Streaking Into Self Discovery with Noelle Labrie

In this episode, Michael Dargie sits down with Noelle Labrie, a learning and development professional who helps restaurant owners and their teams lead better. Calling in from Miramar Beach on the Emerald Coast of Florida, Noelle explains that she doesn't walk into a kitchen and tell anyone they're bad at leadership. Instead she looks at turnover, staff culture, and online reviews, then works with management and chefs to figure out how they can serve their staff so their staff can serve their guests.

Her favourite people to work with are the newly promoted, young not in years but in experience. The awesome line cook or standout server who suddenly gets a supervisory role and has no idea how to hold yesterday's drinking buddies accountable, read a P&L, or control food and labour costs. Nobody teaches them, and that gap is exactly where Noelle likes to work. Her eight-week Carpe Diem Leadership program breaks that learning into small, digestible tasks with an in-theory, in-practice, in-review rhythm each week.

Then there's the streak. As of the recording, Noelle had run at least a mile every single day for 3,792 days, roughly ten and a half years. It started almost by accident. A marathon fundraiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society took her to Dublin for her 30th birthday, where she promptly fell in love with Ireland. Years later, wrapping up a work contract in Costa Rica, she decided to run a mile a day until her flight home. Forty days became a hundred, and she simply never stopped. What began as physical health has become far more about her emotional, spiritual, and mental wellbeing, the way she clears her head and sets her intention each morning.

The conversation wanders happily, the way the best ones do. Noelle has run six marathons, most recently New York City for her 50th birthday. She's run in a Tahiti airport in flip-flops while crossing the date line, and she's lived and worked in Kuwait for four years, opening a restaurant in Istanbul, a city she'd move to tomorrow if she spoke the language. A quiet moment outside her Kuwait apartment, two single women dressed head to toe in black, one in a hijab, left her with a lasting thought: are we really that different?

That thread carries into her answer for the one thing she wishes the world knew, that we are far more alike than we are different, and that a little more compassion and empathy would go a long way. Her advice for rebels is just as human. Be gentle with yourself. Show yourself grace. K