Six years ago, in a small Barcelona flat during the brutal COVID lockdowns, Betsy started a podcast about discomfort. Her work had vanished, she couldn't leave the house, and it felt like the universe was holding her on her back like a puppy until she stopped squirming. Back then she believed discomfort was something you got through. It ended, you got a calm patch, and then the next one arrived.

Now she's recording the opener to Season 6 in October 2026, with a summer of chemotherapy behind her and a few newly arrived eyebrows (you should have seen the situation a month ago). Her relationship with discomfort has quietly turned inside out. It isn't a finish line you cross once. It's the texture of life, and she's learning to hold it with open hands... most days, at least for today.

This season shifts focus to "embodied leadership in the wild" - how people lead from the gut, the heart, the senses and the nervous system, not just the MBA framework. Expect more solos, less scripting, a little less polish, and video for the first time, which is deeply uncomfortable for her. Expect weird questions too, like "Where do you feel that in your body?" Don't get hung up on the word leader. If you're not leading your own life, who is?

Whether you've been here since season one or pressed play thirty seconds ago, you're welcome exactly as you are, nervous system and all.

In this episode, Betsy explores:

- Why she started The Discomfort Practice during the Barcelona lockdown, and what she believed discomfort was back then

- How an unexpected breast cancer diagnosis and a summer of chemo rewrote that belief: discomfort as rhythm, not a chapter that closes

- Why she's doing more solos, less scripting and video for the first time (and the compliment she's learned to take: "I like listening to you waffle out loud")

- What embodied leadership actually means, and why "I'm not a leader" doesn't get anyone off the hook

- How a leader's nervous system patterns show up in their culture, what fractals have to do with it, and where Mike Tyson comes in

- Why this season's guests will be asked about the body, and why checking in with how you feel is intelligence, not weakness

- Launching the Embodied Leadership Lab in June, at the start of chemo, and the unexpected gift of a membership community

- Your turn: if leadership is a practice before it's a performance, what are you practising right now?

The Discomfort Practice explores the uncomfortable edges where personal growth, leadership, embodiment and systems change intersect. Follow Betsy for more reflections on embodied leadership, living out loud, and what happens when you stop trying to get through discomfort and start learning from it.

Subscribe to The Discomfort Practice wherever you listen - and a five-star review always helps

Follow Betsy's writing on Substack: substack.com/@thebetsyreed

Work with Betsy - coaching and consultancy: www.embodiedleadershiplab.com

Embodied Leadership Lab membership: www.patreon.com/c/embodiedleadershiplab

In this solo episode, the final one of Season 5, Betsy doesn't try to tidy six years of the show into something resolved. Every neat version she drafted felt like a lie, so this is the untidy one, left hanging on purpose.

The real throughline of the season wasn't the guest list, it was becoming visible, whether the episode was about that directly or not. She started Season 5, then paused it for nearly a year. She came back to it with a completely different life underneath her. She didn't resolve her discomfort with and desire for more visibility. She just got more honest about not having resolved it. And recorded more solos than she has in any previous season.

And here's what's actually shifting. She's been through a cancer diagnosis and is still in treatment - and will be for some time yet. Her work landscape has cracked open too, bringing real financial discomfort alongside new clarity about how she wants to work and with whom. Embodied Leadership Lab is real now. Not a someday thing. A thing with a name and a door.

Season 6 will have new territory: embodied leadership in the wild, discomfort as something that shows up in the body in real time, not just a concept discussed with guests. She's walking into it the way she's walked into every uncomfortable thing on this show, before she's got the ending, before she's privately practiced showing up perfect.

In this episode, Betsy explores:

• What Season 5's real throughline turned out to be, underneath the guest list
• Why she paused the season for a year, and what came back different when she returned to it
• The shift she's not hiding: a cancer diagnosis, ongoing treatment, and a work landscape that's cracked open in hard and clarifying ways
• Why Embodied Leadership Lab stopped being a someday thing
• What's staying exactly the same going into Season 6, and what's turning up in volume
• The question she's leaving open: how real is too real, and where confessional tips into everyone else orbiting your emotions
• A closing practice to sit with: what's one thing that's currently over but not quite over for you, and can you let it just be what it is?

The Discomfort Practice explores the uncomfortable edges where personal growth, leadership, embodiment and systems change intersect. Follow Betsy for more reflections on visibility, reinvention and building a life, and a body, that can hold the truth of what's actually happening.

Follow Betsy on Instagram: @thebetsyreed
Subscribe to The Discomfort Practice wherever you listen - and a five-star review always helps
Join her on Substack, Voice Notes from the Edge: substack.com/@thebetsyreed
Work with Betsy - coaching, the Embodied Leadership Lab membership on Patreon, community circles, and People Like Us dinners across Europe: www.embodiedleadershiplab.com

In this solo episode, Betsy comes back to a line she's been circling for months - since being diagnosed with cancer. She records this episode on the other side of a summer of chemotherapy, which she didn't know was coming when she first jotted down notes for this episode.

She bites into Anthony de Mello's line "life is a feast but most people are starving to death."

This isn't a recovery story. It's not "here's what cancer taught me," tied off with a bow. It's Betsy asking the same question mid-feast that she asked in March, post-cancer diagnosis, pre-surgery, pre-chemo: are you feasting, or are you starving in a room full of abundance?

In this episode, Betsy explores:

• What it costs to keep choosing the feast when circumstances get harder instead of easier

• "Starvation consciousness" - the stories that convince us we're in famine when we're not: not enough, behind, wrong country, wrong timing

• Why abundance was never about the conditions. It's about what you let yourself taste

• The direct line between nervous system regulation and whether life feels vivid or flat

• The difference between numbing pain and actually metabolising it

• Why presence doesn't require the threat to be gone, and why that's the uncomfortable part

• What it costs to want things fully when wanting itself feels risky

• Why she refuses to sit here and politely starve

The discomfort practice for this week:

Notice where you're starving in the middle of abundance.

Where are you postponing joy? Where are you numbing instead of tasting? Where are you pretending not to want what you actually want?

And where might life already be offering you something you're afraid to receive?

Just take one bite...

The Discomfort Practice explores the edges where growth, truth and aliveness meet, the places we usually avoid, but where our real lives actually begin.

If this one landed, send it to someone who needs the reminder that life can still be vivid in the middle of not knowing.

How to get more of Betsy:

• Substack, Voice Notes from the Edge: https://substack.com/@thebetsyreed

• Work with Betsy - coaching, Embodied Leadership Lab membership, community circles, and People Like Us dinners across Europe: https://www.embodiedleadershiplab.com and https://www.patreon.com/embodiedleadershiplab

• Subscribe to the podcast and leave a five-star review