What if the biggest thing standing between you and resilience isn't what's happening around you — it's the voice inside your own head?

In this episode, we sit down with Sara Bell, founder and CEO of RIISE, a global marketplace for sustainable fashion and beauty, and RIISE Productions, a film and television company built around lower-impact storytelling. Before RIISE, Sara spent four years taking on fossil fuel subsidies worth billions of dollars in the European Courts — a legal challenge she won in 2018.

Sara opens up about the internal work behind that fight: how she learned to change her own inner voice by building what she calls a "mash-up parent" from the words of people she admired, why she believes fear is a tool politicians use against you, and how she moved from being driven by anger to being driven by love. We also get into RIISE's approach to sustainable fashion, why her production company is currently financing a fashion horror film, and what she thinks it actually takes for leaders to be resilient going forward.

Sara Bell is proof that outer impact starts with inner change.

Check out RIISE here: https://riise.world/

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31.5°C indoors. No A/C in sight. That's the moment that changed how host Lauren Scott thinks about her own industry.

Thirteen years into building automation, Lauren always led with the environmental case — less energy, less grid strain, fewer emissions. Comfort was always the quieter argument. Then a near-record heatwave in Ireland, a country where fewer than 1 in 10 homes have air conditioning, made the case for her: as extreme heat reaches places never built for it, comfort stops being a want and becomes a need — and smart, energy-efficient HVAC controls, sensors and software are exactly how buildings meet it.

In this solo episode, Lauren breaks down the realization, the numbers behind it, and why the environmental and human-comfort cases just became one.

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This episode's is someone I've wanted to sit down with since the very early days of this podcast — and trust me, the wait was worth it.

Jef Combdon is a 30-plus year marketing communications and media strategist who has built campaigns for some of Canada's most recognized names: Molson Coors, Kraft, Colgate, Maple Leaf Foods, and Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism, among others. He has operated at the highest levels of both holding companies and independent agencies, across Toronto and St. John's.

And then he walked away from all of that to build something entirely his own.

MarkerTree is Canada's first and only social enterprise in the marketing communications space — a company with two mandates built right into its DNA: deliver exceptional outcomes for clients, and use the profits to fund Mi'kmaw language reclamation. Jef is a proud Mi'kmaw and active member of the Ktaqmkukewaq Mi'kmaq community, and he co-founded the Ktaqmkuk Mi'kmaw Fluency Project — an online and immersion school working to bring fluency back to Newfoundland, where it had all but disappeared.

What does that mean for you, listening right now? Whether you're an entrepreneur questioning whether your work is aligned with your values, a leader navigating what reconciliation actually looks like inside a business, or someone who has ever had to choose between getting ahead and being fully yourself — this conversation will stay with you.

Learn more about MarkerTree: https://markertree.ca/

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