Leading Human
by Chad Prevost
You've achieved the success. You've checked the boxes. But something still feels off.Welcome to Leading Human—a podcast for high-achieving leaders, founders, and mission-driven professionals who are questioning whether the life they built is actually the life they want. This isn't about productivity hacks or surface-level self-care. This is about the real work: reclaiming your authentic self beneath the conditioning, the burnout, and the unconscious patterns running your life.Hosted by Chad Prevost (and sometimes Shelley), co-founders of Big Self School, Leading Human explores conscious leadership through the lens of depth psychology, the Enneagram, and the emerging role of AI in human development. We believe burnout isn't something that happens *to* you—it's something that happens *for* you. It's a soul crisis revealing where you've been abandoning yourself.Each episode tackles the friction between who you are and who you've become. We explore how personality operates beneath the s
Episodes
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Stop Chasing and Start Building with Justin Jones-Fosu
At 33, Justin Jones-Fosu pulled his car over to the side of the road and wept about a father who was never around. For years he’d lived by a rule that sounds a lot like fairness: if I didn’t cause it, I shouldn’t have to carry it. This conversation is about what he did next. Justin runs a firm...
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What If No One Comes
There has never been an easier time to publish a book, so why are more people than ever afraid to write theirs? Are the two things related? Two fears keep a good book unpublished: that it’s hard, and that you’ll put it out there and no one will come. Chad takes both apart, with a reality check on...
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Four Million Books Published Last Year: What It Actually Costs to Publish One
Last year 4.2 million books were published in the United States with an ISBN. Three and a half million of them were self-published. Traditional publishers put out 642,000. So for every book that came through the old machine, more than five came through the side door, and this year almost a third…
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Ready, Nearly, Not Yet
Last week I mentioned an agent who read 6,152 queries and signed two writers. This week I want to talk about the other 6,150. Every one of them got a letter—or possibly just a long and unreturned response—but one way or another the message said some version of: thank you, but this isn’t the right...
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Nobody Knows Anything, Except Maybe Your Editor
In 1983 the screenwriter William Goldman wrote three words that people in Hollywood have been quoting ever since. Nobody knows anything. About twenty years later a psychologist spent two decades testing whether that's true about everything, collecting somewhere near twenty-eight thousand...
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Random House Told You the Truth
In the summer of 2022 the federal government sued to stop the biggest publisher in the world from buying the fourth biggest, and for two weeks the people who run American publishing had to explain their business under oath. Asked how publishing decides what succeeds, the CEO of Penguin Random…
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Nobody Is Watching You That Closely, Especially Not Your Successes
Forty-six and twenty-three. Then forty-eight and eight. Those four numbers come from an experiment where college students had to wear a Barry Manilow t-shirt into a room full of strangers, and I think the second pair might be the most freeing finding in social psychology. Especially if you have...
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Two Fingers in the Book?
Did you keep two fingers in the book? One on the page you were on, one back at the choice, so a bad ending never had to count. Guilty! I’ve never met a Choose Your Own Adventure reader who didn’t. And if you were a purist, I genuinely want to hear from you, because maybe you’re my ideal reader....
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Every Day Is a Birthday
Live from Home Bar with Genesis, on a Friday evening in August. I brought a poem this time. The last time we sat down together I got self-conscious about which one to read and never read any of them, and then a night or two later I had a dream: a baby left with me in an upstairs room, a baby I...
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Why You Need to Hear from More Than Those Who Made It
Almost every piece of writing advice you have ever received came from a survivor. In 1943 a statistician looked at where returning bombers had been shot and realized the military was about to armor exactly the wrong parts of the plane. This episode is about what his correction has to do with…
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The Detours Are Sacred: Chris Heuertz on Grief, Love, and the Myth of Arrival
If you’ve spent any real time with the Enneagram, you’ve probably felt Chris Heuertz’s influence whether you knew his name or not. Chris is the author of seven books, including The Sacred Enneagram (foreword by Richard Rohr) and The Enneagram of Belonging, with an eighth on pilgrimage coming from...
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Why Everyone Else's Book Is Doing Better
You open the app and it seems like every writer you know is having a better year than you are. There’s a name for what’s happening in your head and it isn’t envy. Two psychologists went and read what NFL fans posted when the season schedule came out, and found that every single fanbase was…
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Learn by Going
Everyone has a GO button. Mine was a drawer holding seven unpublished choose-your-path books I finally published under my own name. What happened after? On what courage actually is (a heart energy, not a head energy), what it isn’t (recklessness refuses feedback; courage subscribes to it), and…
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We Should Have Quit That Day
Last week I told you to stick with things. This week I want to tell you about the afternoon Daniel Kahneman sat in a room, was handed the exact information that should have made him quit, and carried on as if nothing had happened. It cost him eight years, and the thing they were building was…
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Why We're Not Rational (And Never Were)
A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much is the ball? If you said ten cents, you're in good company, because more than half the students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton said the same thing. It's wrong. This episode is about why the wrong answer arrives so…
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What Your Book Is Worth
The Anthropic settlement got final approval, Amazon raised its royalty ceiling for the first time since 2007, and the first half sales numbers say something uncomfortable about nonfiction. Three answers to one question, and none of them came from a reader. The difficulty in life is the choice. If...
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Speaking into the Wilderness
I spent last week in a cabin outside Ellijay, Georgia, a couple of hours north of here. I’d thought about doing something more epic with my one week away, driving out to Chaco Canyon or somewhere like it, and then realized I’d spend most of the week driving and arrive exhausted. So, a cabin. I…
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Every Creative Block Is an Avoided Decision
There’s a decision you’ve not made for months. Maybe years. You know what it is. You knew what it was the moment you read that first sentence, it surfaced on its own, without any effort from you. That’s how you can tell it’s the one. And you know exactly why you haven’t made it. Here’s what I…
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Write the truest sentence you know
I had sixty-thousand words then I had twenty-thousand, and I still did not have a book. This Thursday’s episode is about how I finally learned the difference, and it’s the most useful thing I know about the work. The manuscript had frameworks. It had seven tidy maps. It had the warm, encouraging,...
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Locate yourself
I went out to play disc golf yesterday, and I kept losing focus on the game. My mind wandered off down every side trail in the woods. This Monday’s episode follows a few of those trails. We start with the poem you think you know. “The Road Not Taken” gets read as an anthem for bold…
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The Difficulty: live from The Home Bar with co-host Genesis the Greykid
The difficulty in life is the choice. And this week the choice came fast: an hour before we sat down, a tree took a lightning strike around the corner, dropped a branch on a woman’s car, smashed a transformer, took out the block. Genesis’s people — Josh, Kyle — ran toward it and pulled her out....
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Wait, For Now
There’s the feeling of standing on the edge of everything and nothing at once. So much that might happen. So much that could happen. And nothing has happened yet. You can feel your whole life leaning forward, and you can also feel that today, right now, for all your efforts, nothing’s changed....
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Genesis Greykid and Chad Prevost on the Creative Life and the Pathless Path
Host Chad Prevost and co-host Genesis launch the first live happy-hour episode of The Difficulty from Home Bar in downtown Chattanooga, inviting listeners to join Fridays and describing the city as a creative crossroads. They discuss Chattanooga’s “animal” vibe, then welcome Chicago-based...
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The Big Five Just Chased the Indie Author
The difficulty in life is the choice. And every choice is a crossroads. This week’s Working Writer roundup covers three stories that land on the same square, plus an announcement I’ve been sitting on. 1. Simon & Schuster relaunched Pocket Books as a home for indie and hybrid authors.One of the...
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Working Writer: The Money Moved
Five things that actually moved in publishing this month, and what to do about each. The Authors Guild puts hard numbers on why author income keeps slipping, Audible forces a year-end decision on audiobook royalties, FSG opens a no-fee $15,000 fellowship (deadline July 6), book discovery starts...
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Crossings: The 64-Page Book That Knows Where You Are
How many books on your shelf were actually finished (if they were even began)? This episode is about a different kind of book: short on purpose, beautiful enough to keep, written from the far side of a hard turn for the person standing in it now. A case for concentration over padding, and the…
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Weekend Reflection: Penelope at the Loom
Homer gives us a woman who weaves a shroud by day and unravels it by night, holding off a house full of suitors. We call it stalling. Homer calls it devotion. This one is for anyone whose truest work looks, from the outside, like waiting: the patient no, the thing left undone on purpose, the...
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Writing By Hand in the AI Era
I did an episode a few weeks back on Jasmine Sun’s provocations about independent writing in the AI era. One of those provocations: the value of polish is going down, and the value of personal style, charisma, and weirdness is going up. AI is very good at polished prose. AI is bad at voice—the...
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Opening the Doors: The Crossroads Commons
TL;DRToday we open the doors. Crossroads Publishing Group—a hybrid publisher of serious nonfiction in Chattanooga—announces the Crossroads Commons, our founding membership. Three tiers; fifty lifetime Founder spots, ever.• Join the Commons → crossroadspublishing.group/commons• Publish with us →...
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Weekend Edition: What Have You Ever Gained from Witholding?
This is one of the slower Saturday episodes—no announcements, no news. Just a piece of the book I’m writing, read and thought through out loud. It starts on Circe’s island, where Odysseus’s men have already been turned into pigs. It passes through Dante’s hell, where the greedy push boulders...
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The Questions a Serious Editor Asks of a Manuscript
Monday’s episode last week was about green-lighting yourself, refusing to wait for institutions to validate your work. Today we go one layer deeper. Green-lighting yourself does not mean publishing whatever you’ve got. It means doing the editorial work seriously, on your own behalf, so what you...
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The AI Conversation Just Shifted. Here's a Short Survey of Different Approaches.
WHAT’S EMERGING AND WHAT IT MEANS The question is shifting from “should writers use AI” to “what kind of writing is worth doing.” Tim Moon argues the shame regime around AI use is making honest conversation harder. The Atlantic piece shows the detection question is real but temporary — and the...
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Weekend Reflection: Wanting Everything and Becoming Nobody
In Dante’s Inferno, the lustful are not burned. They are swept, a great relentless wind moves them endlessly, helplessly, no footing, no direction, just the next gust carrying them where it will. This week’s episode is a weekend reflection; slower, more meditative, less about publishing and craft...
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Hybrid Publishing Is Having a Moment
Topics covered: A field report from week one of Crossroads Publishing Group—what’s coming in the door, what’s surprising, what’s confirming. What a hybrid press actually is. A working definition: a publisher where the author shares the financial risk via a fee (broadly $5K to $45K, depending on…
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On Green-Lighting Yourself
Brooke Warner, the founder of She Writes Press, gave a TED talk in 2017 called “Green-Lighting Yourself” that I have been thinking about for years. The argument: the traditional creative industries, publishing and film and music, have shifted toward green-lighting only artists who are already...
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Wrestling with the Self
When I was seventeen, I drove my parents’ conversion van home from a party with a six-pack in my system and a freshly-dented bumper on a stranger’s parked car. The officer who arrived at our house decided not to charge me with driving under the influence. He told me to go inside and sleep it off.…
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Andrew Najberg + The Working Publisher News Digest
This week, two things in one episode. I sit down with Andrew Najberg, novelist, poet, editor at Symposium Magazine, co-owner and co-editor-in-chief of Aethon Books: Wicked House, college teacher, husband, father, and my Chattanooga neighbor. Andrew has five novels out, including The Mobius Door,...
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Publishing as a Creative Act and Why Crossroads Opens Today
In 1917, Virginia and Leonard Woolf set up Hogarth Press in their dining room with about forty pounds of operating capital. Five years later, Sylvia Beach published Ulysses from a Paris bookshop after every major publisher refused it. A few months after that, Hogarth Press published The Waste…
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Scott Bedgood — From Sportswriter to Stand-Up: A Writer's Through-Line
Scott Bedgood started his career covering Little League games at the Tyler Morning Telegraph in Texas. Now Scott is a journalist, author, content marketer, and clean-comedy stand-up opening at The Ryman in just a few days. This is the first interview episode of The Difficulty, and Scott is the...
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Waking in the Dark Wood: Midlife, Ego, and the Descent
Using Dante’s opening in the “dark wood,” host Chad Prevost frames midlife as waking up to being lost after sleepwalking through socially prescribed success, and reframes “abandon hope” as an instruction to stop relying on the old self and tools that created the crisis. He describes needing...
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The Free Lunch Is Ending: Three Publishing Stories Worth Your Attention
If you're an indie writer paying attention to what's happening in publishing right now — this week was a tell. Three stories landed inside seven days. Each one pointed at the same answer.Episode 5 of The Difficulty — the first publishing-news episode in the new "How" lane. This week:— Audible's…
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Resentment, Avoidance, and the Work That Matters
If you finish a paying assignment and feel, instead of relief, a kind of dull resentment — this episode is for you. Or if you sit down to the work that's been pulling at you for years, and the dishes suddenly need doing, the bills suddenly need paying — this is for you, too.Episode 4 of The...
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The Kind of Help that's Hard to Ask For, and the Kind of Help You Don't Know You Need
I almost drowned on the Ocoee River. The thing that saved me wasn’t anything I’d thought to ask for. This is the first essay in the Saturday series at The Difficulty — longer pieces from a series I’ve been writing on Substack called The Descent, about the choices that shape a creative life....
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Get Over Yourself and Learn as You Go
Episode 2 of The Difficulty. The hardest thing about indie publishing isn't writing the book. It's giving up the fantasy that the book will market itself. In this one I get honest about the ego defenses we run as creators when it's time to put work into the marketplace — the survivorship bias of...
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The In-Between Is the Hard Part
The very first episode of The Difficulty. A 50-year-old paperweight on my father’s desk turned out to be a line from a 1900 Irish play, and the seed of this show. What you’re getting on Mondays vs. Thursdays, what’s launching this week at crossroadspublishing.group, the founding-and-selling of…
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Trailer: Welcome to The Difficulty
Here’s the question this show keeps asking: What does it cost to keep choosing the work? This is The Difficulty — a podcast about the choices that shape a creative life, and the courage it takes to make them. I’m Dr. Chad Prevost — writer, publisher, ICF-certified coach. I’ve spent years inside…
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Why Knowing Your Partner isn't the Same as Understanding Them (and How the Enneagram Helps)
In this episode, Chad, co-founder of Big Self School and part of the Leading Human podcast team, discusses the transformative power of the Enneagram in long-term relationships. He highlights the common communication pitfalls couples face and how understanding each other’s Enneagram types can...
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The 3 Communication Mistakes Leaders Make That Kill Trust (And How to Fix Them)
In this podcast episode, Chad Prevost, executive coach and co-founder of Big Self School, delves into the fundamentals of building trust within organizational teams. Chad highlights common communication mistakes that erode trust, such as making vague requests, assuming commitment when it hasn't...
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Building Trust and Integrity: A Leadership Journey with Jim Carlough
In this episode of Leading Human, host Chad welcomes leadership expert and author Jim Karloff to discuss his book, 'The Six Pillars of Effective Leadership: A Roadmap to Success.' Jim shares his journey in leadership, the inspiration behind his book, and how the six pillars—compassion, empathy,...
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Finding Enoughness with David Spinks
In this episode of Leading Human, we sit down with David Spinks, a renowned community builder, coach, and storyteller, to explore his journey of cultivating resilience, belonging, and inner alignment. From founding CMX to dealing with burnout and anxiety, David shares his personal experiences and...
About this show
You've achieved the success. You've checked the boxes. But something still feels off.Welcome to Leading Human—a podcast for high-achieving leaders, founders, and mission-driven professionals who are questioning whether the life they built is actually the life they want. This isn't about productivity hacks or surface-level self-care. This is about the real work: reclaiming your authentic self beneath the conditioning, the burnout, and the unconscious patterns running your life.Hosted by Chad Prevost (and sometimes Shelley), co-founders of Big Self School, Leading Human explores conscious leadership through the lens of depth psychology, the Enneagram, and the emerging role of AI in human development. We believe burnout isn't something that happens *to* you—it's something that happens *for* you. It's a soul crisis revealing where you've been abandoning yourself.Each episode tackles the friction between who you are and who you've become. We explore how personality operates beneath the s
Hosted by
Chad Prevost
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