Globally Grounded: The Work-Life Reset

In this episode, Kyra tackles workplace loneliness, a topic that resonates with her personally, having experienced this on more than one occasion. One in five employees globally feels lonely at work, loneliness costs US employers roughly $154 billion annually, and the health risks are apparently the same as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Kyra takes the conversation global, exploring why the UK and Japan created government ministers f...

In this episode, Kyra explores one of the more frustrating contradictions of the Millennial career experience: a generation that seemingly did everything right is still, in many ways, struggling to feel like it paid off. Drawing on Glassdoor's 2026 Millennial Stability Stacking Report and Deloitte's Global Gen Z and Millennial Survey across 44 countries, she gets into why three-quarters of millennial workers are questioning their c...

In this episode, Kyra gets into AI from a human perspective. She acknowledges the real and justified fears (lately, it feels almost catastrophic), including the fact that some of the people who built these systems are among the most concerned about where they're heading. She touches on the good AI is doing in medicine, then spends the rest of the episode on the irreplaceable human qualities that a tool can’t yet replicate. Fr...

In this episode, Kyra is getting into seashells, camps, and the French concept of la rentrée, and what all three have to do with why September feels so different as an adult than it did as a kid. She explores why 11,000 people ended up on a waitlist for an adult summer camp, what the French get right about September that many of us are missing, and how childhood back-to-school rituals were, and still are, actually quite valuable. A...

In this episode, Kyra returns from a jam-packed summer vacation with her family, which included two very busy but incredible weeks in Europe. She left with one big takeaway: joy is a practice as opposed to a reward. Through the lens of a spontaneous midnight street celebration in Oslo, river surfers in Munich, and biking through the Bavarian Alps and the forested islands of the Stockholm archipelago, she explores how the world's ha...

In this episode, Kyra takes a playful but pointed look at optimization culture — the Oura rings, the 4am wake-ups, the biohacking routines, and the growing pressure to engineer every corner of our lives for peak performance. Drawing on social media musings, the Global Wellness Institute's 2026 trends report, and a global look at cultures that have been doing "slow" on purpose for centuries, Kyra gets into what we’re act...

In this episode, Kyra dives into burnout. Drawing on a recent Fast Company piece by burnout prevention consultant Sally Clarke (We don’t have a burnout epidemic. We have a burnout buzzword problem), she unpacks why the word "burnout" has become so overused that it's actually making it harder for people to get the right support. She walks through the World Health Organization’s clinical definition, takes a global look at...

In this episode, Kyra zooms in on one of the most striking — and most human — findings from Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace Report: the global manager crisis. Manager engagement has dropped more steeply than any other group over the past three years, and the people most responsible for holding teams together are running on empty. Drawing from her own experience leading a manager and leadership program in tec...

In this episode, Kyra digs into Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace Report and what it reveals about stress, thriving, and the complicated relationship between the two. Being engaged at work and completely exhausted at the same time isn't a personal failing, but it is a global pattern. Kyra takes a look at the data, from the cultures with the richest lives outside of work, to the regions where loneliness is climbing, to the...

In this episode of Globally Grounded, Kyra asks: What does retirement actually mean? And is the version we inherited even working for anyone? She unpacks the messy, complicated truth about retirement through a global lens, from the Japanese man her family met running a knife shop on the fourth floor of a Tokyo apartment building in his 80s, to Gen Z chasing FIRE in their 20s, to the Spanish word for retirement that literally means ...

Twenty-five episodes ago, Globally Grounded began as a mission to find the data, the global traditions, and the cultural shifts that could help us fix our sometimes broken relationship with work. But for this milestone, Kyra realized that to truly honor the mission of Clarity West and Globally Grounded, she had to look inward. In this transparent solo episode, Kyra plays both host and guest, conducting a personal audit through 25 q...

In this episode, Kyra takes listeners to a dusty home-build site in Tijuana, Mexico, during a transformative weekend where a mix of volunteers, including kids (her 14-year-old son included), his friends, others from his school, and parents, came together to build a home for a family. Purpose emerges not as an abstract concept but as a hands-on reality. She reflects on how staying in our own bubbles limits us, while stepping across ...

In this episode, Kyra reflects on a recent trip to Big Sur, CA and what it revealed about the uneasy balance between disconnection and peace. From unreliable service to the relief of being off the grid, she explores why stepping away from constant news, work, and family communication can feel so restorative and so unsettling at the same time. She also looks at how nature helps us reset, why re-entry is often the hardest part, and w...

When was the last time you had a win that no one else knew about, and it felt just as good?

In this episode, Kyra continues her exploration of the 2026 World Happiness Report, but through the lens of social media and the pressure to perform happiness, success, and authenticity online. She gets honest about her complicated relationship with LinkedIn. It's an extremely useful tool for job searches, visibility, learning + exploration...

In this episode, Kyra revisits a topic she's explored before: the World Happiness Report. The 2026 edition just dropped, with Finland claiming the top spot again, followed by Iceland, Denmark, Costa Rica, and Sweden. This year's report focuses heavily on social media's impact on well-being (to be covered next episode!), but Kyra zooms in on a different angle: what "happiness" actually measures and what these countries have in commo...

In this episode, Kyra gets into what happens when the values you signed up for at work subtly or not so subtly shift under your feet, especially in fast-moving industries like tech. She unpacks how company values are really formed (beyond the hallway posters), why they evolve or drift over time, how to spot early signs of misalignment, and a practical framework for deciding whether to stay, try to influence from within, or plan you...

In this episode, Kyra reflects on what she'd tell her 18-year-old self about work…the one who went into college pre-med, convinced she'd be a neuroscientist, with her whole career mapped out. Fun fact, that's not what happened. From pre-med to international affairs to consulting to tech to entrepreneurship, Kyra's career has been anything but linear. She explores why we feel so much pressure to have it all figured out early,...

In this episode, Kyra dives into the question no one wants to ask but everyone needs to: whose dream is this, really? After watching her son compete at a junior pickleball tournament—a sport he chose after burning out from tennis—Kyra explores the uncomfortable parallels between youth sports culture and corporate burnout. She gets honest about when parental support becomes control, why the "more is better" mentality des...

In this episode, Kyra explores the reality of midlife career pivots and why reinvention is both increasingly common and surprisingly difficult depending on where you live. She breaks down how cultural attitudes and safety nets shape who gets to pivot (and who doesn't) across the U.S., Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Sharing her own journey from international development to consulting to tech to entrepreneurship, K...