She was advising Parliament and working UN global health policy. Then burnout made her stop and rebuild from scratch.

Annabelle Botea studied political science and law at Sciences Po, advised in the Romanian Parliament, and worked global health policy for an NGO at the UN level. On paper, it looked perfect. Underneath it, she was running on four coffees a day and popping medicine like candy just to keep going. Then burnout forced the stop she couldn’t give herself.

In this conversation, Dan and Annabelle get into:

• The exact moment burnout stopped being abstract and became physical
• Why she treats intuition and emotional intelligence as a competitive advantage, not a soft skill
• “Brenda”: the name she gave her inner critic, and how she sends her for a walk
• Why she doesn’t allow “party poopers” in her Substack comments, and the boundary behind that rule
• Building Pitaya and rejecting the “10k a month in three months” myth of online business
• What she wants to give future employees that she never had: emotional safety

Annabelle now writes Outside the System on Substack and is building Pitaya, helping first-time founders simplify selling digital products and services online.

Outside the System - https://annabellebotea.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips

If you’ve ever mistaken burnout for a personality trait, this one’s for you.

Jennifer Hong, fractional CMO and writer behind the Substack Natural Intelligence, joins Dan Korus for a conversation that moves fast: why image generators keep failing to render real human faces (she calls it "the centroid problem"), why she switched from OpenAI to Anthropic and compares the two to Tesla and Volvo, and why she picked a public fight with Substack's leadership over its handling of death threats and deepfakes on the platform.

They also get into:

• Why "AI fluent" describes less than 1% of users, and what that number actually means
• The 95/10 to 15 self-awareness gap and what it means for leaders specifically
• The difference between a jerk and an asshole at work, and why only one is a dealbreaker
• How two life crises rebuilt Jennifer's relationship with control, trust, and delegation
• Why personal branding is a prenup you're already signing whether you write it down or not
• The plan to buy back Letterboxd for its community instead of selling to private equity

A conversation about self-awareness, trust, and what's left for humans once machines get good at mimicking the average.

Timestamps
0:00 Intro
0:38 Does "intelligence is no longer ours alone" still hold a year later
2:53 If not intelligence, what would you call it: the "centroid" problem
9:47 Why she switched from OpenAI to Anthropic: Tesla vs. Volvo
13:57 Growing up in Los Altos, getting kicked out of Berkeley
20:37 The rules she breaks: buying back Letterboxd from private equity
25:12 Substack's Nazi problem, the open letter, and getting threatened for it
29:38 "Low-key Buddhism" and letting go of control
35:05 Trust and delegation as a leader
36:09 The health crisis that became her line of demarcation
48:31 Personal branding is a prenup you're already signing
58:12 The 95/10-15 self-awareness gap and EQ diagnostics
1:03:39 Lightning round: good leadership, first-day advice, advice for execs
1:15:09 Where to find Jennifer Hong

Follow Jennifer Hong
Substack (Natural Intelligence): https://hongjennifer.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-hong-100/

More from Kestryl Edge
Website: www.kestryledge.com
The Updraft (Substack): https://dankorus.substack.com/

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Hashtags
#EmotionalIntelligence #Leadership #ArtificialIntelligence #SelfAwareness #Substack #PsychologicalSafety #PersonalBranding #AIEthics #Podcast #KestrylEdge

Andrew's Website - https://awallbridge.com/

Andrew's Courses - https://maven.com/leader-s-labyrinth/the-labyrinth-experience

On LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-wallbridge-64b94/

On Substack - https://substack.com/@andrewwallbridge?utm_source=global-search

What separates a good manager from a truly felt leader? In this episode of the Kestryl Edge Podcast, Dan Korus sits down with Andrew Walbridge — leadership consultant, executive coach, and author of Leader's Labyrinth — for a candid conversation spanning 32 years in leadership development, from running a UK pub and leading cultural change at Warner Bros. to becoming a globally recognized voice on emotional intelligence and self-awareness at work.

Andrew shares the story of his mentor Terry Pierce (author of Leading Out Loud), the toxic leadership culture that taught him what not to do, and why he calls himself "the world's worst manager but a pretty good leader."

Together, Dan and Andrew unpack the real difference between management and leadership, why the goal of great leadership is to make yourself unnecessary, how to build psychological safety and trust on a team, and why "finding your voice" is one of the hardest — and most important — shifts a leader can make.

Topics covered: leadership vs. management, emotional intelligence (EQ), self-awareness, servant leadership, building high-trust teams, coaching through questions instead of answers, cultural change management, and the mentorship that shaped a career.

Whether you're a first-time manager or a seasoned executive, this episode offers practical, story-driven wisdom on leading people, not just managing tasks.

Learn more about Andrew Walbridge's books, Leader's Labyrinth and The Anatomy of Felt Leadership, available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Subscribe to the Kestryl Edge Podcast for more conversations on emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and human-centered leadership.

Her Substack - https://giuliascalaberni.substack.com/

Humanship: Leading Across Cultures with Giulia Scalaberni

Giulia Scalaberni started as a coder and became the product manager and team leader of the software she used to build. Today she leads a team of nearly 20 people across Europe and India, building medtech software that puts tools in doctors' hands. She landed in leadership the way most technical people do, with no path and no toolkit, and she learned the rest by watching.

In this episode she breaks down "humanship," her term for the mix of leadership and humanity. It rejects the idea that empathy and high standards cancel each other out. She explains why trust with Eastern-country teammates is built on relationships before tasks, how she used Erin Meyer's Culture Map to fix a team that went silent after every meeting, and why she runs a monthly "fun time" ritual that has nothing to do with work and everything to do with output.

We also get into giving yourself time before you react, treating failure as an enabler instead of a verdict, and finding your Ikigai without forcing your whole life through a diagram. She closes with first-day, mid-career, and senior-leader advice, including the line that culture starts in the basement.

#Leadership #EmotionalIntelligence #Humanship #RemoteLeadership #TeamManagement #CrossCulturalLeadership #WorkplaceCulture #PeopleFirst #TechLeadership #Empathy #PsychologicalSafety #Ikigai #FutureOfWork #LeadershipDevelopment

Brandi Copeland calls herself an accidental HR professional. She built her career end to end at Disney and NBCUniversal before founding The Employee Experience Edit, and she's spent the last decade proving that employee experience isn't the welcome gift or the splashy onboarding event. It's whether someone knows who to ask when they're stuck.

In this episode we get into:

• Why direct report loads are up roughly 50% over the last decade while L&D investment keeps shrinking
• Disney's four-part framework (safety, efficiency, courtesy, show) and what it teaches about prioritizing fundamentals over flash
• The four generations now sharing the workforce, why "generation" is about formative experience and not age, and why Gen Z might be the mouthpiece for everything millennials never felt safe saying out loud
• A simple language fix for feedback conversations: replace "I feel like" with "I observed," and watch what opens up
• Why engagement surveys often ask leading questions, and what to do instead
• Career advice for three different career stages: day one, the messy middle, and the C-suite

Brandi's read on where this is heading: companies that keep treating talking to their people as expensive or optional are going to lose. The ones that figure out empathy is free are going to win.

Being a workplace chameleon isn't fake — it's one of the clearest signs of high emotional intelligence.

HR tech leader Claire joins Dan Korus to unpack what actually separates people with real EQ from everyone else: not "reading the room," but knowing yourself well enough to change how you show up without losing who you are. Claire's spent five years across recruiting, employee relations, and onboarding before landing in HR automation — and she brings the rare perspective of someone who's automated the busywork and still had to sit across the table from burned-out teams.

In this episode:

• Why adapting your communication style for sales vs. engineering isn't disingenuous — "it's still you, just a chameleon"
• The real definition of burnout: not caring too much, but losing control over your ability to recover
• Claire's framework for finding your "So What" — the personal philosophy that turns a job into meaningful work
• Why AI is raising the bar for mediocre output instead of replacing human judgment
• Career advice for first-day hires, messy-middle managers, and CEOs at 10,000 feet: "the folks closest to the issue have the best potential solutions"

If you've ever been told you're "too intense," or wondered whether adapting to different people makes you a fraud, this one's for you.

#EmotionalIntelligence #HRTech #Leadership #Burnout #WorkplaceCulture #FutureOfWork #PeopleFirst #CareerAdvice #SelfAwareness #AIatWork #KestrylEdge #HRLeadership #WorkplaceWellbeing

HR tech leader Claire Walsh joins Dan to talk emotional intelligence, the line between authenticity and adaptability, and why AI is raising the bar on what counts as good work. Plus: practical career advice for every stage, from first-day hires to CEOs.

Learn more about Kestryl Edge: kestryledge.com