Most people treat self-kindness like a luxury. Something you do once the work is done, the team is sorted, and the numbers are in. Leaders especially.

Sophie Bretag spent nearly two decades in HR watching leaders burn themselves out trying to give everything to everyone except themselves. Then it happened to her — first a severe post-COVID burnout after seven and a half years in aged care, and then, in 2024, a head and neck cancer diagnosis that forced her to stop, reassess, and rebuild from the inside out.

I had Sophie on the Energize With Bram podcast this week, and I'll be honest — I wasn't expecting the conversation to go where it did. In the best possible way.

Sophie is now two years cancer-free. She's running her own wellbeing consulting practice. And she has just published The Kind Way — a book with a four-pillar framework she calls KIND, built specifically for leaders who want to lead better by taking better care of themselves first.

Here's what the framework looks like — a...