Healing the Workplace

Heal Magazine

Work should be a place where we thrive, not just survive. But for many of us, especially those at the margins, it’s still a space of silence, burnout, and shrinking ourselves to fit in. Healing the Workplace is a bold, honest podcast exploring the future of mental health at work — through real stories, grounded insights, and socially conscious conversations. Hosted by Selma Lemsaadi (founder of Heal Magazine) and Axelle Ahanhanzo (founder of LAUDACE), each episode goes beyond surface-level wellness trends to uncover what it really takes to build safer, more human workplaces.

Episodes

  1. 3 days ago

    S02E04 | 30 years inside big tech: what actually keeps you human when everything accelerates

    Kimberly Fuqua has spent nearly 30 years inside Microsoft. She's watched the industry go from encyclopedias to AI, from two business trips a year to a pace that shifts hour by hour. And what she's learned across all of it has almost nothing to do with technology. When her son was diagnosed with autism, Kimberly left Microsoft at the peak of her career. One year later, she came back — fully remote, two business trips a year, and a promotion. She got more by stepping back than she ever got by pushing through. That negotiation, and what it took to believe she deserved it, shaped everything that came after. In this episode, Selma and Axelle sit down with Kimberly to ask what nearly three decades inside one of the world's fastest-moving companies actually teaches you about staying human. They get into the speed problem — how technology evolves faster than people do, and what gets lost when organisations stop accounting for that gap. Kimberly's framework for staying grounded: identity, purpose, courage, community, resilience. And her distinction between bouncing back and bouncing forward — to the next version of yourself, not the previous one. Her advice for anyone close to burnout right now: five minutes. No meditation app required. Just sit, and be. Healing the Workplace is a podcast by Heal Magazine and LAUDACE. Instagram: @healingtheworkplace @healmagazine @thisislaudace 🎧 Subscribe and leave a review if this one landed.

    1hr 10min
  2. 27 May

    S02E03 | Still showing up, already gone: the emotional truth behind quiet quitting

    Nicole Sura built an Instagram platform called ShowerrBear around a single premise: naming the emotional truths people carry through their working lives but rarely say out loud. The quiet dread. The over-adaptation. The moment you realise you've stopped caring — but you're not leaving either. In this episode, Selma and Axelle ask her whether quiet quitting is a strategy or a symptom. Her answer lands somewhere more uncomfortable than either. Nicole traces disengagement back to a survival instinct most people never stop to examine. Your job is your livelihood, your stability, your ability to eat and pay rent. Of course, the primal fear of losing it runs underneath everything. And that fear, when it runs long enough, creates fissures: between mind and body, between how you feel and what you can name, between who you are and what the job is asking you to become. She talks about panic attacks she couldn't connect to stress at the time. Her mother's debilitating back pain that ended her corporate career. The way the body starts speaking long before the mind catches up. And the specific trap uncertainty sets: it makes you cling to the job that's draining you, because leaving feels too risky to consider. The conversation also gets into who gets to disengage safely — and who doesn't. The difference between a boundary and a withdrawal. And why the next step, whatever it is, has to come from inside you rather than from anyone else's roadmap. Healing the Workplace is a podcast by Heal Magazine and LAUDACE. Instagram: @healingtheworkplace @thisislaudace @healmagazine 🎧 Subscribe and leave a review if this one landed.

    52 min

About

Work should be a place where we thrive, not just survive. But for many of us, especially those at the margins, it’s still a space of silence, burnout, and shrinking ourselves to fit in. Healing the Workplace is a bold, honest podcast exploring the future of mental health at work — through real stories, grounded insights, and socially conscious conversations. Hosted by Selma Lemsaadi (founder of Heal Magazine) and Axelle Ahanhanzo (founder of LAUDACE), each episode goes beyond surface-level wellness trends to uncover what it really takes to build safer, more human workplaces.