Relational Vitality Episodes

Ella Zhang helps experienced professionals monetise hard-won expertise through inner operating systems that rebuild leadership capability from the inside out. From her Sydney consulting practice, she draws on neuroscience and Chinese medicine to design micro habits that make capability stick where one-off training programs fail. Ella covers four inner operating systems for sustainable performance, diagnosing organisational issues by root cause, and why her book Upgrade maps the path from burnout to aligned practice. Wisepreneurs explores how independent professionals turn accumulated expertise into sustainable practice.

Dr Miklós Pohl OAM fled Hungary during the 1956 revolution at the age of nine, arrived in Australia speaking no English, and went on to become a plastic surgeon and the founder of the Australian Doctor's Orchestra. Now 78, he still practises medicine part-time at the Skin Health Institute in Melbourne and plays violin and viola daily. Miklós started the Australian Doctor's Orchestra in 1993 after noticing how many medical professionals at a music camp were also string players. The orchestra performs twice a year for medical charities, and the experience of working towards a concert has brought many doctors back to playing after decades away from their instruments. His book Music Is Medicine profiles 28 doctor-musicians and explores what amateur music making gives to people whose day jobs involve life-and-death decisions. The conversation covers his escape from Hungary, the instant community that music provides when travelling — he has played chamber music on four continents through …

Mayumi Kataoka moved from Japan to Australia on a working holiday visa in 1997, worked in IT sales, ran a martial arts school, and spent a decade photographing Australian eucalypts before discovering the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku — forest bathing — and recognising it as her life's work. She is now a certified forest therapy guide based in Sydney, taking individuals and corporate groups into the bush for three-hour walks that cover barely a kilometre and a half. Mayumi explains the science behind forest therapy, which originated in Japan in the 1990s with studies measuring cortisol reduction through saliva tests. The Japanese Forest Therapy Society has since built a body of research linking time in natural environments to improved immune function, reduced stress, and greater cognitive clarity. She describes her guided walks as a rhythm of slow movement, sensory exercises, and stillness — starting with eyes-closed sensory tuning, moving through invitations to notice light on le…

Dr Michael Best practised medicine for over 50 years — first in medical administration, then as a GP in Melbourne — before a routine phone call during COVID introduced him to the endocannabinoid system, a biological network present in every human body that he had never learned about in medical school. He was 75. He has now spent five years researching medicinal cannabis, worked in the field for three and a half years, and is writing a book called The Science Beneath Medicinal Cannabis under the mentorship of Hazel Edwards. Michael explains why an internal system discovered only in 1988 — one that regulates pain, sleep, anxiety, and immune function — remains largely unknown to most doctors. The endocannabinoid system is ancient, present in every animal with a backbone and likely in every dinosaur that walked the earth. Medicinal cannabis acts on this system, but because the plant cannot be patented and the multi-million-dollar trials required for formal regulatory approval have not be…

Amy Alkon is an award-winning investigative science writer and the author of Going Menopostal: What You and Your Doctor Need to Know About the Real Science of Menopause and Perimenopause. Based in Detroit but writing for a global audience, she specialises in what she calls science help — doing the deep dive into peer-reviewed research, critically evaluating the evidence, and translating it into language that lets readers make informed decisions about their own health. Amy's core argument is that the gap between what medical science knows about menopause and what most doctors actually provide is shockingly wide. Women in their forties and fifties — often at the peak of their professional careers — experience brain fog, fatigue, and memory problems that the medical system routinely misattributes to stress, ageing, or depression rather than to hormonal changes with well-established physiological mechanisms. The result is that accomplished professionals mistake a solvable medical issue f…

Michal Novotný is a Czech physiotherapist who has worked with Rafael Nadal, Maria Sharapova, Orlando Bloom, and Chris Hemsworth. He was one of five ATP physiotherapists on the professional tennis tour, but his philosophy sets him apart from most practitioners in his field: the best physio is not the one who treats injuries but the one who makes sure they never happen. Michal's approach is radically individualised. He categorises patients by somatotype (ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph), by temperament (melancholic Nadal vs sanguinic Djokovic vs phlegmatic Federer), and by age band — what he calls bronze, silver, gold, and diamond periods. The exercise or diet that works for Chris Hemsworth (a mesomorph who gains and loses muscle quickly) will produce no visible result on Michal himself (an ectomorph with a fast metabolism). His book Sport Is Pain, which took 2,500 hours to write and became an immediate Czech bestseller, guides readers through self-assessment before offering any recomm…

Krisna Hanks returns to Wisepreneurs for her second appearance. A former professional dancer who spent two decades in Amsterdam and now lives in Tucson, she has moved from executive coaching into metabolic health, working as Director of Employee Wellness Programs for heart surgeon Dr Philip Ovadia. Krisna's core argument is that too much sitting is not the same as too little exercise. You can hit every recommended activity target — 150 minutes of cardio, two strength sessions a week — and still be what researchers call an active couch potato if you sit for back-to-back hours. The mechanism is physiological: prolonged sitting suppresses lipoprotein lipase activity, which is necessary for triglyceride uptake and HDL cholesterol production. In effect, your body behaves as if you have gone to sleep, and the metabolic machinery slows down. The Australian research that sparked this field, led by Neville Owen and Genevieve Healy, found that women fare worse than men on these measures. The …

Dr Holly Whelan has a neuroscience PhD, a 20-year marketing career at Unilever, and a frustration that would not go away: marketing stops at awareness and engagement, but real behaviour change goes further. She co-founded Habit Partners with Dr Mark Cobain, taking the HeartAge Tool — which explains your heart disease risk as a biological age — out of Unilever as a spin-out asset. Their niche sits between academic behaviour change science (rigorous but dry) and advertising (engaging but shallow): campaigns and programs that actually shift what people do, not just what they think. Holly's own career is a study in deliberate change. She left the lab because she did not want a research career, joined FMCG marketing when it was the gold standard, then left corporate when she wanted to do the right thing rather than sell more margarine. The conversation covers how to take intellectual property with you when you leave an organisation, why values-driven work makes the risk of going solo bea…

Natasha Ginnivan researches how aging stereotypes undermine experienced professionals before they even open their mouths, and what the evidence shows about countering them. She explains how stereotypes affect professional identity, why social connections and lifelong learning protect cognitive wellness, and what research from CEPAR at the University of Queensland and Stanford's Distinguished Career Institute supports about aging well in professional life. Wisepreneurs explores how independent professionals turn accumulated expertise into sustainable practice.

Hazel Edwards OAM wrote 200 books over 50 years as an independent Australian authorpreneur. Best known for There's a Hippopotamus on My Roof Eating Cake — now 45 years old and adapted into film, musical, braille, and Auslan — she has sustained a prolific writing practice without organisational support across five decades of publishing change. The conversation covers how creative independence compounds over a lifetime, sustaining income through multiple streams including writing courses and mentoring, and her Complete Your Book in a Year program. Hazel's career is a masterclass in adapting from print to digital, building audiences across formats, and treating writing as a professional practice rather than a series of projects. Wisepreneurs explores how experienced independent professionals position accumulated expertise and build sustainable practice.

Charlotta Segerlund-Darnell treats psychological wellbeing as something to maintain, not something to fix after it breaks. Based in Stockholm, she is a CBT therapist, behavioural scientist, and mindfulness instructor who calls herself a psychological strength trainer — because she wants seeking help for mental health to feel like going to the gym rather than going to hospital. She covers managing stress as an independent professional, why digital distractions erode the cognitive capacity solopreneurs depend on, and the significant difference between being busy and being productive. Her approach reframes mental health from a crisis response to a daily practice — the same way you train a muscle before you need it, not after you have injured it. Wisepreneurs explores how experienced independent professionals position accumulated expertise and build sustainable practice.

Professor Martin Hyde from the University of Leicester studies how aging reshapes work, why ageism operates as the least addressed barrier to late-career employment, and what quality of life research reveals about professional longevity. He explains why the 100-year life concept requires fundamentally different planning than traditional three-stage careers — education, work, retirement — and why ongoing education sustains professional relevance far longer than most people expect. His research shows that age discrimination in the workplace is not just unfair but economically irrational: organisations that discard experienced workers discard the pattern recognition and judgment that take decades to build. Wisepreneurs explores how experienced independent professionals position accumulated expertise and build sustainable practice.

Laetitia Vitaud is a French writer and expert on the future of work from a feminist perspective. Drawing from her latest book, she explains why our obsession with productivity creates diminishing returns and why the care economy belongs at the centre of any serious conversation about the future of work. She argues that entrepreneurship among older professional women is quietly reshaping work in ways the statistics do not yet capture, and that humane approaches to work create better outcomes than acceleration and optimisation. The conversation challenges the assumption that more output is always better — and makes the case that experienced professionals are uniquely positioned to model a different way of working. Wisepreneurs explores how experienced independent professionals position accumulated expertise and build sustainable practice.

Krisna Hanks helps women over 60 build metabolic health, strength, and nutrition practices grounded in 33 years as a professional dancer. A certified health coach and LCHF/keto nutrition advisor with an MSc in Kinesiology and MBA, she explains why metabolic health is the foundation of self-care for experienced professional women, why protein intake matters more than most realise, and why strength training is a necessary investment for ageing well. Her career from dance to health coaching shows how finite careers prepare you for professional reinvention.