The Courage of a Leader Podcast is where top leaders tell real stories about achieving extraordinary results and share practical advice and techniques you can immediately apply for your own success. This is where you will get inspired and take bold, courageous action.
Guests on The Courage of a Leader® are powerful, successful leaders who are passionate about authentic, engaging, difference-making leadership. Amy gets beyond the theory and dives deep with her guests about how things really work, so you walk away with tangible ideas to grow your influence, inspire your team, and get extraordinary results.
The podcast launched on February 22, 2022, and reached the top 75 in the US, UK, Australia, Denmark, Philippines and The Netherlands within 3 days; and remains in the TOP 3% GLOBALLY. That’s exciting and enables us to reach more leaders.
Join us to step into the full power of your leadership and achieve what you care about most. Here’s where you’ll ignite The Courage of a Leader®!
How do you give difficult feedback without damaging trust? Katie O’Brien Ceccarini, author of Fearless Feedback: Everything Managers Have Never Been Taught About Feedback and founder of Endurance Management Coaching, brings two decades of experience leading, managing, and training teams. She shares how leaders can prepare for hard conversations, navigate emotional reactions, and say what […]
We often treat burnout as a personal failure when it is really a warning that our demands have exceeded our available time, energy, and support. Burnout prevention specialist Sophie Anderson shares five courageous habits that help us protect our energy before exhaustion takes over. She challenges us and helps us see how to practically get […]
The higher we climb as leaders, the easier we expect decisions to become. Yet, the opposite is often true. Bigger responsibilities bring greater complexity, higher stakes, and more uncertainty. The strongest leaders aren’t the ones who always know the right answer. They’re the ones who have the courage to move forward without waiting for perfect […]
What if the biggest driver of employee engagement isn’t charisma? Amy challenges one of leadership’s most common misconceptions, showing why authenticity, presence, and intentional leadership inspire people far more than motivational speeches or big personalities. Through five practical leadership questions, she shares strategies for reconnecting disengaged employees, building trust through everyday interactions, creating a compelling […]
Why do accountability systems fail even when roles and responsibilities seem clear? In this episode, we sit down with Robert Snyder, Founder and President of Innovation Elegance, LLC, to explore why most organizations unintentionally separate authority from accountability, creating confusion, project delays, and trust issues. Robert introduces his Five Verbs framework—draft, review, revise, approve, and […]
What if the hardest thing you ever face becomes the experience that shapes you into a stronger leader? Steve Garraty shares how a cancer diagnosis at age 18 became one of the most defining experiences of his life. Through a season marked by uncertainty, loss, and physical hardship, he discovered the power of perspective, resilience, […]
In the second episode of the Courage in Action series, Amy explores the traits that define courageous leadership in today’s workplace. She challenges the idea that leadership is about having all the answers and instead focuses on the courage required to navigate uncertainty, have difficult conversations, build trust, and lead authentically. Through practical leadership examples, […]
In this first episode of the new Courage in Action series, Amy answers some questions she receives from leaders and their teams about the reality of change, especially when it is unexpected or uncomfortable. She walks through how leaders can pause instead of react, how they can lead their teams with intention, and why resistance […]
Most leaders want change, but we often avoid the one place it has to start. Truth. In this encore presentation of our conversation with David Johnson, we challenge the instinct to jump straight to vision and instead ground ourselves in reality. We explore why leaders struggle to be fully transparent, how avoiding hard truths slows […]
This encore presentation revisits our conversation with Natasha Miller Williams, a speaker and writer who brings data and insight together to advance the conversation about inclusion in the workplace. Together we explore a powerful idea: one person can challenge an established system. We talk about why systems inside organizations often continue long after they stop […]
International Women’s Day is more than a calendar moment. It is a leadership opportunity. In this episode, we challenge ourselves to move beyond performative gestures and celebrate in ways that actually build visibility, confidence, and equity. We share four practical ways to recognize the women on our teams with intention and specificity. We reflect on […]
Leadership often asks us to be steady, composed, and productive, even when real emotions are moving underneath. This is an UNFILTERED compilation, in which we bring together some of the most powerful, raw and unfiltered moments from our UNFILTERED series. Across these episodes my co-host Daphna Horowitz and I very intentionally work to slow down […]
Leadership often looks confident and composed from the outside. Inside, it can feel very different. In this UNFILTERED compilation, we slow down and talk honestly about what leaders carry beneath the surface. Self doubt. Imposter syndrome. Loneliness. The pressure to stay in control. These are not flaws or failures. They are human responses to responsibility, […]
As we look back on 2025, this conversation brings together five voices who helped shape how we think about leadership when things feel uncertain, human, and real. Russell Harvey, Genevieve Retzlaff, Pat Broe, Mary Lynn Fayoumi, and Susan Inouye each offered a different lens on what it takes to lead forward instead of clinging to […]
Crisis and change have a way of revealing what truly drives leadership. In this episode, I explore how leading through uncertainty is less about control and more about clarity, trust, and intentional choice. I introduce a simple but powerful formula for composure and reflect on why staying steady does not mean ignoring emotions yet learning […]
What if one of the greatest challenges in leadership isn’t decision-making or pressure but loneliness? In this Unfiltered Series conversation, leadership experts Amy Riley and Daphna Horowitz get real about the isolation that often hides behind confidence and success. Even the most connected leaders can feel unseen when everyone’s looking to them for answers. Amy and Daphna explore how this quiet […]
In this episode of UNFILTERED: Courageous Conversations about Anger and What your fire is trying to tell you, Amy and Daphna explore the misunderstood emotion of anger, an experience many of us are taught to hide or downplay. Together, they unpack why anger is often labeled as “unprofessional” or “unproductive” and instead reframe it as […]
We all want to do things well — to be responsible, stay on top of it, make sure nothing slips through the cracks. But when does that turn into control? In this episode of UNFILTERED, Daphna Horowitz and Amy Riley get honest about the fine line between responsible leadership and the need to control everything. […]
The Courage of a Leader® 4 Pillars
The Courage To Be Authentically You
the courage to say what needs
to be said
the courage to TRUST THE
LEGACY
A Summary of The Courage of a Leader® 4 Pillars