Today I had the privilege of sitting down with Chinazom Nwabueze, a Nigerian-born performance psychologist whose journey from Lagos to London to the US reads like a masterclass in resilience and reinvention. We traced his remarkable path from those brutal boarding school days in eastern Nigeria—where he learned survival skills that would serve him for life—through his economics studies at Leicester, a successful banking career, and his bold pivot into performance psychology at 39. What struck me most was Chinazom's raw honesty about that pivotal moment when he looked in the mirror and refused to let fear of failure trap him in a career that was slowly killing his spirit. His insights on men's mental fitness are profound, particularly his concept of "real talk"—both with ourselves and others—and how most of us reach our forties having mastered spreadsheets but knowing nothing about our own inner workings.

The conversation kept circling back to self-love under pressure, which Chinazom identified as the deceptively simple answer to the complicated question of high performance. His hiking group of Nigerian men and the transformative power of "banter" reminded me that healing happens in community, not isolation. Sometimes the most radical act isn't positive thinking—it's simply getting curious about what we're actually grateful for when life feels overwhelming.

Bio:

Chinazom (pronounced 'Chee-Nah-Zuhm') Nwabueze is a strategic and innovative C-level coach, consultant, advisor, trainer and facilitator, Chinazom delivers solutions at the intersection of business, people, and coaching strategy. As the founder of Dreamcatchers Performance LLC, he has dedicated his career to integrating high performance with mental fitness to unlock resilience, adaptability, innovation and sustained change. Through deep discovery, Chinazom creates innovative solutions that bridge the gap between business transformation and human capital, driving business outcomes, breakthrough performance, and best-in-class working environments.

I had such a meaningful conversation with Kristal DeSantis, a marriage and family therapist whose journey from Kobe, Japan to becoming an expert on modern relationships perfectly illustrates how outsider perspective can reveal hidden truths. Growing up as the eldest of eight in a multilingual household with Chinese and American parents, Kristal learned early about responsibility and organization, but it wasn't until she landed in North Carolina at eighteen that she discovered the bewildering complexity of American dating culture. Her hilarious moment of asking a coworker "Who are his parents?" after hearing about a first date perfectly captures the culture shock that would eventually fuel her professional calling. What struck me most was Kristal's refreshingly honest admission that she avoided dating entirely until family pressure around her sister's wedding forced her to confront her own relational blind spots. Her discovery that being intellectually capable doesn't automatically translate to emotional vulnerability led her to therapy, where she learned the difference between being guarded and being open to connection.

Kristal's decision to write specifically for men emerged from noticing the stark imbalance in relationship resources available to couples, and her insights about the myth of the "non-emotional man" challenge us to recognize that passion for football and road rage are just as much emotional expressions as tears. In a world obsessed with quick fixes and life hacks, Kristal reminds us that the deepest connections require the courage to step into the arena of vulnerability.

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I had such a great conversation with Tripp Lanier, who has this gift for cutting through all the self-help nonsense with refreshing honesty. We got into the whole armoring thing that men do—you know, that exhausting performance where we pretend we've got everything figured out while secretly running from anything that might actually challenge us. Tripp's journey perfectly illustrates how we convince ourselves we can hack our way out of life's uncomfortable realities, only to discover that the escape hatch we're desperately seeking doesn't actually exist. What I loved about our chat was his insight into authentic men's work—the difference between advice-giving (which nobody wants) and the art of asking questions that help guys discover their own truths. We talked about responsibility, power, and why so many successful men are secretly miserable despite checking all the cultural boxes. Tripp's perspective on growing up versus just getting older really hit home, especially his point about how we keep looking for the next guru or system to save us from having to actually feel our feelings. The whole conversation kept circling back to this central question: what if we stopped running from the very things that could transform us?

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