Your Authentic Executive Podcast
Authentic Leadership. Profound Stories. Proven Lessons.
Your Authentic Executive is where executives go on the record — the pivotal moments, the hard-won lessons, the vignettes that shaped who they are as leaders. Not polished success stories. The real ones. New full episodes drop the first Tuesday of every month.
About SPARKs Between full episodes, SPARKs deliver power-packed excerpts built to ignite action. Drop a SPARK into your next team meeting, play it, and use the Action4Traction™ and Talk4Traction™ prompts to open real leadership conversations and drive next steps. SPARKs drop Tuesdays 2, 3, and 4.
✅ Full Episode – First Tuesday of Every Month
🔥 Sparks – power-packed excerpts to share and ignite action.
🎙 Subscribe now and join us on a journey to uncover the stories, struggles, and strategies behind Your Authentic Executive.
About Your Host: Janyne Peek Emsick, Ph.D.
For 35+ years, Janyne Peek Emsick, Ph.D. has helped Fortune 150 companies, award-winning privately owned organizations, the public sector, global nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations on six continents. All engage Janyne for a specific reason: when the hardest things go unspoken, she names them — and does it in a way that opens the door rather than closes it. Ph.D. in transformational leadership | Harvard Law Executive Education | NeuroLeadership Institute | Founder, 5R Edge™. Pronounced jah-neen'.
Together, we've got this.
📌 Follow Janyne on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/janynepeekemsick
📌 Explore Executive Coaching → YourExecutiveCoach.com
Your Authentic Executive Podcast
Leading When Your Life is On Fire with Lindsey Rai Kortan
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
"More than education, more than experience, more than training — resilience determines who succeeds and who fails." Diane Coutu's 25-year-old definition opens this conversation, and Lindsey Rai Kortan lives it.
Lindsey leads Ronald McDonald House Charities of Omaha, an organization built for families fighting for their children's lives. While leading it, she privately navigated domestic violence, her husband's addiction and overdose, her mother's death, and single parenting two sons — during COVID. This is an honest look at leading through the unimaginable, and the architecture of survival: community.
Content / sensitivity note: This episode discusses domestic violence, addiction, and overdose. If you are someone you know is strugging, contact SMHSA National Hotline, or Al-Anon.
In this episode, Lindsey and Janyne explore:
• Resilience as a built capacity, never achieved alone
• Why shame — not a lack of helpers — keeps leaders isolated
• Psychological safety that starts when the leader goes first
• Policies that make care reliable: compassion leave, unlimited PTO, meeting check-ins
• The brain under threat, and why empathy reopens clear thinking[1]
Diane Coutu's research names what Lindsey embodies: the most resilient people accept hard reality clearly, hold a deep belief that life is meaningful, and improvise a way through.[2]
Take the FREE 5R Edge™ Diagnostic and discover your resilience edge.
https://tinyurl.com/5R-Podcast
🎯 Action4Traction™ — Take one this week:
1. Name one private weight to one person you trust this week.
2. Open one meeting by saying how you're actually doing first.
3. Remove one fear your team carries — make it a real policy.
💬 Talk4Traction™ — Bring one to your next team meeting to elevate the dialogue:
1. What are we each carrying that we haven't said out loud?
2. Where does shame keep us from asking each other for help?
3. What would make it safe here to not be okay?
About our Guest:
Lindsey Rai Kortan is the CEO of Ronald McDonald House Charities of Omaha, where she leads an organization that stands with families fighting for their children's lives — in the cancer ward, the ICU, and the hardest moments they will ever face. What makes Lindsey rare is that she has lived the territory she leads through: while running her organization, she privately navigated domestic violence, her husband's addiction and overdose, her mother's death, and single parenting two young sons — all at once, during COVID. She is, in every sense of the word, a study in resilience.
Connect with Lindsey on LinkedIn
Together, we've got this!
Janyne
Connect with Janyne on LinkedIn
Subscribe: Your Authentic Executive Podcast · The Executive Edge™ — Resilience in Action
#YourAuthenticExecutive #5REdge #ExecutiveLeadership #Resilience #PsychologicalSafety
[1] Matthew D. Lieberman et al., "Putting Feelings into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli," Psychological Science 18, no. 5 (2007): 421–28, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x.
[2] Diane Coutu, "How Resilience Works," Harvard Business Review, May 2002.
Your Authentic Executive Podcast
Authentic Leadership | Profound Stories | Proven Lessons
Hosted by Janyne Peek Emsick, Ph.D.
For SPARKS! sneak peeks of each full episode, follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook!
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janynepeekemsick/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/janyneyourexecutivecoach/
You can also listen to our podcast on-the-go now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts!
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3Hf8dKgOS9jniNdmfg1i8q?si=4ded7c1ab5c0440a
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-authentic-executive-podcast/id1794646555
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