🧠INSPIRE
May had a quieter yet powerful kind of weight to it.
A question kept surfacing in the background of all the business and hum of the daily: What do you actually believe?
Not what you say you believe. And certainly not the performative sounds of many leadership meetings or for-looks-only values statements. But the beliefs running underneath all of it… the ones shaping what you see, what you attempt, what you allow yourself to hope for, and what you quietly decide is possible.
Because here’s what this month’s listening kept returning me to: our beliefs aren’t passive and they’re more powerful than we might imagine. They don’t sit politely in the background while we lead. They bend reality. They determine what the brain even bothers to scan for. They shape what looks hard and what looks possible. They ripple outward into the people around us, amplifying or quietly limiting the culture we’re building together.
And sometimes, maybe especially in the hardest seasons, the most important leadership work isn’t the strategy or the system or the next initiative. It’s the interior work. The choice about what you’re going to believe, and what you’re going to do with what you’ve been given.
This month’s five episodes each pulled at that thread in a different way. Together, they form a persistent invitation that only we can give ourselves… to lead from the inside out.
Here are my Top 5 Leadership Podcast Picks for May 2026 – episodes that challenged and inspired me to examine what I believe, and to choose more intentionally.
Read through them individually, or spoiler alert… you can skip to the end for a curated playlist of all five!
🎧 LEARN
1. The School of Greatness with Lewis Howes | “The Auschwitz Survivor Who Chose Freedom” with Dr. Edith Eger
I want to begin here, because this one earned its place.
Dr. Edith Eger was 16 years old when she was sent to Auschwitz. On the night she arrived, she danced for Josef Mengele while her mother was taken to the gas chambers. She survived. And then she spent decades running from what happened, until she finally turned around and walked straight back into it.
What she found there changed everything.
Dr. Eger passed away on April 27, 2026, at the age of 98, just weeks before I sat down to write this. And yet this conversation, recorded in her final year, feels like a gift she was still finding ways to give. Not despite what she lived through, but because of it. That distinction is everything.
She teaches that freedom is not something that happens to you. It’s something you choose. Again and again. The prison that holds most of us isn’t made of walls… it’s made of the stories we tell ourselves about what’s fixed, what’s too hard, and what we deserve. And the key, she says, is already in your pocket.
For leaders, the invitation here is profound and uncomfortable in equal measure: What mental prisons are you still living inside of? Where are you waiting for circumstances to change before you allow yourself to live and lead fully? And what might it look like to choose differently… not because it’s easy, but because the alternative is too costly?
There is something extraordinary about sitting with wisdom that was forged through the worst of what human beings can do to one another and hearing it offered with this much generosity. That’s not inspiration in the easy, comfortable sense. That’s the real thing.
This is one of those conversations you carry with you.
2. A Bit of Optimism with Simon Sinek | “Stop Telling Us Everything Happens for a Reason” with Tom Nash
I explored this conversation in Edition 042 of The 5-Minute Mentor, and I keep finding new layers in it.
At 19, Tom Nash contracted a rare bacterial infection with a 2% chance of survival. He survived, but lost both arms and both legs in the process. And he’ll tell you, without performance or pretense, that it’s the best thing that ever happened to him.
This episode isn’t about resilience in the way we usually talk about resilience. It’s about something more powerful and more challenging: agency. The belief that even in the moments that feel most like they’re happening to you, you still hold the pen.
What moved me most was the story of the moment Tom’s doctor gave him a choice. Amputate his two arms and have a chance at living, or keep them and face certain death. Making that choice, even an obvious one, completely changed his relationship to what followed. He wasn’t a victim of the amputation. He was the one who decided. That’s agency. And as Tom shows us, it holds immense power.
His three inner characters, the Artist, the Author, and the Alchemist, offer a practical framework for accessing that agency in everyday life and leadership, not just in crisis. The Artist zooms in or out to shift perspective. The Author asks what story the hero of your life would choose. The Alchemist turns hard things into gold, not by pretending they aren’t hard, but by looking for what hasn’t been found in them yet.
Paired beautifully with Dr. Eger’s episode, this conversation asks: where are you outsourcing your agency? And what would change if you took it back?
3. HBR IdeaCast | Episode 1076: “Why Your Team Won’t Speak Up (And How to Fix It)” with Charles Duhigg
I unpacked this one in Edition 043 of The 5-Minute Mentor, and it’s one of those episodes that keeps giving.
Charles Duhigg, author of Supercommunicators, comes to this conversation with a premise that’s both obvious and routinely ignored: most leaders say they want candor. But their organizations default to silence. So what’s actually going wrong?
The answer, Duhigg argues, isn’t about personality or culture in some abstract sense. It’s tactical. Psychological safety isn’t built through warmth or goodwill alone… it’s built through specific, repeatable behaviors that leaders can learn and practice.
Two stood out to me. The first is equality in conversational turn-taking – everyone in the room should feel they’ve had a voice, not just the loudest or most senior. Leaders who actively invite the quiet people in (“Hey, I haven’t heard from you. What are you thinking?”) aren’t being soft. They’re building the conditions for the best thinking to surface.
The second is what Duhigg calls ostentatious listening – visibly, actively showing people that what they said mattered. Repeating it back. Resurfacing it later. Connecting it to someone else’s idea. This isn’t performance; it’s the signal that tells people their contribution was worth giving.
There’s also his framing of three conversation types, practical, emotional, and social, and the “matching principle”: the best communicators recognize which conversation is actually happening, and meet people there. A team member who walks in talking budgets but speaking in emotion needs the emotion acknowledged before the spreadsheet opens.
If you believe your people aren’t speaking up, this episode is worth your full attention. The silence isn’t the problem… it’s the signal. And this conversation helps you read it.
4. Lead from the Heart with Mark C. Crowley | “Shawn Achor: The Power of Belief and the Hidden Architecture of Human Performance.
This one connected so deeply to the heart of what Culture of Belief is all about, I explored it in Edition 044 of The 5-Minute Mentor, and it’s been living in my thinking ever since.
Shawn Achor has spent two decades studying human performance across 50 countries, with NASA, the NFL, and over a third of the Fortune 500. His new book, The Power of Beliefs, distills that research into a finding that is both profound and actionable: the greatest predictor of your future isn’t your talent, your resources, or even your circumstances. It’s the beliefs you hold right now.
Beliefs don’t just reflect reality. They bend it. If your brain doesn’t believe growth is possible, it won’t even scan for the evidence. And what it doesn’t scan for, it deletes… meaning opportunities that are right in front of you can become literally invisible.
Achor identifies seven Core Beliefs most predictive of success and flourishing: My behavior matters. I matter. I am not alone. This work is meaningful. I have things to be grateful for right now. I have something to give. There is something greater than me. And his research is clear that leaders don’t just hold these beliefs for themselves… they actively shape whether the people they lead hold them too.
The hill study he references landed particularly hard: people who believed they’d climb a hill alone rated it 15% steeper than those who believed they’d have a partner beside them. Connection literally changes how hard the road ahead looks. That’s not metaphor. That’s the data. And as a leader, that means the beliefs your team holds about whether they matter, whether their work is meaningful, and whether they’re truly in community are shaping performance right now, whether you’re tending to them intentionally or not.
The question Achor suggests leaders return to regularly: Are my beliefs opening up possibilities or quietly shrinking them? That’s a question worth asking… and worth asking on behalf of your team, too.
5. The Curiosity Shop with BrenĂ© Brown and Adam Grant | “Exploring the Paradoxes of Human Nature”
I’ll be honest: I was ready to love this episode before I pressed play. I have long been a fan of paradoxes… the beautiful, productive messiness they bring to leadership and to life. And I have been citing the Stockdale Paradox in leadership conversations for years.
So when Brené and Adam went deep on it, I was there for it.
For those less familiar, the Stockdale Paradox comes from Admiral James Stockdale, who survived years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. His insight, shared with Jim Collins and immortalized in Good to Great, was this: the prisoners who didn’t survive were the optimists. The ones who said, “We’ll be out by Christmas.” And then Christmas came and went. And they broke. Stockdale survived by holding two truths at once: I will never give up the faith that I will prevail in the end. And I must confront the brutal facts of my current reality.
That’s the paradox. And it’s one of the most important things I know about leadership.
BrenĂ© and Adam extend this beautifully into the Abilene Paradox, groups making decisions nobody actually wants, simply because no one spoke their truth, and into Jim Collins’ concept of “The Genius of AND.” This idea has shaped me. I’ve incorporated it into the core values of two teams I’ve had the privilege of leading. The belief that you don’t have to choose between purpose and humanity, between celebrating achievements and having the sense of urgency to improve, between gritty facts and gritty faith. The “and” is the work.
Leadership lives in the tension. This episode will help you get more comfortable there. To read a later reflection of mind sharing this, check out Edition 046 of The 5-Minute Mentor.
🌀 AMPLIFY
🎧 Want to give these a listen? Check out my Top 5 Leadership Podcasts from May 2026 playlist here:
As you work through these episodes, here’s the thread I keep pulling on:
Leadership begins with what you choose to believe.
Dr. Edith Eger chose freedom… not because her circumstances offered it, but because she understood that no one could take her interior life from her. Tom Nash chose agency… picked up the pen to his own story in a moment that could have ended it. Charles Duhigg shows us that the silence on our teams is shaped by what people believe is safe, and that leaders can change that belief through specific, deliberate actions. Shawn Achor gives us the architecture: seven beliefs that quietly predict everything, and the reminder that as leaders, we’re either actively nurturing those beliefs in our people or leaving them untended. And BrenĂ© and Adam invite us into the Genius of AND, the leadership skill of holding two truths at once without needing to collapse the tension into something simpler.
Five different conversations. One through-line: what you believe shapes what becomes possible. For you, for your team, for the culture you’re building together.
The interior work of connection and belief isn’t separate from the leadership work. It is the leadership work.
As you listen, notice which conversation speaks most to where you are right now. And when something resonates, share it and tag me on social media (@melodystacy) 🌀 so we can keep learning and growing together.
The world needs leaders who believe. Keep going.
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