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
Favorites Replay: It's Not Going to Be That Bad - Train Your Body to Lead Under Stress with Robert Vause
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Heart racing. Short of breath. Trying to calm down and feeling it slip away like sand. Robert Vause got tired of walking into hard rooms that way. So he took up freediving.
In this Favorites Replay, Robert shares what holding his breath underwater taught him about leading under pressure. The urge to breathe, it turns out, isn't really about oxygen. Once he understood that, he could train his brain to bring everything back down when every signal said bring it up.
Meet Robert Vause: Robert started leading adults in his family's agricultural equipment dealership at sixteen. He set out to become a Navy pilot, spent 39 months pursuing acting in Los Angeles, came home to help the family business grow, and moved into corporate leadership in the ag equipment industry. He now leads a region, and he's an avid reader, a learner, a husband, and a dad.
In this episode, Robert and Janyne explore:
- What freediving taught him about the stress response - and how he uses it in the boardroom
- Why he says trust is built "against your self-interest"
- Starting a new job one week before the world shut down, and meeting his team in a parking lot
- The interview question that let him say, "You would have never seen the fight in me"
- Going from a family business to a large corporation - from flying a fighter plane to flying a jet
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Take the FREE 5R Edge™ Diagnostic and discover your resilience edge.
https://tinyurl.com/5R-Podcast
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Action4Traction™ - Take one this week:
1. Before your next hard meeting, take five slow breaths with a long exhale.
2. Walk in with Robert's line: "It's not going to be that bad. It's okay."
3. Own one mistake out loud before anyone else points it out.
Talk4Traction™ - Bring one to your next team meeting to elevate the dialogue:
1. When pressure hits, do we bring everything up - or back down?
2. Where are we protecting ourselves at the expense of trust?
3. What's our "rocket" right now - the thing we prepared for as a jet?
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Together, we've got this!
Janyne
Connect: https://tinyurl.com/JPE-LinkedIn
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ENDNOTES:
[1] James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (New York: Riverhead Books, 2020).
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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