Work and Wellness

What if getting more done isn’t about finding more hours in the day?

In this episode, I sit down with Dr Amantha Imber — organisational psychologist, bestselling author and founder of Inventium — to talk about her latest book, The Energy Game, and why managing our energy could be far more important than managing our time.

Amantha burnt out in 2024 despite being one of Australia’s leading experts on productivity. That experience led her to rethink the way we approach productivity and ultimately became the basis for her most personal book yet — a science-backed look at how to boost, rest and protect your energy so you can perform at your best without running yourself into the ground.

We also talk about AI, why it isn’t delivering the productivity gains many organisations expected, what we risk when we outsource too much of our thinking, and the one experiment Amantha challenges every listener to try this week.

Key Topics
Why time management alone won’t save you from burnout — and what to focus on instead
The three categories of energy strategies: boost, rest and protect, and when to use each
Why most of us are doing “fake rest” and what real rest actually looks like
The minimum viable dose of cold water immersion and why you don’t need an ice bath
How AI could be making us cognitively lazy and what we risk losing if we outsource our thinking
Why AI isn’t delivering the productivity gains many organisations expected
The silent walk — one of Amantha’s favourite strategies and why it works

About Amantha
Dr Amantha Imber is an organisational psychologist, bestselling author and founder of the award-winning behaviour change consultancy Inventium. In 2021, she became the first Australian to win the prestigious Thinkers50 Innovation Award, described by the Financial Times as the “Oscars of Management Thinking”. In 2025, she was named AI Consultant of the Year at the Australian AI Awards.

She is the host of the number-one-ranking business podcast How I Work, with more than six million downloads, and her work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Forbes and Fast Company. Her latest book, The Energy Game, explores the science of how to better protect, restore and use your energy.

Connect with Amantha
⁠Book: The Energy Game⁠
⁠Substack: One Percent Better⁠
⁠How I Work podcast

We all have them. The colleague who drives you absolutely crazy. The leader who says something that leaves you speechless. The person you genuinely cannot figure out.

In this episode, I get into one of the most requested topics I've had — how to work with difficult people without losing your mind or your professionalism. Because not everyone who feels difficult actually is difficult. Sometimes it's a personality clash, sometimes it's a values difference, and sometimes yes — it really is just them.

I break down the three categories every difficult situation falls into, why understanding someone's motivation changes everything, and the exact phrases I use when someone says something completely out of line. This one is practical, honest and full of things you can use immediately.

Key Topics
The difference between a personality clash, workplace friction and genuinely dysfunctional behaviour and why each one needs a different response
Why understanding what motivates someone changes how you work with them completely
The question every team should ask before starting a project together and almost never does
What to say in the moment when someone says something wildly out of line
When to document behaviour, when to escalate it and when to make a decision about your environment
How to have the awkward but necessary conversation about working better together
Coming back to self awareness before deciding someone else is the problem

Keywords: Difficult people, workplace conflict, communication, leadership, boundaries, self awareness, team culture, performance, mental health, wellbeing

Nobody teaches you how to be a great leader. You just get promoted and figure it out.

In this episode, I open up the Instagram question box and answer your leadership questions completely off the cuff, no textbooks, no frameworks, just the real lessons from my own experience leading teams through COVID, the Northern Rivers floods, and everything in between.

We cover the questions people are actually asking but rarely get honest answers to — is leadership really worth the promotion, how do you stop taking things personally, how do you lead when you don't have the answers, and what is the one leadership skill nobody talks about enough. This one is practical, personal and full of the kind of advice I wish someone had given me when I first stepped into a leadership role.

Key Topics
Is leadership really worth the promotion and what you need to honestly ask yourself before saying yes
The future of leadership in an AI-driven world and the human skills that will matter most
How to stop taking things personally as a leader without stopping caring
How to lead through uncertainty when you don't have the answers either
How to support your team without absorbing all of their problems
The SBI framework for hard conversations and why clear is kind
The two most underrated leadership skills: repair and pause
The best leadership advice Angela has ever received

Keyword: Leadership, management, high performance, communication, burnout, feedback, hard conversations, self-awareness, team culture, future of work

This one is personal. It has just ticked over a year since my dad, Phil — big Phil — suddenly passed away. And over that time, through my own experience and in talking to so many people who have been through grief and loss, I've come to realise that there are some things nobody really talks about openly enough.

In this episode, I share my unfiltered thoughts from the last year — the things that helped, the things that hurt, and the unexpected gifts that grief brought with it. Because grief is not just something you get through. It changes you. It shifts your perspective in ways that are impossible to fully explain until you've felt it yourself.

This episode is for anyone who is grieving right now, and for anyone who loves someone who is, because at some point, we will all need to know how to sit beside someone in the mud.

Key Topics
How grief changes you as a person in ways that are permanent and profound
Why acknowledgement is the most powerful thing you can offer someone who is grieving
The heartwarming and heartbreaking reality of how people show up — and don't
Why grief is not linear and why the world moving on doesn't mean you have to
The unexpected gifts grief brings — clarity, perspective and freedom from other people's opinions
Why going back to work too early is something Angela wishes she hadn't done
The stone in your pocket — Angela's analogy for what grief really feels like over time

Connect with Angela
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mind.your.grit/
Website: https://www.mindyourgrit.com/

Keywords: grief, loss, wellbeing, mental health, perspective, resilience, support, death, healing, mindfulness

What if everything you've been taught about resilience is actually making you less of it?

In this episode I sit down with Jay Abbasi — global keynote speaker, TEDx speaker, former Tesla leader and host of the Unstuck podcast — to completely reframe how we think about pressure, resilience and what it actually means to thrive. Because the version of resilience most of us have been sold about keep going, push through, don't show weakness, is not resilience at all.

Jay brings a rare combination of high-pressure corporate experience and deep expertise in mindfulness and neuroscience, and he is one of the most genuinely thoughtful guests we have had on this show. We get into his formula for real resilience, why people pleasing is actually a selfish act, the difference between being a superhero and a captain of the ship, and the story of what happened when his long-awaited TEDx talk couldn't be published and how he responded. This one is rich, practical and full of reframes that will stay with you.

Key Topics
Why the traditional definition of resilience is nonsense and what it actually requires
Jay's formula: energy plus space plus choice equals resilience
The difference between being a superhero leader and being the captain of the ship
Why people pleasing is not selfless — it is self-serving
The Victor Frankl quote that changed how Jay thinks about pressure and presence
Why curiosity and effective communication will be the most critical leadership skills in the AI era
What Jay's TEDx talk story taught him about bouncing back from unexpected adversity
Why trusting your intuition requires stillness and how to cultivate it

About Jay
Jay Abbasi is a global keynote speaker, TEDx speaker, coach and host of the top-rated podcast Unstuck with Jay Abbasi. A former Tesla leader who built and led national training programs for over a thousand employees, Jay has since coached leaders at Google, Amazon, TikTok and Wells Fargo. Blending corporate experience with deep expertise in mindfulness, resilience and wellbeing, Jay's message is that success isn't about avoiding challenges — it's about mastering them with clarity, energy and purpose. He has been featured in Forbes, Authority Magazine and Medium, and is based in New Jersey.

Connect with Jay
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayabbasi
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jayabbasi_
Website: https://jayabbasi.me/
Podcast: Unstuck with Jay Abbasi — available on YouTube and all podcast platforms

Keywords
resilience, leadership, high performance, burnout, pressure, mindfulness, self-awareness, curiosity, communication, intuition