Have you ever heard leadership advice that sounded great, but fell flat the moment you tried to put it into practice?
Willing to Grow is the go-to podcast for business owners, practice leaders, and team managers who are serious about their leadership and how it impacts their team. Each episode is short and easy to digest, featuring fun, straight-to-the-point conversations filled with detailed strategies, exclusive resources, and sticky insights you can immediately put into practice.
Hosted by Amy Lafko, bestselling author of People First: A Proven Method for an Exceptional Healthcare Practice, this show goes beyond theory. With more than 20 years of leadership experience across teams and organizations, Amy's work began in healthcare but extends far beyond one industry. Leadership works the same wherever people work.
Each week, Amy brings you tactical, practical, and easy-to-implement strategies to help you lead with clarity, strengthen accountability, improve communication, and unlock your team's performance potential. If you're ready to close the gap between intention and impact and create a culture where people (and performance) thrive, subscribe to Willing to Grow and start leading in a way that actually sticks.
Find additional tools and resources at CairnCS.com.
We tend to promote our most talented individual contributors into leadership roles. As our team grows, those brilliant managers expect brilliance in their team; after all, if they can understand a process, why can't everyone else?
In this episode of Willing to Grow, Amy examines a deceptively simple question: when we assume everyone operates at our level, what blind spots does that create?
Through a real story from her workshops where a critical healthcare verification step kept falling through the cracks, Amy unpacks the gap between what we expect and what's actually happening, and what is actually more important - being right, or being helpful?
If you've found yourself baffled by your team's performance, this episode is for you. Especially if you built your reputation on doing exceptional work yourself.
6 Oct 2026
Squash Your ANTs: Stop Making Assumptions
Ever find yourself overthinking someone's body language, tone or words in an email? Does "Okay, thanks" sound annoyed or anxious, or just genuinely thankful?
From the moment we step into our workplace each day, our brains are instantly connecting dots and drawing conclusions based on who we are, what we've experienced, and what we believe.
Those automatic negative thoughts (ANTs) aren't actually facts. They're simply assumptions.
In this episode of Willing to Grow, Amy walks through one of her most transformative exercises from the Productive Conflict workshop, where she coaches others to learn to recognize those ANTs before they dig deep.
If assumptions have ever derailed a conversation or created tension where there didn't need to be any, listen in.
29 Sept 2026
Thank you for bringing up your concern.
Interviews, which are fundamentally built on questions, mark the very beginning of our relationships with new employees. An entire industry has developed around mastering interview responses, and a standard piece of advice stands out: always kick off your answer by thanking the interviewer for the question.
Why is it, then, that we as managers frequently default to defensiveness when confronted with the challenging questions that fly in our direction?
In this episode, Amy explores how incorporating one straightforward statement into our daily interactions can shatter that barrier and create a truly noticeable difference. If you're ready to build a culture of healthy communication, start here.
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