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...

Most leaders are so busy doing they forget to pause and look at who they’re being.

In this week’s episode of Energize With Bram, I had the privilege of speaking with Karin van Zuilen, founder of Senz Strategy Consulting, who brings deep psychological insight to leadership transformation.

Together, we unpacked her Leadership Quadrant Model—a powerful framework that reveals how great leaders balance four essential layers of awareness:

💡 Strengths – What you’re naturally good at
🌑 Shadows – The hidden behaviors that sabotage results
⚡ Triggers – What sets you off (and why)
🚀 Potential – The highest expression of your leadership

Karin also shared her Pyramid of You, which shows how we can rise above reactive, fear-based patterns… and step into inspired, values-led self-leadership.

We covered:

✅ How your past conditioning impacts your current leadership style
✅ How to turn emotional reactivity into powerful self-awareness
✅ Why developing the inner game of leadership changes everything on ...

Most probably, you have met business leaders whose behaviour truly put you off, without them even knowing. Right?

You also might have met salespeople who made you feel really awkward as a client and still be completely oblivious to your emotional experience...

I certainly remember how I kept repeating a destructive pattern until well into my thirties before I became more self-aware. Only then, did I make a commitment to make a change for the better.

Self-awareness is one of twenty subcategories of emotional intelligence. 

Because we can measure it, we can transform it.

Watch my second video in this series on EQ

Why would you watch it?

• Great leaders have developed high levels of EQ
• Exceptional sales professionals, especially those in the top 10%, have high levels of EQ
• People that society perceives as unique role models and human beings tend to display high levels of EQ

The opposite is true too: poor leaders, average salesmen and women, and questionable citizens tend to st...