Abandoning the persona that got you promoted.

Description

For years, Moh believed he was doing exactly what a successful professional should do.

After his manager suggested that the way he dressed affected how seriously colleagues took him, he didn’t just swap oversized hoodies for penny loafers. Slowly, almost without noticing, he changed the way he spoke, the way he led and even the way he related to other people. The clothes became an armour. The armour became a personality. And the personality eventually followed him home.

The strange part? It worked.

He was promoted. His career progressed. From the outside, every signal told him to keep going. Until one day his own team joked that mentioning his name was enough to make other departments back down. Instead of feeling proud, he realised he’d become someone he didn’t want to be.

Our conversation explores what happens when fitting in turns into becoming someone else. We talk about code-switching, authenticity, identity and why wearing a professional mask doesn’t just change how others see us, but also how we see them. Moh describes the moment he stopped leading through authority and started leading through trust, why that transformed his relationships at work, and how reclaiming something as simple as the clothes he wore became part of reclaiming himself.

This episode invites you to reflect on:

• Which parts of your personality have changed because you believed they weren’t professional enough.
• Whether the version of yourself that helped you succeed is still the version you want to become.

Over to you

Where in your work are you still performing a version of yourself that no longer feels true, and what would be the smallest step towards letting that mask slip?

About the guest

Moh Guissé is the founder of The Team Wizard, where he helps organisations build stronger collaboration, trust and leadership. After nearly twenty years in the fashion industry, he left corporate life to create a business where he no longer had to code-switch or hide behind the image of what a professional should look like. Today, he works with teams exactly as he is, believing that trust begins the moment people stop performing and start meeting each other as humans.

Every team is stuck in its own way. Ten questions to map how yours is. Three minutes, it's all it takes: https://ttw-diagnostic.netlify.app/

Links to learn more about Moh Guissé:

Website

LinkedIn

Questioning the professional rules we’ve always followed, without ever choosing them.

Description

Every now and then, a conversation comes along that completely breaks my understanding of unprofessionalism. This episode starts with one of those moments. I realised that simply breaking professional norms isn’t enough. Some people challenge conventions to gain attention, power or status. Others do it because they’re trying to make work more human, more honest or more courageous. The difference matters.

But perhaps the most interesting part isn’t what my guests do. It’s what happens inside us when we hear their stories. That little voice saying, “You can’t do that.” Where does it come from? Is it protecting something you deeply value? Or is it repeating a rule you inherited without ever questioning it?

If this podcast has ever made you uncomfortable, this episode explains why.

This episode invites you to reflect on:

• Why feeling uncomfortable doesn’t necessarily mean someone crossed a line.
• How to tell the difference between breaking a rule that’s outdated and one that’s worth protecting.
• Why most of us follow professional norms that nobody ever explicitly taught us.

Over to you!

The next time you catch yourself thinking, “You can’t do that,” ask yourself: What professional rule did they just break? And do I still believe that rule deserves to exist?

About the guest

Myriam is a facilitator, behavioural economist and the host of Unprofessionalism. After interviewing dozens of leaders, entrepreneurs and creatives, she has realised that every time she thinks she understands unprofessionalism, a new conversation stretches its boundaries.

This episode is one of those moments.

Links to learn more about Myriam Hadnes:

LinkedIn 

Website 

Myriam’s personal newsletter

Make the thing you've always kept furthest from work the centre of it.

Description

Charlie Robertson spent years keeping two lives carefully apart: the consultant at a well-respected firm, and Charlene Coco, the drag persona he performed in nightlife and mentioned to almost no one at work. Then he left the consulting career, went freelance as a facilitator, and — only about a year ago — did the thing that still makes him flinch when he posts about it on LinkedIn: he brought Charlene into the boardroom.
What follows isn't a coming-out story so much as a working theory of costumes. Charlie's argument, borrowed from RuPaul: we're all in drag, every day — the suit, the meeting voice, the confidence we perform. Most of us just never chose ours. Drag queens choose everything: the wig, the makeup, the walk, the reaction they want from the room. So what happens when you bring that level of intention to how you show up at work?
Along the way: why Charlene was once braver than Charlie in gay bars and is now more nervous than him in offices; the workshop participant who paces her flat in her highest heels before big video calls; what Charlie's dad means when he calls all of this "my Britney thing"; and a discovery neither of us saw coming until it happened mid-conversation — why an audience wills a drag queen to succeed, and what that reveals about which leaders we're actually willing to get behind.

This episode invites you to reflect on:

• Where the line sits between adapting to a room and disappearing into it
• What your version of the high heels is — the small, deliberate thing that switches your confidence on before you walk in

Over to you!

What's the one part of yourself you edit out before every meeting — and what would it take to wear it on purpose instead?

About Charlie

Charlie Robertson is the co-founder of Make it Werk, a consultancy helping organisations build teams worth being part of — and cultures worth staying for. He and his best friend Safiya started it after realising the inclusive spaces they created in nightlife were exactly what companies were missing. He facilitates trainings, offsites and workshops — sometimes in full drag, as Charlene Coco.

Links to learn more about Charlie:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertsoncharles/

instagram.com/thecharlenecoco

https://www.makeitwerk.co/

Telling someone honestly how their behaviour affected you, instead of hiding behind professionalism, blame or silence.

This episode invites you to reflect on:

• Why do we suppress a difficult emotion although we know that it makes it even stronger?
• Why feedback falls flat when we can't name what a behaviour actually did to us.
• Why the leaders people trust most build the conditions for others to grow, rather than solving every problem for them.

Most of us were trained how to behave professionally. Almost none of us were trained in how to handle frustration, disappointment, or hurt. So we hold it in, stay composed, and let it surface later as a clipped reply, a quiet withdrawal, or blame aimed at someone who never heard from us the true impact of their behaviour. The more "professional" we try to look, the harder an honest conversation becomes.

Mariam Halfhide does the opposite, on purpose. When something gets to her, she doesn't swallow it, and she doesn't fire back — she steps away, settles herself, then goes to the person and tells them plainly how their behaviour landed on her, without assuming they meant harm. She's found that these conversations end with more trust than they started. Across feedback, leadership, altered states and emotional regulation, she keeps returning to one question: how do you become more honest without becoming less trustworthy?

Would you dare?

The next time someone's behaviour unsettles you, could you tell them how it landed on you — as a person, not a process — instead of letting it leak out as a rant or complaint?

About the guest

Mariam Halfhide works at the intersection of AI strategy and human connection. Having lived and worked across many cultures, she brings a sharp perspective on adaptation, belonging, and the courage it takes to choose a workplace where more of yourself is welcome.

Links to learn more about Mariam Halfhide:

LinkedIn

Watch on YouTube: The Projection Exercise

When he worked at a medical office, he used to sit in the break room before his shift with his laptop and coworkers walking past started asking what he was writing. Some began buying his books. His supervisor became a regular listener of his podcast.

At his current job in banking, almost nobody knows. The difference, Jamell says, has less to do with courage of opening up or wanting to remain professional but more about whether the environment makes curiosity possible at all and how fast a numbers-driven, fully remote workplace can make that kind of connection feel like effort.

We talked about what happens when work becomes only about hitting targets, and what it takes to bring the parts of yourself that don't fit the job description into the room anyway.

Links to learn more about Jamell Crouthers:

eBook

Paperback

Audiobook

Blog

Podcast

The job she walked away from was a corporate role she had stayed in through a merger and acquisition that kept her and her team in the dark, and left everyone working in an unfinished office surrounded by moving boxes for months. The message was clear long before the layoffs: stop investing. Stop expecting. Just wait.

The hotel window was Donatella's accidental third space — the room outside both home and work where she could finally see herself. She now designs that room intentionally, for teams. She helps organisations have conversations the office wasn't built for, to rebuild belonging in places where gratitude is demanded and silence is rewarded.

We talked about why grief gets skipped when organisations change, what happens to a team when a leader hands back agency instead of holding the line, and what four haircuts taught her about leading through change.

Links to learn more about Donatella Caggiano:

Website

LinkedIn

Newsletter

Substack

Podcast

He has spent decades inside corporate and agency life watching great ideas die because of terrible culture. He now works with teams on what he calls conversational debt: the gap between what people nod through in meetings and what they actually act on. His research found that when people are asked why others don't speak up, the answer is fear, but when asked why they themselves don't, the answer becomes pointlessness: a learned belief that nothing will change anyway.

Gustavo refuses to live that way. He fires clients before the work even starts if the fit is wrong. His rule is that he'd rather lose his job over one conversation than avoid a hundred — and he did.

We talked about the power dynamics that shape what is considered professionalism, the most dangerous type of silence in organisations and why we should all drop the invisible contract nobody handed us and stop waiting for permission to speak.

Links to learn more about Gustavo Razzetti:

Forward Talk (Gustavo’s new book)

Website

Substack

Workshops

She's spent decades in digital innovation and marketing, watching organisations say they wanted disruption and then treat the people delivering it as the problem.

That’s made her conclude that 80% of innovation is change management. Rori explains how most of us obsess over the idea while it is actually the smallest part of the problem. The larger part is whether the people around you feel safe enough to hear it.

She acted before consensus throughout her whole career, took the heat for it, and now she is sharing the blueprint.

Links to learn more about Rori Duboff:

LinkedIn

Website

All Things Trust

Substack

That’s a pattern he kept running into. Different countries and roles but the same kind of distance disguised as formality to keep things simple and boost performance. In consultancy, where everyone is climbing the same ladder, connection becomes a liability as only one person can move up at a time.

The irony is that the performance everyone’s after lives exactly in the connection they've learned to avoid. That’s the space Emanuele keeps moving towards for nearly two decades. Sometimes the barriers are pushed and sometimes they push him. His solution? Love - the deepest form of connection.

Emanuele firmly believes that love belongs at work and is a core leadership trait and nothing will inspire people to do and be their best at work like feeling loved.

Links to learn more about Emanuele Mazzanti:

LinkedIn

She coaches TED speakers and executives to do the same. To stop becoming a flatter version of themselves the moment they walk into a professional space, and to trust that what makes them recognisable outside of work is exactly what will make them land inside it.

She has a name for what happens when people don’t believe who they are is enough: voice masking. Her argument is that the moment an audience senses someone performing instead of connecting, they stop listening. Not consciously. Viscerally. And no amount of memorisation fixes that.

We talked about the wall we are told to build between our personal and professional lives, and why Cathey's career is a case for replacing the bricks with glass so you can see what's on the other side and decide what's worth bringing through.

Links to learn more about Cathey Armillas:

Website

LinkedIn

Speaker Skills Academy

Benjamin thought the opposite. That staying professional in that room was going to make it impossible for anyone to have an honest conversation. What happened next? An awkward silence and the topic remained untouched for the rest of the that meeting.

He has spent his career walking into rooms like that one. And what he keeps finding is that most people just don't know there's another option. Sometimes it takes someone breaking the rule in front of you for you to realise that you’ve been following one all this time.

We talked about where professional norms come from and why they're so hard to name, what it costs to break them and what it costs not to.

Links to learn more about Benjamin Taylor:

Website

LinkedIn

Sir John Kay's Lecture

Sitcom ‘Dear John’

That’s how she spent 17 years as one of the highest-paid professionals in a male-dominated field before realising that the secret lay in building relationships. She's turned that into a book called This Sh!t Works, and a speaking career with keynote speeches 99.9% of audiences want to hear again. Turns out, the sh!t does work.

We talked about why everyone keeps asking the question they hate being asked, how a woman complimenting her flowered pants on the street turned into the perfect lesson on what networking was always supposed to feel like, and what it actually takes to be someone people remember after the room clears.

Links to learn more about Julie Brown:

Website

LinkedIn

A clarity that a 70-page document full of acronyms that nobody in those steering group meetings would admit they hadn't read could never provide.

He has spent decades inside large organisations finding the people whose working lives are shaped by decisions they had no part in making, and asking the questions everyone inside stopped asking on day three. We talked about what happens when organisations become the very obstacle standing between themselves and the change they're trying to make and what changes when you stop delivering that change to people and start designing it with them.

Links to learn more about Jussi Hermunem:

LinkedIn

Personal Website

Company Website

With +15 years of managing teams across industries and seven countries around the globe, she spent a lot of that time being called difficult for doing things like putting her own phone number on an emergency contact list so her junior team members could have Christmas or pushing back against a request that would disrupt her team’s weekend.

Tramaine is a leader who runs toward the hard conversation, takes the consequence that comes with it, and has taken a demotion more than once because she decided the price of staying was higher than the price of leaving. We talked about what it costs to be called difficult as a woman in corporate, how she decides what's worth the fight, and why everything - every choice, every boundary, every stance - has a price. The only question is whether you've made peace with paying it.

Links to learn more about Tramaine Teo:

LinkedIn

He was in his mid-twenties, in Australia, competing against people he knew might be sharper than him. His logic was simple: if I try to beat them on their terms, I lose. So he placed a different bet. One where he'd either come last by a long way, or come first.

He came first. It wouldn't be the last time betting on himself paid off. You might be familiar with The Coaching Habit, a best-seller book he self-published a decade ago and has over a million copies sold around the globe.

Sometimes knowing who you are comes with a price-tag. Michael lost a $300.000-a-year contract because a CEO hated the name of his company ‘Box of Crayons’. Instead of changing, he went looking for clients who loved it instead. We talked about what it costs to hold that line, and what happens when you stop making decisions to preserve a reputation almost nobody was tracking in the first place.

Links to learn more about Michael Bungay Stanier:

The Coaching Habit 10th Anniversary

LinkedIn

Newsletter

Podcast

YouTube

Website

The freedom to show up unpolished isn't equally available. Sometimes is contextual. Sometimes we are born closer to that permission than others.

Maybe that's why it's been harder than I expected to find female guests for the podcast. Being unprofessional, in the corporate world, it's often a verdict. Putting your name next to a show celebrating not following the script might be risky.

This episode is me thinking out loud, as someone who still hasn't fully dropped the mask, about what it actually costs to be yourself at work and how to make this space safer for those who have more to lose

Links to learn more about me:

Website

LinkedIn

Substack

Both times, the "thou shalt” voice telling him to stay on course was very loud. Both times, he ignored it. But the last one he gave himself nine months to make it work or face the consequences.

In less time than that, he built a company centred around the virtue behind his "unprofessionalism". One he believes to be the source of all virtues: courage. 

He even has a mathematical formula: courage = power x purpose ÷ dragons. The dragons are the doubt, the fear, the inner voice that tells you the risk isn't worth it. And his whole work is about shrinking them — not by ignoring them, but by naming them, auditing them, and asking one simple question: what is the cost of doing nothing?

He also makes the case that we celebrate courage only when it works out. And that this is exactly how companies train people out of trying.

Links to learn more about Roi Ben-Yehuda:

LinkedIn

Website

The pattern is always the same: claim it first, build it second. Resourcefulness shows up after commitment, not before it. Waiting until you’re ready is the riskier move.

In this episode: why tight deadlines are a gift, what happens when you fuse your identity with your work, and why disliking failure and fearing it are two very different things.

Links to learn more about Leanne:

Website: https://www.leannehughes.com

Work Fame Substack: https://workfa.me

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leannehughes/

Instagram: https://www.youtube.com/@LeanneHughes

YouTube: https://www.instagram.com/leannehughes/

As he walked the Camino after redundancy, his body told him with every fibre of his being, that he wasn't going back to corporate life. Now he lights a candle in the early hours of the morning, takes executives for long walks in nature, and asks his coaching clients to slow down long enough to hear what their inner tutor would tell them.

We talk about why the unspoken rules often do the most damage, what gets buried when leaders aren't allowed to feel, and why two hours walking in nature will do far more for your business than a back-to-back calendar full of big, important meetings.

Links to learn more about Martin:

Linkedin

Website

Book

She'd grown up watching her uncle bridge worlds in apartheid South Africa – endlessly curious, fascinated by people and possibility, and the doctor of Nelson Mandela. He taught Philippa something that no business school curriculum was ever going to: the return on being more human. Today, she takes this conviction into boardrooms across the world.

We got into what happens when people genuinely care about each other at work, and what it costs when they don't. As Philippa will tell you, connection and belonging isn’t the soft, smushy stuff in business, it's by far your greatest asset.

Links to learn more about Philippa White:

LinkedIn

Website

He walked away from a six-month internship, would sneak off to watch films when he should've been serving popcorn, and then decided he was done pretending he had it all figured out. Now at just 25 years old, he’s figuring it all out in public. After hundreds of conversations about why people feel lost in their careers, he’s building an AI career coach for the ones tired of faking it.

Alex doesn’t claim to have all the answers though – and that’s precisely the point. We talk about what happens when you stop performing expertise — and start solving problems from the inside.

Links to learn more about Alex McCann:

Substack

LinkedIn

What she didn’t expect was how long the good girl mindset would follow her. Even now, a decade into solopreneurship and 370 episodes into her podcast Reimagining Success, Anna still feels the pull of the old scripts. Say yes, never chase, be likeable, and fill up your diary to feel important.

We talk about what success looks like once the gold stars disappear and you’re left to figure it out on your own. Anna’s advice? Bring your A game, set the boundary, go the extra mile – but whatever you do, don’t go two.

Links to learn more about Anna Lundberg:

Website

LinkedIn

Book

Podcast

We got into why real vulnerability isn't the rehearsed trauma story but the small, mundane thing you say in the moment that reminds everyone they're sitting with a human. We talked about boundaries as a source of connection (not walls), why agreement is overrated in teams, and what happens when senior leaders can't admit they're overwhelmed even though it would be weirder if they weren't.

Learn more about Mark McCartney:

Newsletter

Website

LinkedIn

YouTube

Rotem Kazir was trained never to let her coaching clients know anything about her. Keep distance. Stay neutral. That's professional. Until a founder she'd coached for two years said something that broke the rule for good.

She's spent 20 years working with startup founders — first in HR, then on the VC side, now as a coach — and what she keeps seeing is that the performance breaks down at the exact moment people need each other most. One founder walked into his board meeting and said he didn't know how to take the company forward. The room shifted from performance review to actual problem-solving. He went on to raise $100M. We talked about why that almost never happens, when vulnerability is strategic versus reckless, and why she now opens meetings with "What's hard?" instead of status updates.

Links to learn more about Rotem Kazir:

LinkedIn

Jon is the founder of Xchange and one of the most in-demand facilitators in the world. He also spent five years running global conferences in a suit on top and barefoot on the bottom. We talked about why that's not a gimmick — it's connected to something he's learned about nervous system regulation and what happens when the person holding the room is actually relaxed. We got into the inner work behind facilitation, why the moments that go sideways are the ones that build the most trust, and what it actually costs to keep performing a version of yourself the room didn't ask for.

Links to learn more about Jon Berghoff:

LinkedIn

Website

Tieren has a doctorate in organisational leadership and a decade of experience as an instructional designer and coach. We talked about what it actually costs to mask every day — adjusting your tone, reading the room before you've even opened your mouth, teaching your kids to do the same. She was honest about the exhaustion of it, and honest about the risk that comes with stopping. This conversation changed something for me: the freedom to be "unprofessional" is itself a privilege. Not everyone gets to drop the mask and call it brave.

Links to learn more about Tieren Scott:

Website

LinkedIn

Mike spent 35 years in consultancy before founding his liminal coaching practice, and he's been thinking about where that fear comes from — Taylorism, factory floors, a management culture that treats "I don't know" as a career threat. We talked about why daydreaming might be the most productive thing a knowledge worker can do, how asking "why" gets read as insubordination, and what his mother once told him about the word "amateur" that reframes the whole conversation.

Links to learn more about Mike Parker:

Website

LinkedIn

Substack

Jill went on to write a bestselling book called The 10 Permissions, and this conversation is really about where that idea was born. We talked about the invisible rules we follow without questioning them, why "am I allowed?" is the most exhausting question to carry through a working day, and what she learned in Zimbabwe that took her decades to put into words: nobody is coming to give you permission.

Links to learn more about Jillian Reilly:

LinkedIn

The 10 Permissions Website

Together, we’ll be peeling back the limitations of professionalism, on a mission to restore our humanness and bring joy, defiantly, back to work. You’ll hear stories from scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and true masters of their craft as we question the very construct of professionalism, its silent expectations, how we can break free, and seek to be unprofessionals in all that we do!

But first, join me from the very beginning. In episode 000, we’ll journey from the birth of professionalism to its existence in the age of AI, and why the only sustainable thing left for us to be is our real, brilliant, unfiltered selves.

Find out about:

• The history of professionalism, its construct, and why it has become such a paradox
• The wonderful guests I’ll be interviewing in the coming weeks, and the topics we’ll be exploring
• The Unprofessionalism book I am writing alongside the podcast, and the research that has led me here