Through the Noise with J. Renay

What do you do when the story that falls apart is your own?

Lance Gould is the CEO of Brooklyn Story Lab, a media strategy firm that helps purpose-driven organizations tell their stories. Before that came thirty years in journalism, ending with an executive editor's chair at HuffPost and a layoff one week after the 2016 US Presidential election.

What set in, he tells Renay, was "sheer panic." He was 51, with two daughters, in a fie...

What does it cost to be so good at surviving that no one — not even you, at first — notices what it's taking?

Aman Singh is, by trade, a translator of complexity — she leads global sustainability communications, shaping narrative for some of the biggest names in retail and consumer brands. She is very good at telling other people's stories. This episode is about what happened when she tried to tell her own. After ...

What does it actually take to stay in the work of changing systems — not for a season, but for a life?

Shawna Wakefield has spent twenty-five years building frameworks for transformative feminist leadership at Oxfam, Gender at Work, and the UN. She is also a practitioner of somatics, meditation, and embodied leadership — a woman who learned, long before she had language for it, that the body holds knowledge the thinking...

How do you stay true to your convictions when they set you apart?

Renay sits down with Leonard E. Robinson — over forty-five years in environmental management, appointee under four California governors, former Acting Director and Chief Deputy Director of California's Department of Toxic Substances Control, Partner and Chief Sustainability Strategist at SEMCO, Sustainability Coordinator for the Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta,...

What if telling positive stories — at a moment when negativity sells — is its own act of resistance?

Renay sits down with Larry Confino — independent documentary director, producer, and the filmmaker behind 50 States of Sustainability, currently airing nationally on PBS in its second season — for a conversation about what it takes to spend twenty-plus years pointing a camera at people who don't make headline...

What if the planet doesn't need saving — and we do?

Renay sits down with David Biello — TED's science curator, longtime Scientific American editor, and author of The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age — for a conversation that quietly dismantles almost everything we assume the climate conversation is about.

David has been on the environment and energy beat since 1999 — lon...

What does it take to sustain leadership across decades of struggle? Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. has been a political prisoner, a denominational executive, the CEO of the NAACP, a Nation of Islam minister, co-founder of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, president and CEO of the Black Press of America, and host of The Chavis Chronicles on PBS. He coined the term environmental racism — from a jail cell — at a time when ne...

What does a guitar lesson have to do with corporate accountability? More than you'd think.

In this episode, Renay sits down with Andrew Winston — author of Net Positive, TEDx speaker, and one of the most clear-eyed voices on sustainable business — for a conversation that travels from music theory to quantum physics to what it actually costs a leader to stay silent right now.

Andrew has spent decades trying to get compan...

Welcome to the inaugural teaser of Through the Noise. Leadership educator J. Renay Loper introduces a show dedicated to exploring the gap between how leadership looks from the outside and what it actually feels like on the inside. In a world filled with the "noise" of performance, speed, and uncertainty, Renay asks a fundamental question: What actually has to happen on the inside for leadership to ...