Send us Fan Mail

There was a version of me — years ago — who made a decision that cost her something real. She made it because she believed it would lead somewhere. She trusted that the person who arrived on the other side would do something with what she had built.

I am that person. I am the one who arrived. And I have been wondering lately whether I kept the promise.

This episode is about the debt between who you were and who you are. Not a debt of gratitude — we talk about that one all the time. A debt of fidelity. The one we almost never name. It's about what happens when you get so absorbed in maintaining the life she built for you that you forget what it was for. When the destination quietly becomes the default. When choosing becomes maintaining, and you don't notice the shift until years have passed.

She didn't take that risk so you could be careful. She didn't leave the safe thing so you could find a different kind of safe thing and call it ambition. She did it so you could be free.

The question she would ask you — if she could sit across from you right now and ask you one thing — is not whether it worked out. It's simpler than that, and harder.

Was it worth it?

Soul to Soul, Lisa.

Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.

New episodes drop every Monday.

Follow the journey: 📍 Instagram: @lisacarterbawa 📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacarterbawa/ 📍 Website: www.lisacarterbawa.com

Follow me on Substack: https://soultosoulleadership.substack.com/

Enjoyed this episode? Leave a review, share it with someone who needs it, and subscribe so you never miss a Monday.

Not role to role. Soul to soul.

Send us Fan Mail

Somebody described me to someone else recently. The description was kind. It was generous. And I didn't feel recognized — I felt maintained. Like someone had looked at a photograph of me and described the frame.

This episode is about what happens when someone else's words for you become the house you live in. Not because they're wrong. Because they're fixed. The compliment that quietly becomes a job description. The admiration that hardens into an expectation you are not allowed to stop meeting. And the strange cost of being so well-described by the people who love you that you stop updating the description yourself.

We don't talk about this. We talk about performing — the version of ourselves we put on deliberately. But this is about the version of you that lives in someone else's sentence without your permission. The version that was accurate once and became architecture.

The question at the center of this episode is one I'm still sitting with: what if the most generous thing you can do for the people who love you is to disappoint their sentence about you?

Soul to Soul, Lisa.

Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.

New episodes drop every Monday.

Follow the journey: 📍 Instagram: @lisacarterbawa 📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacarterbawa/ 📍 Website: www.lisacarterbawa.com

Follow me on Substack: https://soultosoulleadership.substack.com/

Enjoyed this episode? Leave a review, share it with someone who needs it, and subscribe so you never miss a Monday.

Not role to role. Soul to soul.

Send us Fan Mail

Envy is the emotion we skip past — too ugly for public consumption, too petty for someone who has built a life she chose. But what if envy is the most honest compass we have?

In this episode, Lisa explores the one thing she envies — and it's not a title, a trip, or a career milestone. It's the ability to rest without guilt. Starting with the gendered double standard around unplugging, she traces the thread from a system that rewards women for overavailability, to a postdoc praised for being always on the grid, to a girl in school who learned that stillness meant falling behind. And then she tells the story of a woman she met on the Nile who changed how she thinks about all of it.

This is an episode about the phone you check before your feet hit the floor, the fear underneath the checking, and what happens when you stop treating envy as a character flaw and start treating it as instructions.

Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.

New episodes drop every Monday.

Follow the journey: 📍 Instagram: @lisacarterbawa 📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacarterbawa/ 📍 Website: www.lisacarterbawa.com

Follow me on Substack: https://soultosoulleadership.substack.com/

Enjoyed this episode? Leave a review, share it with someone who needs it, and subscribe so you never miss a Monday.

Not role to role. Soul to soul.

Send us Fan Mail

Something surfaced for you this summer. In a quiet moment — a long walk, a slow morning, a pause you didn't plan — you heard something you haven't been able to un-hear. In this episode, Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa explores what happens when the noise finally stops and the truth arrives. Two leaders. The same moment of clarity. Two very different choices about what to do with it. If you're about to re-enter the speed of fall, listen to this first.

Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.

New episodes drop every Monday.

Follow the journey: 📍 Instagram: @lisacarterbawa 📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacarterbawa/ 📍 Website: www.lisacarterbawa.com

Follow me on Substack: https://soultosoulleadership.substack.com/

Enjoyed this episode? Leave a review, share it with someone who needs it, and subscribe so you never miss a Monday.

Not role to role. Soul to soul.

Send us Fan Mail

We have a whole vocabulary for professional change. Restructuring. Realignment. Transition. Pivot. And sometimes those words are accurate — sometimes the ground really is shifting toward something, and the task is to move with it.

But sometimes those words are doing something else entirely. Sometimes they're a way of making a loss sound like a strategy. A way of converting grief into a project plan. A way of telling people who are watching their life's work get dismantled that the correct response is to update their LinkedIn and attend a webinar on resilience.

This episode is about what happens in that gap — between the institutional language and the human experience it's papering over. It's about the people who built something real, who watched the evidence prove it was working, and who are now being told to hold it loosely. It's about the particular cruelty of knowledge without agency — of knowing exactly what needs to be done and being told to stand down. And it's about the quiet, stubborn, deeply brave act of still being here. Still carrying what you know. Still refusing to pretend it didn't matter.

Not role to role. Soul to soul.

Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.

New episodes drop every Monday.

Follow the journey: 📍 Instagram: @lisacarterbawa 📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacarterbawa/ 📍 Website: www.lisacarterbawa.com

Follow me on Substack: https://soultosoulleadership.substack.com/

Enjoyed this episode? Leave a review, share it with someone who needs it, and subscribe so you never miss a Monday.

Not role to role. Soul to soul.

Send us Fan Mail

Every important decision about your career happens in a conversation you are not part of.

The meeting after the meeting. The hallway. The car ride home. Someone turns to someone else and says something about you, your work, your idea — and that conversation, the one you will never hear, is where almost everything that matters actually gets decided.

In this episode, I talk about what I wish someone had told me fifteen years ago: the difference between performing well in the room you're in and giving people language for the room you're not in. Why the most advocated-for people are not always the most accomplished — they're the ones who made it easy to advocate for them. Why being described as "really dedicated" and "great team player" kept me invisible for years. And why clarity — not credentials, not charisma, not working harder — is the thing that travels from one room to the next.

If someone had to describe your work to a stranger in two sentences, could they? And would those sentences be the right ones?

This episode is about the only thing you can send into a room you are not in. And why it is enough.

Soul to Soul with Lisa Carter-Bawa. Where Science Meets Soul.

Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.

New episodes drop every Monday.

Follow the journey: 📍 Instagram: @lisacarterbawa 📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacarterbawa/ 📍 Website: www.lisacarterbawa.com

Follow me on Substack: https://soultosoulleadership.substack.com/

Enjoyed this episode? Leave a review, share it with someone who needs it, and subscribe so you never miss a Monday.

Not role to role. Soul to soul.

Send us Fan Mail

I didn't go looking for perspective. I went looking for a window seat and a meal I didn't have to cook. In this episode, I talk about what travel actually gives you — not the Instagram version, but the quiet version. The luxury of being nobody. The way unfamiliar places force you to pay attention again. How being a beginner for a week reconnects you to every beginner in your life. And why the leaders who stay creative and human across long careers aren't the ones who work the hardest — they're the ones who leave the radius of their routine often enough to remember who they are underneath the title. It doesn't have to be far. It just has to be somewhere your autopilot can't follow.

Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.

New episodes drop every Monday.

Follow the journey: 📍 Instagram: @lisacarterbawa 📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacarterbawa/ 📍 Website: www.lisacarterbawa.com

Follow me on Substack: https://soultosoulleadership.substack.com/

Enjoyed this episode? Leave a review, share it with someone who needs it, and subscribe so you never miss a Monday.

Not role to role. Soul to soul.

Send us Fan Mail

Nobody tells you about the Tuesday. The one where you wake up and nothing is on fire. No emergency. No decision that has to be made by noon. Just coffee that's just coffee and a morning that's just a morning. In this episode, I talk about what happens after everything — the disorienting, beautiful, slightly terrifying return to an ordinary life. Why your body stays braced long after the crisis ends. Why peace can feel like vertigo. And why the small wants — the walk, the quiet morning, the meal made slowly — aren't small at all. They're the whole point. They're what you survived for.

Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.

New episodes drop every Monday.

Follow the journey: 📍 Instagram: @lisacarterbawa 📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacarterbawa/ 📍 Website: www.lisacarterbawa.com

Follow me on Substack: https://soultosoulleadership.substack.com/

Enjoyed this episode? Leave a review, share it with someone who needs it, and subscribe so you never miss a Monday.

Not role to role. Soul to soul.