“I am so acutely aware that little girls born like me don’t sit in rooms with billionaires and don’t help run tech companies. So with the incredible privileges that I have, I don’t know that I can justify doing anything else but trying to make sure that other people have access to those same things." Meet Aubrey Blanche - an absolute powerhouse and world leader in workplace culture, inclusion and belonging - and the Global Head of Equitable Design and Impact at Culture Amp, one of Australia’s biggest startup success stories.  In this conversation on Human Cogs, Aubrey courageously and insightfully shares her ‘twisty’ family of origin story, her sense of both grief and hope following her recent diagnosis of bipolar, and her lifelong commitment to dismantling the codified systems and practices that prevent each of us from connecting with others, and sharing our authentic selves at work. This episode will challenge the way you think about the real story of who you are, and your role in creating a sense of belonging and equity for yourself, and those around you. "I’ve been so lucky, but I don’t want people from my community to have to be lucky to have opportunity. I just want them to have it.”   Guest: Aubrey BlancheShow Links: Aubrey Blanche Twitter Blog Culture Amp Hosts: Sabina Read and Madeleine Grummet Producer: Daryl Missen at Purple Wax Human Cogs is available on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via our website where you can also catch great conversations with previous guests :) Got some thoughts on today's episode you'd like to share?Join in the convo at Instagram @human.cogs   Want to support our show? We will sprinkle you with loving kindness, gushing accolades and all good things if you CLICK FOLLOW on Apple and Spotify! Or if you're really feeling it, PLEASE LEAVE US A QUICK REVIEW. It really helps us get these stories out to more awesome peeps like you! Thanks for listening!Learn more and support the show: https://www.humancogs.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When you think about your life, is there a moment that comes to mind which you know changed you indelibly? Fergus Watts says that moment happened when he was 15 years old, and the legendary AFL footballer and Reach founder Jim Stynes changed his life by unlocking the vulnerability hiding underneath his masculine bravado to finally give him permission to talk about “real stuff”.  That encounter 21 years ago sparked in Fergus a lifelong commitment to getting the absolute best out of himself, being true to who he really is and making an opportunity of every opportunity. This has seen him play professional AFL then have his career cut devastatingly short, found a powerhouse marketing agency employing 300 staff across three countries, and in a remarkable full circle, he’s now playing it forward as newly appointed CEO of The Reach Foundation scaling life-changing preventative mental health programs to thousands of young people across Australia. The path hasn’t always been easy, or linear. But the lessons are loud.  This conversation will challenge you to think about how to get comfortable with failure, cast off the labels and roles you define yourself by, and undertake the self-discovery required to get to the core of who you really are. Guest: Fergus Watts Show Links: The Reach Foundation Hosts: Sabina Read and Madeleine Grummet Producer: Daryl Missen at Purple Wax Human Cogs is available on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via our website where you can also catch great conversations with previous guests :) Got some thoughts on today's episode you'd like to share? Join in the convo at insta @human.cogs   Want to support our show? We will sprinkle you with loving kindness, gushing accolades and all good things if you CLICK FOLLOW on Apple and Spotify! Or if you're really feeling it for us, please leave us a REVIEW. It helps us get these stories to more awesome peeps like you! Thanks for listening!Learn more and support the show: https://www.humancogs.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Have you ever wondered how you can use your remaining days on this planet better? In this episode we explore this question with Dr Amantha Imber, plus unpack stacks of other fascinating, perplexing, super-curly conundrums like: How do high achievers find balance? What does work look like in a post-pandemic world? Can you stop perfectionism? Would you survive “the airport test”? Why are you a people pleaser? And where can you find true love after divorce? Amantha is the author of best-selling book Time Wise, an organisational psychologist and the founder of global behavioural science consultancy Inventium, which has worked with Google, Apple, Disney, LEGO, Atlassian, CommBank and many others to reinvent the way they work. In 2021 Amantha won the Thinkers50 Innovation Award and is also the host of the number one ranking business podcast How I Work, which has received 3+ million downloads, and features interviews with the world’s most successful people about their habits, rituals and strategies for using their days better. (It's bloody good. Well worth a listen.)In this conversation Amantha shares awesome personal and practical tips, from finding the work you love to surviving the wilds of dating after divorce to helping us all rethink how we really use our time. So if you’re looking to say “hell yeah” to a new lease on work or love or using your time wisely, then this episode is for you. ***** Guest: Amantha ImberShow Links: Time Wise, How I Work, Inventium Hosts: Sabina Read and Madeleine GrummetProducer: Daryl Missen at Purple Wax Human Cogs is available on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via our website where you can also catch great conversations with previous guests :) Got some thoughts on today's episode you'd like to share? Join in the convo at insta @human.cogsWant to support our show? We will sprinkle you with loving kindness, gushing accolades and all good things if you CLICK FOLLOW on Apple and Spotify! Or if you're really feeling it for us, please leave us a REVIEW. It helps us get these stories to more awesome peeps like you!Thanks for listening!Learn more and support the show: https://www.humancogs.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

During the dark days of the pandemic not everyone was baking sourdough. Many women were locked in their homes with people they feared, and psychological, physical, financial and fatal abuse played out behind closed doors with domestic violence continuing to devastate too many lives. Tarang Chawla is a writer, speaker, anti-violence campaigner and mental health advocate, whose beloved 23-year-old sister Niki was tragically murdered by her partner.  Niki’s horrific death and inspiring life has become the catalyst for Tarang’s powerful change-making. Named as Young Australian of the Year Finalist, AFL Community Champion Award Winner, India-Australia Young Community Achiever of the Year, and Pro Bono Top 25 Most Influential Australians, Tarang founded the ‘Not One More Niki’ movement, Australia’s largest campaign to end violence against women in culturally diverse communities. Tarang continues to use his voice to serve the community and champion human rights, and has just released a ground-breaking new podcast in collaboration with Future Women and supported by CommBank called There’s No Place Like Home, which features the stories of 10 extraordinary people who have survived family violence and domestic abuse. In this difficult, inspirational and hope-filled conversation, Tarang emphasizes the importance of victim-survivors stories, explores how we move to solutions, and shares how keeping his sister’s spirit alive in his everyday has given him the fuel to keep fighting for social change. It might be hard to listen and front up to the truth of the abuse and violence that is perpetrated behind closed doors.​ But as Tarang says: “It’s vital that we do. We have to listen. Because we need to learn.​”Guest: Tarang ChawlaShow Links: There's No Place Like Home, Future Women, Instagram Hosts: Sabina Read and Madeleine GrummetProducer: Daryl Missen at Purple Wax Human Cogs is available on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via our website. Got some thoughts on today's episode you'd like to share? Join in the convo at insta @human.cogsWant to support our show? We will sprinkle you with loving kindness and all good things if you CLICK FOLLOW on Apple and Spotify! Or if you're really feeling it, please leave us a REVIEW.Thanks for listening! Learn more and support the show: https://www.humancogs.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Did you know that you spend most of your waking life working – a jaw-dropping 90,000 hours for the average person.  Work dominates our days. It can be the thing that gets you up in the morning, or the thing that keeps you awake at night.  What about you? Has the pandemic changed your relationship with work? Are you at a career crossroads, feeling tired, unmotivated, a tad lost in your work life? Are you experiencing burnout? Do you want to be more intentional about the role of work in your life so you can grow more joy and meaning in your career, and make your work, well, work for you? We sat down to explore some of these questions with ABC Broadcaster Lisa Leong, who along with journalist Monique Ross, has spent a lot of time thinking and writing about work and co-authored a brilliant just published book called This Working Life - How To Navigate Your Career In Uncertain Times. In this conversation, Lisa and Mon share how being on the brink of burnout was the wake up call they each needed to change their relationship with work, and themselves. They reflect on their personal, hard-won learnings and how they had to rethink unsustainable and negative work habits to rebalance their work life coherence, do less to gain more, and harness their energy and superpowers to craft the careers they now truly love.  There’s stacks of great practical advice in here to help kickstart your career next steps, or at least help you have a good hard look at how you spend your working life.  Guests: Lisa Leong and Monique RossWebsite: This Working LifeSocials - Lisa: Twitter, InstagramSocials - Mon: Twitter, Instagram Hosts: Sabina Read and Madeleine GrummetProducer: Daryl Missen at Purple Wax Human Cogs is available on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via our website. Got some thoughts on today's episode you'd like to share? Join in the convo at insta @human.cogsWant to support our show? We will sprinkle you with loving kindness and all good things if you CLICK FOLLOW on Apple and Spotify! Or if you're really feeling it, please leave us a REVIEW.Thanks for listening!Learn more and support the show: https://www.humancogs.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Have you ever set yourself a crazy big hairy audacious goal, and found yourself against the odds somehow achieving it? Women climb invisible mountains every day. But Laura Youngson's eureka moment came on a volcanic ash pitch, 5,714 metres above sea level, on Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro in June 2017. Youngson, an ambitious entrepreneur, gender activist and Co-Founder of global non-profit Equal Playing Field and Ida Sports, had a crazy idea that if she could convince two teams of female soccer players from 20 countries to join her on an expedition up a mountain to set the Guinness World Record for the highest altitude game of soccer ever played, they could literally change the game for women and girls the world over.  The record made news across the planet, and set Laura on a path she could never have foreseen. This is a conversation about what happened next, about change, showing up, and how it’s mostly the failures that shape us and make us. Laura shares with us the shadow side of striving, the relentless juggle of businesses and babies, and that if we can each just summit the limits we impose on ourselves, women and girls can do anything they put their minds to. Guest: Laura YoungsonLinks: Ida Sports, Equal Playing Field, LinkedIn Hosts: Sabina Read and Madeleine GrummetProducer: Daryl Missen at Purple Wax Human Cogs is available on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via our website. Got some thoughts on today's episode you'd like to share? Join in the convo at insta @human.cogsWant to support our show? We will sprinkle you with loving kindness and all good things if you CLICK FOLLOW on Apple and Spotify! Or if you're really feeling it, please leave us a REVIEW.Thanks for listening! Learn more and support the show: https://www.humancogs.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sushi Das is an award-winning British Australian journalist of more than 25 years, spending much of her career at The Age, where she held a series of senior reporting and editing positions.
 She is the winner of two Melbourne Press Club Quill Awards including Best Columnist (2005) and currently works as a freelance columnist and as a researcher for RMIT ABC Fact Check. A brilliant writer and storyteller, Sushi is the author of Deranged Marriage - an affectionate, often hilarious, memoir of growing up in London in the 1970s in a strict and traditional Indian household, she raged against the control of her father and tried desperately to avoid an arranged marriage.  Education was Sushi’s passport to freedom and it enabled her to escape to Australia in her 20’s to live the life she wanted for herself, and to find her own place in the world on her terms, as she navigated the tug between Eastern expectations and Western desires.  Like so many of us, she has grappled with parental and cultural pressures that clash with her own deep needs for independence and justice. In this episode, Sushi reflects on the role of mothers in raising strong daughters, in not repeating the patterns of the past, and in letting your children be free to emerge into who they are - as she says, “I do not own my daughter. I am her custodian. I am the bow and she is the arrow.” Guest: Sushi DasSocials: Twitter, LinkedIn Hosts: Sabina Read and Madeleine GrummetProducer: Daryl Missen at Purple Wax Human Cogs is available on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via our website. Got some thoughts on today's episode you'd like to share? Join in the convo at insta @human.cogsWant to support our show? We will sprinkle you with loving kindness and all good things if you CLICK FOLLOW on Apple and Spotify! Or if you're really feeling it, please leave us a REVIEW.Thanks for listening! Learn more and support the show: https://www.humancogs.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What happens when, aged 30, you understand you’re transgender? This was the question that confronted Dr Yves Rees, an award-winning author, historian and regular contributor to ABC Radio and The Conversation, whose life was upended by gender transition in 2018. Then known as a woman called Anne, Yves was forced to grapple with the knowledge that they were not, in fact, a woman at all.  In this episode, Yves shares the events that led to their transition including completing a PhD, ending a relationship with a male, moving cities and even dabbling in a brief encounter with marijuana which unlocked the human who’d been hiding inside all along. Yves describes the limitless joy that surfaced when the binary confines of society gave way to the euphoric possibility of what’s next.  Yves expresses the desire that sits within each of us to be seen for who we are, regardless of the complexities and conflicts that are so very innately human. Yves’s wisdom is profound and invites the radical self-inquiry of us all. If there’s any part of you that yearns to be more you, we know you’ll relate to Yves while applauding this very personal, and universal story of a wise, articulate and curious human who’s just trying to be themselves in a world that has space for them. Guest: Yves ReesWebsite: www.yvesrees.comSocials: Podcast, Twitter Hosts: Sabina Read and Madeleine GrummetProducer: Daryl Missen at Purple Wax Human Cogs is available on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via our website. Got some thoughts on today's episode you'd like to share? Join in the convo at insta @human.cogsWant to support our show? We will sprinkle you with loving kindness and all good things if you CLICK FOLLOW on Apple and Spotify! Or if you're really feeling it, please leave us a REVIEW.Thanks for listening! Learn more and support the show: https://www.humancogs.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Many of us hear the word menopause and may think it’s not meaningful or relevant in our own life – regardless of our gender, career path or life stage. As an accomplished business executive who travelled the world working in often male-dominated industries, Melissa MacGowan was once probably the same. Until the symptoms of undiagnosed peri-menopause wreaked havoc in her own life. Melissa is now a passionate business coach who supports female leaders to banish burnout and manage the many and complex personal and professional changes associated with menopause. In this chat, Melissa shares her own tools and strategies for maximising growth, managing stress, and dialling up vitality. She reveals the power of exploring unexamined beliefs, the importance of taking a team approach with her husband (who she describes as her partner in growth), and how her many moments of 2am despair catalysed a conscious slowing down, and the revelation that stress steals your mojo. If you’re wondering how to better manage your time and energy, if you would like to prioritise energy over action, and if you want to focus on how you wish to feel rather than what you want to achieve, then this insightful chat is for you. Whether you are male or female, I know you’ll learn something about yourself, your partner, or a colleague. Regardless if they have reached menopause or not! Guest: Melissa MacGowanSocials: Instagram, LinkedIn Hosts: Sabina Read and Madeleine GrummetProducer: Daryl Missen at Purple Wax Human Cogs is available on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via our website. Got some thoughts on today's episode you'd like to share? Join in the convo at insta @human.cogsWant to support our show? We will sprinkle you with loving kindness and all good things if you CLICK FOLLOW on Apple and Spotify! Or if you're really feeling it, please leave us a REVIEW.Thanks for listening! Learn more and support the show: https://www.humancogs.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Adam Schwab is a former corporate lawyer, company founder, angel investor and the co-founder of Luxury Escapes, a global travel company. He has also written for Crikey and SmartCompany since 2005 and is the author of Pigs at the Trough: Lessons from Australia’s Decade of Corporate Greed.  From being a self-described glorified filer at a top-tier law firm, to great accomplishments as an entrepreneur, Adam credits his hard work, grit and precision, honed as a law student, as key ingredients in building Luxury Escapes into the juggernaut that it is today. We started by asking how Adam would describe himself if you met him at a party. What followed was a rapid-fire rundown of his journey to now, harnessing his insatiable appetite for winning, keeping his head while riding the highs and lows of the entrepreneurial journey,  all while at the helm of a billion-dollar company. This conversation offers a fascinating window into the entrepreneurial mindset, the line danced between risk and safety, the power of co-founder relationships; and in the face of great success, how Adam sees himself as a frugal everyday man, and the kind of person that loves a good holiday deal just like the rest of us. Guest: Adam SchwabWebsite: Crikey, Luxury EscapesSocials: Twitter, Podcast, Instagram Hosts: Sabina Read and Madeleine GrummetProducer: Daryl Missen at Purple Wax Human Cogs is available on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via our website. Got some thoughts on today's episode you'd like to share? Join in the convo at insta @human.cogsWant to support our show? We will sprinkle you with loving kindness and all good things if you CLICK FOLLOW on Apple and Spotify! Or if you're really feeling it, please leave us a REVIEW.Thanks for listening! Learn more and support the show: https://www.humancogs.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.