Hi Reader,

The first thing I ask my podcast guests is to tell me a story about a time when they've been unprofessional. One story that was part of my keynote last week was when I was hosting an online workshop for a luxury German automotive company. I was still young but had embraced the concept of "connection before content" and so I opened the session with my now famous Turn to Your Neighbour moment.

Not even one minute into the 1-1 breakout, I get a personal message from my client: Abbruch! Stop this immediately, the boss finds it too touchy feely.

My mantra was "trust the process" so I carried on, ignored it. For the rest of the workshop, I stared at middle-aged white German men leaning back with crossed arms. They had paid for 4 workshops in advance. This remaind the only one I delivered.

If I had been one of those men, I am sure I'd have gotten away with it. Maybe even been considered courageous and 'out of the box'. But I wasn't a middle-aged white man. I was a young woman with maybe a bit too much confidence.

When I told this story at the keynote last week, I doubled down: when women ask groups to sit in a circle and close their eyes, it's often considered spiritual woo-woo. If a man does the same, he's courageous.

Unprofessionalism doesn't carry the same risk for everyone.

What surprised me most was who this statement resonated with. Not just my feminist friends, but the men. The way the male audience opened up to their potential blindspot really touched me. One even reflected about it on LinkedIn:

What I'm taking away: a vulnerable personal story and an honest provocation without blame can open conversations on difficult topics — and even get a man to publicly ask for help.

🎤 Waiting for you on the Unprofessionalism podcast:

Gustavo Razzetti once sat next to a woman at a corporate conference, judging the regional VP presenting on stage until she revealed that was her husband. Instead of backpedaling he apologised, then stood by every word. That instinct of owning the mess without pretending he didn’t mean it is the backbone of his work.

He has spent decades inside corporate and agency life watching great ideas die because of terrible culture. He now works with teams on what he calls conversational debt: the gap between what people nod through in meetings and what they actually act on. His research found that when people are asked why others don't speak up, the answer is fear, but when asked why they themselves don't, the answer becomes pointlessness: a learned belief that nothing will change anyway.

Gustavo refuses to live that way. He fires clients before the work even starts if the fit is wrong. His rule is that he'd rather lose his job over one conversation than avoid a hundred — and he did.

We talked about the power dynamics that shape what is considered professionalism, the most dangerous type of silence in organisations and why we should all drop the invisible contract nobody handed us and stop waiting for permission to speak.

🎧 Click here to listen to the interview

📥 Download my 1-page summary

​UP_022_Summary.pdf​

That's it from my side. I hope to see you next week!

Myriam