Episode Description
In this episode of The Kindness Podcast, Nicole Phillips sits down with Lauren Wu, keynote speaker, attorney, former healthcare privacy executive, and founder of Heart Led Leadership, for a conversation about what happens when life forces us to rethink everything we thought we knew. Lauren shares the unexpected thread that connects her journey from ballerina to healthcare executive to founder, and how a life-threatening health event reshaped her understanding of success, leadership, and her own worth. Together, Nicole and Lauren explore what it means to build a career and a life around being human rather than around endurance, why empathy, authenticity, accessibility, and resilience are strategic advantages in the age of AI, and what kindness actually looks like inside a workplace. Lauren also offers a tender invitation for anyone who has built their identity around being the strong one, the dependable one, the high performer, and is quietly running on empty.
About our guest: Lauren Wu
Lauren Wu, Esq., CIPP/US, is a keynote speaker, attorney, former healthcare privacy executive, and founder of Heart Led Leadership, where she helps organizations rethink leadership, burnout, and performance in the age of AI. Before stepping onto stages, Lauren spent nearly two decades leading privacy, regulatory, and compliance strategy at companies including Roche, Exact Sciences, and Evidation Health.
A former ballerina turned executive, Lauren’s work explores what happens when high-performance cultures are built around constant endurance instead of sustainable human systems. After surviving a life-threatening health event that forced her to step away from her executive career, she began speaking about empathy, authenticity, accessibility, and resilience not as soft skills, but as strategic advantages.
Today, Lauren speaks at the intersection of leadership, healthcare, ethics, technology, and human-centered design, helping audiences build systems where people can succeed without losing themselves in the process.
Links and Resources
Lauren’s website: https://www.heartledleadership.org
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-foster-wu/
Instagram: http://instagram.com/heartledlauren
