Introduction
Alice Evans spent the first forty years of her life assuming she would die young. Her mother died of cancer at 40. Her aunt died at 36. Her grandmother died in her sixties. Long before genetic testing could tell her whether she carried the same hereditary cancer gene, she had already made a decision about how to live: flat out, without restraint, because she assumed time was short.
Then she turned 40. She was still alive. And she noticed, to her own surprise, that she had quietly started living a safe life instead.
That contradiction sits at the centre of this conversation with Sope Agbelusi on Everyday Leadership. Evans is a systems coach, team coach and executive coach based in Amsterdam, a visiting fellow at Oxford's Skoll Centre for Social Innovation, and the former deputy chief executive of a UK charitable foundation. She is also the host of a new podcast called Pleasuring Myself, built around a question that stopped her cold: what do you do that is entirely for you, with no other purpose than enjoyment?
What follows is a conversation about grief, power, fear, parenting, improv, and what leadership actually requires when the room, and the stakes, keep changing.
A Childhood Built on Uncertainty
Evans describes two distinct halves of her early childhood. Before she was nine, she was surrounded by formidable women, women she describes as trailblazers in their fields [CHECK: specific claims about a great-great-aunt as an early female explorer and a grandmother's role at the Treasury are difficult to verify from audio and should be confirmed before republishing]. She was treated as an adult from a young age, expected to have opinions and to be heard.
Then her mother died when Evans was nine, and everything reorganised around living with her father and two siblings.
Rather than describing this as trauma in the conventional sense, Evans frames it as an early and unusually thorough education in uncertainty. "Living with uncertainty, living with complexity, just became my normal," she says. Patterns that form between the ages of eight and ten tend to stick, and hers formed around instability as the baseline rather than the exception.
The practical effect was that she grew up fast. She compressed the recklessness other teenagers spread across several years into a short, intense period in her early teens, then made a deliberate choice to change course, reasoning that continuing down that path would not end well and was not fair to a father who was managing his own grief.
From International Development to the Frontline of Homelessness
Evans nearly became a commercial lawyer, then redirected towards international development, drawn by a love of travel as much as a sense of purpose. At eighteen she went to India, certain she was there to help.
She was wrong, and she says so plainly. She arrived with a naive, UK-centric idea of what poverty looked like. She and her fellow volunteers treated everyone as equal without understanding the caste system they had walked into, and made repeated missteps as a result. Four months in, she concluded the entire premise was flawed: she had no business travelling to another country to tell people how to live when the UK had its own deep inequality to address first.
That experience ended one career path and opened another. Evans moved into frontline homelessness work, then discovered she lacked the practical skills the job demanded after witnessing a man have a seizure and head injury in a hostel and realising she had no idea how to respond. What she could do, she decided, was think and argue clearly. She moved into policy and research, and later into a senior role at a UK charitable foundation focused on social justice work [CHECK: the foundation's name is referenced in the audio but not clearly enough to confirm the spelling with certainty].
What a Funder Learns About Power
The years that followed reshaped how Evans thinks about power, and they form some of the most useful material in this conversation for anyone leading an organisation.
The first lesson: almost everyone is trying to do a good job. Where things go wrong is rarely bad intent. It is skill, or the structures and institutions people operate inside, that limit what they can do. That reframe changes the question from who is to blame to how do we get people into honest conversation with each other.
The second lesson is about rank. Evans argues that when people in positions of power do not own that position, whether out of discomfort or false modesty, they inadvertently stop others from owning theirs. An apologetic funder makes the people asking for funding apologetic too, and that dynamic becomes paternalistic rather than collaborative. Owning your position, she suggests, is what makes real partnership possible.
She also learned to see power operating in places it is not usually named. When people did not engage with services her organisation funded, her instinct used to be to see that as a problem to fix. She came to understand it differently: non-engagement was itself an exercise of power, a message being sent. The task was to listen to what was being communicated, not simply to push harder.
And she is candid about her own mistakes. She describes discovering that funding criteria her team had built, without deliberate intent, effectively excluded groups serving Black communities. She names this plainly as a serious error, and describes the discomfort of having to own it and change it. She also recounts inviting another funder into a community project without checking with the group first, and being told directly that she had overstepped. Her response in both cases was the same: acknowledge it, do not defend it, and repair it.
Living Like Every Day Might Be Her Last
The cancer history running through Evans's family shaped her twenties and thirties more than she initially realised. Believing she carried a high risk of dying young, she decided to live accordingly: fully, with intensity, without excessive caution.
She later took a genetic test and found she did carry the cancer gene. She had preventive surgery and significantly reduced her risk. But by then the belief had already done its work, for better and for worse.
At 40, alive and facing a longer horizon than she had planned for, Evans noticed she had started making safer, smaller choices, and that this did not feel like her. That noticing became the trigger for a significant life change: she left her senior role at the foundation and retrained as a systems, team and executive coach, a move she describes as terrifying, not least because she was the sole breadwinner in her household at the time. A programme called the Money Workshop, focused on the relationship between money and a fulfilling life, gave her the final push she needed to trust the decision.
The Question That Stopped Her in Her Tracks
The idea for Evans's podcast, Pleasuring Myself, did not arrive as a business plan. It arrived as a question someone put back to her: what do you do for yourself that is entirely for yourself, with no other purpose than enjoying it?
She could not answer it. That gap, between a woman who coaches senior leaders on how to operate well and a woman who could not name her own sources of simple pleasure, is what she decided to explore publicly, by interviewing other women about what brings them joy.
Her own list, once she started building it, turned out to be made of small things: the sound of rain on a roof, sun on her face, laughing properly, the pleasure of making and eating food, serendipitous encounters with strangers. Not grand achievements. Ordinary moments, unpaused and unnoticed until she went looking for them.
She now asks her podcast guests to name fifty things they enjoy every day, a deliberately long list designed to force a genuine reframe of how someone looks at their own routine, rather than a quick, easy answer.
The Joy Barometer: A Practical Tool for Leaders
Asked whether she runs an internal checklist to stop herself slipping back into old patterns, Evans describes something closer to a running filter than a checklist: a joy barometer. Faced with a decision, she asks whether it holds pleasure or joy for her. If a task is unavoidable, she asks how she can do it in a way that still brings her something. And if something starts to feel like effort, like forcing, she takes that as information rather than pushing through it regardless.
She frames living this way as a form of quiet activism. So much of what gets sold to people, she argues, is sold through pain and urgency. Choosing pleasure and ease as an organising principle is, in her words, counter-cultural. She references Adrienne Maree Brown's book Pleasure Activism [CHECK: name and title as heard in audio, worth confirming spelling] as language that gave shape to something she had been circling for years.
The conversation also turns to why slowing down feels so hard for the senior leaders Evans coaches. Her answer is blunt: a survival instinct, reinforced by a culture that equates constant productivity with safety. She notes that stepping out of that state is not instant. The nervous system needs time to settle once the adrenaline stops. Leaders who create even brief moments of genuine presence with the people they lead, she suggests, often see it land as something close to transformation, precisely because it is so rare.
Improv, Armour, and Letting Go of Control
Evans took up improv comedy after noticing, coming out of the pandemic, that she had forgotten how to properly laugh. She froze for the first five to ten sessions. She kept going anyway, because something about it was giving her what she needed: a place to be playful and silly with no audience, no judgement, and absolutely no ambition to turn it into a career.
She connects this directly to a pattern she recognises in herself as a leader: a protective identity, an armour, built up over years to appear composed, mysterious and professional. She is honest that she has made peace with parts of that armour rather than dismantling it entirely. But she also notices its cost: the same protection that keeps her safe also limits how freely she can show up, especially with people outside her immediate family and closest friends.
She has found that improv loosens that armour in a specific way. When she is focused on making a scene partner look good rather than managing how she appears herself, self-consciousness drops away. She has since noticed the same tools showing up, informally, in her coaching work: the improv principle of building on what someone offers rather than blocking it, and a greater freedom in her own body language when her attention is on the person in front of her rather than on herself.
Parenting has become a related training ground. With two children moving into their teenage years, one of them quiet and introverted in contrast to Evans's own instincts, she describes learning to let go of control and to meet her daughter where she is rather than expecting her daughter to meet her. A move to the Netherlands has added another layer: a visibly freer parenting culture, with unfenced school playgrounds and children cycling to school unaccompanied from around age ten, that regularly confronts her own more fear-based British instincts.
Leadership Changes Shape Depending on the Room
Asked to define leadership, Evans's instinctive answer is about modelling: showing people what is possible, inspiring them to try, and creating space for others to succeed and do their best work.
But she immediately complicates her own answer. Leadership, she argues, is not one fixed thing. She describes delivering leadership training to police officers, where the operating context is command and control, because emergencies involving life and death demand fast, decisive, unambiguous direction. She recalls a colleague from the Royal Military Police genuinely struggling to understand her more collaborative approach, unable to see why anyone would ask people for their opinions in that context.
Her point is not that one style is right and the other wrong. It is that leadership has to be read against context, and that leaders get into trouble when they apply the operating system built for one environment to a completely different one. It is a useful check for any leader convinced their default style is simply correct rather than simply familiar.
