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The Unlock Moment: The Inner Shift That Changes How You Lead

Dr Gary Crotaz PhD

Great leaders aren't defined by their title.

They're defined by a moment.

A moment when clarity cuts through the noise. A moment when a difficult decision becomes unavoidable. A moment that changes not just what they do, but how they lead.

This is The Unlock Moment.

Downloaded in more than 140 countries, The Unlock Moment is the leadership podcast that goes beyond success stories, strategies, and polished narratives to uncover the moments that shaped the people behind them.

In each episode, master interviewer, executive coach, and author Dr Gary Crotaz sits down with world-class leaders, entrepreneurs, athletes, thinkers, and change-makers to explore the turning points that transformed their perspective, their performance, and their lives.

These are not conversations about what happened.

They're conversations about what changed.

From boardrooms to Olympic podiums, from start-ups to global institutions, every guest reveals the insight, challenge, setback, or breakthrough that unlocked a new level of leadership.

Because when you understand someone's Unlock Moment, you understand what really matters.

And you might discover one of your own.

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20 episodes
Avg 46 min
English

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#200
Sunday · 53 min
200 Mark Thompson, CEO Coach and Author: What It Really Takes to Keep the Top Job
He’s been called the world’s number one CEO coach, with a client list that includes Richard Branson and Steve Jobs. What fewer people know is that Mark Thompson struggled all the way through school, with a learning and eyesight difficulty that made traditional education hard, and it took him years to understand why that mattered. Mark has coached the CEOs and founders of Pinterest, Lyft, Fitbit and Waymo, led more than a hundred board-level succession engagements, and in 2023 became the first c
#199
Friday · 32 min
199 Eve Hanks, Founder, CEO and Veterinary Scientist: More Terrifying to Stay Than Scary to Go
There’s a particular kind of certainty that comes from a traditional career. You have the training, the title, you know what good looks like. Starting a business feels like stepping off solid ground onto a rollercoaster you’re still building as it moves. Recorded live at Climb 26, this is a conversation with Eve Hanks, founder and CEO of veterinary diagnostics company MI:RNA. Eve spent years as a vet and scientist before a midlife moment when she sat with her finger hovering over the “incorpora
#198
Thursday · 34 min
198 Andy Wood, Entrepreneur and Creative Technology Pioneer: The Game That Still Haunts Me
How do you stay ahead of the curve when you’ve been surfing the wave for 40 years? Recorded live at Climb 26 as Andy Wood received the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award, this is a conversation with a man who has been present at the exact moment new ideas became whole new industries ... from the early days of the UK games industry, through computer vision and digital humans, to the AI tools reshaping creativity today. Andy takes me back to the beginning: an adopted boy, endlessly curious, se
#197
Wednesday · 31 min
197 Tayo Adebisi, Founder and E-commerce Entrepreneur: From £5,000 to £5 Million
Most great things don’t start with a perfect plan. They start with a moment. Recorded live at Climb 26, this is the story of how Tayo Adebisi turned a £5,000 investment into a business turning over £5 million. Tayo didn’t come from retail, or business, or money. She came to e-commerce at rock bottom, needing something to pull her forward, and she began with a single secondhand ukulele that she bought on a bargain and sold at a profit. From there it was £2,500 recycled at a time, car boots full
#196
October 19 · 57 min
196 Jamie Ramsden, CEO, Coach and Author: No One’s Coming to Save You - and No One’s Going to Stop You
As a boy, Jamie Ramsden sat at the foot of the tallest rollercoaster in Europe, too afraid of heights to get on - until he realised the fear was something he’d built himself. That moment became the idea his whole career rests on: most of the limits we run into are self-imposed, not structural. Jamie is an award-winning former CEO, an executive coach, and the author of Let’s Go: How Great Leaders Shape the Future. Over two decades he’s coached hundreds of Fortune 500 C-suite leaders, and develo
#195
September 21 · 56 min
195 Jennifer McCollum, CEO, Author and Leadership Expert: Why Fixing Workplaces for Women Fixes Them for Men Too
Jennifer McCollum spent twenty-five years climbing toward a seat she wasn't sure she'd ever reach. Then a single phone call changed everything by telling her exactly what she didn't want. Jennifer is President and CEO of Catalyst, the global nonprofit working with many of the world's most powerful companies to build workplaces that work for women, and only the sixth leader in its sixty-year history. She's the author of In Her Own Voice and, most recently, Men at Work: The Road Map to Gender Par
#194
September 7 · 48 min
194 Rita McGrath, Professor, Author and Strategy Advisor: Stop Defending The Past - How Leaders Build What Comes Next
Some leaders sense change early. Far fewer know what to do with it. Rita McGrath has spent her career studying the moment the ground shifts under a business ... and why so many brilliant, well-resourced companies miss it completely. She's a professor at Columbia Business School, ranked among the world's top ten management thinkers by Thinkers50 and winner of their number one award in strategy, and the author of The End of Competitive Advantage and Seeing Around Corners. In this episode, Rita t
#193
August 28 · 57 min
193 Mohan Nair, Author, Speaker and Transformation Leader: How Not To Lose Your Mind In An AI-Obsessed Era
Every day, most of us drive around the car park of our own brain looking for the closest possible space ... the easiest answer, the fastest shortcut, the machine that will do the thinking for us. Mohan Nair thinks that habit is costing us something we haven't begun to measure. Mohan is a speaker, author and transformation leader who has spent decades working at the intersection of business, innovation and human experience, as CEO of Emerge, former Chief Innovation Officer at Cambia Health Sol
#192
August 3 · 49 min
192 Neri Karra Sillaman, Author, Professor and Entrepreneur: What Immigrant-Founded Businesses Can Teach Us About Resilience In Leadership
Close to half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants. Eighty per cent of billion-dollar startups have an immigrant founder or executive. And businesses founded by immigrants statistically outlast the ones founded by everybody else. Nobody had properly asked why ... until Dr Neri Karra Sillaman did. Neri stood at a border at the age of eleven with her nine-year-old brother and her parents, who carried two suitcases and nothing else. She is now a professor at Oxford, the founder of
#191
July 20 · 41 min
191 Stephanie Millward, Paralympic Gold Medallist: All The Nasty Things Are Wonderful - Reframing Overwhelming Odds To Find Purpose And Fulfilment
What do you do when the life you've spent everything building is suddenly taken away from you overnight? Stephanie Millward MBE was 16, a British record-breaking swimmer heading for the Sydney Olympics, when she went blind, lost the ability to walk and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Doctors gave her 10 years to live. She's now 44. In this episode, Stephanie takes me through one of the most extraordinary stories of reinvention I've ever heard ... how she learned to hold a funeral fo
#190
May 26 · 44 min
190 Christine Barnes, Coach and Author: The Inclusion Trap - Why Leaders Are Getting It Wrong Without Knowing It
Some of the most powerful shifts in leadership come from seeing something that's been there all along, but never fully acted on. On this episode of The Unlock Moment, I am joined by Christine Barnes, executive coach, UC Berkeley lecturer, and author of Inclusionable: Transform How You Lead and Elevate Your Team's Performance ... and her story is a brilliant example of exactly that. Christine has spent her career inside some of the world's most complex organisations, from IBM to Oracle, Roche
#189
April 27 · 57 min
189 Chris Whitaker, Disability Advocate and Coach: Rethinking Disability, Talent, and Potential Through Coaching
Chris Whitaker has spent his life navigating systems that weren’t built with him in mind … and then choosing to change them. Born six weeks prematurely with cerebral palsy, Chris grew up learning how to operate in a world that often underestimated him. That early experience only served to sharpen his ambition. From university rowing squads to national-level sport, and later into leadership roles across the charity and disability sectors, he developed a perspective grounded in both lived experie
#188
April 1 · 57 min
188 Luisa Baldini, Broadcast Journalist: Composure Under Fire - What Leaders Get Wrong About Handling The Pressure
What does it take to perform when there is no second take … and no margin for error? In this episode, I speak with Luisa Baldini - former BBC correspondent and co-founder of Composure Media - about what it takes to communicate under pressure. For over two decades, Luisa reported live from major global events, often with millions watching, producers speaking in her ear, and events unfolding in real time around her. She shares what those moments taught her about composure, confidence and
#187
March 9 · 40 min
187 Mildred Yuan, Talent Agent and Coach: How to Play the Discomfort Olympics - A Masterclass in Negotiation
Some negotiations are lost long before a single word is agreed. They’re lost in the rush to fill silence … in the instinct to ease tension … in the urge to make the other person comfortable. My guest in this episode understands this better than most. Mildred Yuan is a leading talent agent, negotiator and executive coach - and she also happens to be my partner in life. Years ago she was my dance partner too, back when competitive ballroom dancing played a big role in our lives. Her approach to
#186
February 23 · 37 min
186 Dr Joshua Coleman, Psychologist and Media Personality: Why Estrangement Happens - and How Repair Begins
What happens when a relationship doesn’t explode … it just disappears? In this episode of The Unlock Moment, I’m joined by high-profile US psychologist Dr Josh Coleman to unpack why estrangement happens - and what actually helps when you want to rebuild a relationship that’s been lost to distance, conflict, or silence. We explore the major pathways to estrangement (including cultural change, divorce, political differences, and therapy narratives), why the “old rules” of hierarchy and obligatio
#185
February 9 · 45 min
185 Dr Michelle K. Johnston, Professor, Author and Coach: The Seismic Shift, How Connection Unlocks Purpose
What happens when success comes at the cost of authenticity? In this episode of The Unlock Moment, I’m joined by Dr Michelle K. Johnston - Distinguished Professor of Management, executive coach, and co-author with Marshall Goldsmith - to explore the moment that reshaped her leadership, her research, and her life. At just 28, Michelle was a rising academic star. But sitting alone in her office, reading student feedback she found hurtful, she realised something profound: she was succeeding by pr
#184
January 26 · 57 min
184 Ryan Wain, Policy and Politics Thought Leader: The Future of Britain - Disrupt Or Be Disrupted
What does it take to stay human in a system that rewards slogans over thinking? In this conversation, Ryan Wain - Senior Director of Policy & Politics at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change - traces his path from Sainsbury’s checkouts in Liverpool to shaping ideas that influence governments in the UK and around the world. We talk about the leadership lessons he learned from everyday people … why place and connection matter more than most policy debates admit … and the moment at King’s C
#183
Dec 29, 2025 · 48 min
183 Paul Ollinger, Comedian, Speaker and Facebook Alum: The Day Financial Freedom Stopped Feeling Free
What happens when you get everything you thought you wanted, and it still doesn’t feel like enough? For Paul Ollinger, that question surfaced after leaving Facebook with financial freedom in his early forties. On paper, it was success. In reality, it sparked a deeper reckoning about identity, purpose, and what actually makes a life feel whole. In this conversation, Paul reflects on the disorienting space that can follow achievement, the moment he realised money had stopped being the motivator
#182
Dec 22, 2025 · 36 min
182 Garry Ridge, Legendary CEO: The Hard Truth About Happy, High-Performing Cultures
Some leadership lessons arrive through strategy. Others arrive at 38,000 feet, reading a single sentence that reframes everything. For Garry Ridge, former CEO and Chairman Emeritus of WD-40, that moment sparked a radical shift in how he thought about leadership, culture, and responsibility. In his second appearance on The Unlock Moment, Garry returns to reflect on what he’s learned since stepping away from the CEO role … and what still matters most about leading well. In this conversation, Gar
#181
Dec 15, 2025 · 46 min
181 Dr Bob Gomersall, EdTech Founder and CEO: Worthwhile Wealth and the Courage to Redefine Success from an Edtech Pioneer
Recorded live at Climb25 - The UK’s Festival of Business Growth & Innovation, this episode of The Unlock Moment features Dr Bob Gomersall: physicist, teacher, accidental entrepreneur and pioneer of global educational technology. Bob traces his journey from teaching physics in the late 1970s to building a business delivering assessment platforms now used around the world, supporting awarding bodies, professional organisations and educational institutions to deliver over 45 million exams across 1

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