This conversation with Jean Gomes is about what it means to stay human when leadership, work, and technology keep pushing us toward speed, cynicism, and performance.

We start with agency, not “positive thinking,” but the practical kind: choosing how you show up, what you feed, and what you participate in. From there, we get into the stories we’re sold about success (and why so many of them collapse in real life), what “leaders worth believing in” actually means, and why accountability has a physical and emotional foundation, not just an intellectual one.

We also talk about AI, tech culture, and the way “existential fear” can be used to numb people into passivity. Jean shares why the real advantage in an AI-first world isn’t efficiency, it’s mindset, embodied intelligence, imagination, and moral ambition.

What comes up in the conversation

In this episode, we talk about:

- Why “agency” is getting harder to hold onto and why it still matters

- The gap between business-school success stories and what actually happens inside change

- Leadership archetypes and why charisma without moral centre is a dead end

- Why your body is part of your brain and what embodied intelligence changes

- The Mindset Economy: what becomes valuable when machines can think

- AI narratives, power concentration, and the risk of learned futility

- Polarisation at work, ideology vs values, and what it costs to stay quiet

- Reclaiming a “both-and” mindset in a world addicted to binary thinking

- Building a healthier relationship with your future self

About Jean Gomes

Jean Gomes is a New York Times best-selling author and an advisor to hundreds of CEOs, focused on applying the science of mindset to leadership, wellbeing, and organisational agility. He is part of the research-based consultancy Outside, and co-host of The Evolving Leader and The Mindset Economy podcasts. Since April 2024, Jean has been Professor of Practice at UCL Global Business School for Health. He co-authored the New York Times bestseller The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, and his book Leading in a Non-Linear World explores how to build mindsets for uncertainty. Jean also writes the newsletter The Mindset Monthly.

Links & resources

Jean’s Speaker Profile (London Speaker Bureau):

https://londonspeakerbureau.com/speaker-profile/jean-gomes/

Jean’s newsletter (Mindset Monthly / The Mindset Economy on LinkedIn):

https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/mindset-monthly-7001265313933619201/

About the podcast

12 Steps to Success is a podcast about what happens when the path you were on stops making sense.

Hosted by Eric Mackay, the show centres on honest conversations with people navigating change, pressure, identity shifts, recovery, and redefinition. These are not success stories or instruction manuals, but real conversations about how people live inside uncertainty and keep moving without false certainty.

Website: https://twelvestepstosuccess.com

Instagram: https://instagram.com/twelvestepstosuccess