Unprofessionalism

Mark McCartney showed up to facilitate a C-level team in Berlin on the hottest day of the year, drenched in sweat, and opened by pointing out his own stain marks. They laughed. The room shifted. That's Mark — someone who left a 15-year finance career, spent a year in Peru, and has since asked 300+ people the same question: what is a good life?
We got into why real vulnerability isn't the rehearsed trauma story but the small, mundane thing you say in the moment that reminds everyone they're sitting with a human. We talked about boundaries as a source of connection (not walls), why agreement is overrated in teams, and what happens when senior leaders can't admit they're overwhelmed even though it would be weirder if they weren't.
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If you miss the "workshops work" podcast, join us on Substack, where Myriam builds a Podcast Club with monthly gatherings around old episodes: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

Sometimes, just sometimes, the rules are there to be broken. Because when you dare to break them, miracles and moments of beautiful humanity could be waiting just on the other side.
Rotem Kazir was trained never to let her coaching clients know anything about her. Keep distance. Stay neutral. That's professional. Until a founder she'd coached for two years said something that broke the rule for good.
She's spent 20 years working with startup founders — first in HR, then on the VC side, now as a coach — and what she keeps seeing is that the performance breaks down at the exact moment people need each other most. One founder walked into his board meeting and said he didn't know how to take the company forward. The room shifted from performance review to actual problem-solving. He went on to raise $100M. We talked about why that almost never happens, when vulnerability is strategic versus reckless, and why she now opens meetings with "What's hard?" instead of status updates.
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Jon Berghoff walked into a room of C-level executives from billion-dollar companies and noticed they'd all filled the back rows first. He spent two hours debating whether to say something. Then he got on stage and asked them to move to the front. The looks he got said: nobody has ever told us where to sit. Three Fortune 50 companies in that room ended up hiring him.
Jon is the founder of Xchange and one of the most in-demand facilitators in the world. He also spent five years running global conferences in a suit on top and barefoot on the bottom. We talked about why that's not a gimmick — it's connected to something he's learned about nervous system regulation and what happens when the person holding the room is actually relaxed. We got into the inner work behind facilitation, why the moments that go sideways are the ones that build the most trust, and what it actually costs to keep performing a version of yourself the room didn't ask for.
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Early in her career, Tieren Scott was told she needed to sound more "bubbly" when presenting. Her manager pointed to a colleague in the room as the example. Tieren's natural voice — grounded, measured, clear — wasn't the problem. It just wasn't the default. That moment taught her something black women in America already know: professionalism was never a neutral standard.
Tieren has a doctorate in organisational leadership and a decade of experience as an instructional designer and coach. We talked about what it actually costs to mask every day — adjusting your tone, reading the room before you've even opened your mouth, teaching your kids to do the same. She was honest about the exhaustion of it, and honest about the risk that comes with stopping. This conversation changed something for me: the freedom to be "unprofessional" is itself a privilege. Not everyone gets to drop the mask and call it brave.
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A software engineer fired a test missile and watched it cartwheel into the ocean. He looked at the code and thought: that looks like what would happen if I hadn't loaded all the microcode. Did I load the microcode? Oh God. Did he tell anyone? No. So they fired three more. Same result. He was too afraid to speak up. That, says Mike Parker, is what professionalism encodes: fear dressed up as competence.
Mike spent 35 years in consultancy before founding his liminal coaching practice, and he's been thinking about where that fear comes from — Taylorism, factory floors, a management culture that treats "I don't know" as a career threat. We talked about why daydreaming might be the most productive thing a knowledge worker can do, how asking "why" gets read as insubordination, and what his mother once told him about the word "amateur" that reframes the whole conversation.
Links to learn more about Mike Parker:
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If you miss the "workshops work" podcast, join us on Substack, where Myriam builds a Podcast Club with monthly gatherings around old episodes: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/