My friend, Susanne, knows the most interesting people.

I met her at the Organizational Development Network many years ago and we’ve stayed in touch since then. She left her day job not long after we met and began traveling to Nepal, where she worked with a nonprofit that was educating young women and helping them find jobs, so that their impoverished parents wouldn’t sell them. Later, she did a TEDx talk and started doing executive coaching and consulting about leadership, often being invited to lecture on women’s leadership. A few years ago she started her blog, Take It From the Ironwoman, which later transformed into her podcast.

Each week – and sometimes multiple times a week, she interviews people that she finds interesting, who have chosen interesting paths or are working on interesting projects. The format is simple, a 15-minute Q&A interview with a person who may not think what they are doing is remarkable – they’re just living their lives – but which others may find inspirational. Susanne grew up in Austria and is fluent in several languages and her podcast spans 5 languages.

This book is a collection of those interviews, edited, and with Susanne’s thoughts about why she chose these people, what she learned from them, and what their journey can share with others.

When I was evaluating the graduate school that I ultimately selected, the Dean asked if it would help my decision to speak with someone who had graduated from the school. He mentioned people who were then high-level executives at huge, glamourous organizations – but I didn’t want to talk to them. I wanted to speak to people who were doing something more relatable, something that I could picture myself doing.

I was reminded of that this week, when a colleague mentioned that the members of a focus group she had interviewed had said that they didn’t want to hear from influencers or celebrities about how to take action on what they were learning in the courses the company we work for offers – they wanted to hear from people like them, people on a journey, preferably people just a few years further down the journey than they themselves were.

That made sense to me.

And so the stories in Susanne’s blog and in her books help us see women who are leaders but aren’t the women who we often see featured in a 30 Under 30 or a 50 Over 50; these are women like you and me, who are exploring, learning, testing, growing – “quiet disrupters” as one of the featured women calls herself.

You learn more about Susanne’s podcast and order your copy of her book on her website, http://www.SusanneMueller.biz.