Most of us were taught to earn joy. Land the results, hit the numbers, and then maybe you get to feel good. Greg De Koker spent a career proving that this order is backward, and that the truth reaches into every part of a life, not only the office. On this episode of I Know I Belong When…, Greg joins host Christopher Bylone. He is a brand and culture transformation expert, a bestselling co-author, and the mind behind the forthcoming book Joy Squared: The Hidden Power of Joy in Leadership.

Greg carries a mission with a number attached to it: forty-four million people living, working, and leading with more joy, on purpose. That mission grew from a pattern he could not ignore across hundreds of stakeholder interviews. There was too much suffering at work, and it did not stop at the office door. He named it the global joy deficit, and then he built an ecosystem to help close it.

This conversation moves from the boardroom to the family cottage and back again. Greg reframes joy as rigorous strategy rather than a soft perk, and he shows how a single childhood moment reshaped what home means to him. This is a story about building belonging and creating belonging in everyday life, across self, home, community, and work.

Belonging is bigger than any office. It begins in the quiet knowledge that who you are is already enough, and it follows you into every room you walk into for the rest of your life. In this episode of I Know I Belong When, host Christopher Bylone sits down with Öykü Api, a thought leader in inclusion, change, and leadership whose story stretches across self, home, community, and work.

Öykü spent twenty years inside corporate finance and walked out with three published books, a Cornell credential in women’s leadership and diversity, a law degree, and a passport stamped on all seven continents, Antarctica included. Underneath the resume sits one clarifying thesis: when a career, a relationship, or a place stops serving your growth, the cost of staying becomes higher than the cost of leaving.

This is a conversation about knowing your worth in every room. Öykü reframes a sense of belonging as something a person carries inward first, not something a title, a team, or another person’s validation hands over. She gives listeners language for belonging that reaches from the self outward, into chosen family, into community, and into the daily work of building inclusive culture. Through her first-person story you will find new words for authentic leadership, strategic inclusion, and the quiet courage it takes to leave a room that no longer fits. This is storytelling as strategy, and proof that creating belonging in everyday life begins with you.

What does it mean to lead so that everyone in the room knows they belong? Our guest has spent more than 25 years answering that question, and his answer reshapes how we think about people, work, and life.

Meet Dean Carter. He has served as chief human resources officer four separate times, at Fossil, Patagonia, Sears and Kmart, and Guild, earning national recognition for reinventing the future of work. His book, Employee Experience Design: How to Co-Create Work Where People and Organizations Thrive, became an Amazon number one bestseller. Now he leads Instill, an AI-native culture operating system built on a single, human-first conviction, that technology should protect people and culture rather than thin them out.

In this conversation with host Christopher Bylone, Dean shares the story of when he knew he belonged and the harder moments when he did not. He moves from a Texas office under the sodomy laws, to a community that once shut him out, to a Santa Barbara theater where shy kids sang off-key and knew they belonged. His through-line is human-first leadership, the daily practice of making sure the quiet person, the new mother, and the overlooked kid are seen. This is belonging as a whole-life reality across self, home, community, work, and society.

Belonging is not built at the office. It is built wherever a person is, at the dinner table, inside a circle of friends, in the places we worship and organize, and at work too. Season three of I Know I Belong When… proved that twelve times over.

In this special season three recap, host, Christopher Bylone, Principal Strategist at Innovation Unbiased, brings every guest from the season back together to examine what it takes to be fully inclusive. Twelve guests. Six behaviors. One question asked again and again: what does it actually look like to build a place where people know they belong? The answer frames the episode and its title. The question is never whether a person fits. The question is what they add.

This is not a highlight reel. It is a language lesson in building belonging across every part of life, anchored by the Inclusive Behaviors Framework and the Belonging Formula that ground all of Innovation Unbiased's work. You will hear a bank CEO lead with her humanity before her title, a hip hop journalist find belonging in a circle that asks what you bring, and a leader living with blindness move the barrier off the person and onto the design. If you have ever searched for language to name belonging, in yourself, your home, your community, or your team, this episode hands it to you in the voices that earned it.

What happens when you combine a lifelong storyteller, a lifelong protester, and a leader who runs toward the work when everyone else is running away from it? You get Chris Jones.

In this episode of I Know I Belong When, host Christopher Bylone sits down with Chris, co-founder of Spectra Diversity and a social justice warrior since 1970, to discuss authentic leadership in turbulent times. Chris has spent more than four decades writing in other people's voices, from documentaries on PBS and National Geographic to scientific work for Mayo Clinic and General Dynamics. Now she is using her own voice to do what she calls her last career: helping leaders measure and improve workplace belonging.

While other DEI consultants quietly pivoted to safer industries, Chris doubled down. She launched a second year of her free webinar series, DEI For Real. She partnered with an employment attorney to help leaders navigate what is legal and what is not. And she keeps asking the question every people leader needs to face: Are you actually building belonging, or are you guessing?

This is a conversation about creating a sense of belonging at work when the cultural tide pushes in the other direction. It is about the difference between box checking and real strategic inclusion. It is about why measurement matters more than mission statements. And it offers fresh language for belonging, drawn from one woman's story of 55 years of making good trouble in the service of an inclusive culture and human-centered innovation.

What happens when you take fifteen years of startup chaos, a front row seat to the exact moment culture either takes root or falls apart, and a leader who gets excited about the hard conversations most people run from? You get this conversation with Brooke Sullivan, Director of People and Talent at Banyan Software, and a leader building belonging inside fast-moving companies.

Brooke has spent her career inside software startups, building people functions from zero, from the "we do not even have an org chart yet" phase, and turning that scrappiness into something real. She has a gift for what she calls scaling moments, that critical twenty-to-one-hundred-person inflection point where inclusive culture either becomes the foundation or something you wish you had built.

In this episode, Brooke shares the practices and small everyday moments that create workplace belonging long before a handbook ever could. She walks us through her Exercising Empathy programming, the one-on-one design choice that changed how leaders showed up for their teams, and the moment she realized the language a company uses for its people reveals everything.

This is a conversation about authentic leadership, human-centered innovation, and what it takes to foster a sense of belonging at work when speed and scale are pulling in opposite directions. Brooke gives listeners practical language for belonging, grounded in fifteen years of building people experience.