About Ash Wright
I’m Ash Wright, a senior leader, writer and speaker based in Australia. I’ve spent close to three decades working in leadership roles, mostly in banking, insurance, customer operations and large-scale change.
I also write from lived experience. My life has included serious mental-health challenges, recovery from alcohol dependence, relationships, parenthood, career setbacks, rebuilding and plenty of moments where I’ve had to learn things the hard way.
Live Well, Lead Better is where those two parts of my life meet.
I write about what helps us become better leaders, understand ourselves more clearly and deal with the complicated human stuff that sits underneath work, relationships and everyday life.
What I write about
Most of the writing here falls into four areas:
Leadership
Trust, accountability, emotional intelligence, workplace culture, feedback, difficult conversations and what actually happens when people lead other people.
Mental Health
Honest conversations about mental health, particularly where it intersects with work, leadership and lived experience.
Personal Growth
Self-awareness, behaviour, relationships, resilience, empathy and the patterns we sometimes carry with us longer than we realise.
The Way Through
My developing book and series of principles about recovery, change and rebuilding a life when things haven’t gone according to plan.
Why Live Well, Lead Better?
I don’t think leadership exists separately from the rest of our lives.
How we handle pressure, react when challenged, manage our emotions, treat people, recover from mistakes and understand ourselves affects both the lives we live and the way we lead.
That’s what I’m interested in.
The writing here is personal when it needs to be, practical whenever possible and grounded in experience rather than theory for theory’s sake. I’m not interested in pretending I’ve worked everything out. I’m much more interested in exploring what I’ve learned, what I’m still learning and what might be useful to someone else.
A little more about me
Alongside my corporate career, I’m a volunteer lived-experience speaker with Beyond Blue and speak openly about my experiences with anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder and recovery.
For a long time, those parts of my life sat largely outside my professional identity. Increasingly, I’ve come to see that they’ve shaped the leader, husband, father and person I’ve become.
They’ve also shaped this publication.
Start here
If you’re new to Live Well, Lead Better, a good place to begin is with one of the main themes above:
Leadership
Practical ideas about trust, accountability, emotional intelligence and leading people well.
Mental Health
Personal stories and workplace conversations about mental health and what real support can look like.
Personal Growth
Writing about self-awareness, relationships, behaviour and becoming a little better at understanding ourselves.
The Way Through
My principles for recovery, change and moving forward.
Why subscribe?
If you’re interested in leadership without the corporate clichés, mental health without pretending it’s simple, and personal growth grounded in real life, you’ll probably feel at home here.
I publish practical reflections, personal stories and ideas designed to make you think about how you live, how you lead and what you might do differently.
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