Surfacing Leaders

In this episode of the Surfacing Leaders podcast, host Marc Koehler sits down with Hanna Bauer, founder of Heartnomics, for a conversation about what it means to lead from a place of true alignment. Diagnosed with a terminal heart disease at age four, Hanna spent five years of her childhood living in a hospital and became the first child to undergo an experimental heart procedure that doctors hadn't yet proven would work. Two decades later, she learned it had gone on to save over 3,000 children — a discovery that shaped the leadership philosophy she now teaches.

Hanna shares how growing up managing an unpredictable heart condition taught her to read the difference between good stress and bad stress, and why she believes leaders can't give their teams an alignment they haven't found in themselves first. She introduces her BEAT method (Believe, Engage, Act, Transform) as a daily practice for internal alignment that leads to external execution, and explains why burnout is almost never a workload problem, it's a misalignment problem.

Marc and Hanna also explore how chaos actually operates inside organizations. Hanna uses the image of a ship in water to explain that external pressure only becomes dangerous once it gets inside a team, and she walks through why leaders need practiced moments of slowing down, not just bursts of speed, to stay agile under pressure. The conversation turns personal as Hanna shares how she once viewed her heart-surgery scar as a symbol of failure, until a shift in perspective helped her see it instead as the process that led to real innovation.

The episode concludes with actionable advice for leaders:

• Build in daily moments of reflection, even if it's only a few minutes.
• Get ready for pressure before it arrives instead of scrambling in the moment.
• Know your own signals so you can tell the difference between good stress and bad stress.
• Reframe your setbacks. What looks like failure may be the process behind your next breakthrough.

Join us in this episode to discover why the most sustainable leadership starts with alignment, and why the hardest chapters of our stories often become the foundation for how we lead.

Connect with Hanna Bauer:
Website: heartnomics.com
LinkedIn: Hanna Bauer on LinkedIn