Jim Moss spent more than a decade playing professional hockey and lacrosse, represented Team Canada, captained teams at nearly every level he played, and built much of his life and identity around being an athlete.
In 2009, Jim developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare autoimmune condition that attacked his nervous system. His athletic career came to an abrupt end, and he found himself facing a very different kind of challenge: recovering physically while figuring out who he was without sport at the centre of his life.
During his time in the hospital and rehab, Jim started noticing something.
The mood of the people caring for him mattered. The way they interacted with each other mattered. And the gratitude and care he showed them seemed to change the experience for everyone involved.
That curiosity eventually led Jim back to university and into the study of happiness, workplace well-being and culture. He went on to build Plasticity alongside his wife, Jennifer Moss, and today his work has led him somewhere new: exploring what he calls the physics of care.
At the heart of Jim’s thinking is a simple idea: care isn’t just something that feels good. It builds trust, changes how willing we are to take risks with one another, and can create real value in our relationships, communities and businesses.
In this episode, we talk about:
• Jim’s career playing professional hockey and lacrosse
• Representing Team Canada and returning to coaching
• Developing Guillain-Barré syndrome and having to rebuild his life
• Losing the identity that came with being an athlete
• The unexpected role gratitude played in his recovery
• Building Plasticity Labs with his wife, Jennifer Moss
• What Jim learned studying happiness, workplace culture and well-being
• Why trust matters so much in healthy communities
• Transactional trust vs. relational trust
• Jim’s idea of the physics of care
• The three Cs: caring, careful and careless
• Why care can be a competitive advantage in business
• How small moments of carelessness can create much bigger problems
• Why, once you start looking for care, you begin to see it everywhere
Jim will also be joining us at Waypoint Retreat this September for a session called The Entrepreneur’s Edge: How Care Can Be Your Competitive Advantage, where we’ll get to take these ideas even further.
This conversation gave us a whole new language for something we’ve always believed: the little things really are the big things. And maybe the reason they matter so much is actually pretty simple.
Because they show people we care.
EPISODE LINKS & REFERENCES
Jim Moss: The SMILE CEO
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On this podcast, we explore what it means to get UNBLOCKED.
You’ll hear stories about finding clarity, navigating career pivots, and choosing to live with intention. Sometimes that’s through conversations with guests who made bold moves and changed direction. Other times it’s just the two of us unpacking the books, ideas, and lessons shaping our own journey.
We’re not experts looking down from a stage. We’re in it too. Building, questioning, adjusting, and trying to create lives that feel more aligned, more alive, and more intentional.
