This Women’s Month, Tim Africa celebrates the transformative power of women by highlighting six women who featured in episodes of
The Incredible Machines podcast. Across these episodes, you'll hear how women in Tim podcasts use their voices to lead systemic change, reimagine business strategy, and build inclusive education models. Their conversations serve as rich toolkits for redefining success, using storytelling, spiritual intelligence, and self-reflection at the forefront.
1. Dr Nerisha Maharaj
Spiritual intelligence, self-love and leadership
A global executive coach, yoga and meditation teacher, and scholar of ancient Indian philosophy, Nerisha reframes what leadership looks like. She bluntly states that insecure leaders bully and her practical remedy to overcoming insecurity is by cultivating self-love, wisdom, and daily reflective practices. Leadership, she argues, is a steady inner practice with ritualised reflection and persistence that turn inward security into outward compassion. When a leader’s clarity is habitual, that tone radiates through their teams, creating space for growth and sustained creativity.
For Tim listeners building human-centred businesses, Nerisha offers a leadership roadmap. Leadership is a journey, not a destination and the work you do on yourself is the work you do for your organisation.
Listen / Watch: Episode 5: Coaching Self-Love and Spiritual Intelligence in Leadership
2. Naretha Pretorius
Creativity as curriculum and civic courage
Naretha reimagines education and creative thinking as tools for social transformation. Her work as an educator and “thinking facilitator” is rooted in designing spaces where people learn to critically disrupt the status quo to make institutions and ideas more generative.
She believes the curriculum must be reorganised to cultivate creative critical thinking, creative research methods, and non-conformist practice so students can adapt within a rapidly changing society. Her take on inclusive education models pushes institutions to embrace creative leadership that teaches students how to think, not what to think.
Naretha’s episode offers a practical blueprint for embedding creativity into institutions, which is precisely the kind of thinking needed to build campaigns that ask deeper questions. Her emphasis on radical pedagogy sharpens how we design learning and content at Tim.
Listen / Watch: Episode 6: Navigating Creative Thinking
3. Cindy Norcott
Unstoppable clarity – business, service and grit
Cindy’s episode is a masterclass in intentionality. In a world obsessed with growth at all costs, she insists that clarity about why you do what you do is the antidote to drift and burnout. Intentionality gives you momentum because it aligns decisions, people and daily practices with a wider purpose. She provides practical steps to overcoming imposter syndrome, especially as when one’s business progresses. The throughline of her work is intentional balance: build people, serve others, lead from love.
For Tim’s audience, Cindy’s tools help leaders align vision with values, scale ethically, and stay grounded in purpose. Her insights are a practical guide on staying authentic, centering your heart in your work, and letting purpose shape long-term strategy and community impact.
Listen / Watch: Episode 16: Being Unstoppable
4. Debra Clelland
Listening through barriers and leading with care
Debra’s journey is a lesson in empathy and structural inclusion. Her leadership demonstrates how listening, adaptive communication, and humility create access in systems that tend to exclude people.
As the founder of DeafKidz International, her work exemplifies how women's voices in leadership can transform adversity into advocacy. Her approach to inclusion offers a blueprint for rethinking systems that tend to exclude. By listening carefully and centring marginalised voices, programmes become more responsive and life-changing. Debra’s episode models the sustained bravery it takes to see something through and to turn pain into something transformative.
Listen / Watch: Episode 19: Hearing Your Self
5. Mpume Zwane Langa
Freedom, identity and strategic reinvention
Mpume’s conversation is a lesson in identity and personal branding. She unpacks how women can redefine success on their own terms, shedding static societal labels and embracing personal freedom. Her approach refreshingly challenges norms and encourages others to see self-reinvention as a strategic branding act. She invites listeners to deviate from the fixed script and reimagine their careers, lives, and contributions to the world.
Mpume’s episode is an invitation to rethink what personal success looks like, especially for people who refuse one-size-fits-all categories. Her message is that we don’t need to follow others’ timetables, and we have the agency to reshape systems that weren’t built for us.
Listen / Watch: Episode 24: Freedom, Identity & Reinvention
6. Burgette Yarlett
Surviving & Thriving
From modelling and corporate communications to beauty pageants and branding, Burgette’s early career was rich with performance and polish. But it was a near-fatal car crash at 21 that catalysed her most profound work. Today, she is a Master NLP Practitioner, speaker, mindset coach, and the founder of Beyond Visible Belief, a platform and digital program empowering people to “LIT: Live In Truth.”
In her episode, Burgette shares her journey from external validation to deep inner alignment, transforming trauma into purpose, and doubt into self-mastery. With powerful clarity and emotional intelligence, she equips others to break through limiting self-beliefs and reclaim their narrative.
Listen / Watch: Episode 25: Surviving & Thriving
What these six conversations teach us
These conversations show us how women across sectors and life stages are engines of change. They blend empathy and ambition to demonstrate how meaningful systemic change begins with how we show up for ourselves and one another.
Together, these stories form a tapestry of celebrating women leaders who blend emotional intelligence with strategic action. Each woman in The Incredible Machines Podcast highlights how storytelling, service, and identity reshape systems from the inside out.
Tim Africa celebrates women’s voices as imperative in the blueprint for better institutions, with the most important notes being:
- leadership grounded in inner work
- education that creates creative citizens rather than cogs
- brands that hold purpose above profit
- advocacy born from lived experience
- limitless fluidity in authentic self-expression
- reclaiming agency through a linguistic mindset shift
Behind the mic
The women of Tim who make the podcast possible
A Women’s Month feature would be incomplete without honouring the brilliant women who work behind the scenes at Tim. From design and editing to research, copy and pitch ideas, our colleagues play a vital role in shaping the stories and sharpening the arguments. Women on the mic and women behind the mic together turn insights into ideas and ideas into execution.
How to keep listening
Subscribe to The Incredible Machines Podcast on your favourite platform for more podcast conversations with women driving systemic change, creative transformation, and personal empowerment.
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