The change we need is human change, and it can start with you.

What happens when the fuel behind your change work isn't just clarity or care, but guilt? In this episode of Emotions of Change, Brazilian social entrepreneur Renata shares how the weight of privilege slowly pushed her from purpose into burnout, and what happened when she finally stopped to question the guilt driving her. Alongside reflections from host Michelle Grant and insights from non-violent communication teachers and practitioners Miki Kashtan and Aurelia Saint-Just, we explore what guilt is really doing in our work, and how we can begin to move through it.  Miki introduces a four-stage framework for processing the guilt of privilege - taking us from denial, guilt or shame, to tenderness and collective stewardship. This episode offers a map, and a deeply human story for navigating one of the hardest emotions in change work.

When Zoya Miari fled war for the second time, she arrived in Switzerland carrying more than just her past, she carried a vision. A storytelling platform for displaced people, built from her own experience as a Palestinian-Ukrainian refugee. But between nursing shifts, family responsibilities, and self-doubt whispering “you’re not enough,” that vision nearly stalled. In this episode, Zoya and host Michelle Grant go behind the polished surface of changemaking to talk about what happens when we get stuck in doubt and what it takes to keep going. With insights from psychotherapist and author Britt Frank (The Science of Stuck), they explore how self-doubt can be less of a problem to fix and more of a message to understand. It’s a story of burnout, bravery, and the quiet decision to start anyway, one micro yes at a time.

After many years of hosting change-maker communities, Michelle Grant started to notice something. That there was plenty of space to talk about vision, strategy and impact. But no space to sit with the raw, contradictory, and often inconvenient emotions that come with trying to make a positive difference in the world. The actual experience of feeling, in real time, is still something we mostly do alone. We want to figure it all out first, go through the mess of it privately, and only share when we can neatly package our experience into learnings and wisdom. This brand new podcast series, Emotions of Change, is a public space to share different types of impact stories. Ones with real people and real feelings.