44: Susan Rivers Interviews Becky Margiotta

Unleashing Social Change

Mentorship is often thought of as unidirectional - flowing from the mentor to mentee. In this upcoming season, I interviewed a baker’s dozen of my mentors - people who were there to guide me through some of my biggest leadership challenges - to find out about their biggest leadership challenges.

If my military mentors taught me anything, it was this: leaders don’t ask the people to do anything they aren’t willing to do themselves. That goes for cleaning toilets, answering the phones, or disclosing your biggest leadership challenges to your podcast listeners. So we’re launching season four with my dear friend, Dr. Susan Rivers, Executive Director and Chief Scientist of iThrive, who agreed to interview me about the hardest challenges I’ve faced as a leader.

Susan invites me to go behind the scenes into some challenges I’ve shared a hundred times before and she draws out some new stories I’ve never shared before. I’m so grateful to Susan for her generous listening, her keen insights, and her ability to help me make sense of some of the hardest moments I’ve experienced.

Show Highlights:

• The pain of not being able to tell the truth about my sexual orientation while I served in the military
• Why authenticity is so important to me now
• How I worked through my fears by being humble and letting go of the need to be blameless
• Reckoning with decades of socialization as a white person in the United States and the negative impact that has on showing up fully in community
• Differentiating between impact and intent to take responsibility for my actions
• The big question: How do I take healthy responsibility for the whole web of life?
• Learning to listen to what my body is trying to tell me

Pre-order Becky’s Book Impact With Integrity: Repair the World Without Breaking Yourself