Inside the Leaders Mind

About Inside the Leaders Mind

What if the biggest leadership breakthroughs happen not from learning something new—but from seeing yourself differently? Welcome to Inside the Leader's Mind, where host David Suson—executive coach, keynote speaker, and creator of The Perception Code™—sits down with high-performing executives, founders, and thought leaders to unpack the internal shifts behind their external success. This isn't just another leadership podcast. It's a deep dive into the stories, identity shifts, decisions, and moments that changed everything. Each conversation explores how leaders spot limiting patterns, shift their perception, and spark action that leads to real performance, real results—and real impact. If you're a leader who wants to lead with more clarity, empathy, and influence, this is your new go-to podcast.

Publisher

David Suson

Category

business · education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

9 Oct 2025

Latest episode

4 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

1 of 52 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   4 Sept 2026

   Why Leaders Give Power Away | Nicole Saunders, Higher Logic

   Summary Nicole Saunders has spent 15 years studying how people connect, why they engage, and what gets them to move together. She joins David Suson to take apart a belief most leaders never examine: that leading means having the strongest point of view in the room. Nicole is Senior Director, Customer Experience Strategy at Higher Logic, and her path there ran through journalism, freelancing, startups, and community leadership at Zendesk. Her argument is that the real work is handing power away, and that almost everything good she has built came from getting out of her own way first. Takeaways Show up with a service mindset. Nicole walks into cross-functional rooms saying she is not precious about the outcome, which dissolves the defensiveness that kills collaboration before it starts. Ask what someone does outside of work before you ask what they do for work. People tell her no one has ever asked them that, and it makes them memorable to you. Level set at the top of every conversation. Here is why I asked you here, here is what I hope to cover, does that sound good? She uses it in board rooms and when she calls her mother. True leadership is getting out of the way. Create the conditions for collaboration, let the good ideas happen, then pull the threads back together and confirm the next steps. A no is usually a not now. Nicole pitched one project every year for six years before it was approved, and nothing about the idea had changed. The timing had. Disagree and commit is part of being a good team player. Say why you disagree, support the initiative anyway, and be ready to learn from the outcome either way. People want to say yes far more than you expect. Nicole learned this recovering from hip surgery, when accepting help deepened her friendships instead of burdening them. Lean into strengths instead of repairing weaknesses. Moving someone from a one to a four still leaves you a four. Moving a seven to a ten gives you a ten. Humans are messy. Design the ideal program, then treat hitting 70 percent of it as a win. As AI makes written content harder to trust, face to face contact becomes the thing people can verify. Nicole expects community to become the new moat. Soundbites "I am not precious about the outcome. I want to understand what you're working towards, and I want to figure out how I can help you." "Most leaders feel this need to come in and put their stamp on something. I think true leadership is actually getting out of the way." "Everyone is more interesting than you think they are when you first meet them." "Somebody going from a one to a four, they're still only a four after all that effort. But going from a seven to a ten, well, now they're a ten." "The only thing that people really know that they can trust is talking to another actual human face to face." "It's impossible to get alignment if you don't know what you're aligning people to." Contact links for the guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoledsaunders/ Email: nsaunders@higherlogic.com Website: www.higherlogic.com Keyword tags leadership, community building, customer experience, cross-functional collaboration, influence without authority, disagree and commit, building trust, employee engagement, customer retention, AI and human connection, servant leadership, Higher Logic, Nicole Saunders, David Suson, Inside the Leader's Mind

2. 

   13 Aug 2026

   What Data and AI Can't Detect | Elizabeth Rea, Insightful

   Summary On this episode of Inside the Leader's Mind, David Suson sits down with Elizabeth Rea, founder of Insightful, who advises CEOs, founders, investors, and board members on what their data cannot show them. She calls her approach Expanded Intelligence, an ability to perceive hidden agendas, true character, and unspoken dynamics that logic, data, due diligence, and AI cannot detect. Her access opened after a near-death experience at sixteen and expanded dramatically about fifteen years ago, but she kept it private for decades, worked discreetly with U.S. federal agents on cold-case murder investigations, and only recently went public. Elizabeth and David talk about the accountant who was misrepresenting a firm's financials to its bank, the hidden second decision-maker who unlocked an acquisition worth tens of millions, the con man she identified by his golf pants, and why she believes inside technology, not outside technology, is the coming competitive edge. Takeaways Data, logic, experts, and conventional due diligence cannot detect a hidden agenda, cloaked character, or a lack of integrity, because business is ultimately done by people. Everyone has intuition, which she describes as access to non-local intelligence. What distinguishes her work is that the details are specific and verifiable, so a client can act on them. She kept her ability private for decades out of fear of being judged, and says the thing that was in the way was her own concern about other people's scorn. A C-suite hire in Silicon Valley costs roughly a million dollars once recruiting and relocation are counted, and a bad one can cost nine to fifteen times that. The people who do the most damage inside a company often look excellent on paper and are charming, charismatic, and popular, so no one catches it until it is too late. The work is not only about spotting risk. In one acquisition, showing more deference to the owner's assistant, an unrecognized second decision-maker, unlocked a deal worth tens of millions. The higher a leader rises, the more people package the truth for them, and clients rely on Elizabeth precisely because she has no attachment to the outcome. AI can only see what has already been recorded, so as leaders offload more cognition to machines, perceiving what was never recorded becomes the real advantage. Soundbites "In business, people lie. And they even lie to themselves." "Outside technology is great, but it's old news. Inside technology, like this, is what is going to deliver the competitive edge." "I don't sell it. I just show it." "What was in the way was me. Isn't that always the thing that's in the way?" Contact links for the guest Website: www.insightful.foundation LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethannrea/ Keyword tags Elizabeth Rea, Insightful, expanded intelligence, non-local intelligence, executive advisory, due diligence, executive hiring, mergers and acquisitions, leadership decisions, intuition, hidden agendas, character assessment, investor insight, high stakes decisions

3. 

   13 Aug 2026

   The Engineer Who Became a Homeopath | Dr. Jo Polich, ActivMend

   Summary On this episode of Inside the Leader's Mind, David Suson sits down with Dr. Jo Polich, a former director of engineering turned homeopath, inventor, and founder of ActivMend. Dr. Jo held senior technology roles at IBM and Alcatel, worked on satellite chipsets and fiber optic manufacturing, and holds three engineering degrees, two of them in materials engineering. Then her two-year-old daughter spent a year with stomach problems no specialist could diagnose, and a homeopathic remedy she grabbed almost at random from a Whole Foods shelf resolved it in a day. That sent her back to school for a medical license and into a second career. Years later she ruptured her own ACL, treated it with a topical she had improvised for patients, and walked into the head of orthopedics at Northwestern with an unswollen knee. He told her she had discovered something remarkable. Dr. Jo and David talk about walking away from a respected engineering title, why she tells customers not to buy her product, the difference between irrational optimism and denial, and what it took to win the first modern homeopathic patent. Takeaways Homeopathy drew her in precisely because it was not supposed to work. She saw it resolve her daughter's year-long illness, then researched it and could not explain the result. Engineering turned out to be ideal training for homeopathy, which she says demands more analytical rigor than anything else she has done. Her career was spent troubleshooting manufacturing problems, where following false data is fatal. Leaving engineering cost her professional respect. Say you are an engineer and people assume you are smart; say you are a homeopath and, in her words, they look at you like you have grown a new ear out of your head. After rupturing her ACL she had near-complete flexion at one month without anti-inflammatories, and the head of orthopedics at Northwestern told her she was doing better than 90 percent of his patients who used them. A conservative orthopedist told her he could not get a homeopathic study approved even if he sponsored it, so she took the work to plastic surgeons and dermatologists instead. In a controlled study they dropped a three pound bar twenty inches onto a hip to produce consistent bruises, and prevented them entirely rather than just resolving them. Allergan licensed the technology, the first time a major pharmaceutical company embraced an arnica-based product. The patent office initially refused any homeopathic product outright. Clinical data reversed that position and produced the first truly homeopathic patent in modern times. ActivMend's website states plainly what the product does not work on, including shin splints, high ankle sprains, and long-degraded tendon injuries. If a customer emails about a condition it will not help, staff tell them not to buy it. Irrational optimism is fine as long as the data supports it. The moment the data says no, you have to follow the data, and she says the same to the startups she advises. Her empathy runs high enough that her challenge is dialing it down, and she credits listening as the route to it. If you really listen to someone, it is hard not to reach their humanity. Soundbites "It was the fact that it's not supposed to work that intrigued me." "I have been the head of orthopedics for thirty years and have never seen a fully ruptured ACL that's not swollen." "Irrational optimism is fine based on the data that you have." "If you ever speak to any physician and they say I can fix anything, you should leave the office." "I have given to the world so much more by making that change than I ever could have as an engineer." Contact links for the guest Website: www.activmend.com Email: dr.jo@activmend.com Keyword tags Dr. Jo Polich, ActivMend, homeopathy, career change, engineer to entrepreneur, arnica, sprains and strains, OcuMend, Allergan, medical patents, radical honesty, startup advising, women inventors, empathy in leadership

Inside a recent episode

Lee Caraher How High Appreciation and High Standards Drive Performance

Published 30 Dec 2025 · Transcript excerpt

[…] But if you don't have a vision for what it could be, your people will not, they're all looking to you for answers. There, I don't know anybody who's not looking for answers on this topic right now. What do you think it's going to be like in three years? I have no idea. Be willing to say, I don't know. But here's what I think is going to happen. And because this is what I think is going to happen. It's important by these things. I think we're going to go here, here, and here. And we'll be at least we'll be on a road. And you need to be on that road. If you're not going to be on that road, I will help you be successful somewhere else. […]

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