This week, Mona sits down with Jennie Baird to pull the word apart. Jennie explains why tech is one of the least regulated fields that touches people's lives the most (would you hire an uncertified civil engineer to build your bridge?), why every builder needs their own personal code of ethics, and how the BBC's seven core values shaped real product trade-offs, including the call to walk away from Facebook Pixel tracking to protect user trust. They also get into what to do when your company's values and your own don't line up, why "yes, and" beats a flat "yes" when a stakeholder asks you to build something, and why finding a community of people who share your values matters more than any training program.

Ethical Decision Making is one of the seven skills inside the Sostibl Impact Innovation Hub.

Trust is not a feeling. It is a leadership mechanism — the thing that makes people follow you when you have no authority over them, and the thing that gets organizations to collaborate when their incentives don't align.

Amanda Ready has built that kind of trust across some of the hardest environments to do it in: a therapy practice grown entirely by word of mouth, a nonprofit she runs as a volunteer, and school communities where parents, teachers, and administrators all have different needs and agendas.

In this conversation, we get specific. What actually builds trust — and what breaks it. Why consistency is more powerful than charisma. How vulnerability works as a leadership tool, and when it backfires. What it means to lead with curiosity when trust cracks. And why relationship management is becoming the most urgent skill deficit she sees in young people right now — more than AI, more than technical skills, more than anything else.

Amanda is the founder and president of Ready to Empower, a nonprofit expanding access to mental health programs, and a licensed therapist partnering with schools on emotional wellbeing. She has been part of the Ready to Empower board for over three years. This conversation is real.

This is Week 4 of The Sostibl Leader series — seven skills, seven conversations with leaders who have lived them.

Cross-cultural navigation is not about cultural sensitivity training. It's about actually seeing the room you're standing in.

In this episode I talk with Jackie Watkins, Director of FCRS, who has spent years working with the youth community in Conakry, Guinea. Jackie brings one of the most grounded perspectives I've heard on what it actually takes to lead across cultures — and why ignoring difference doesn't make you unbiased. It just makes your expectations wrong.

We get into the school bus project that took years and still isn't simple, why a question as basic as "how far do you live from school?" means something completely different in Conakry, and what a reflexive mindset actually looks like in practice versus in a leadership book.

We also talk about where AI creates a new blind spot in cross-cultural work — and why the young people in Guinea may be better positioned for what's coming than most leaders in the West.

This is Skill #2 of 7 in The Sostibl Leader series.

I've known Andy for over a decade now, going back to our Dow Jones days, and more recently through the tech academy he co-runs for students in Guinea. In that time he's watched up close what actually separates leaders who adapt from leaders who get left behind, which is exactly why he was the obvious choice for the first episode of this series.

His argument is that most companies are using AI as an addition, just a person plus AI doing the same job a little faster. The leaders who are actually pulling ahead are using it as a multiplier, running several paths at once so a human can pick the best one and solve the real problem instead of just finishing the task quicker.

The final shift is the one sitting underneath all the others: time itself.

For years I optimized everything — my calendar down to the minute, my sleep tracked nightly, my steps counted. Yet the more time I saved, the less I actually had. In this last episode of The Shift Series, I share how I went from treating time as something to conquer to something to hold loosely — and why I eventually stopped wearing a watch altogether.

Then, a look back at all seven shifts from these seven weeks: work and life, reading, the time AI freed up, money, control, waiting, and time.

None of these shifts happened because I planned them. That's exactly what I'm building Sostibl to change for other leaders.

Keep going with me in my newsletter, Catalysts for Tomorrow — link in the show notes. And something new drops next week. Watch this space.

When's the last time you actually felt allowed to enjoy your life right now, not after the next milestone?

Most of us are running the same script: study hard now, enjoy it later. Get the promotion, then relax. Raise the kids, then live. It's the same hamster wheel at every stage, and somehow we keep skipping the present entirely.

In this episode, Mona shares the shift that broke that pattern for her, and what she found two pages apart in an old journal: a 10-year dream written in May 2023, and the day Sostibl was actually born four months later in September.

She also gets into why this matters beyond the personal, and what it's costing the next generation to inherit a culture that keeps telling them to wait.

This is Episode 6 of The Shift Series.

This week, Mona unpacks her relationship with control, why we're wired to chase it, what Black Swan taught her about letting go, and the untold side of her viral "found a job at nine months pregnant" story: a layoff, a visa tied to employment, and two of the hardest months of her life. A raw look at how uncertainty, when you stop fighting it, becomes the thing that actually makes you a better leader.

Link to the viral story: https://powertofly.com/up/jobswhilepregnant

What does enough actually mean to you? In this episode I get into how going out on my own forced me to rethink my entire relationship with money, two books that changed my thinking (The Psychology of Money and Scarcity Brain), and a moment on a flight home from Guinea that's stuck with me since.

Then I connect it to something unexpected: why I started doing more of my own chores, what kickboxing has to do with discomfort, and how we're raising our kids to sit with challenge instead of constant comfort.

If you've ever felt like you're earning more but enjoying it less, this one's for you.