Episode
Awaiting Approval. Season 2, Episode 18 - Debrief
- Podcast
- Awaiting Approval
- Published
- Apr 2, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1107
- Processing state
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Summary
Season 2 of Awaiting Approval comes to a close with something a little different. No guest this time. No one-word theme attached to a single conversation. Just me, stepping back to look at what this season became. And honestly… I’m still a bit stunned by it. Since launching the show in summer 2025 with no marketing spend, the podcast has grown far beyond anything I expected. More than 10,000 listens. Charting in over 15 countries. And not a single day since August 2025 where it hasn’t appeared somewhere in the charts. That still feels surreal. But this episode is not really about numbers. It’s about what stayed with me. Across Season 2, I gave each episode a single word. Not to reduce the conversation, but to give it an anchor. A way of holding onto the essence of what each guest brought into the room. And when I stepped back and looked at those words together, something else emerged. A pattern. Not a neat one. Not a single message repeated over and over. But a thread. And the thread that kept surfacing, in all sorts of different ways, was kindness. Kindness in the work. Kindness in leadership. Kindness in how we treat each other. And maybe most of all, kindness towards ourselves. Because so many of these conversations touched on pressure, expectation, self-doubt, burnout, ambition, fear, and the endless feeling that we should somehow be handling it all better than we are. And underneath all of that was this quieter truth. We do not need to make it harder than it already is. This episode is a reflection on what Season 2 has meant to me, what the guests gave so generously, and how the podcast has started to grow into something bigger than a series of interviews. I also talk about one unexpected side project that came out of the season - a playlist called Awaiting Approv…