Welcome to episode 211 of The CUInsight Experience podcast with your hosts, Randy Smith, co-founder of CUInsight, and Jill Nowacki, President and CEO of Humanidei.
This episode is sponsored by Alacriti—a leading payments fintech helping credit unions compete with challenger banks and digital wallets. Alacriti delivers seamless, real-time money movement experiences for loan payments, A2A transfers, digital disbursements, and bill pay. With a single, cloud-native platform that connects to The Clearing House, Fedwire, ACH, and FedNow, credit unions can modernize without overhauling legacy infrastructure. Learn more at Alacriti.com.
In this season, Jill and I will have conversations centered around leadership, credit unions, and living our best lives. We will have some of the most respected leaders from around credit unions who we are grateful to call friends join us in the discussion from time to time too.
In this episode, we are joined by Lauren Culp, Executive Director at the National Credit Union Foundation (and former President and CEO at CUInsight). She joins us to talk about energy, not just as a buzzword but as a very real challenge that leaders must face. Lauren reflects on what depletes her and what restores her, including deleting social media off her phone. We explore the difference between being productive and being present and how hard it is to do both when you’re living in a steady stream of notifications and back-to-back meetings.
We also open up about learning to say no, what boundaries look like in leadership, and how to tell the difference between what is actually urgent and what just feels urgent. Whether it’s blocking no-meeting days, turning off email notifications, or just having the self-awareness to admit that you are “out of words,” these are the tools that help us stay grounded rather than just efficient, especially since there is a difference between being productive and actually being present.
Join us for an insightful conversation about being human and about protecting the parts of ourselves that leadership can easily burn through if we aren't being careful. If you’ve ever found yourself feeling scattered, exhausted, and completely out of energy, then this episode is definitely for you. Enjoy our conversation with Lauren Culp!
