Carpe Disruption

If you’ve ever tied your worth to a number, a title, a result, or anything external you couldn’t quite hold onto, this episode will find you somewhere personal.Alex Ostergaard was eight years old when he came home from school in France with 18 out of 20 on a test. One of the best grades in the system. He could barely contain himself. He waited all evening for his dad, heard the keys in the door, and ran.His dad looked at the grade and said: nice. But why didn’t you get a 20 out of 20?He meant well. He forgot about it almost immediately. Alex carried it for thirty years.He spent those years looking for that 20 out of 20 from somewhere. He got into Google. Heard the words from a recruiter over the phone and fist-pumped around his living room in Copenhagen. Called his parents immediately. For the first time, his dad looked at him with nothing but pride. No correction. No improvement notes. Just: pure pride.It was the first 20 out of 20 Alex had ever felt. And it became addictive fast.He spent his time at Google terrified someone would figure out he didn’t belong. He moved the goalpost. Burnt out. Left corporate. Became a life coach. Wrote a book about overthinking, and every morning he’d get up, make a coffee, and refresh his Amazon page. 56 reviews. Refresh. 56 reviews. Another coffee. Refresh.One morning the page didn’t load. Just an error. Amazon had taken his book down permanently.And in the middle of the anger and the grief and the days he spent arguing with his pillow about it, something shifted. He realised what he’d been doing every time he hit that refresh button.It wasn’t a 36-year-old author checking his numbers. It was an eight-year-old boy. Checking to see if he’d finally gotten a 20 out of 20. Checking to see if he was finally enough.That’s the episode.In this conversation: the 18 out of 20 story and the thirty years it built. Why achievement never gives you the feeling permanently. What Google looks like from the inside when you’re carrying imposter syndrome into one of the most competitive rooms on earth. The drama triangle and how most relationships quietly run on it. What burnout really is when you strip away the language. And what it takes to stop looking for proof in the wrong places.Find Alex on LinkedIn: Inner Freedom with AlexHis book: dissolvingoverthinking.comSubscribe on Substack: carpedisruption.substack.comThe only constant in this world is change. Be curious about how to seize it, for yourself.

Series 1 - Transitioning is a Frame of MindEpisode 9 - Hannah & Jason DenhartHannah and Jason Denhart met at Royal Ascot and have spent the years since building a life that keeps moving. Four countries. Amazon. Luxembourg. And now Helsinki, where they arrived on January 1st with six suitcases and four feet of snow in the car park.In this episode, Jeremy and Alaina sit down with a couple who’ve had their relationship tested across four international moves. Each one a full renegotiation of work, identity, community, and what home actually means.What comes through isn’t a neat guide to relocation. It’s the decision-making framework underneath all of it. How they handle uncertainty together. Why they don’t do loads of research before moving. And what they mean when they say you make the decision and then you make it the right one.They talk about small wins as anchors, how to stay yourself when everything around you changes, and what it does to your kids when they grow up in countries that aren’t their own.Plus the lightning round, the Hard Left Turn, and a relationship described, in one of the best answers of the series, as lightly salted.

Podcast Episode 11 - Martin HaywoodSeries 2/Episode 3 - Work, ActuallyThere's a geological term for sediment that gets left behind when water moves through it. The heavier material the current was never strong enough to shift. Not because it's more valuable. Because it doesn't move.Geologists call it a lag deposit.When you look at the metrics most TA functions still use, the same dashboards sitting in the same place through every leadership change, every restructure, every initiative that promised to fix things, you have to ask: what's the lag? What has nobody been strong enough to move?That question opens this episode. And Martin Haywood is exactly the right person to ask it to.He's run TA at Amazon, one of the most demanding recruiting environments ever built, and at Sainsbury's, retail at scale, entirely different pressures, entirely different definition of what the function is for. That combination is rare. It's not theory. It's comparative intelligence about how a function actually operates versus how it gets described by the people running it.The conversation covers a lot of ground. He makes the case for recruiting for the company rather than against jobs. Build the talent marketplace first. Let the tech do the matching. He draws a real line between AI and automation that most organisations are still blurring. He talks about on-time hiring versus time-to-fill, why storytelling is the TA skill nobody's developing, and what he thinks this function risks losing as it automates more of its work.

56 percent of people surveyed say they feel psychologically safe at work.That means 44 percent do not.Jeremy Sholl and Alaina Schnipke spent a long time with that number in the first ever Riff Session of Carpe Disruption.And what followed was one of the most honest conversations about the workplace that this show has produced, without a guest, without a script, and without a clean ending.They cover the stat itself and what the 44 percent are actually experiencing. They cover COVID as the event that did not create the psychological safety problem but made it impossible to ignore.They cover employee listening surveys, the difference between doing them and acting on them, and why the companies that talk about psychological safety the most are often the ones with the biggest problems.Alaina shared advice a professor gave her at 21 that she has thought about regularly for the fifteen years since."When you realize an environment is toxic and no longer suiting your growth, you can either stay and get poisoned by it and become toxic yourself, or you can take whatever light is left within you and go reignite it somewhere else and allow it to heal."They also go somewhere most psychological safety conversations do not. The employee side. The responsibility that sits with the individual to be part of the solution, to give feedback that can actually be used, and to make the choice to leave when the honest answer is that the environment is not going to change.And they close on the epidemic nobody is naming directly, organisations putting people in leadership roles who do not want to lead, have not been trained to lead, and are creating a ripple effect into culture and psychological safety that takes years to undo.No guest. No script. No tidy conclusion.Just the conversation that needed to happen.Carpe Disruption — Riff Sessions — Episode 1.

Carpe Disruption — Series 1: Transitioning is a Frame of Mind. Episode 8. Virginie Zaghini.Virginie Zaghini started her career testing blood compatibilities in a medical laboratory. The margin for error was zero. A patient at the end of the process was waiting for vital care.She now leads global talent acquisition across forty countries.The path between those two things involves a biology degree she walked away from, an au pair position she took because it was the smartest investment she could make with exactly the means she had, a leap to India at twenty three that her parents did not understand but could not talk her out of, and a chain of moves that deposited something in her from every environment she passed through.What she chose to keep from each one is the episode.In this conversation Virginie sits down with Jeremy Sholl and Alaina Schnipke to talk about what it actually means to move through very different professional cultures without losing yourself in any of them.The specific things each organisation deposited in her that she still carries. The things she had to unlearn. The boundaries she set on day one of every new role and never moved.And the moment she decided she was not going to let a career transition dictate her decision to have a child.This episode also covers the Paris Brest pastry, driving too fast, dishwashing, what happens when a meeting organiser says "so who wants to kick us off?", the Northern Lights, and a private pilot's license that is still on the list.Her philosophy in one line: you do not have to become the environment to survive it.

Carpe Disruption Podcast - Series: Transition is a Frame of Mind - Paul HeyesThis episode is for every military professional in the world who has ever wondered whether the extraordinary thing they built in uniform will ever be seen for what it actually is.It will.Paul Heyes spent 25 years in the Royal Navy. He contributed to live conflict operations in eastern Europe. He built intelligence systems at NATO that tracked adversary movements across four seas simultaneously. He stood on HMS Prince of Wales at her commissioning by King Charles III. He is a decorated Warrant Officer whose record spans aircraft engineering, cybersecurity, international intelligence, and operational leadership at the highest level.He is also currently in Luxembourg. In the middle of the military to civilian transition.Figuring out how to make what is genuinely extraordinary visible to a professional world that has almost no language for it.In this conversation Paul sits down with us to give the most honest account of military transition we have recorded.Not the version from a programme or a brochure. The version from inside it.What the identity cost actually is.What the specific loneliness of the decompression feels like.What it takes to translate 25 years of formation into language a hiring manager can receive.And what the civilian hiring world is consistently getting wrong about the most capable candidates available to it.This episode carries two messages simultaneously.To every military professional navigating this transition right now. The pressure did not make you. It revealed what you were made of. That capability does not disappear when the uniform comes off. It reorganises. Into something the right environment will finally see and name.Take your time. You built something extraordinary. Now give yourself the space to find out what it becomes next.To every business leader, HR director, and talent professional. The military professional sitting across from you is not a translation problem. They are the most pressure-tested, ethically grounded, leadership-proven candidate you will encounter.The document in your hand is not a CV/Resume you cannot read. It is a map to one of the most capable people you will ever have in your building.Learn to read it.

🎧 Series 1, Episode 6 — Carpe Disruption: Transitioning is a Frame of Mind - Kim AcostaGeologists use something called the Mohs Hardness Scale to figure out what a mineral is actually made of. You scratch the surface with something harder, and whatever leaves a mark tells you the truth.Seven and a half years at Amazon, a move to Luxembourg, two kids learning German and French at the same time, and a return home that didn't feel like coming home at all, that's basically a Mohs hardness test for a person.Kim Acosta went through it. Then she built a company from scratch, and Amazon became one of her first clients.In this episode, Kim talks about growing up the daughter of an immigrant father who worked night shifts at a paint factory and laid timber floors by day to build a business from nothing. She talks about watching her daughter sit alone in a Luxembourg schoolyard with a book because she couldn't speak the language yet.She talks about the six-month window she gave herself to build a personal brand before walking away from a stable paycheck, and the moment she realized she'd already stopped trying to get the job offers she was interviewing for, because her brain had already moved on to something else.This is a conversation about what gets revealed, not created, when life applies pressure. About choosing discomfort on purpose, twice. And about finding out that home was never a place to begin with.The question this episode leaves you with: What pressure are you currently under that isn't breaking you — it's just showing everyone, including you, what you're actually made of?💬 "Home is not a place. Home is your family. So wherever they are, I'm going to feel at home." — Kim Acosta

For every other episode of this show, Jeremy's been the one asking the questions.This time, we turned the mic around.Because there's a story most people don't know: before Jeremy built talent intelligence functions from scratch inside hyper-growth companies, before he learned how to move rooms full of executives using nothing but data and timing, he was a geologist. Walking through the woods with his grandfather. Reading rock formations for a living.And the thing his grandfather told him decades ago never left him:"The surface is always lying to you."That line became the whole career. Because organizations today don't have a data problem. They have dashboards, forecasts, AI models, more workforce data than any generation of leaders before them. They can see the wall coming from a mile out, sometimes years in advance.The problem was never seeing the wall.The problem is that knowing and believing are two completely different muscles, and only one of them changes behavior before it's too late.This episode goes places we don't usually go on this show, building a function nobody asked for, influencing executives who didn't want to hear the truth, and a moment of real vulnerability about mental health that reframes everything he's built his career around.If you've ever tried to get a room to believe

Most people have a Bentonville.  Not literally. But the feeling of it.The place, the circumstance, the orbit that keeps pulling you back before you are fully ready to leave.The version of your life that is safe and significant and respected and somehow still not quite the one you were meant to be living.  Laurie Hickey has spent twenty years navigating hers.She left northwest Arkansas for California when everything in her said go. The sun, the beach, the feeling of a bigger world. Life brought her back. Family brought her back. And she came back and built something extraordinary inside the orbit she had tried to escape, running some of the most significant brand work in retail and entertainment on the planet.She left for Hollywood. She came back. She went to Los Angeles to give the world of television production a try but found herself building licensed partnerships and developing consumer products for film and television. She came back.  And every time she came back she told herself it was a choice.This episode is about whether it was. The question at the heart of this conversation is the one every person listening is quietly carrying about their own orbit. What does it actually take to finally leave the version of your life that is good enough for the one that is actually yours?

Series 1/Episode 4 - Catherine BaezHer dream dinner party guests are Maximus from Gladiator, Professor McGonagall, and Tony Stark. And she once had to talk herself out of a very dramatic moment by simply saying out loud... "this is temporary, this is temporary".... until it was.Catherine spent twenty years working with the most vulnerable young people in a county. Kids navigating substance abuse, family breakdown, crises that most of us never have to look at directly. She built real expertise. Real relationships. A career trajectory that people in her field spend a lifetime reaching for.Then life asked her to start again. New city. New context. Twenty years of experience that the corporate world looked at and said; "we don't quite see it. Try this entry-level role instead."Showed up anyway. Found one leader who looked at her differently than everyone else had. And walked through a door that made no logical sense on paper.On the other side of that door she discovered something worth the whole journey. That everything she had built helping the most vulnerable people reach their potential had quietly prepared her to help everyone else do the same thing. The skills just had different names now.This is a warm but serious conversation about what it costs to go backwards before you can go forward. And there is a moment where she says something so quietly true that we had to stop and sit with it.This one is for anyone who has ever been told their experience does not translate.It does. You just need the right person to see it."Do not believe everything you hear. Know who you are and the skills that you own." — Catherine Baez