we feel as a woman, from the tween and teen years, into motherhood and menopause. We explore Ali's "standing in front of a 747 jet engine" image of society's pressure not to age, and what women actually find...

What if the story you tell about your body isn’t really yours to begin with?

In this warm, honest, and beautifully grounded conversation, I sit down with Steph Claire Smith – co-founder of KIC, model, podcaster, and mum – to explore the imprints that shape how we see ourselves, and what it takes to slowly, gently, rewrite them.

Steph grew up in the public eye at a time when the wellness world had a very particular idea of what health was supposed to look like. We talk about what it meant to internalise that, how it showed...

What if the feelings you’ve spent a lifetime pushing down are the very things asking to be heard?

In this solo episode, I want to talk about something people ask me about all the time – what does it actually mean to “do the work”? I recognise that the majority of us grew up in homes where feelings weren’t exactly welcomed. Anger got shut down. Tears got ignored. Mistakes got shamed. And so we learned pretty early that the safest thing to do was to push it all down and get on with it. The problem is, those...

What if the worst thing that ever happened to you turned out to be the thing that taught you how to live truly?

In this deeply moving and beautifully honest conversation, I sit down with Lisa Corduff – podcaster, storyteller, entrepreneur, and solo mum to three extraordinary kids – to explore what it means to carry grief, raise children through loss, and still choose joy.

Lisa's husband Nick died in September 2019 while travelling in India and Lisa’s challenge was to keep showing up, to stay open to find joy even inside profound grief. We talk about the gi...

What if the moment that changed your life wasn’t a success story... but a 15-year-old boy dying with his feet planted on the ground, reminding you not to waste yours?

In this raw, joyful, and deeply moving conversation, I talk with Tommy Herschell – former Queensland primary school teacher, founder of ‘Find Ya Feet’, and one of the most genuinely human people I’ve had the privilege of knowing.

This conversation is about the moment Tommy hit rock bottom. It’s about what it really means to find your feet – to stop, think about where you are, and t...

What if authenticity isn’t something you find... but something you return to?

In this warm, honest, and at times deeply moving conversation, I sit down with Kat John; coach, author, and one of those rare humans who just radiates something you want to lean into. Kat helps people come home to themselves, their hearts, and what really matters. And in this conversation, she does exactly that - for herself, and for all of us listening.

We explore:

What happens when the voice in your head that's kept you "safe" your whole life starts to get quieter... and you're not sure who you are without it?

In this beautiful, warm and deeply honest conversation, I sit down with Josh van Cuylenburg - co-host of The Imperfects podcast (one of Australia's biggest mental health podcasts), freelance filmmaker, visual storyteller, musician, dad of two little humans, and a really, really lovely guy!

Josh and I explore the beautiful, messy reality of parenting two little boys, what it really feels like to be in the trenches...

Sometimes the challenges in life bear the greatest rewards!

In this honest and tender conversation, I sit down with Sarah Pound, nutritionist, recipe writer, author of two best-selling cookbooks, and the creator behind Wholesome by Sarah, where over 1 million followers turn to make food feel effortless and joyful.

But this conversation goes way beyond recipes and Instagram. Sarah and I explore the beautiful, messy reality of navigating competition, comparison, and understanding that creativity comes in many forms. We explore:

What if the thing that triggers you most about your child's behaviour is actually showing you exactly what needs healing in you?

In this solo episode, I wanted to lean into something that I've been exploring for nearly 20 years – why parenting feels so hard, and why we react the way we do. Because whilst we all start off hoping we'll be calm and connected, the reality is often frustration, shame, guilt, and wondering why our kids push our buttons so intensely.

This isn't about more parenting tools or strategies. It's about understanding what's happening inside of...

What if we stopped measuring our worth by what we achieve, and started remembering who we actually are?

In this heartwarming and playful conversation, I sit down with Ben Crowe, Australia's most in-demand mindset and performance coach, founder of Mojo Crowe, and someone who deeply understands that we are human beings first, and human doings second.

Ben works with elite athletes and high performers, but this conversation goes far beyond sport or success. It's about what it means to simply be human... to play, to explore, to be worthy regardless of outcome. And to remember...

What if the very things we judge ourselves most harshly for are actually the doorways to our deepest growth?

In this raw and moving conversation, I sit down with Dr Billy Garvey – developmental paediatrician, podcaster, and someone who understands that our struggles aren't problems to fix, but invitations to understand ourselves more deeply.

Billy works with children and families navigating neurodevelopmental differences, but this conversation goes far beyond diagnosis and treatment. It's about what it means to be human, to carry pain, and to find our way toward wholeness.

We explore:

What does it really mean to belong? And what happens when we're brave enough to step into uncomfortable places to create a sense of belonging for others?

In this deeply moving first episode, I sit down with Rana Hussain – founder of ‘Good Human’, broadcaster, board member, and one of the most courageous humans I know. Rana was the first Muslim woman appointed to a national sporting board, and today sits on the boards of Welcoming Australia, Reconciliation Australia, and Basketball Australia.

But this conversation isn't about achievements or accolades... it's about the human experience beneath them a...