Enough, the Podcast

You can run a board meeting after terrible news, and no one would know. Push through and deal with the feelings later. Or not…
But sometimes a situation just takes your knees out from under you, and pushing through isn't an option. Then what? 
My guest is Regena Thomashauer – known to thousands as Mama Gena – the New York Times bestselling author of Pussy: A Reclamation, founder of the School of Womanly Arts, where she's taught pleasure for over three decades. Her new book, On Our Knees: Loving Your Life Even When You Hate What's Happening, is out now. This is not an episode about leopard print and bubble baths. It's a real, raw conversation about how to switch gears from pushing through to letting big feelings move through you. Regena shares her own story of how she was on her knees on the wings of a Broadway theatre, feeling broken and weeping at what (from the outside) looked like the apex of her career. The super-successful persona of Mama Gena she'd created had drifted too far from Regena. This conversation is about how she reconciled them.
If you've ever been praised for how well you "held it together" and secretly wondered what'd happen if you didn't, this one's for you. 
Links:
Regena Thomashauer's website (and books).
Regena on Instagram
Mandy on Instagram

You can lead the team, close the deal, hold an entire organisation's chaos in your head. And yet somewhere in your kitchen, there's a bag of salad turning into a science experiment. You know it's there. You're not dealing with it today.
This episode is about that gap — and the secret, if-anyone-knew shame that comes with it. Because the more capable you are over here, the more brutal that inner voice gets over there.
My guest is Dr Emma Offord, clinical psychologist and founder of Divergent Life, specialist in high-masking neurodivergence — the people who look completely sorted while paddling like mad underneath. This is not an episode about ADHD. It's about why your nervous system runs on interest, not importance — and why that changes everything about how you get the boring, important things done. 
If you've ever nailed something genuinely hard, then sat frozen in front of something tiny — this one's for you.
In this episode: Bore-out, task paralysis, and the interest-based nervous system. Why it's not laziness or a discipline problem. Body doubling, scaffolding, and the accommodations high achievers secretly need. Changing your expectations — not lowering them. And shame as a "starter motor": familiar, effective, and so expensive.
Links:
Dr Emma Offord — Divergent Life
Instagram: @divergentlives @mandylehto

How was your day? is the greeting. What follows — the homework, the essay, the spelling test — is the audit. Most of us never hear ourselves make the switch.
Now the research that stopped me mid-sentence: kids raised in high-achieving environments now sit on the same mental-health risk list as kids growing up with poverty and trauma. The tutors, the top schools, the 6am swim squad — same list. Not because of the schools. Because of one specific thing that loving, well-intended parents do without noticing. Yes, I've done it. Probably this week.
My guest is Dr Tara Porter, clinical psychologist and author of Good Enough — she's spent nearly thirty years in the therapy room with the kids from these families, and with the perfectionist adults they grow into. Which is where you come in.
Because this is not a parenting-tips episode. Listen for the double mirror: the kid you were — the one who learned that gold stars meant being loved — and the parent, boss, or relentless self-optimiser you became. Same wiring. Both mirrors.
Also in here: the well-meaning phrases to retire ("we're only pushing you because we believe in you" — I know, I know), the figure skater who quit, came back on her own terms, and won Olympic gold, why your terrifyingly good time management was never the problem, and the story of the toothbrushes. You'll see.
Links:
Dr Tara Porter's website and books: taraporterpsychologist.com
Good Enough and You Don't Understand Me — wherever books are sold
mandylehto.com
Instagram: @mandylehto and @drtaraporterpsychologist

What if the thing that's exhausting you isn't the pressure? What if it's the formula you've been using to handle it all these years? It's probably the same formula that built your career, which is now quietly running you into the ground.
In this conversation, leadership researcher Nick Petrie shares what he learned from studying more than 1,000 high performers and the handful who seem to have cracked a code the rest of us missed.
Not because they're tougher. Not because they're better at self-care. And not because they've figured out how to squeeze even more productivity out of an already overstuffed life. Most of them hit the wall too.
This group of "thrivers", as Nick calls them, did something different, and I'm pretty sure you want to know about it.
We go places in this conversation: From Roger Federer to quilting and Argentine tango. Come join us.
LINKS
Nick Petrie's book, Burn Bright: 10 Habits to Sustain High Performance in an Always-on World.
Nick Petrie on LinkedIn
Mandy Lehto on LinkedIn and Instagram

What happens when you finally achieve the thing you wanted… and still feel weirdly unchanged?
In this episode, I'm joined by author, musician and meditation teacher Cory Allen for a conversation about ambition, creativity, overachievement and the strange emotional flatness that can follow success.
We explore why so many high achievers quietly expect achievement to do something it was never designed to do: finally make them feel enough.
In this episode we explore:
Why achievement often fails to deliver the feeling we expected

The exhausting cycle of striving, arriving, and immediately moving the goalposts

Mimetic desire and how we learn what to want by watching other people

The hidden fear beneath obsessive, brittle overachievement

Cory's idea of "rotating the prism" — and how changing the way we look at disappointment can completely change our experience of it

LINKS
Cory Allen's website & books
Cory on Instagram
Mandy on Instagram
Meg Josephson episode