GRACE Works

Paul Crick
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Management

You can usually tell when pressure has started to change you. The conversation that would have taken ten minutes last year now takes three emails and a meeting. You are shorter with people you like. You catch yourself listening for the end of someone's sentence rather than the sense of it. GRACEWorks is a podcast about our capacity to relate. To each other, and to ourselves, and particularly under pressure, whether that pressure arrived by accident, came from outside, or is something we have quietly done to ourselves. If you have built something, you will know a particular version of this. You hired well. You meant to step back. And still the hard calls land on your desk, everything comes back to you, and the business keeps growing while leadership feels increasingly stretched. That is rarely a talent problem. What usually happens is that complexity grows faster than the ways people have learned to work together. The organisation has not yet learned to carry what growth is asking of it, so you carry it instead. Underneath that sits an older and simpler question, and it is the one this podcast is really about. How do people become more capable together? Not how to become a better leader, or a tougher individual, or a higher performer. How do we cultivate, between us, the capacities that let us think, decide, disagree and carry more than any of us could alone? Trust, judgement and shared responsibility are not installed. We grow them between people, usually under pressure. Each episode is an unhurried conversation with someone who has thought seriously about that. What trust actually rests on. How people learn. What happens to judgement when the stakes rise. How we find our way back to each other after we have got it wrong. Organisations turn up often, because they are one of the richest places to watch human beings under load. But they are the laboratory here, not the subject. The subject is always human. This is not motivation. It's not productivity hacks. And it's not another mindset podcast telling you to push through. Your plan and pitch deck say one thing. Real life seems to say something different. These conversations sit with that gap rather than trying to talk you out of it. If more decisions return to you than move away from you. If you are tired of managing pressure by brute force. If success has come at the cost of ease, meaning, or your health. If you want to build something that can carry more without losing what made it work in the first place. And if you would rather hear people think out loud than be told what to do, this is for you. Hosted by Paul Crick. Twenty years alongside organisations of every size, many more practising Aikido, and a long habit of watching closely and being slow to assume. GRACEWorks is part of The Elevate Partnership. Questions before answers, mostly. Find an hour and come and think alongside us.

  1. 5d ago

    Who Are You Designing the Chair For? With Liz Pealey

    Liz Pealey spent her first year at art school designing beautiful chairs for spaces that didn't need them. Then a new course leader asked who the chair was actually for, and nobody in the room could answer. Fifteen years later she's still asking that question of banks, government departments and her own return to work after having a baby. In this conversation: Liz Pealey has spent fifteen years working out why organisations get in their own way, at HSBC, at an agency, at Sky Betting & Gaming, at HMRC, and at a bank where she ended up leading eighteen designers. We get into why she wasn't allowed to speak to a colleague she could see across the room, what a "coffee holder" is, and why an expensive consultancy report full of things your own people already told you is a very costly way of not listening. Then it turns. Liz talks about her own return from maternity leave, being asked back a month early, and what happened in the car park afterwards. It is the least abstract thing anyone has said on this podcast about why the human side of work is a commercial problem. She ends with the question she'd hand to any woman deciding whether to go back, and a warning about the word "bouncing". About Liz Pealey: Liz Pealey runs Pealey Consulting, where she does fractional business change and service design for growing organisations, and built Return Ready, a programme that treats the first ninety days after parental leave as a transition to be designed rather than an admin task. She trained in product and service design at The Glasgow School of Art, spent fifteen years in corporate and public sector roles, and is also an accredited infant sleep consultant, which turns out to be less of a detour than it sounds. Resources mentioned in this episode: Liz on LinkedIn, and the place she asks people to go — linkedin.com/in/elizabethpealey. You can book half an hour in her calendar directly from her profile.Pealey Consulting, Return Ready and the Manager Masterclass — returners.pealey.co.ukLiz's workshop and facilitation work — pealey.co.ukCohorrt, the fractional-leader community — cohorrt.com

  2. 5d ago

    What Deb Crowe Learned About The Heart Inside Organisations

    Deb Crowe's Nana had polio and dragged one leg, so a ten-minute walk to church took half an hour. Deb was nine, and that half hour taught her the thing she now brings to chief executives. A conversation about listening without fixing, planning the hard conversation, and why a fractional chief heart officer starts with being present. In this conversation: Deb's father died when she was twenty-one. She spent the next seven years volunteering in hospice and came out, in her words, an exemplary listener. Paul asks what those rooms taught her that business school couldn't, and what "heart" actually does inside an organisation. They talk about the strategy with the gold bow that nobody can carry out, white space in the calendar, why failure and success are the same thing, and the silent retreat that started her year. It ends with her nana, a dark rum and coke, and a question about whether she's stopped to celebrate. About Deb Crowe: Deb Crowe is an executive coach, speaker and fractional chief heart officer based in London, Ontario. She is the author of The Heart-Centered Leadership Playbook, teaches emotional intelligence at university level, and works with leadership teams on culture, communication and difficult conversations. She is also a yoga teacher and has worked with adults with disabilities for many years. Resources mentioned in this episode: Deb Crowe — debcrowe.comFractional Chief Heart Officer — debcrowe.com/fractional-chief-heart-officerThe Heart-Centered Leadership Playbook by Deborah Crowe — [Buy the book]Deb's Substack — debcrowe.substack.comDeb on LinkedIn — linkedin.com/in/debcroweDeb on Instagram — @deborah__croweDeb's podcast — Imperfect - The Heart Centred PodcastThe EQ-i 2.0 emotional intelligence assessment, which Deb uses in her teachingDr Alan Wolfelt, grief educator

  3. Oct 2

    Your Inner World Walks In With You With Tim Wright

    Tim Wright is a psychotherapist who works almost entirely with senior leaders, which means he spends his days with people who cannot afford to look uncertain anywhere else. He thinks the steadiest-looking person in your organisation might be carrying the most. This conversation explores the difference between stress and pressure, why armour is normal, and what it takes to trust you'll be okay. In this conversation, Tim draws a distinction most of us collapse. Stress is external, largely outside your control, and workplaces will always produce it. Pressure is internal, what you do with the stress, and it comes from the relationship you have with yourself. From there he makes a claim that should unsettle anyone who keeps their personal life in one box and their professional one in another: your inner world walks into every meeting you go into, and shapes what happens there. We get into projection, and the leader whose fear of a decision turned out to have almost nothing to do with the decision. We get into armour, why everyone wears it, why he refuses to call it a fault, and what it costs. And he makes a case I have not heard put this plainly: executives should have supervision, as therapists do, because the intensity is comparable and the reflective obligation isn't. He leaves it with a question rather than a prescription, aimed squarely at whoever in your organisation currently looks the most together. About Tim: Timothy Wright is an integrative psychotherapist with around fifteen years in practice, a decade of it in private practice, working at the point where leadership, pressure and wellbeing meet. He now works almost exclusively with senior leaders and executives through Leading Edge, which he describes as a psychological partnership: confidential, non-directive, and deliberately free of consequence. Before that, he designed and delivered Employee Assistance Programme services for organisations. He writes on leadership pressure, emotional perfectionism and the limits of conventional wellbeing provision. Read the blog article here Resources mentioned in this episode: Leading Edge — leadingedge.org.uk Tim Wright on LinkedIn"Leadership Pressure Is Not Stress" (Feb 2026)"The Shadow of Emotional Perfectionism" (Oct 2025)"Have we started treating emotions like gospel truth?" (Oct 2025)

  4. Sep 30

    What's at the Top of Your Hill with Karen Valencic

    Karen Valencic was the family peacemaker — the one who baked cookies so nobody had to say the difficult thing. Then she became an engineer on a General Motors floor where the ratio was ten men to one woman, and eventually said the difficult thing anyway. It cost her a black mark on her record. Thirty years later, she teaches conflict for a living, and she still doesn't start with the conflict. In this conversation: Karen spent a decade in engineering before an aikido demonstration rearranged how she understood power — not force, which pushes, but something rotational that moves with. From that, she built a body of work about conflict that begins nowhere near the argument. We get into why the physician who says "the lab tech laughs me off" has misidentified the problem, why sixteen warring hospital staff will tell you the same thing they want if you ask them about bicycles instead, and why she now thinks being totally truthful all the time is not the same as being useful. There's a definition of grace in here that has nothing to do with softness. And there's a moment late on where she names the thing aikido actually taught her, which turns out not to be about other people at all. The question she'd hand to anyone who thinks conflict is something to win: when have you ever actually won one? About Karen Valencic: Karen Valencic is a speaker, author and consultant who has spent three decades teaching people to work with conflict rather than against it. A mechanical engineer by training, she began her career at Delco Remy, a division of General Motors, and developed the Spiral Impact® method by combining principles from aikido, which she has practised to black belt, with the physics she already knew. She writes Ahh…Yes! Power with Grace on Substack and is active in the Conscious Capitalism community. Resources mentioned in this episode: Karen's website — karenvalencic.com (also reachable via spiralimpact.com)Spiral Impact: The Black Belt Edition — The Power to Get It Done with Grace — Karen's book on AmazonKaren's Substack, Ahh…Yes! Power with Grace — valencic.substack.comKaren on LinkedIn — linkedin.com/in/karenvalencicKaren's "Conflict Like Water / What's the Cost of Conflict?" video — on her home page [Link]Thomas Crum — the aikido demonstration that started it; his book The Magic of Conflict [LINK TO ADD]Onegaishimasu — the aikido greeting, "will you practise with me?"A Course in Miracles — referenced by Karen on defensiveness as attackConscious Capitalism — consciouscapitalism.org

  5. Sep 14

    We Are The Miracle We Are Looking For With Genevieve Westerman

    Genevieve Westerman has spent her life paying attention to what happens between people — and underneath it, to the plain miracle of being alive at all. We move from a furious teenager who couldn't order cheese in a language she didn't yet speak, to a woman who came back from the edge of death and chose to stay. It's a conversation about power, silence, the body, and the strange idea that we might already be the thing we keep trying to become. In this conversation, Genevieve draws a line most leaders miss: the difference between power over — telling people what to do because you're the expert — and power with, which she describes as drawing forth the wisdom already in the room. She makes an uncomfortable case that politeness can be more dangerous than conflict, because the dysfunction just goes underground. And she keeps returning to the body — the idea that dialogue is a physiological event, that the body knows before the mind can find the words. Somewhere in the middle, it stops being a conversation about work at all. What you take from it depends on what you bring; most people will leave sitting with her one unanswerable question — how does anything know how to become whole? About Genevieve: Genevieve M. Westerman is a writer, yoga teacher, and dialogue practitioner whose work centres on how people talk past each other and what it takes to actually meet. Born in the Philippines and raised for a time by her aunt and uncle before moving to the Netherlands at fifteen and later to the UK, she came to this work through yoga, regenerative and organic farming, food-forest design, and her own recovery from a traumatic brain injury. She writes and teaches under the banner of Nourishing Dialogues. Resources: Genevieve's website — thenourishingdialogues.com Genevieve's Substack — "Nourishing Dialogues" Genevieve's book — Nourishing Dialogues. Grab a free chapter here and buy a copy hereConnect with Genevieve on LinkedIn

  6. Sep 1

    Something Good Will Come From This with Barry Adkins

    Barry Adkins was an ordinary engineer who liked being at home, right up until the night two police officers and a man in plain clothes appeared at his door. This is the story of what a father does with the worst thing that can happen to him, and the walk that turned unbearable grief into a mission. In this conversation Barry lost his son Kevin to alcohol, then walked fourteen hundred miles across three states with Kevin’s ashes in his backpack, telling the story at every school and church that would have him. Two decades and two hundred thousand listeners later, he still says he is not the right man for the job. We talk about the ordinary life he almost took for granted, the 4am moment that gave him a mission, the trick of counting in small chunks when the road is too long, and the forgiveness that took years and had to start with himself. It is a conversation about making something good from the unthinkable, and about how the people most worth listening to are often the ones who never set out to be heard. About Barry Adkins Barry Adkins is a speaker and prevention advocate, and the author of Kevin’s Last Walk. After losing his son Kevin, he walked from Arizona to Montana to raise awareness of alcohol and drug harm, and has since spoken to hundreds of thousands of students and families. His latest project, the Million Mile Challenge, invites others to tell their own stories and walk their own miles. Resources mentioned in this episode • The Million Mile Challenge — millionmilechallenge.com • Kevin’s Last Walk (book and website) — kevinslastwalk.com

  7. Aug 18

    The Aliveness I Didn’t Know Was a Thing With Yvonne Moore

    Yvonne Moore was not an artist four years ago. Then a marriage ended, her father died, and one restless evening she watched paint pour across a canvas and felt something she had no idea was even a thing. This is a conversation about coming back to life in your fifties, and being able to say exactly how it happened. In this conversation Yvonne spent her forties with the big house and the big job, quietly asking whether this was all there was. She now has far less of that, and far more life. We talk about the aliveness she found in paint and mess, the truth that only shows up once she stops trying to control the painting, telling intuition from avoidance, and why she has renamed her first solo show an invitation rather than an exhibition. It is a conversation for anyone who suspects it might be too late to become someone new, and hopes it isn’t. About Yvonne Yvonne Moore is an Irish artist who came to painting in 2022, in her mid-fifties, after a season of upheaval. Working largely with acrylic pouring and abstract landscape, she paints for what she calls aliveness and truth rather than technique, and is preparing her first solo show. She is refreshingly clear that if she can do this, plenty of other people can too. Resources mentioned in this episode Yvonne’s website: find all her prints and original artwork here.Yvonne on Instagram: @thisisyvonnemoore Yvonne on LinkedIn GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough. Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another. Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment. If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it. © 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

  8. Jul 20

    Open The Aperture with Teri Pruitt

    Teri Pruitt has spent thirty years in the wings, eighteen of them on Wicked, making a live show land the same every night while nobody in the audience sees the effort. In this conversation, we follow her from a girl who was always someone's little sister to a woman who has made a craft, and now a business, out of the disciplines that keep a team alive under real pressure. In this conversationWhat does a lifetime of deliberately invisible work teach you about ego, pressure, and worth? Teri and I talk about why backstage was the first place she got to be herself, how you hold continuity and aliveness at the same time through the work nobody sees, and why she now insists on taking the work seriously without taking herself seriously. There are two stories you won't forget: a ringing phone in ancient Rome and a goat tail carried across a Broadway stage like a torch, and each carries a real lesson about care and repair. You'll leave with a cleaner way to think about your own team: hold the goal tightly, hold everything else, including yourself, lightly. About Teri PruittTeri Pruitt is a Broadway wardrobe professional with more than thirty years in live theatre, including roughly eighteen years on Wicked. She is the founder of Open the Aperture, a consultancy that brings theatrical solutions to business problems, taking companies backstage to learn how live performance handles pressure, teamwork and repair. Her talks run from a brown-bag lunch to a keynote, and they are funny before they are instructive. Resources mentioned in this episodeOpen the Aperture / Teri Pruitt Teri on LinkedIn YouTube — “Behind the Magic of Wicked with Teri Pruitt”  GRACEWorks is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and thoughtful humans who sense that success alone is no longer enough. Hosted by Paul Crick, each episode explores what it means to lead, live, and work with GRACE especially when we find ourselves under pressure of some sort or another. Through honest conversations, lived experience, and reflective inquiry, GRACEWorks invites you to move beyond relentless striving toward clarity, presence, and alignment. If this episode resonated, you’re warmly invited to explore more conversations, reflections, and practices at GRACEWorks and to share this episode with someone who might need it. © 2026, The Elevate Partnership Limited. All Rights Reserved.

See All (30)

About

You can usually tell when pressure has started to change you. The conversation that would have taken ten minutes last year now takes three emails and a meeting. You are shorter with people you like. You catch yourself listening for the end of someone's sentence rather than the sense of it. GRACEWorks is a podcast about our capacity to relate. To each other, and to ourselves, and particularly under pressure, whether that pressure arrived by accident, came from outside, or is something we have quietly done to ourselves. If you have built something, you will know a particular version of this. You hired well. You meant to step back. And still the hard calls land on your desk, everything comes back to you, and the business keeps growing while leadership feels increasingly stretched. That is rarely a talent problem. What usually happens is that complexity grows faster than the ways people have learned to work together. The organisation has not yet learned to carry what growth is asking of it, so you carry it instead. Underneath that sits an older and simpler question, and it is the one this podcast is really about. How do people become more capable together? Not how to become a better leader, or a tougher individual, or a higher performer. How do we cultivate, between us, the capacities that let us think, decide, disagree and carry more than any of us could alone? Trust, judgement and shared responsibility are not installed. We grow them between people, usually under pressure. Each episode is an unhurried conversation with someone who has thought seriously about that. What trust actually rests on. How people learn. What happens to judgement when the stakes rise. How we find our way back to each other after we have got it wrong. Organisations turn up often, because they are one of the richest places to watch human beings under load. But they are the laboratory here, not the subject. The subject is always human. This is not motivation. It's not productivity hacks. And it's not another mindset podcast telling you to push through. Your plan and pitch deck say one thing. Real life seems to say something different. These conversations sit with that gap rather than trying to talk you out of it. If more decisions return to you than move away from you. If you are tired of managing pressure by brute force. If success has come at the cost of ease, meaning, or your health. If you want to build something that can carry more without losing what made it work in the first place. And if you would rather hear people think out loud than be told what to do, this is for you. Hosted by Paul Crick. Twenty years alongside organisations of every size, many more practising Aikido, and a long habit of watching closely and being slow to assume. GRACEWorks is part of The Elevate Partnership. Questions before answers, mostly. Find an hour and come and think alongside us.

Information

  • Creator
    Paul Crick
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    30
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Elevate Partnership Limited All Rights Reserved.
  • Show Website
    GRACE Works