Launching Lead Me On
Three episodes. Three people. Three different corners of the world. Three people who have every reason to have given up and didn’t.
I want to be honest with you about why Lead Me On exists.
I didn’t start this podcast because I wanted to teach. I started it because I needed it. Because somewhere in the noise of the last few years, the headlines, the political decay, the slow erosion of trust in the people and institutions we were supposed to be able to count on, I started to feel something I didn’t want to name.
Despair isn’t too strong a word.
Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind. The kind that creeps in when you are paying attention and the world keeps giving you reasons not to.
And I thought: I cannot be alone in this. And then I thought: the antidote isn’t to stop paying attention. It’s to find the people who are doing something about it, and to listen to them, really listen, until the proof is louder than the noise.
That’s what Lead Me On is. Three episodes are waiting for you right now.
Here’s what I’ve been sitting with since recording them:
Every single guest, in their own way, came back to the same thing. That the deepest act of leadership is freeing someone, freeing them from a prison, from poverty, from loneliness, from the story they’ve been told about who they are, so they can become more fully themselves. Not a fixed version of themselves. Their fullest, most possible self.
Shaka Senghor spent 19 years incarcerated, seven in solitary confinement, and came home to build a roadmap for freedom, not just from walls, but from the invisible prisons we all carry. And now he’s pivoting to art: a screenplay, a one-man show, his first novel. Because he believes fiction can crack open what nonfiction cannot. He talks about vulnerability, about starting over after celebrated success, and about why the act of creating is itself the freedom, not the outcome.
🎧 Episode 1 — The Leadership of Liberation | Shaka Senghor
Mihoko Kashiwakura calls it love. Not as a concept. As a practice. She has built four nonprofits in Japan, feeding children, supporting elderly people who have no one, redistributing food across communities that official statistics pretend aren’t struggling. She uses the word “love” in every leadership conversation she has. She says it without apology. I found that radical.
🎧 Episode 2 — The Moral Architect | Mihoko Kashiwakura
Victor Ochen grew up in a refugee camp in Northern Uganda for twenty-one years. He became the first Ugandan and the youngest African ever nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He told me that unresolved trauma sits at the heart of most of the world’s conflicts, not just in survivors, but in the leaders who start the wars. And he is quietly, patiently building a generation that loves its way to power instead of killing its way there.
🎧 Episode 3 — The Wound Behind the War | Victor Ochen
Three people. Three different corners of the world. Three people who have every reason to have given up and didn’t.
I think of you, whoever you are reading this, as part of that same group. People who haven’t given up. People who are quietly doing extraordinary things, or who are trying to lead with kindness in systems that don’t always reward it, or who are still here, still paying attention, still refusing to be a bystander.
You are not naive. You are necessary.
This is your binge-starter. Listen to one on your commute. Or all three this weekend. Or come back to them when the headlines get loud, and you need to remember what’s also true.
🎧 Episode 1 — The Leadership of Liberation | Shaka Senghor
🎧 Episode 2 — The Moral Architect | Mihoko Kashiwakura
🎧 Episode 3 — The Wound Behind the War | Victor Ochen
And if one of these conversations lands for you, if it gives you something you needed, please send it to one person who needs it too.
Hope isn’t naive. It’s necessary.
Like. Share. Review.
Let’s Build This Together.
With so much gratitude for being here,
Alexandra
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Lead Me On
Empathy, justice, and kindness are not alternatives to leadership. They are leadership.