HX Experience

About HX Experience

The HX Collective explores the human experience through three main channels of life: work, relationships, and self. With raw, authentic conversations, the podcast investigates how challenges can become powerful teachers, leading to personal growth and deeper connections. Rooted in humanity-centered design, each episode reflects a commitment to doing good and doing well, featuring diverse voices and generational perspectives. Expect gripping stories of struggle and success, with thought-provoking discussions and concrete tools and tactics that encourage you to rethink your relationship with dis

Publisher

The HX Collective

Category

society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

1 Sept 2025

Latest episode

5 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

64 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   5 Oct 2026

   work - Colleen Affeldt | between the halls and the walls – how culture elevates human flourishing

   In this episode, Deb Knupp sits down with Colleen Affeldt, Vice Chair at Corient Wealth Management and a lifelong student of why people do what they do. Colleen's path is unusual: fifteen years running her own consulting practice with a parallel foot in academia, then years embedded inside an operating company after joining a Dallas firm, once a consulting client, that was later acquired by Corient, and now, at the end of this year, a return to private practice with what she calls the third period of the hockey game. Two fellow Texans who found each other late and decided they were sisters separated at birth, Deb and Colleen spend the conversation on the thing every company claims to have and very few can actually locate. Underlying the conversation is a distinction Colleen has spent years sharpening. Every company has its mission, vision, and values framed on a wall somewhere. That is the walls. What actually happens on the ground, in the hallways, in the micro moments between people, is something else entirely. That is the halls. Most of us stand in that gap waiting for power to close it, waiting for the corporate team to fly in on the Gulfstream with a chiseled tablet declaring what the culture now is. Colleen's message is that the plane is not landing, and that while everyone waits for power, the influence sitting at their fingertips goes unused. Key Highlights The walls and the halls: the gap between the values in the lobby and the experience people actually have, and why the leaders already good at culture are the ones reading the culture books. Pizza on Fridays and ping pong tournaments are employee engagement. Important, Colleen says, but not culture. The three questions she put to the audience at a recent speaking event: what do you think your culture is, what do you want it to be, and what three things have you done in the last thirty days to make the second one real. Quote of the Episode "Waiting for power that's never coming, while ignoring influence that's standing right at your fingertips, I think, is a mistake." – Colleen Affeldt About Our Guest Colleen Affeldt is Partner and Vice Chair at Corient Wealth Management, an ultra-high-net-worth advisory firm that acquired the Dallas firm she had joined, a former consulting client. She has spent her career at the intersection of human behavior and commercial performance, first as an independent consultant for fifteen years with a parallel foot in academia, and then embedded full time inside the ecosystem of an operating company. She retires from Corient at the end of this year and returns to private consulting with two focuses: helping wealthy families navigate the emotional dynamics of wealth transfer, clearing the emotional noise so they are ready for succession, and helping companies understand how to optimize their growth position, whether for continued growth or for a transaction. She speaks the commerciality of the CEO, points out that we are not job factories, and argues that people are the most strategic lever a business has. When her retirement was announced, more than four hundred messages arrived within 72 hours, and they weren't quick congratulations. They were people telling her what she had meant to their careers, the return on six years of micro moments nobody ever gave her permission to create. Connect with Colleen Affeldt Colleen Affeldt on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleenaffeldt/) Reach Colleen at colleen@colleenaffeldt.com (mailto:colleen@colleenaffeldt.com) About The HX Collective The HX Collective explores the human experience through three lenses: work, relationships and self, through raw, authentic conversations rooted in human-centered design. Each episode offers gripping stories, thought-provoking discussion, and concrete tools that help you rethink your relationship with distress and strengthen your whole human experience.

2. 

   5 Oct 2026

   work - Matt Kocanda | more santa and less stalker

   In this episode, Deb Knupp sits down with Matt Kocanda, office managing partner for the Chicago office of Corient and, by Deb's own description, her collaborator in crime for more than ten years. The subject is one most people would rather not discuss at all: sales. Matt did not arrive here by choice. He spent an earlier stretch of his career actively running away from it, and left a firm specifically because the next role was a pure sales job, the kind that asks you to push your interests instead of the client's. What changed was not his aptitude. It was a single reframe, the one Deb's work at GrowthPlay is built on: sales is at its best when the selling itself is an act of service. Underlying the conversation is a claim Matt makes early and then spends the episode proving: in wealth management, and in professional services generally, nobody chooses you because you have the best widget, because you're the smartest, or because you outperform. They choose you because they trust you. Which means the work is not pitching. It is listening well enough to hear the actual problem, solving it even when solving it earns you nothing, and being honest when the answer is that you are not the right fit. As Matt puts it, the best business developer he ever watched spoke for maybe five or ten percent of a meeting. Key Highlights The washing machine. A widowed client called her advisor about buying one. The average response is "we'll send you the money." Instead he asked how she was feeling about it, learned she had never done it without her husband, and went to the store with her. Telling clients the truth. One of the hardest parts of the job is telling someone their plan won't work. When a client asked an advisor to promise they'd never run out of money, the honest answer was "I can't do that," and that honesty is what builds trust. The dad group. Matt is a father of three young kids, noticed that mothers have affinity groups and fathers largely do not, and built one out of clients and centers of influence. Busy, successful professional men always made time for an hour-long Zoom about how hard the dad thing is. Some became clients. That was never the point. Quote of the Episode "It's inefficient, but relationships aren't efficient either." – Matt Kocanda About Our Guest Matt Kocanda is the office managing partner for the Chicago office of Corient, one of the largest private wealth management firms in the country, where he leads both operations and the firm's growth and sales culture efforts. He has spent his entire career in private wealth, across firms large and small, and describes the work as more than stocks and bonds: helping people take apart a difficult relationship with money and rebuild it into something closer to stewardship than control. He is candid that he once fled a sales role, and equally candid that learning to see selling as an act of service changed the trajectory of his life. Today he coaches junior advisors on the difference between the getter's game and the giver's game, builds community for its own sake and lets the business follow, and argues that the firms that win are the ones whose people believe what they do makes a difference. He is a husband and a father of three, and he shares a birthday with his wife, which he takes off every year. Connect with Matt Kocanda Matt Kocanda on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-kocanda/) About The HX Collective The HX Collective explores the human experience through three lenses: work, relationships and self, through raw, authentic conversations rooted in human-centered design. Each episode offers gripping stories, thought-provoking discussion, and concrete tools that help you rethink your relationship with distress and strengthen your whole human experience.

3. 

   5 Oct 2026

   relationships - Heather Heaton | hospitality isn't a gift - it's a posture

   In this episode, Deb Knupp sits down with Heather Heaton, a writer, an unconventional pastor, and Deb's friend and fellow resident of a town of fewer than eight thousand people. The subject is hospitality, but not the version involving hors d'oeuvres and hot dishes. Heather's argument, formed in seminary while she questioned and unlearned a great deal about the role of women in the church, is that hospitality is not an activity and not a gift some people happen to have. It is a posture. She talks with her hands, and by her own admission she'll be doing it the entire conversation. Underlying it is a reframe that quietly upends how most of us use the word. Hospitality is not one person hosting another. It is reciprocal, which means a hospitable person has to know how to receive as well as how to host. Heather traces the idea back through table fellowship in scripture and forward into a divided present, where opening your arms to someone who holds different values feels less like generosity and more like exposure. Her question for that discomfort is a simple one: is there actually a threat here? Key Highlights The salt table. Heather opens her home to any woman in town, and when they RSVP she does not ask them to bring a dish. She assigns ingredients. Bring lemons and butter. Strangers cook a meal together and then sit down and eat it, and the table does the rest. Hospitality as a two-way dynamic rather than a gift or a service. "A hospitable person knows how to host and how to receive," and Heather is candid that receiving love has historically been the harder half for her. Practical starting points: watch your actual body language, notice which way you are angled toward the person who disagrees with you, and remember that unity is not sameness. Also, crack the joke. Humor is an open posture. Heather is clear this applies to everyday disagreement, not unsafe or abusive situations. Henri Nouwen's "Reaching Out," and the line that reframes the whole conversation: the opposite of hospitality is hostility. Quote of the Episode "We cannot love through closed arms. We cannot thrive through closed arms." – Heather Heaton About Our Guest Heather Heaton is a writer, speaker, and self-described unconventional pastor whose work centers on hospitality as a posture rather than a practice. She came to the idea in seminary, in a season of deep theological study spent questioning and unlearning what she had been handed about the role of women in the church, and it took root through the study of table fellowship, a thread running from the Old Testament forward as a way people remember God. After seminary she went to work behind the bar at a hole-in-the-wall whose regulars were retired truckers, and within a year some of them were calling her Pastor Heather. Today she writes the Substack A Holy Ruckus, where her prose has the quality Deb describes as being able to taste the coffee, and she hosts the salt table in her own home for any woman in her small town willing to walk through a stranger's door. She is a mother of boys who have absorbed the lesson well enough that one of them once invited the grocery store cashier home for dinner. Connect with Heather Heaton Read Heather's writing at A Holy Ruckus (https://heatherbheaton.substack.com) Listen to Heather on 2FightFor Podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/2fightfor-podcast/id1854593858) Heather Heaton on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/heatherbrie17/) About The HX Collective The HX Collective explores the human experience through three lenses: work, relationships and self, through raw, authentic conversations rooted in human-centered design. Each episode offers gripping stories, thought-provoking discussion, and concrete tools that help you rethink your relationship with distress and strengthen your whole human experience.

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Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

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