What if the greatest obstacle to your growth was never your circumstances — but your certainty?

Laura Miner spent much of her life in a world where questioning wasn't allowed. She learned early that you defend what you see — or else. It wasn't until her mid-40s, with no bachelor's degree and a funny argument with her husband, that everything began to shift.

In this conversation, Michael Carey sits down with Laura Miner — leadership coach, scholar, and PhD in organizational leadership — to trace the arc of a woman who rebuilt her thinking from the ground up. Laura shares how a string of bad leadership examples pushed her out of corporate America for good, how a mentor she never expected pointed her toward her next ascent, and why seven words at the heart of her dissertation took everything she’d been through to truly understand.

Along the way, they explore what it means to pause long enough to actually see something, why a book Laura reads every few years feels like a different book every time, and how the Socratic art of asking questions became her primary tool for helping others discover what they already know.

This is an episode about intellectual humility, the slow work of becoming, and giving yourself permission to think again.