Action's Antidotes

Homelessness is a complex crisis—one that can't be solved by temporary fixes alone. It takes compassion, innovation, and the courage to rethink how we support those in need. What if we could build communities that restore dignity, stability, and hope? In this episode, I'm joined by Ashley Garcia, founder and executive director of Tiny Villages Inc. We dive into the deeper issues behind homelessness and explore bold, community-centered solutions. Ashley shares how her team is building small, self-contained homes and community spaces that give people not just a place to live, but the support they need to move forward. It's a reminder that even small ideas can lead to big change. --- Listen to the podcast here: Innovative Solutions That Are Changing Homelessness with Ashley Garcia Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about addressing some of these major societal issues. Now, we all have our different reasons for why we're taking on the initiatives we have, but some of us are really moved by things that we see in the world, some major issues, and, sometimes, it could be pretty daunting to think about something that has been an issue for sometimes decades, centuries, even millennia, and really dig in and take it on. My guest today is Ashley Garcia and she is the founder and executive director of a Colorado nonprofit called Tiny Villages, the address is tinyvillages.org.  ---     Ashley is taking on a major societal issue and, Ashley, welcome to the program.   Thank you, Stephen, for having me today. I'm excited to talk a little bit more about Tiny Villages Inc.   Let's start out by, first of all, describing your story about the issue that you were moved to address and what made you decide that you have the capacity, have the talent, everything else to dive into it.    So, Tiny Villages Inc. is a 501(c)(3) Colorado nonprofit corporation where we're providing permanent housing solutions to citizens in the United States, and this includes safe housing with high quality of life and we're folding that into three different parts so there's housing, agriculture, and innovation. And with that, there's going to be things like solar panels being used, there's going to be over 110 acres on each of the tiny villages where we will provide agriculture that will give food to the villagers when they move in. And, with that, right now, we're focusing on the unhoused population. The reason being is, back in 2021, one of my businesses is real estate investing, and so with that company, myself and several of my business partners went and traveled the United States because we're looking for property so that we could have landing strips and have resorts and have gated communities, 24-hour security so that all the elitist in the United States could come, or actually in the world, could come and mastermind and just figure out and collaborate how to solve big world problems. And, the reality is, when we went and did this trip, we found out that there's a lot of land, and every single state that we went to, there was the unhoused population. So that's when I flipped all of this around and started Tiny Villages Inc.    So you noticed a lot of land, and another part of your mission is related to agriculture so did you notice a lot of land not only, and I'm specifically thinking about some places I've been to or used to live in like Illinois and Iowa where there's a lot of land but I just imagine a lot of it being corn fields, soy fields, and stuff like that, but I'm guessing you observed a lot of land that wasn't also already being used for agriculture?   That is correct. There's a lot of undeveloped land or there's a lot of like little towns and cities that have folded up because the people have actually left and went to the major cities where jobs are and so it was just eye opening to even see that.

Sales can be intimidating—especially when you're chasing a passion that doesn't come with a natural knack for selling. For many, mindset is the missing piece, not just in business but in life. But what happens when you combine strategy with psychology to unlock real growth? In this episode, I have Christopher Philippi, a seasoned sales consultant and coach for CEOs. He helps people overcome the fear of selling and client acquisition by blending both coaching and consulting to support real growth. In our conversation, Christopher shares how mindset shapes our actions, why clarity and consistency matter, and how to shift your thoughts to get better results in business and life. Tune in to learn how the right strategy and mindset can change everything. --- Listen to the podcast here: Mastering Sales and Mindset with Christopher Filipiak Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. A lot of us have ideas, a lot of us have passions, and a lot of us have the impact that we want to make onto the world and maybe you're listening and you're thinking about it a little bit, thinking, okay, should I get serious about this? It's springtime, there's a new energy going on, maybe it's time to actually get serious. But we have a series of things that oftentimes trip us up, make us a little bit intimidated, make us kind of question whether or not we want to hit that proverbial Start button. And one of the things that can really intimidate a lot of people is sales or kind of building a client base/audience, how do you actually connect your product to the market that you're trying to connect it to, i.e., how do you actually sell the thing? Is someone going to ever pay me for this? Today, to talk about that subject, I would like to bring on my guest, Christopher Filipiak, who is a sales consultant and a coach for CEOs. ---     Christopher, welcome to the program.   Hey, Stephen. It's so good to be here today. Thanks for having me on the show.    Yeah, thank you for popping on. So not kind of a normal combination, sales consultant and coach for CEOs. What does that mean in tandem?    Yeah, sure. It's a good question because consulting is its own unique thing and coaching is its own unique thing so when I think of consulting, you kind of think of three buckets, strategy, planning, and implementation of something, and a consultant is really someone who provides expert advice and a proven process, meaning, know how to get something done and they're there to be an expert and go, “Hey, this is how you do that.” A coach is more there to help you create clarity on what you want and help you discover your own truths. So a coach isn't there to tell you how to do it, a coach is really there to help you figure out how you want to do it and provide you some support and some challenge and a container for you to do that. So, when it comes to sales, I think both things are important, because my clients need someone who can help them set up a sales system, a sales process, the skills around the strategy and tactics of building a business that's competent and making sales, and so much of sales deals with what's going on in your own head and your own confidence and your own leadership and your own material around money and strangers that having coaching is also really supportive so that's why I do both.    And are your clients often the same for both the coaching and the consulting or is it usually separate endeavors based on what someone at a certain time?    Yeah, that's a really good question. So, they tend to be the same. When I work with my clients, what happens is we'll have calls that are focused on building skill sets or implementation work around the strategies and tactics around sales and then we'll have separate calls that are coaching-only calls. And so most of my engagements with my clients, I do both things,

Family legacy means different things to different people. For some, it's a big part of who they are, with strong traditions and high expectations. For others, it's something they're still trying to figure out. But how do you build something new while honoring where you came from? In this episode, I have Leslie Lane, the founder and lead photographer of Studio 13. Photography runs in her family, and she's been able to take that legacy and shape it into something of her own. In our conversation, Leslie shares what it was like growing up in a photography family, how she found her own style, and what it means to her to carry that legacy forward while doing things her way. Tune in and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: What It Means to Carry Legacy Forward with Lesle Lane Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about a topic that we've yet to really cover in this particular podcast, and that is the idea of a family legacy. I know some people have a stronger family legacy than others. For some people, it really looms large and there's a lot of expectations, and, for others, it's maybe even lacking direction too much. But my guest today, Lesle Lane, is the founder and lead photographer of Studio 13 but she comes from a family that has a legacy of photography and she's been able to take their business and kind of move it in a direction that puts her own mark on it. ---     Lesle, welcome to the program.   Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure.   Definitely. So, tell us first about how photography is part of your family legacy.   I sure will. So, my grandfather actually started the business. He came into the photographic industry because when he was an eighth grader, his father tried to kill him with a garden hoe and so he ran away from home. You've got the shocked look on your face. It's true. He ran away from home and they didn't have Child Protective Services and so he ended up getting in with traveling salespeople, nomadic people, that's what they did, and one of the things that they did was teach him how to be a photographer. And so he would go from town to town taking pictures and then going back several weeks later to deliver the pictures and, finally, came upon my grandmother, who he ended up marrying, though he was hired to shoot her engagement portrait so that was quite scandalous. And then they settled, started their portrait photography business in Columbus, Georgia. And then my mother and father divorced where we moved to Indiana together, she married my stepfather and then I took over his version of the photography studio, which was corporate and commercial work.    It's just shocking to hear someone trying to kill their own son with a garden hoe because people will oftentimes joke about it and they're like, funny, like, “Oh, I could kill you,” or something like that, but like this was a literal attempt to end his own son's life.   Yes, and, actually, I misspoke, it was a stepfather, but still, the man that was married to his mother, and it was during the Depression times, things were not good, there was no work, there was no money. It doesn't excuse it at all but he had no choice. And so my grandfather, he survived and ended up running a very successful business and dying a multimillionaire. He made something amazing of himself after leaving home in the eighth grade. That is a legacy. That is something you can grab on to. Great father, great grandfather, and I'm blessed to have known him.   One of the things that I've done personally and I know a lot of other people have talked about recently and it gets a little bit spiritual sometimes is this idea of multigenerational patterns and how they affect anyone's life going forward. And so you have this family legacy of photography, which I definitely want to talk about as well as that's your business,

Starting a business is a big decision, and people do it for different reasons. Maybe you have a passion you really care about, or you just want more freedom in how you spend your time. For some, it's about doing something different from the usual 9-to-5 job and having control over their own path. But what does it really take to start a business—and is passion enough to keep you going?  In this episode, I have Clara Ansel, CEO and Founder of Business Powerhouse. Clara shares valuable insights into managing business growth sustainably without burning out. The conversation delves into the importance of having a clear destination or 'Point B,' the role of mindset in business success, and practical steps to avoid chaos and inefficiency. Clara also discusses the significance of decluttering one's mind and surroundings, actionable advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, and her personal journey from corporate consultancy to empowering small business owners. Tune in to learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Starting and Scaling up a Business with Claire Ansell Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidotes to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about starting and scaling up businesses. Now, perhaps you have your reasons for wanting to start a business and, usually, it's about passion that you have or just the desire to have a life where you have a little bit more autonomy over what you do and when you do it, something other than the corporate life, but maybe you're looking at these processes of starting a business and seeing how daunting the process is, how much it really goes on, especially if you do end up with an investor that expects you to scale or if you personally have the desire to scale because whatever mission you're serving, you're kind of wanting to bring to more or more people. My guest today is Claire Ansell, and she is the CEO and founder of Business Powerhouse and she has some good thoughts about how we could go about managing this whole process without kind of burning out, without kind of ending up doing too much in a more sustainable fashion. ---     Claire, welcome to the program.   Hey, Stephen. How are you?    I'm doing pretty well today. It's actually a nice 70 degrees here.    Nice. That's good. Summer is coming.    It always feels nice at this time of year. How are you today?    I'm pretty good. It's been an exciting day with doing lots of –– actually like in the same realm as what you're talking about. We launched a new kind of series in our hub called Awaken, which is all about mindset so it's pretty exciting to be jumping on here with you today and kind of continuing the conversation.    Yeah, and that's a good place to start. We can talk a little bit about mindset because I'm assuming you work with a lot of people who are either starting businesses or have a business and they're just starting to become overwhelmed as their web traffic, their client base, something kind of picks up.    Yeah, and I think it doesn't really matter what phase of business you're in, whether you're a startup or a ten-million-dollar business, the reality –– or a hundred-million-dollar business. I mean, I've seen it right up to 600 million. I mean, at some point, a business owner is overwhelmed in chaos and facing that burnout. It's just the reality of the way in which we structure and grow our businesses.   Now, given your role in your business, is there any way to prevent that burnout? Is there any way someone that's starting a business now can adopt either a mindset or a set of operational practical you want to start a business but you don't want to burn yourself out?  Yeah, 100 percent, and I think one of the biggest pieces the business owners really miss is they don't understand what their point B is. We talk about point A is where you are today and point B is where are you going in the future and that could be at ...

Stress is part of life, but learning how to handle it well can make a big difference for your health and well-being. When we don't have the right tools, even small problems can start to feel overwhelming. The good news is, there are easy ways to bounce back and stay on track. But what if there was a way to actually measure how well you're handling stress? In this episode, I talk with Matt Bennett, founder of Optimal HRV. We dive into heart rate variability (HRV) and how it relates to your body's ability to recover from stress. Matt shares how HRV tracking can give you early signs of health issues before symptoms even show up. He also talks about affordable tools and breathing techniques that can help anyone improve their stress response and build resilience. --- Listen to the podcast here: Understanding HRV and Managing Stress with Matt Bennett Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about stress and, in some aspect, our response to stress, because that's one of the things that can really get in the way of us following our passions, and you can easily ruin a good reputation you built with one terrible stress response and that's something that is really sad to see because we all are human and we all have the times where we don't quite respond the right way but it can be a little bit difficult. So, one of the tools that a lot of people are using to manage their stress as well as their overall health is HRV which, my guest today, Matt Bennett, the owner and founder of Optimal HRV, is going to talk to us more about. ---     HRV is the heart rate variability and, Matt, welcome to the program.   Thanks for having me. Big fan of the show so it's an honor to be on.   Thank you so much for coming on and I want to start off with explaining to the audience to make sure we're all oriented, I know some people are probably pretty familiar with what HRV is, others maybe not as much, but I think most people probably aren't familiar with it and its significance on the level that you are.   Really, when you get down to what is heart rate variability, it's your body and mind's ability to handle or recover from stress. And, as you said in your intro, the stress response is so fundamental to everything we do. Now, stress can be an illness. Stress can be a very, very difficult workout. Stress is often you talk about on your show, can be, I've got five, six hours of screen time today and we know that can add stress to the system as well. So, your ability to handle or recover from stress is the best foundational definition for heart rate variability that I have seen. Now, we're doing that by measuring millisecond variations in your heartbeat, and I'm happy to explore the science behind that, but that gives us, I think, a good working definition to start out our conversation with.   So you're talking about like millisecond variance in heart rate and some people might be thinking why there should be variance at all because one of the key aspects of it that might be good to orient people to is that is there a too low, a too high number, or is it just a matter of keeping it at or above a certain level?   Right. So, we're in a time where consistency is usually leading to a good outcome. You and I want to turn our computers on and, for the most part, we want it to do the same thing it did yesterday and the day before. You don't want to sit in your car and have it operate totally different than it did the last time you drove it. In this high tech environment, mechanized environment that we modern humans live in, consistency is usually equated with good quality. We are biological systems so this variation is actually a positive thing. Now, you could have variation in your heartbeats to an extent where you have a medical issue, arrhythmias and other things are obviously not what we're talking about here and those need t...

We can't remove emotion from our lives — it's always been there since the beginning. Sometimes, when we're making big life decisions, we have to face and work through past trauma. That trauma can show up in different ways. So how do we start to heal? In this episode, I talk with Regard Tang, an energy healer and channeler who focuses on emotional and social trauma. We chat about how our childhood and our parents' influence shape our emotional habits as we grow up. Regard shares why it's important to deal with emotional and generational trauma so we can live healthier lives. She also explains how energy healing works, including how she connects with a person's ancestors and spirit guides to help uncover and release deep emotional pain. --- Listen to the podcast here: Healing Emotional Trauma and Understanding Energy with Regard Tang Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. When we are preparing for whatever our next move is, oftentimes that will be starting a business, starting a new initiative, or starting a new chapter in our lives, we need to do various things to, whether it be purge the old chapters or just kind of heal, reset ourselves, oftentimes, that will involve kind of overcoming or processing some trauma from previous areas of our lives, and that can take on many different forms, but it is a very important thing that I think a lot of people don't necessarily think of of why am I in this mentality where I don't seem to ever be able to get a move on what I'm doing or make a decision or really kind of go for what I'm going for. And so I want to present with you various different forms in which we can heal the trauma, because there's many different ways that we can process our energy. Today, my guest is Regard Tang, and she is an energy healer and a channeler. ---     Regard, welcome to the program.   Thank you for having me, Stephen.    Thank you so much. And I want to start this podcast with a quick explanation, because I'm bringing on a concept that may be new to a lot of people about the two things that you do, which are energy healing and channeling. By energy healing, what does that mean? What does that really entail?    So, energy healing, we all carry different kind of energy. Some people, they carry a little bit like a heavier energy and I'm sure that when you walk into the room, you can just stand –– the room is carrying those very heavy energy versus when you're seeing some people that they're very bubbly and they're just like lighter, they light you up. So energy healing, what I do? I do channeling. So energy healing, you can go to sound healing, you can go to reiki. There's a lot of different methods, but for me, I specialize in channeling. What does channeling mean? It means that I can talk to my client's ancestors, I can talk to my client's spirit guides, which is spirit team, and I can also talk to my client's inner self, means that, because I specialize in emotional trauma and social trauma, so I'm able to tell are their emotion aligned? Means that they're like, “Well, I experienced X, Y and Z,” but I'm able to tap into their emotion, it's like, actually, it's not exactly what you feel on their surface. I can feel very, very deep emotions that they literally put it in the box and put it away when they were younger. And, of course, in a minute, we'll explain a little bit more, but that is what I do.    Okay. And so I want to start the beginning of the story, which is these emotions that are pushed away and the energy that people all kind of come out in the room, because it sounds like this is something that could be really limiting some people from living their best lives and really presenting themselves in a way. So, what does it look like for someone whose energy is not aligned because of an emotional baggage from the past? What does it feel like when you walk into a room and you encounter that person and...

Having a big idea or vision is great—but at some point, you've got to share it. Whether you're talking to future customers, hiring a team, or just explaining what you do, people need to get it. And it's not just about what you say out loud or post online. A big part of it starts with knowing yourself—what you believe in, what you offer, and why it matters. So how do you figure all that out and actually get your message across? In this episode, I talk with Alice Marie Brink, and Ed Moehlenkamp about how to communicate your vision in a way that actually connects. We chat about the impact of social media, communication and leadership. Tune in, to learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: How to Effectively Communicate Your Vision with Alice and Ed Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Any vision that you have, you're going to need to communicate that vision outward somehow. There is just no getting around it. At some point, someone needs to know what you're doing, whether it is people you hire to enact your vision and do the communication or the communication that you do directly yourself for your vision. And when it comes to communicating your vision outward, there's actually an internal and an external component of it. The external component is what we often see because those are the words you say or the words you type or the images you put out there. However, there is some also internal work that you need to do in order to understand what you're communicating, understand who you are, and understanding, in many cases, what your value proposition is, which is important for anyone to understand why they should be doing business with you regardless of what your idea is. To talk about both the internal and external components of this concept of communicating your vision outward, I would like to introduce to you Alice Brink and Ed Moehlenkamp with their Energy Interplay Initiative. ---     Alice, Ed, welcome to the program.   Thank you.    Thank you.    Nice to see you.    Great to see you as well. And so just to orient us a little bit, we'll start with you, Alice, as the internal component, which is the first component, and you work with mindset, energy, and mindfulness.   That's right. No matter where we go and what we do, we're carrying this internal environment with us and so my work helps people get in touch with that, become aware of it, and then learn how to drive that energy, because, after all, it's all energy. And so, through exercises and then practical application, I love the energy, I've been in energy work for almost three decades now, and so that's shown me a lot of different outpicturings of that. And so one of those, now that I'm with Ed, we're applying it to our presentation skills offering. So it's all about what you're bringing to this presentation internally that drives the energy and the connection of your presentation.Share on X Now, when it comes to energy work, how much of it is kind of overall what energy you bring to every single day interaction, whether you're attending a networking event, meeting with one of your employees, or even just hanging out with your friends, versus the energy reset that you do in advance of the actual presentation that you're about to give?   This is funny you bring this up. So, in almost every one of my workshops and in my coaching interactions, we get to a point where I share this favorite quote of mine, and it is, “Don't let the weeds grow on the path to the dear friend's home.” And I believe it's an old Chinese proverb of some kind, but the dear friend is you, and so getting familiar with that path that leads you inward and tamping down the weeds, if you will, through repeated trips there allows that connection to be more readily available and to be more authentic to you and more in alignment. So, especially now,

We all experience moments when emotions overwhelm us, especially if we have trapped emotions that build up over time. In today's fast-paced world, it's easy to feel overloaded with anxiety, stress, and negative news. How can we find balance and set boundaries to protect our well-being? In this episode, I sit down with Vanessa Shippy, an expert in energy work and emotional healing. Vanessa is dedicated to helping individuals release trapped emotions, cultivate self-awareness, and create a more balanced life. Through her work at Dawning Hope, she guides clients on their healing journeys by integrating energy healing, mindset shifts, and self-care practices. We discuss how emotional buildup affects our nervous system, why setting energetic boundaries is essential, and how self-compassion plays a key role in emotional well-being. Vanessa shares real-life experiences from her clients, practical tips on processing emotions, and ways to stay grounded despite life's challenges. Whether you're dealing with stress, anxiety, or emotional overload, this conversation will provide actionable insights to help you regain balance. Tune in for an enlightening discussion! --- Listen to the podcast here: Finding Balance and Emotional Well-Being with Vanessa Shippy Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a common situation where we have some trapped emotions, and what I mean by that is you want to get some stuff done, you have an important meeting maybe or even just a list of tasks that you would really like to accomplish and do well, yet something someone said or something someone did just kind of stays tracked in your mind, like it triggered you in a way, and you don't even oftentimes know why do I keep thinking about that but you just can't stop thinking about it. Why was her tone of voice like that? Why did he slam the door? Etc. So, today, I want to talk to you about how we can possibly get past some of these and other energetic and balanced situations by introducing to you my guest, Vanessa Shippy, and she is the founder of Dawning Hope. ---   Vanessa, welcome to the program.   Hi, thank you for having me.    Thank you and welcome to Action's Antidotes. First of all, tell us a little bit about Dawning Hope.   Yeah, so Dawning Hope is my business. I'm honored to serve in a way. I get to offer intuitive energy reading, clearing, balancing, and channeling sessions, and I'm actually also currently putting together resources and a guide to help people come into touch with their own energy and body. I typically will encourage this through like nervous system regulation and emotional processing, like through gaining knowledge and restoring balance to the mind, body, and spirit as a whole. I myself went from bedridden to feeling better than I ever have. My vision for my business is to let others know that even after the darkest night, the sun always rises and the dawn brings new hope.   With my initial statement, am I even thinking about it properly? Because I guess I was thinking about a situation where, okay, this person said something like this, this person was in a bad mood and it's weighing in my mind, but is that even the situation or is it about something way more than what happened yesterday, what happened this morning that I just can't stop ruminating on?   Yeah, so that can be more of the effects of what maybe actually happened. Typically, some of our deepest, you could say, traumas or trapped energies will occur in childhood. I personally have a theory that children are so open and, in openness, it's a gift but it can also be a vulnerability, and so, oftentimes, the way that they perceive the world is rather deep and they can internalize it more than adults might just because they don't have the same understanding or experience as adults. Say, if someone said something to you this morning and you're ...

In a world that's increasingly dominated by screens, how does reducing screen time impact our mental health and our connection to the world around us? In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Joan Savage, a multifaceted author and former professor, who transitioned from academia to pursue her passion for writing. She best known for her gripping murder mystery novel Red Fever, which she published after overcoming a challenging journey, supported by her community. With a background in business management and a deep commitment to mental wellness, Dr. Savage spent years researching the significant impact of virtual reality on mental health, particularly for vulnerable populations like young boys and military personnel. Together, we explore the pervasive issue of screen time and its effects on our lives. Dr. Savage shares her insights on how social media and technology can lead to feelings of isolation, and the importance of community in overcoming these challenges. She also discusses the balance between seeking validation online and forming genuine connections in a digital world. This conversation is full of meaningful insights and tips for fostering authentic relationships while reducing screen time—so you won't want to miss it! --- Listen to the podcast here: Navigating Life Beyond Screens with Dr. Joan Savage Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of my initiatives here in 2025 and something I'm trying to showcase is helping people cut down on their screen time. We've been seeing a lot more people take notice on how much of the excess time that we're spending in front of what's often referred to as attention grabbing or addictive technology is really impacting the lives we live as well as the mindsets that we adapt, so I'm going to be bringing on some guests from time to time that have their own really unique stories about how cutting down on screen time has changed their lives. Today, I would like to introduce you to Dr. Joan Savage. ---   Dr. Joan Savage, welcome to the program.   Thank you. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.    It's wonderful. So, Dr Savage, like myself, has a lot of different initiatives in life. I think, traditionally, we've always thought of people as their job title, or at least for maybe about 100 years in the 20th century mostly where it's like, okay, you are a broker, you are a data analyst, but we also know that, in life, people are way more than that so I want to start out by introducing you to my audience as all the different things that you're a part of right now that you have done recently and are doing.   Great. Too many things, I think.   Well, as long as it make you happy, right?   And it does, yes, you're right.   So, yeah, so you start by telling us about all the different things that you're –- yeah, all your different things.   So my –- I'll try to do things backwards chronologically. I feel like that makes a little more sense. So, right now, my full-time job, I guess, is I'm an author. So, a year ago, I released a murder mystery. It's got a little bit of eroticism in it but mostly it's a murder mystery. It's called Red Fever and it's my first attempt at fiction so that was a nightmare getting it published. I was really blessed to have just so many beautiful people in my life to speak into that and help me get that done and give me the courage to resign from my job as a professor. I was an adjunct teacher for about three years at Florida Tech and I was so, oh my gosh, that job came at such a time when everybody was looking for a remote position when COVID had hit so I have no complaints about that. Although I never wanted to be a teacher, that's just –- it fell into my lap. I knew it was what the universe was guiding me and, in COVID, everyone wanted to be home so I loved it. I took it, again, it wasn't anything that I've studied for,

Did you know that trauma and stress don't just affect your emotions but can also be stored in your body—especially in your spine? How can we release this tension and improve our overall well-being? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Lauren Stefanik, a chiropractor at Wellness Rhythms, to explore the powerful connection between stored trauma and physical health. Drawing inspiration from The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Stefanik explains how everyday stressors and past trauma manifest physically, leading to discomfort and emotional imbalances. We dive into Network Spinal chiropractic, a gentle technique that helps release tension in the spinal cord, promoting higher energy states and better health. Dr. Stefanik also shares her journey into this integrative healing approach and emphasizes the importance of self-compassion, body awareness, and open communication for overall well-being. If you're looking for ways to release stored tension, enhance your health, and embrace a holistic approach to healing, this conversation is one you won't want to miss! --- Listen to the podcast here: Healing Trauma Through the Body with Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Recently, I read a book called The Body Keeps Score, which talks a lot about the idea of all of our traumas, everything happening in our past, regardless of what it is, kind of being stored in our body, this is oftentimes things that we sometimes tend to forget about, forget about how it's continuing to impact our lives, such as continued patterns in our childhood that we kind of lived through or even other kind of more acute lived experiences that could be one car accident when you're 16 and now you're 35 so it doesn't really become something you think about in a lot of your minds. Now, there's been some study about how some of these subconscious patterns continue to emerge through some subconscious programming, but here today, I'm here to talk to you a little bit more about how the body itself keeps score, how certain parts of the body kind of retain the memories of these traumas and how it can still be impacting what we're doing today and how we're showing up in everything around. And to facilitate this conversation, I'd like to invite on my guest, Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk with Wellness Rhythms. She is a doctor of chiropractic services. ---   Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk, welcome to the program.   Hi, Stephen. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really grateful that you have this awesome podcast and that you've given me the opportunity to be on it. And, yeah, I do network spinal as a doctor of chiropractor.   We're talking about how the body keeps score, and your focus specifically is on how the spine has kind of kept score of some of these traumas or other items from our past.    Yeah. So, what we like to say is that what goes to the back of the mind tends to go to the spine and so what Network Spinal is specifically helping people realize is that there's events that happen in our life, whether you call them stressors or traumas or just stressful events, your body actually doesn't really know the difference between a massive stressor like something that we usually, quote-unquote, call “trauma,” or the small kind of everyday stressors, where we're stressing to get to work on time or we have a deadline or our dog is barking at us and we don't know why. Your nervous system actually doesn't know the difference between a massive stressor and a small stressor. It really responds in the exact same way and, sometimes, that is responding by going into fight or flight. So, when we go into fight or flight, there's a lot of things that people realize happens. So, your eyes, your pupils are going to dilate, your breath becomes a little bit more shallow and more rapid, your heart rate becomes more rapid, your muscles tense, all of those things people recognize,

We spend a lot of time on screens these days, whether it's for work, social media, or just relaxing with a show. It's easy to lose track of time, and hours can pass before we know it. But how much is too much? What exactly is the impact on our health and daily lives? In this episode, I talk with Sumayyah Emeh-Edu, Founder of Embedded Consulting. We discuss the impacts of excessive screen time and social media on mental health and the importance of connecting with people around us. Sumayyah shares her struggles with social media and how she observed its impact on her friends and family. Tune in to hear her insights! --- Listen to the podcast here: How to Break Free from Screen Time Overload with Sumayyah Emeh-Edu Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. And, today, I want to talk to you about a topic that's really near and dear to my heart, as in I know I have my own initiative around this, which is cutting down on people's screen time. I think you've probably seen in the news that we do have a lot of problems associated with the excessive amount of time in front of screens and people come up with different numbers depending on which particular study you're using or if you're considering phones, TVs, computers, and everything as well, but, regardless, it seems out of control and anyone that's old enough to remember the world before smartphones and everything took it over can remember a world where we spent a lot more time relating to each other in person as well as doing things not in front of some form of digital technology and it's hard not to make a clear connection between that and a lot of the mental health and loneliness issues that we're experiencing today. So, today, I'd like to bring on someone who is kind of taking on an initiative in the same vein, in the same realm, Sumayyah Emeh-Edu, the founder of Embedded Consulting LLC. ---   Sumayyah, welcome to the program.   Thank you, Stephen. Nice to be here.    Yeah, thank you so much, and thank you so much for connecting because it's always great to meet and connect with anyone else who's kind of observed the same issue. So why don't you start by telling me your story about kind of when you first started observing this whole issue, I think it was roughly maybe 15 years ago-ish that we all started in mass adopting these smartphones and excessive social media and the changes started to be visible in everyday life, regardless of whether or not you saw it as a problem.    Yeah. So, I was on Myspace back in the day, 2008 I got onto Facebook, and I didn't really see it as a problem. I was just like, “Wow, this is awesome.” There was a couple documentaries that came out around like 2014, 2015 that I had watched. There was also a lot of ethical folks and whistleblowers that were coming out of all of the big tech companies. And it was just information I digested but, like most people, I'm like, “Well, that does affect me,” and I would say a majority of my time was spent on Facebook. Twitter was always too fast and I wasn't even on Instagram at that point, and I had already been a person who didn't have, for instance, social media notifications in my email and on my phone because it just takes up space and I just hate my inbox just filled with a bunch of junk, but I had been in higher education most of my early career and then I made the transition into diversity, equity, and inclusion in 2015-ish, and it was just interesting because the election was going on, the first election with Trump, and it was a lot of negativity, a lot of just ridiculousness going on from a political perspective. And then, on top of it, I was doing diversity, equity, and inclusion work and I was deeply impacted when I would see injustices go viral or, unfortunately, the murder of a black man go viral, and so when I heard all of this thing about how social media is addictive, how it can impact your mood, and again,

Today's job search is considerably different from the busy, fast-paced job hunts of the past. Nowadays, it goes beyond having the ideal CV or applying as soon as possible. Finding a career that aligns with your values, demonstrating your abilities, and establishing genuine relationships are now important. In light of significant shifts like remote work and new hiring practices, how are you preparing to thrive? In this episode, I chat with Wyatt Carr, a partner at The Page Group and a seasoned recruiter. Wyatt talks about the struggles of finding a job and hiring the right people in today's fast-changing world. We discuss simple ways to stand out when job hunting, how automation is changing the workplace, and what businesses are doing differently when hiring. Tune in now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Navigating the Job Search in a Changing World of Work with Wyatt Carr Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a topic, something that I find one of the most frustrating aspects of the world we're in today, and that is the process of finding a job or the process of connecting people with jobs. I know a lot of people and I also personally have been in situations where it just seems to just take a long time to find a job and there's all these things about getting noticed, getting your resume out there, when all it is that you really want is to just find a job that fits what you studied in school, what your background is, what you think you'd be good at and also be interested in, do a good job at it. The process does not seem to be that much better, per se, from the employer side too because they're just looking for talent and I know that there's mismatches all around. So, to talk about where we are in the process of job finding, talent acquisition, all that, I would like to introduce my guest today, Wyatt Carr, who is a partner with The Page Group and an experienced recruiter. ---   Wyatt, welcome to the program.   Thank you so much, Stephen. Happy to be here.    Happy to have you. I just see the frustration so many people express to me, whether it be in person or even over LinkedIn, about people really looking for jobs. If anyone out there listening is in that situation where they're looking for a job, they just need to find something, what do you think people need to be doing?    So I think the number one thing to understand when you're looking for a job is to realize that you are an investment if someone offers you a job. They expect to make more money than you cost to employ and that's the current challenge with the current market is companies are seeming to do more with less and that is a huge concern about AI and how it will impact the workforce and how it will target or potentially take opportunity from a lot of white collar professions. Everyone thought automation would come for blue collar and it's come to white collar, everyone's probably heard that already. You need to understand what value you bring to a business and then find the businesses that need your services, find the businesses that would value from what you can bring to the table.Share on X I think we were very spoiled the last 10 years, literally, in my career, I've been in staffing and talent management, the economy has just continued to boom. I think during COVID, white collar workers did better. Blue collar and essential workers, they absolutely were devastated. So much money shifted to the laptop class and the billionaire class. Corporations weren't hurt. Very few corporations were hurt from the pandemic. The small person was, the blue collar worker, the essential worker, and a lot of people did lose their jobs, but it was somewhat short lived on the white collar side, the skilled labor, laptop class, they call it or college degree educated class, and for the last 10 years with that exception where some people were impacted by...

Finding meaning and happiness in your career boils down to how you align your work with your values and passions. When we work on something that feels purposeful, it gives a sense of fulfillment that goes beyond a paycheck. How can we find a career that resonates with who we are? In this episode, I chat with Debbie Morris, the founder of Live, Learn, Serve, a career transition coaching service. We talk about how to create a happier, more meaningful work life by focusing on things like employee engagement, career growth, and aligning your values with your work. Debbie breaks down why so many people feel disconnected at work and shares tips on finding purpose, practicing self-reflection, and adopting a positive mindset. Don't miss this conversation—it's packed with insight! --- Listen to the podcast here: Finding Meaning and Happiness in Your Career with Debbie Morris Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a topic that's really new to me as I've experienced it myself, I know a lot of other people have experienced it, which is how do we make work a better place to be, a happier place to be, a place that you really want to be? And I often comment that hating work is kind of built into our culture, if you think about Sunday scaries, Wednesday hump day, thank God it's Friday, and I've often said to people that it doesn't have to be that way. We can live a life where work is just one of the things we do along with weekends and you enjoy your weekend, you go, you dance, you party, and then you come to work on Monday and you also get to do something you love doing. To talk about how we can maybe help make that world a little bit more of a reality for more people, I would like to bring to you my guest today, Debbie Morris, the founder of Live Learn Serve career transition coaching service. ---   Debbie, welcome to the program.   Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Thank you. I'm excited,   Well, I'm excited to talk to you about this because you've brought up the Gallup surveys that seem to be pretty consistently stuck with only about a third of the people in this country actually being engaged in their work, and then, globally, that number is even worse than the United States. So let's start there. What leads to this result and this kind of stagnant result that, despite the fact that we've understood for so long that results in our organizations would be better if more people enjoy their job, why is it still that only a third of Americans are actually engaged in and what keeps it stagnant?   Well, I think first we have to sort of deconstruct the word and the intent of engagement. So, as organizations grow and they bring folks in, they want people to be committed to their work and to find alignment with the organization's values. So, intrinsically, they want that level of commitment and they know that if you are intrinsically motivated, that you are more likely to stay and be high performing. So, the goal is to have that level of engagement. In order to do that, though, there has to be some level of alignment so there has to be alignment to what I believe in, what that organization believes in, and I think, first and foremost, what we've seen lately is that, oftentimes, there is a misalignment. So, people don't necessarily feel like they are connected and believe in the same things their organization does. So, number one, there's misalignment. Number two, I think people have said over and over again, we hear this all the time, is that they want opportunities to grow. So, career growth, that is a type of growth, but then as we look across generations, we see growth as meaning different things. So, growth could be vertical movement within an organization, but it could just also mean I want to expand as an individual or I want to expand as a global citizen or I want to contribute to something larger. So,

Managing group finances can be tricky, but it's all about clear communication and setting shared goals. Whether it's splitting bills or budgeting for a project, transparency keeps things running smoothly. Have you ever had a financial disagreement that taught you something valuable? In this special episode, I'm joined by Joshua Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Tribe Money Pools. We talk about struggles of managing group finances, from tracking contributions to avoiding awkward money conversations. To deal with these, Joshua introduces his app, designed to streamline group financial management, making it easier to collaborate, stay organized, and maintain trust within the group. Tune in, and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Collaborative Solutions for Group Financial Management with Joshua Lee Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today is an important day for Action's Antidotes because it is my 150th episode, that's kind of a milestone and, usually, I don't make these episodes or any of these episodes about myself. Usually, it's about the guest I'm interviewing, but this particular interview actually pertains to an area of my life personally because I'm the treasurer of an organization called Toastmasters, not the organization International, if you're familiar, but of a local chapter, I'm a treasurer, and as a treasurer of the group, I oftentimes go to the bank, facilitate transactions with a bank account, because groups like Toastmasters or any other group oftentimes require having a budget, and a lot of people have clubs like that or perhaps you're out there thinking about what kind of club or organization you want to start. Well, when I go to the bank, I never know what to say to the banker about whether it is a personal or a business account, because it kind of treads that line kind of between the two. It's not a business, we're not trying to make a profit or anything like that, we're just trying to organize all the Toastmasters activities and expenses under this account so that we can fund our operations with our dues and what we owe the international organization and stuff like that. Given that a lot of our pursuits and a lot of us are going to find ourselves in a situation like this, I want to introduce to you today's guest, Joshua Lee, who is the co-founder and CEO of Tribe Money Pools. ---   Joshua, welcome to the program.   Awesome. Thank you so much for having me today.    Yeah, thank you for hopping on. And so I want to start a little bit about what Tribe Money Pools does about these situations where, okay, you're not a business but you're also not a personal account, you're kind of operating something together in a group.   Yeah, absolutely, and I think it would be a little helpful for me to provide a little context as to what Tribe Money is just very quickly. Tribe Money is a digital platform that helps groups share and manage their finances. What we've taken are the fragmented processes that occur in group financial management today, such as communication, facilitation, execution, and, most importantly, governance, which is all done with different applications or through different means and different channels. We've taken all that and consolidated it all into one platform so the actual financial management, the process of sharing and collecting finances with members of your group, whatever it might be, is much more streamlined, way easier and easier to track, and it's much more secure than all traditional methods that really exist out there in the market today. So. Really pertaining to what you were talking about earlier, what we've brought to this space to really help groups such as yours is provide these quick, virtual, shared bank accounts that people can put together with the click of a few taps. Most importantly, set rules and access controls to ensure that people can monitor who can spend,

Have you ever been in a situation where, if something doesn't work, it feels like going back to square one? This might make you question where and what you should pursue in life. One thing that prevents us from reaching our potential is limiting beliefs. What's holding you back, and how can you begin shifting your mindset? In this episode, I'm joined by Taylor Lehn, the founder of Black Raven Coaching. Taylor shares her story, starting as an aspiring coffee shop owner and eventually finding her true calling as a wellness and spiritual coach. We dive into the importance of building community and the value of in-person connections. Along the way, Taylor talks about the power of following your passions, breaking free from limiting beliefs, and creating a life that truly aligns with who you are. --- Listen to the podcast here: Breaking Free from Limiting Beliefs with Taylor Lehn Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One thing that's really important to me, in case you haven't heard it in some of my other episodes, is bringing community together, bringing people together actually in person more and more. We have a lot of online platforms where people are connecting with one another and that's great and that's beautiful, but one of my goals going forward is going to be, and has been for years, is how do we reestablish on this community feel, someone to feel like you're a part of something and that you're actually interacting with the other people in your community. My guest today, Taylor Lehn, is a life coach and a local wellness event coordinator and the founder of Black Raven Coaching here in Denver, Colorado. ---   Taylor, welcome to the program.   Thank you so much for having me.   Well, thank you for joining and I want to start a little bit by going into your story. Obviously, when you started this whole journey, you had a very different idea about what you were going to be doing.    Oh, definitely. Ever since I was young, I always knew that, as far as my career was concerned, that I just needed to be my own boss. So, entrepreneurship was always where I assumed I would go. However, when I was younger, I had almost no clue what I was passionate about and finding something that I could pursue that would actually fulfill me for my entire life seemed like a very daunting task. So, when I went to college, of course, and I studied entrepreneurship and economics and the only thing I really knew I was passionate about per se was, funnily enough, coffee. I'd always been a coffee snob throughout high school, into college, while going through college, when it came time to find a job, coffee shop barista was the number one. So I dove into that and loved it, absolutely loved it. Knowing that eventually I wanted to own my own business once I got out of college, I really pursued that path of becoming a barista, really thinking that opening and owning my own coffee shop someday was what I was going to do. So I spent about the next six years or so after college really pursuing that. However, as I learned the trade, met some amazing baristas, worked my way up to becoming a coffee shop manager, really learning the ins and outs of what it takes to get a coffee shop started and to keep it running, it is a lot of work. I would say owning a coffee shop is one of the most difficult businesses you could pursue. It usually takes a coffee shop about five years to even break even. Really seeing the inside of it, seeing the people who are at the top of their game and what they had to go through and struggle through just to keep their business and their dream alive, I started realizing that that might not actually be what I wanted to do for my entire life, and that left me feeling very confused and really just not knowing what step to take. I didn't know what else I wanted to do.    Yeah, that's a tough spot to be in, to be honest.

In today's world, shared workspaces have become more than just a place to work—they're hubs for connection and collaboration. They bring people together, creating opportunities to build relationships, share ideas, and grow alongside others who share similar goals. These spaces remind us how important it is to surround ourselves with supportive communities that inspire us to reach our full potential. How can being part of a shared workspace community help us achieve our goals? In this episode, I chat with Ann Marlin, the Owner of Broadway Collective, a co-working space in Englewood, Colorado. Ann shares her insights on creating spaces where entrepreneurs and small businesses can truly connect and thrive. We also explore the impact of a well-designed workspace on productivity and how finding balance between work and life can lead to long-term success. --- Listen to the podcast here: Community through Shared Workspaces with Ann Marlin Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of the things that I find most important in today's society is connecting people, rebuilding community. You're probably aware that compared to, say, 50, 100 years ago, we've seen a lot of our traditional sources of community decimated and people don't really kind of run into each other and people will often talk about this idea of a third place, a third place being somewhere other than the home and other than the work where you still go and regularly interact with people and regularly just bump into people, and that the way a lot of people build connections is just by these chance circumstances in which you run into anyone. And in modern society, in my own life in particular, I often notice that someone has to start taking the initiative to plan meetings. Otherwise, people can easily go weeks, months without seeing their friends, without seeing the people they're connected with. Today, I would like to bring on my guest, Ann Marlin, who is the owner, founder, and operator of a building where we're actually sitting in right now, called the Broadway Collective. ---   Ann, welcome to the program.   Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.    Well, excited to have you. We're sitting here so we're on the premise of the very initiative so this is a first for Action's Antidotes here at the Broadway Collective. Tell us what the Broadway Collective is all about.    Thank you. So the Broadway Collective really was born for the necessity of our sister company as we needed office space. We outgrew our previous office space and found an amazing mid mod building right here on Broadway in Oxford in Englewood, Colorado, and we fell in love with the building because of the floor-to-ceiling windows and just the overall vibe. It had not been touched since the 80s so I'm talking wood paneling, purple carpet, baby blue walls, but we really could see the potential in the building in that our sister company, we do real estate investments and fix and flip. The minute we stepped into this building, we're like, “Gosh, this is amazing.” We knew, however, that this building was going to be too big for our sister company, Elevation, so we thought, well, what can we do with this building? And our passion is to support other small and local businesses and so I thought, oh my gosh, let's make a co-workspace out of it and invite other businesses into our sphere and see if we can pass back business back and forth.    Now, one thing I love about your story is how you were able to come in and play a little bit bigger than a lot of people were thinking because I think a lot of people would look at something like this and be like, “Oh my god, I love this building so much but it's too big for us. What are we gonna do with all this space? Let's just keep shopping for somewhere smaller or find a way to get by with what we currently have.” What would you say is it about your experience,

When we hear the word longevity, it's not just about living longer—it's about thriving through the years with good health. Adopting healthy habits can make a difference in our day-to-day life. What are the things we can do to promote healthy longevity? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Cory Goldberg, a distinguished plastic and craniofacial surgeon with a vision for longevity medicine and aesthetic surgery. He discusses how to promote healthy longevity, emphasizing diet, exercise, sleep, and emotional health. He highlights the impact of poor diet and processed food on health and life expectancy. Listen now to explore strategies for a healthier, longer life! --- Listen to the podcast here: Unlocking the Secrets of Healthy Longevity with Dr. Cory Goldberg Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about longevity. Now, we've covered this a little bit in some of our podcast episodes that have covered health, fitness, wellness, but we've never really talked about longevity specifically. My guest today, Dr Cory Goldberg, is at the forefront and using some innovative techniques to promote longevity and some innovative ideas for the future of this entire subject as well as healthcare in general. ---   Dr. Cory Goldberg, welcome to the program.   Hi, Stephen. It's a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. Looking forward to our conversation   Where we began here. So you have some innovative ideas about longevity. I know, traditionally, people just talk about stuff like getting regular exercise, eating well, and even we've recently talked about some other kind of psychological things people can do, like controlling their thoughts, minimizing stress, and being around the right people and spending good time and good company. Is that part of your program or do you go right to some of these more innovative, less currently mainstream techniques?   Well, honestly, what you just hit on are two of the most important pillars of healthy longevity and good diet and exercise are keystone. I mean, you can't have healthy longevity without that. There's no quick fix that gets you around those basics. And I would add to that, good healthy sleep and a good emotional state and interpersonal relations so you commented on your episode on thought control and those kinds of things, being present and controlling your thoughts and your emotions and relations with other people really key for healthy longevity. So, no matter what else we add to that now, those four pillars are by far the most important things that anybody can do to make sure that they're as healthy as possible for as long as possible.   And so if you think about the average person, either the average person you encounter or the average person kind of in society today, what do you think is the number one worst thing people are doing for the health on a regular basis?   I have to say it's diet. People follow the diet that their parents taught them, the idea of four main food groups. They follow eating habits that are based mostly on addiction to the foods that we were exposed to on a regular basis in our society. People are eating poison, they don't even know it, and I think that's the biggest contributor to poor health. And the reason that in the United States, the past few years, the average life expectancy has actually gone down by a couple years for the first time in over a century and a half and that's with corrections around the pandemic and COVID. Even with that, the life expectancy is going down and I would say diet is the number one contributing factors to that.Share on X   And so what is the biggest mistake people are making in their diet? You talk about the foods that you become addicted to, the foods that you're trained to eat. What can someone do right now to get out of that?   Well, as with any addiction,

Sometimes, we all stop and think about where our life is going and feel like we're meant to accomplish more. Life might be good, but there's something inside that is urging us to grow and do something bigger, and we are willing to work for it. It's a feeling many of us have had, and it often leads to big changes. When you feel like this, how do you turn that feeling into real steps forward? In this episode, I sit down with Christian Ray Flores, a performance coach and entrepreneur. He discusses the common experience  that we seek more in life despite achieving some level of success. He explains the concept of hedonic adaptation and the natural cycles of life, including the need for personal growth and fulfillment at different stages. Redefine success — tune in today! --- Listen to the podcast here: Embracing Growth and Change with Christian Ray Flores Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We've had some episodes that have covered some broad topics and we've also had some episodes that have covered some specifics, specific aspects about starting a business, specific pursuits, specific components of our lives. Today, I want to take us a little bit back to the more broad topic because we've all found ourselves in that situation and I think the broad category of experiences around the situation can be I'm looking at my life and maybe it's okay, maybe it's not, but I know I'm capable of something more and I have the desire for something more, I have the willingness to work for it, which is the situation that a lot of people find themselves in and I found myself in quite a bit throughout my life. To touch on this topic, I would like to introduce to you my guest today, Christian Ray Flores, who is an entrepreneur, evangelist, media producer, and a performance coach. ---   Christian, welcome to the program.   Thank you for having me.   Thank you so much for joining. So, as a performance coach, you work with a lot of people in the situation that I just kind of described there where someone's saying, “Okay, I'm taking a look at my life and I'm deciding that I'm ready for something more, I want something more, I'm capable of something more.”   Yes, a lot. Me, actually, most of the people I work with are in that space.    Yeah, I can imagine that. What's a good way to kind of wrap your head around it, starts with a feeling, I'm assuming, for most people but –   It totally does, yeah.    Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is an excellent question, by the way. Thank you for setting me up for success here. You know what I think? I think what happens is that the world changes around us and we change and those are the main reasons why we find ourselves in these places where we go, “You know what worked for me two years ago, three years ago, five years ago, it's just not working for me anymore. It's just not satisfying me and something that I would be grateful for five years ago, it's just not enough, and what do I do with that now? What kind of moves do I need to make? What kind of skills do I need to acquire? What risks do I need to take?” And that is sort of in the back of our mind. It's a little voice telling you, “Is this all there is?” and, yes, and I think the – I'll tell you a story of – I've had so many of those, so many. I can count at the very least five big ones where I've made, as a result of that thought, thinking about it, talking to some people, making a switch that is dramatically into another lane professionally, for example, so I've had five different careers, and I think I can name maybe five more that are more minor but also significant. But I'll tell you a story of one of the earliest ones. One of the earliest ones earliest ones was I think it describes the situation when you have acquired your first level of success, you professionally have mastery, maybe you're a senior executive, VP,

In order to grow our business, whether small or large, there are many initiatives to consider. It could be advertising. But one thing that can help you gain leverage, get exposure, and develop new clients is gift cards. How do we do it? In this episode, I talk with Larry Rubin, Founder of Swipe It. He shares his journey, including how he overcame significant debt and the importance of supporting small local businesses. We talked about how small business owners can utilize gift cards to generate revenue and build a customer base. Larry emphasizes the versatility of gift cards, which can be used as promotions, employee rewards, and for online sales. Grow your business with gift cards. Tune in now! --- Listen to the podcast here: How Gift Cards can Drive Business Success with Larry Rubin Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about gift cards and a little bit about the restaurant industry, specifically the manner in which restaurant industry uses these gift cards and what it says about what we might need to do in general to help level the playing field between smaller and larger businesses or give smaller businesses, give the person that's just starting up their own business, whether it be a restaurant or any other kind of business, a chance to survive, a chance to really make it in this particular current state of affairs in the United States, or in any other country, for that matter, given that a lot of you out there listening are trying to build something, build something that you're passionate about and really putting your all into it, but, sometimes, when you see these bigger corporations out there, it does feel like that the cards could be stacked against you. My guest today, Larry Rubin, is the gift card guru, the founder of SwipeIt, and he's here to tell us a little bit about his initiative to help some of these smaller, locally owned restaurants take advantage of this tool that is much more readily and easily available to a lot of the bigger restaurant chains. ---   Larry, welcome the program.   Thank you for having me and excited to talk to you about hopefully leveling the playing field for these smaller guys.   Yeah, so 100 percent because I remember when we first connected, it didn't feel to me necessarily obvious that gift cards was one of the ways that the bigger, larger chains kind of stomp on their smaller competitors, but you've observed something very different when it comes to leveraging this tool. First thing I'm kind of curious about is what makes gift cards such a powerful tool for any restaurant to use in kind of generating sales and customer base?   That's part of our battle is going in and really educating the small business owner who, right now, they think of a gift card as a product that someone walks into my business, they purchase it, and they walk out. And that's great for people who maybe are living or working within 15 or 20 minutes of your business. Gift cards can be utilized in many, many ways. It's a huge revenue stream for restaurants and other merchants. It's a great gift to give someone. I don't know what clothes they wear, I don't know what their activities are but I certainly know that this guy loves his chicken parm from this restaurant so I'm going to buy this gift card to his favorite restaurant. I know that you can always use it. And what we're doing is helping the restaurants look at kind of outside the box. Great, we know that someone can walk in and purchase a gift card but do you have a website? Are you offering them online? Are you capturing last-minute gift giving by offering e-cards? All different ways to bring in revenue. And then we look at it in a different light as well and say, hey, it's great for people to come in and pay you for gift cards but can we use these gift cards to bring in customers, run promotions,

A lot of us want to have a successful and meaningful business. After many years in our business, we all want to ensure that the business we have worked hard to establish will carry on well if we retire. Succession planning is the key to ensuring a seamless transition and long-term success. But how? In this episode, I sit down with Lowell Mora, President of Impact CFO, who specializes in family- and privately-owned businesses. Lowell talks about the importance of planning for business transitions, especially as founders or business owners approach retirement, including finding suitable successors and maintaining business continuity. Tune in to learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Align Your Life and Thrive with Diamond Drip Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about succession planning. We've talked quite a bit about the process of starting up a business on this particular podcast, about what challenge you face on the come up, but then, what happens when you're getting ready to retire and you want to make sure that the business is going to be in good hands and you want to make sure that your own wealth is going to be in good hands. To discuss this topic, I would like to introduce you to my guest today, Lowell Mora, fractional CFO, who specializes in working with a lot of these family-owned businesses around such issues. ---   Lowell, welcome to the program.   Thanks for having me. Appreciate you having me here today.    Tell me a little bit about Impact CFO. Tell me a little about your story, what you do with your clients.    At Impact CFO, I help primarily as a fractional CFO, which fractional means exactly as it sounds, I spend a portion of my time helping a business that may not be able to afford – it typically can't afford a full time CFO. So my practice focuses primarily in on the family-owned business in the small to midmarket that is looking towards a transition, either to another family member or to an external exit to maximize the wealth of the family and the value of the business.    Now, when you say businesses that can't quite afford, say, a full-time CFO, what's a general size? What number of employees is that typical –   So the typical, most of us finance guys talk in dollars, but in employees, it's typically employee levels of 25 to 100, 150. Again, it depends on the complexity of the business as well. So, in dollars, we typically talk somewhere around $5 million in sales, up to $50 million. Now, I've worked with smaller and I've worked with bigger but that's the sweet spot.    And so you've encountered a lot of these family-owned businesses that have gotten to this level. You said like $5, $25 million annually. I assume it means, right? So, what do you notice in some of these family-owned businesses that get to that level? Do you notice any kind of common thread in the type of people that you work with and the type of founders who are in the situation about who they are, what they've done to get to where they're at?    Yeah. Typically, in my practice, a lot of people out there is values based. So I look to work with people that share the same values as me, which are pretty basic, which is a high level of integrity, strong, hard work ethic.Share on X A lot of what I do is in the manufacturing, industrials, industrial products, industrial equipment. I also work with services, business services, and IT providers and things like that but, typically, it's a business of an entrepreneur and they're overwhelmingly, today in our world, they're overwhelmingly male, and they've gotten to a point where they have a successful business and can support them but they don't necessarily have a natural heir or successor. In a lot of cases, they don't know what to do with that. And what typically happens, and it's common,

Are you working full-time but dreaming of starting something new, like a business or passion project? Balancing a job with a new venture can be tough, and finding the right alignment to make it all work can feel overwhelming. How do you balance your time and energy to turn your ideas into a success? In this episode, we're joined by Diamond Drip—a coach, speaker, and Human Design enthusiast who's passionate about helping women break free from the “who do I think I am?” mindset. Diamond Drip empowers women to move past self-doubt and confidently step into their potential, making their big dreams a reality. Together, we dive into the struggles of balancing a new project alongside a full-time job. Diamond Drip shares why this balance can be so exhausting and offers practical strategies for managing dual roles. From time management to energy-boosting tips, this episode is packed with advice you can start using today. Tune in now to align your life, find your balance, and thrive in everything you do! --- Listen to the podcast here: Align Your Life and Thrive with Diamond Drip Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. A lot of us are in a situation where we're trying to create something new in our lives, whether it be starting a business, starting any kind of endeavor, just do something different, and sometimes we end up struggling a little bit and one of the struggles that we oftentimes end up with is that our lives are not really in alignment. That's some of the challenges that we have where situations that I see a lot of people and, say, you have a full time job and you're also trying to start a business that can be really exhausting, it can be really hard to find time, in the same way I oftentimes find people starting businesses while not having a full-time job, not having a steady source of income, and having to struggle in a whole different way. And in some of those pursuits is where my guest today, Diamond Drip, a coach, speaker, and human design enthusiast who helps her clients overcome some of these challenges and find a life that's in alignment for them because not every person is the same and one of the things we're trying to move past is what I often refer to as the one-size-fits-all solution for life, the one-size-fits-all prescription for life. ---   Diamond Drip, welcome to the program.   Hey, Stephen. It's so great to be here with you and our listeners today.   Yeah, thank you for coming on and sharing some of these ideas with listeners because I think when it comes to starting up anything, and it doesn't have to be a business, it could even be just trying to do better at your current job, when it comes to trying up anything, people often talk about the practical stuff, like you need to do more of this, you need to learn this skill, you need to learn this industry. People might talk less frequently about some of the stuff that you specialize in, which is how to bring your life, your habits, and everything else into alignment with who you are, which starts with an understanding of who you are. So, tell us a little bit about what you do with your clients.    Absolutely. I love that you brought in that piece too about people wanting to build up their skills, people wanting to learn these other things, and one of the things that I work with my clients on is making sure that the things that they're adding to that list of to-dos, those skills to add, those classes to take are actually things that light them up, not just because someone said they should do it. And so I have a really simple framework when it comes to how I support my clients. It's called the trust framework. And so the very first thing that we do is we tune in to their authentic self. So, every single one of us has a unique, energetic blueprint, you and I were talking about this a little bit the last time we met, and it is in that blueprint that we can recognize our in...

Starting a nursing career is both exciting and challenging, especially in the fast-paced world of healthcare. New nurses often struggle as they transition from school to real-world practice, navigating complex systems and high demands. How can we improve nursing education to better support them? In this episode, I speak with Morgan Taylor, Chief Nursing Officer at Archer Review. Morgan shares insights into the challenges new nurses face, the structural issues within nursing education, opportunities for innovation in healthcare, and ways to better align incentives in the field. Don't miss out, listen now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Carving Your Own Path in Nursing with Morgan Taylor Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about the many different ways in which we can go about carving your own path because I think sometimes people think about any pursuit and they think about the most common manifestation of it and they think the most common manifestation of carving their own path as being something along the lines of either starting your own business or doing something really, really wild, like going and living off the grid somewhere in, I don't know, Uganda, for the lack of a better place to think of, but there are plenty of different ways in which you can kind of discover where your path is going and discover how you can get to a place where you once again feel excited about the things that you once felt excited about.  ---   Today, my guest is Morgan Taylor and she is the chief nursing officer at Archer Review and chief nursing officer, I feel like a different C-blank-O title emerges every other week, so, yeah, Morgan, tell us a little bit about that.    Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on today. I'm excited to talk. Yeah, chief nursing officer, to me, sounds totally normal, because I grew up as a nurse at big hospitals that always had a chief nursing officer. But, of course, if you don't work somewhere that has nurses, that's going to sound a little funky to you, right?    Yeah.    And really how I got to where I am is kind of funky. It was not a straightforward path at all, not something I had planned out or set my sights on a decade ago. I started out as a bedside nurse at Duke University in the Raleigh-Durham area here in North Carolina. I started working in a – we called it the children's resource unit. I went to all different pediatric areas of the hospital, spent a lot of time in the ICU, in the emergency department, and I loved it. I learned so much. It was a wonderful experience. And then COVID happened and things got a little dicey there. It was a big challenge, one that I'm proud to have played a part in, but what was most impactful for me and kind of what started me on this path where I ended up today now was I started seeing that the new nurses coming in to join us in this profession were very underprepared, and not to any fault of their own. They just didn't have the experience that they needed to get prior to coming and working in a level one trauma center taking care of very, very ill patients. So that got my wheels turning. I started to think maybe there's something I can do in kind of the education bubble, that's something people talk about. I started kind of looking for ways to dip my toes in the water, so to speak, see what's out there, and that was when I connected with the CEO, Karthik Koduru, of Archer Review. He was working on trying to put together a platform to really enable nursing education that was accessible and affordable and specifically targeted nurses getting ready to take their board exams. We call those exams the NCLEX and it's that last test you have to take before you're fully licensed, you're out there on your own actually caring for patients. And we had really poor pass rates. They were anywhere from about 80 to 87 percent,

Technology is revolutionizing healthcare, providing innovative ways to enhance patient care and streamline services. Digital tools like telemedicine and health platforms enable better access to information and personalized care. How can we use these advancements to build a more patient-focused healthcare system? In this episode, I have Whitney Isola, a registered dietitian and Co-Founder of Aqua Power. Whitney shares her journey from co-founding a healthcare startup to creating the review platform. She discusses the challenges of working in the healthcare industry and how to leverage technology and patient empowerment to improve care. Don't miss this insightful conversation—tune in now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Transforming Healthcare with Tech and Care with  Whitney Isola Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of my big concerns, and I think a big concern of a lot of people, is what we're using our technology for. We've seen a recent advancement in technology and we're seeing ongoing discussions about things like AI, machine learning, all these other things, and the question is what are we doing with it and I think we've seen a lot of cases where some of our technological advancements were used for purposes that did not necessarily have the best outcome on human health, human mental health, etc. I have in my head a list of the types of things that really are a good use of this technology because technology can do a lot of powerful things and my guest today, Whitney Isola, has some experience using our technology for some of these purposes that seem like they actually have the potential to improve the human experience as opposed to just bombard you with advertisements, like a lot of them try to do. So, Whitney is a registered dietitian as well as the cofounder of OncoPower, now the chief of staff at ArcherReview. ---   Whitney. welcome to the program.   Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I'm excited.    I'm excited too because this is a great thing to talk about. Now, let's first start with your story because you've done a lot of different things, like where did it all begin? Have you always wanted to find innovative solutions for these human problems? Is this something that you've always been kind of interested in doing?    Yes, there's some sort of natural curiosities and problem solver that live within me. I will say I don't think I can fully take credit for ever being like the visionary or the idea person, I'm definitely a little bit more of practical thinker and like kind of roadmap best course to get us there but I don't always have that end state vision but I'm very good at listening to the on-the-ground feedback early and often so I would say that type of critical thinking and product planning is a little bit more of my wheelhouse and expertise. But, yeah, I mean, that said, I think I've always had this little bit of hunger for building something that didn't exist before. I went into college and higher education kind of wanting a very traditional career in healthcare and realized about three-quarters in taking some business classes that I could think more broadly, almost a little too late or it felt too late education wise to make a change. I kind of had that more traditional early career experience in terms of working in a community hospital setting, multidisciplinary medical practice setting, and then health major, New York City health system setting, I kind of always kept the door open to taking on projects or ideas or working with people in terms of executing something new or creating something out of nothing. My first job outside of the hospital, so I guess my second job ever, was with a multidisciplinary medical practice where they didn't have a dietitian and I pitched them that, “Hey, you have 22 providers but you don't have one dietician, let's add those services for your patient population,

Leadership is more than just holding a title; it's about guiding, inspiring, and managing people effectively. Often, new leaders find themselves promoted into roles without the right tools to succeed. How can we better prepare ourselves to excel in leadership, both internally and externally? In this episode, I have Chris Thyberg, Founder of The Serving Way. Chris and I discuss the challenges of leadership, particularly when someone is promoted to a leadership role without the necessary training to manage and inspire effectively. We also explore the difference between the 'inner game' and 'outer game' of leadership. Elevate your leadership skills—listen now! --- Listen to the podcast here: The Inner and Outer Game of Leadership with  Chris Thyberg Welcome to Action's antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. How many of you out there have ever had a bad boss? And I say that because there's kind of two different kinds of bad bosses in my view. There's the person who's just not able to tame their ego, that can be a little bit psychopathic, sociopathic, but then there's a broader category of kind of more low-key bad bosses that kind of arise because, well, oftentimes, we promote people who are good at doing the day-to-day job, who are good at delivering the results but not necessarily the ones that are best suited or even training them on how to be a leader of people, which is an important caveat, and so when we look at that category of bad bosses, one thing I want to impress upon you is that it's oftentimes not those people's fault, they were never given the training to learn how best to inspire people, how best to manage people, how best to cultivate a positive and joyous work environment for the people working for them, all they know is how to do the day-to-day job and they did it well. To talk about this topic a little bit, I'd like to introduce you to my guest, Chris Thyberg, who is the founder of The Serving Way and a leadership coach. ---   Chris, welcome to the program.   Stephen, thank you so much for having me and what a great setup. I need you to write copy for my website, please. That was just on point.    Well, my production team does produce a transcript of every episode so when this episode does drop in a few weeks, it'll come in on the page on my website.    It's a delight to be with you. Let's go.   All right, well, that's wonderful. So, Chris, it sounds like you're observing the same phenomenon. We talked a little bit about how there are some people who are just psychopathic or haven't tamed their ego but this broader category of people where they just weren't set up to be good bosses, good managers, good leaders, because the training you get when you get promoted doesn't really emphasize that. That's exactly right, and as I joked with you on the pre-show, as long as that keeps happening out in the marketplace, I have employment for life. Every single client that I am working with is in that in-between space. I call it the growing edge, where more of what got them there is not going to take them where they need to go at this level of leadership. So, for example, the star individual performer with super high competencies, expertise, skills, experience, knowledge, what I call the outer game of leadership, great, great. And then they get that promotion, almost like the bridge too far, and they are on the other side of this thing and they say, “Oh my gosh, I just got a 360 performance review and everything I built my identity around that I got promoted for is now what my team tells me is killing us. What do I do?” And they come to me in that place of how on earth did I get set up for this failure and I said, “No worries. This is the human condition. You are fine.” You are at a growing edge, which means, and I truly believe this and every coach worth his or her salt must come from this point of view, this point of view is that, Stephen,

There are many details that demand mental energy. You're likely focused on starting something new and how to bring your vision to life, but smaller tasks—like choosing the right payment processor for your business—can become overwhelming. With so many options, how can we stay focused while navigating these essential but exhausting decisions? In this episode, I have Jeff Maine, founder and CEO of Pay Proudly, a payment processing company. Jeff discusses the payment processing industry and how his company aims to provide a better experience for businesses. He emphasizes building relationships with customers based on transparency and trust, offering personalized solutions tailored to each client's needs rather than competing solely on price.     --- Listen to the podcast here: Payment Processing Solutions for Businesses with Jeff Maine Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Now, when it comes to a lot of the endeavors that we're taking on, particularly starting businesses, there's a lot to figure out and there's a lot of things that we need to put mental energy into that we might not necessarily want to be thinking about because, likely, you're thinking about what your passion is, you're thinking about what you want to start, and thinking a bit about how you want to do it, but some of these nitty-gritty details, such as selecting a payment processor solution when there are so many out there, can be just a huge use of mental energy that you weren't necessarily hoping to sign up for and I know how some of this decision fatigue around this and many other issues can cause people to lose their steam. So, today, I would like to introduce you to my guest, Jeff Maine, and he is the founder and CEO of a company that helps you figure out payment processing called Pay Proudly. ---   Jeff, welcome to the program.   Thanks so much for having me today, Stephen. Looking forward to talking about this fun subject of payment processing.    Yeah, it's just one of the many things that businesses need to think about. And so, to orient our audience here, what do payment processors do and why does nearly every business need a payment processor?   The majority of businesses take the majority of their payments today through electronic payments so a lot of people go the Square routes. They go to big box shops, they go to their bank, sign up for credit card processing, but there's a lot of small, independent sales organizations out there that have relationships with the big banks that this is what we focus on. This is our business. And so, obviously, when we were founding Pay Proudly, we – I've been in this business for 25 years and we've seen a lot of different things and I apologize to a lot of people for our industry. When I walk indoors, I apologize for a lot of what's happened in our industry, and we can dive into some of that today, but there's just a bad stigma around our industry. I tell people sometimes I feel like it's that used car sales approach and there's just a lot that goes on. And so one of the big differences that we've done in Pay Proudly is we want to know our customer and we want our customer to know us and we know we're never going to grow as big as the big guys but we're taking that extra step and the first part of our mission is all about clarity to our merchants. We really want them to understand payment processing and understand why they need to process or how they need to process and what kind of system they need to process on and really dive into it so that they feel more comfortable with making a decision that affects a big part of their business. So how we get paid is often overlooked but it shouldn't be. So that's what we're doing.   So what do most people do when they look for a payment processor? Say, the average person just starts a website where, I don't know, just say you're selling a basic service and needs to collect $100...

Remodeling is different from other home service businesses. It's a special industry that needs its own strategies and approach for creating a marketing plan. While other service businesses need a lot of leads, remodelers don't. How can remodelers create an effective marketing plan without needing so many leads? In this episode, I have Brooks Burnette, Founder of Remodel Reach Marketing. His company specializes in serving residential remodeling contractors. Brooks shares his strategies for working with contractors, generating and converting leads, and building effective websites. He also emphasizes the importance of listening to and understanding clients' needs. Tune in and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Lead Generation for Remodeling Contractors with Brooks Burnette Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about contracting, specifically remodeling contracting, but contracting in general is a kind of topic that's gotten a little bit more attention lately. I know we just lived through a few decades where a lot of that type of work was looked down upon by some segments of the population, and now, amongst the new generation that's seeing kind of a greater amount of security in that, there's a renewed interest, as well as the clear impact that you see with your work right away as opposed to some of the jobs that a lot of people feel stuck in. But, of course, there's a lot of considerations when contracting or starting any business that you need to get your business off the ground. An important one and a topic that I've covered before is also getting noticed, getting your business out there, getting it marketed. To talk about his business around remodeling contractors, how they get their digital marketing done, is the founder of Remodel Reach Marketing, Brooks Burnette. ---   Brooks, welcome to the program.   Hey, Stephen, thanks for having me. I appreciate it, man.   Oh, well, thank you so much. And I like to start a lot of my episodes by getting people oriented. So we know you're talking about Remodel Reach Marketing so you're obviously not the contractor yourself, you're the one handling the marketing for the contractor.   Right, exactly. So we're a full-service digital marketing agency for remodeling contractors. Typically, that's just residential. There's not very many remodeling contractors who are solely commercial versus residential, most of them are residential and those are the guys that we like to talk we like to target. The commercial, they typically have their own client base and they go to the same people over and over, like in one industry, like restaurants or like hotels and things like that so they typically don't need a lot of help. But the residential guys, they're the ones that we really go after.    Now, when you talk about the residential versus the commercial, can we think of this as kind of similar to the difference between a B2B and a B2C play, where the commercial contractors or commercial remodelers are doing B2B and B2B is going to have a very different method of marketing than B2C, the residential, where you're talking about the individual person who's looking to do a remodel in their home?    Yes, yes, absolutely. So, one thing that we find is B2C, there's a few different strategies that really work well for them with lead generation and SEO and all those things that you kind of mentioned a little bit earlier, and the B2B, it's pretty much all about relationships and just building relationships with those other industries and getting their name recognized within those industries, going to shows for those industries, like restaurants, again, for example, and just really focusing in on those individuals rather than trying to build their brand like a residential contractor would have to do in their local area.    Now, that makes sense.

In today's digital age, the internet offers powerful platforms for sharing ideas and building connections.  Whether through podcasts, social media , or online communities, these tools allow us to reach hearts and minds across the world. How can we use  these platforms to make spiritual connections and conversations? In this episode, I have Craig Dehut, CEO and Co-Founder of Appian Media. He shares how he brings the Bible to the world, gathers support, and distinguishes between valuable input and distractions. He discusses his journey into biblical content creation and how the content is used to bring people together. Tune in and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Bringing the Bible to Life Through Media with Craig Dehut Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about connecting people with the content in the Bible. Now, as you know, in this show, I'm not telling you what to believe in or telling you what to think or anything like that, but the Bible has a lot of content that people need to resonate with and I think almost everyone should have some sort of a grounding in something bigger than themselves. My guest today, Craig Dehut, he is the COO and co-founder of Appian Media and a documentary filmmaker. ---   Craig, welcome to the program.   Hey, thanks for having me.    Well, let's start a little bit with your story. Where did you originate? Were you always interested in creating content and creating stories and also documentary filmmaking?    Yeah. So, it took a variety of forms, but growing up, I really was always interested in stories. For a while, it took the form of just writing stories. I wanted to be a cartoonist there for a while, so I was interested in drawing and illustrations. But, eventually, about 13, 14 years old, someone let our family borrow a camcorder and so myself and my siblings went out into the backyard and would create all kinds of ridiculous things and I just kind of fell in love with the medium and decided to go to film school, graduated from there back in 2007, and, originally, that was supposed to be kind of major motion pictures, I wanted to write and direct feature films, but my career kind of took the form of working at television news and other forms where I got to document real stories, actually shoot interviews and follow news stories of real things that are happening, and, eventually, kind of fell in love with that format, that form of storytelling, and was able to combine that with my love for scripture, my love for the Bible, and put those two things together.    So, at some point, you decided to go out on your own, or not on your own but be the co-founder of your own company. What prompted that particular move?    Sure. So back in 2015, I was working at a video production company at the time, but also had recently met my, who's now my co-founder, Stuart Peck, another Christian creative who had moved to the Indianapolis area, and he and I were just shooting the breeze, meeting over coffee and talking shop, talking about the industry, and talking about the things that we wish were out there, especially when it came to like Bible videos. We were finding things that were hard to watch. Some of them were just kind of hard to watch. They were not keeping the attention of the kids that we had in our Bible classes. And it was actually Stuart who kind of pitched the idea originally, was like, “Hey, what would it take for us to take a group of us over there, over to the lands of the Bible, and produce the content for ourselves, something that's biblically accurate but also professionally produced?” 'It's got to be packaged well so that people will actually want to watch it and we wanted to make it freely available.Share on X And so we did that by creating a not-for-profit called Appian Media. And we were able to, through donations,

Perseverance and staying true to core values are essential elements for any business to become successful. But along the way,  difficult obstacles and failures are unavoidable. How can we turn these challenges into stepping stones for growth and improvement? In this episode, I have Tim Shaffer, Co-Founder and CEO of SearchTires. We discuss the importance of supporting local brick-and-mortar businesses and the model he created to help consumers find the best local prices on car tires. Tim shares how he learned from early mistakes to build a simple, user-friendly platform that solves a real consumer need. Tune in, and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Overcoming Failure to Find Success with Tim Shaffer Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidotes in the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of the things I've alluded to in some of my past episodes is this idea of four barriers to success and when I talk about these four barriers, there's other versions of it, I generally think of awareness, action, persistence, and then, of course, dealing with some kind of a setback or dealing with some kind of a failure often, people oftentimes have to readjust. My guest today is Tim Shaffer, he's the founder and CEO of SearchTires and has a really interesting story about kind of implementing all of that to go after a specific niche, a specific corner of our business world that he feels really passionate about. ---   Tim, welcome to the program.   Thanks for having me, Stephen. Look forward to it.   Definitely. Now, let's start out with SearchTires. So, first, obviously, when I talk about this awareness action and then persistence or sacrifice and then failure, the first thing is awareness and action so what made you decide that you wanted to start a business on your own and then what made you decide that searching for tire prices was going to be the objective of your business?    I come from a tire background. I worked in corporate America for 15 years in that background. Late 2009, I was in Colorado and I'll never forget it, I was in a hot tub and I was skiing and another guy behind me was talking about Kayak because Kayak just came out and how he found flights on Kayak or something or something, and I'm thinking I'm in the tire business, why don't we have something where people can look online, agnostically, at all the prices and then pick the place they want to go to? And so that's how I came up with, so that was the awareness that we really need a tool like this because it helps people save money and more and more as the prices go up. The average price of tires is $700 a set and we save people an average of $180 a set of tires. So, I wanted to implement that even back then, but then the next step you're talking to is the big step. I have the idea, how do I go do it? Because you're afraid. It's like, holy moly, this is a great idea, how do I overcome the fear of coming out of corporate America, which is a lot of work, but the stability is there, compared to on your own, so I inevitably built this kind of out in the background while I was working, and, in 2012, I went out on my own and started to – started on this project, I should say.   Yeah. So, one of the interesting things that people often talk about is niching in businesses and one of the areas where I see this manifest a lot is, of course, when people talk about their target audience and a target audience like, okay, I'm here to serve, you can use traditional demographics or, increasingly, people use psychographics, but your niching seems to be less about who you're selling to in the sense of I'm looking for people that have this psychographic experience, the person that, I don't know, goes golfing and watches certain programs on TV and more the micro niche within the human experience in that you didn't go and try to tackle, say, all auto parts or all transportation or something huge. You stuck with tires.

When we think of CEOs of companies, our initial assumption is that they are very busy people with no time available for socializing. Sometimes, we even wonder how they manage to spend time with their families, friends, and hobbies. But what if I told you that if you want to be a CEO, there is a way to avoid that lifestyle and still have a life outside of this endeavor? In this episode, I have Dr. Jim Schleckser, founder of the CEO Project. We discuss how to achieve work-life balance and effective leadership. He emphasizes the Theory of Constraints, time delegation, schedule control, and workplace autonomy. Tune in and optimize your time now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Achieve More by Doing Less with Dr. Jim Schleckser  Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Perhaps you're out there thinking, “Okay, I want something more, maybe I wanna try to move up some levels at my organization or I wanna start something on my own and be the CEO of my own company,” but then you're looking at other people who are high level CEOs or even other C-level and director-level executives and thinking, “I don't wanna be this busy. I don't want this lifestyle. I don't want the lifestyle where I don't have any time for my family, I don't have any time for my hobbies, I don't have any time to just relax and chill and enjoy myself,” and that can be a real daunting possibility here because you're thinking yourself, “Okay, I still want to be in charge of my own destiny a little bit or I still want to be something more than just a cog in a machine so how do I get there without giving up my entire life and not having a life outside of this particular endeavor?” And that's where my guest today, Jim Schleckser, who is the founder of The CEO Project, also a podcast host as well as a bestselling author who wrote the book Great CEOs Are Lazy comes into play here. ---   Jim, welcome to the program.   Thanks for having me, Stephen. I appreciate it.   Well, thanks for hopping on because I'm sure this is on a lot of people's minds, right? You know, an important person, whether it be rising to the top of the company you're already a part of or starting your own company and once you get somewhere, you're going to have a lot on your plate. What inspired you to start The CEO Project?    A number of years ago, I was doing acquisitions. I worked for a corporate entity and one of our strategies for growth was to buy companies. And I remember these two founders that I was about to buy their company for, I think it was $6 million, I'm like, man, oh man, these guys are not as smart as me, they don't work as hard, they've got four weeks of vacation every summer. I'm like, my gosh, I'm so much smarter than them, I go, wait a minute, I'm about to give them 6 million bucks and they get four weeks of vacation every year. I go, what's wrong with this picture? And at that moment, I said, look, really, for the same level of talent, you get a very different, meaning better outcome in terms of lifestyle control, economic outcome, and so forth, by running your own business. And at that point, I said, okay, that is the path I'm on. That was a decade at least before I jumped out and started my own business.    So you observed these guys start their own business and have way more autonomy over their lives and decided you want that. What did you experience when you first made that observation? Because you said there was some time of a gap between the two. Was there that similar anxiety of like, okay, how am I going to get there, that type of thing?    I had a plan, maybe just there was another element that drove it. I was a member of CEO peer groups for a long time as I ran various companies so this is a mastermind group that helps you think through your problems. So I was a member of one and I saw that people that were founder, entrepreneurs and same profile, better time control,

Skills-based hiring and workforce diversity are important when it comes to performing workplaces. When we focus on hiring based on skills rather than just traditional qualifications, we open the door to a wider pool of talent. How can we make these practices more widespread in our workplaces? In this special episode, I'm joined by Maria Putnam of the DEI Leadership Institute and Stephanie Knight, the CEO of Colorado Inclusive Economy. We discussed the upcoming event on October 11 at the Hyatt Aurora, the 2024 Annual Summit. We talked about the event overview, partnerships, mission, and the progress and challenges in diversity, equity, and inclusion. Don't miss the date—join us! See you there! --- Listen to the podcast here: 2024 Annual Summit: Collaboration of Colorado Inclusive Economy and DEI Leadership Institute with Maria Putnam and Stephanie Knight Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. As you probably know if you've listened to some of my other episodes, I'm based here in Denver, Colorado, and probably about half of my guests are in the area and I do like to promote events that are happening in person, especially events around the things that people around town are doing that they're passionate about. As you know, Denver's a city with a lot of passionate energy, a lot of people that are starting things up, a lot of people that are putting things together, a lot of people that are thinking through the world and how we can kind of even improve upon humanity, to get a little bit woo-woo and high level. One such event coming up in October, I believe in October 11th, is a partnership between Maria Putnam of the DEI Leadership Institute, who you probably already know from one of my earlier podcast episodes, and Stephanie Knight, the CEO of Colorado Inclusive Economy. ---   Maria, Stephanie, welcome to the program.    Thank you.    Thank you.    Yeah.   Yeah, glad to be on.   Well, let's, let's start out by talking about the event in October 11th. What are you putting on? What you were exposing to everyone? And what would people expect if someone might be interested in such an event?    Yeah, well, the event is going to be in October 11, as you said. We're going to be hosting this event at the Hyatt Aurora and we are expecting to have 350 people from all the industries. So, this is a really good event to go and to meet leaders, actually, who are really proactive and working in diversity, equity, and inclusion.    I would just echo what Maria said, it's going to be a wonderful event. It is on the 11th, it's 8 AM to noon, and so, again, it's going to be two distinct tracks of learning with two separate sessions each and we have engaged wonderful subject matter experts to lead these sessions. They're highly topical and things that are on people's mind, like diversity and AI, again, healthcare, inclusion, and scarcity. We're also going to talk about some legal things, not too deep, but talk about with everything that's happening in our larger world around diversity, equity, inclusion, how can companies stay the course and stay safe legally so it'll be a lot for everyone. So excited to host with the DEI Leadership Institute and combine audiences. So we're really excited about it.    And what type of audience are you specifically looking to reach in this event? Is this the CEOs? Is this other leaders, division heads, more kind of small business entrepreneurs? Is there anyone in particular you're looking to reach more with a lot of the advice that you have for these companies?    I will say all together, you just said business owners, CEOs, students, people who's actually doing the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion at whatever capacity they are.    Yeah. It's open to the public. Colorado Inclusive Economy is a membership organization so we engage C-suite leadership and their teammates and what we...

In this digital age, there is a lot of technological change. Whether you're looking to sell, deciding who to market to, determining how to market, or considering technological advances and employment, all of these challenges can have technological solutions. So, what can you do with all this technology? In this episode, I have Ryan Pollyniak, Cloud Transformation Executive at Western Computer. We talk about cloud transformation, cloud computing, and data management. Ryan emphasizes how important it is to select the right technology solutions that can accommodate future growth and align with a long-term strategic roadmap. Additionally, we discuss the impact of AI on employment and its usefulness during the interview process. Listen and explore cloud transformation now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Revolutionizing Business with Cloud Transformation and AI with Ryan Pollyniak Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We live in an era where there's a lot of technological change and a lot of technology to manage even without that change, and many of you out there are possibly looking at starting your own business and wondering, “What can I do with all this technology?” And it might even look daunting. It might even feel like another large task on top of everything else that you're looking into, whether you're looking into what product you want to sell, who you want to market to, how are you going to market, and what are you going to use. So, to help us sort through some of these technological solutions, technological advances, and technological change in employment, even, for those of you out there who are just looking at other employment options as well, I would like to introduce to you my guest today, Ryan Pollyniak, who is a Cloud Transformation Executive. ---   Ryan, welcome to the program.   Thanks, Stephen. Glad to be on.   Well, thank you for joining and, first of all, take us through a day to day. What's a normal activity for someone who's a cloud transformation executive? As a lot of people are familiar with other types of executives but this particular one is very specific to our time, being that a lot of people are doing digital transformation and cloud transformations.   Absolutely, and so if you ask my seven-year-old's third grade class when she told them that I was a cloud transformation executive, they all think I'm a meteorologist now, which is not the case. Actually, working with companies, all different sizes of companies, small businesses all the way up to smaller enterprise level businesses, make that digital transformation, key buzzword you hear all the time, you just mentioned it, have their old, legacy, on-premise systems and siloed data into the modern cloud and there's so many things that go along with that, from keeping your data secure to leveraging the future of AI and everything else. A lot of businesses are making that switch and then you've also got startups, of course, which are wanting to take the appropriate foundational steps as they create their initial business systems to make sure that they're setting themselves up for the future. So, what I'm doing is typically strategizing with the leaders of these companies and pulling in teams of solution architects and project managers and consultants to kind of realize the vision that we set.    So just to also orient our audience, in case anyone's not familiar, like you mentioned, cloud is a term that makes people think of clouds in the air, and I think a lot of people when they put something on the cloud, even anything on their personal computers, probably think that their data just kind of floats around in the air the way the clouds do. So, what does the cloud actually mean? What is it?   That's a great question. There are several different iterations of that. In general, cloud is computing power servers that are not in the server on premise,

When we offer services, one way to connect with our audience is through social media. The challenge is that while we want to reach a large number of people, there are important factors to consider. But how can you truly stand out in the crowded social media landscape? In this episode, I have Wendy Pace, Founder and Owner of PACE Setting Media. We talk about the importance of making content for a specific audience, and marketing strategies for businesses. We also discuss the limitations of algorithmic content creation and how social media algorithms work for content visibility. Learn how to stand out online! --- Listen to the podcast here: Strategies to Get Noticed on Social Media with Wendy Pace Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a broader category of getting noticed. You produce a product, you produce a service, you produce an offering, even wanting to, say, get people together for some sort of a social endeavor. No matter what you're trying to do, you have to find some way of getting noticed, and as you're probably well aware of, over the last half a century and particularly even the last 20 years, the landscape of getting noticed has changed quite a bit, there's a very different way of getting noticed now than it was during, say, the middle of the 20th century. There's a lot of stuff that involves digital marketing and content creation that I'm here to talk with my guest today, Wendy Pace, the founder and owner of Pace Setting Media, about this endeavor and what getting noticed in the 21st century really looks like. ---   Wendy, welcome to the program.   Thank you. Thanks for having me.   Starting on the topic of getting noticed and how much that has changed, what's the number one thing that someone needs to think about, let's say someone just finished building their product or finished outlining their service, outlining their offering, what's the number one thing someone should be thinking on right now as far as getting noticed?   Okay, so they've developed a product or a service, they need to be thinking about who is this for? What does my audience look like and where is my audience at? A lot of people just throw stuff at the wall and hope that it sticks and that's not exactly the way it works in social media.Share on X If you've noticed or paid any attention to your social media feeds, your view of the world has gotten narrower and narrower because of the algorithms. So you really have to have a keen understanding of who your audience is so that you can tell Facebook, you can tell Google, you can tell them, “This is my audience,” and you can get some of that knowing what your hashtag should be, knowing what the lifestyle of your audience is, there are other ways of getting around what Facebook used to, and back in the day, when I started, you could pick your household, right? You'd be like, “I want two-income, I want four kids, I want the dog, I want the cat, I want the white picket fence. I want it in this zip code,” and you could really kind of hand pick who got to see your stuff. Now, you have to be a lot more creative. You need to think about, okay, say it's a car decaling or car mats, you make custom car mats. Well, you need to think about who's that lifestyle? Who's going to be that car person? What are the things they're going to be interested in? What are the most common job titles they might have? Because you can't pick all of them. And then what's the income around base, what kind of generalized income would you be in? And that is where your key audience members are. So, first and foremost, figure out who you're selling this service to, what do they do, what does their life look like, so that you can pick the right pain points to get into their feeds.   And while we're talking about who your audience is, who you're selling to,

Decision making is a crucial part of our lives, affecting us regardless of whether we are pursuing our passions, thinking about business, or focusing on our personal lives. Many people believe that the outcome of our lives is the sum of all the decisions we make, which can be a bit overwhelming. How can we improve our decision-making skills to shape the lives we desire? In this episode, I have Greg Williams, VP of Strategy at Western Computer. Our talk revolves around decision-making in business. Greg emphasizes the importance of evaluating technology vendors and building strong relationships with customers. We also discuss the potential of AI to transform business operations and leverage it to attain work-life balance. Tune in to learn how these insights can enhance your business strategy! --- Listen to the podcast here: Leveraging AI for Smarter Decision Making in Business with Greg Williams Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a little bit of a broad topic, something that really affects all of our lives, regardless of whether or not you're pursuing your passions, regardless of whether or not you're even thinking about a business or a career at all, and that is decision making. There's a lot of people out there saying that your life's outcome is kind of a sum of all the decisions you make, which can get a little stressing to the mind, I would say, in that sense. To talk to us all about decision making, all the facets of decision making and how to make effective decisions that really, truly reflect who we are and what we want to see in the world in our lives, I would like to introduce you my guest today, Greg Williams, the VP of Strategy for Western Computer, ---   Greg, welcome to the show.   Thanks for having me, Stephen. It's great to be here.    Yeah. Thank you so much. And so, first of all, let's get a little bit of your background. So, you're a VP of Strategy, Western Computer, the name doesn't necessarily clearly stay what it is, so what is it that you do as VP of Strategy?    Yeah, so we're an old company and I like to say that we don't sell computers and we're not really Western that much anymore but that's our name and it has a good brand in the marketplace. We provide ERP and CRM solutions to small and mid-market companies. That's what we do. We're primarily a Microsoft partner so we implement the Microsoft Dynamics suite of products. For our customers, we support them long term. Last few years, it's been their journey in digital transformation.    And just so everyone knows what we're talking about here, ERP and CRM, what are those two acronyms refer to?   So ERP is the backbone software of the business, accounting, inventory control, sometimes ecommerce. It's really the core system that you enter orders in and ship products out of or manage projects and that type of thing.    Yeah.   And CRM is, there's two main companies out there, Microsoft and Salesforce, that do that for the most part and it's for your front office. It's your sales team, it's your customer service team, it's your field technicians, if you're in a service business, the applications that they use,   And in your role as VP of Strategy, are you mostly concerned with the strategy of your company and how to obtain and retain clients? Or are you mostly concerned with the strategy of the companies you work with, helping them pick which business solutions they want for their businesses?    A little bit of both. I'm obviously very focused on our strategy but I do advise our clients quite a bit on what IT strategies they can take to optimize their investments in technology.   Well, regardless of which side of your business, which side of this dichotomy you're on, a big part of it is around this decision-making process. Do you have any general ideas or general piece of advice for anyone...

Aging is a natural part of life. As we get older, our physical body changes, our health, and our mind. But what actually happens to us as we age? What does it mean for us and for those we love? And how can we approach aging in a new way? In this episode, I have Dr. Corinne Auman, CEO and Founder of Choice Care Navigators. We discuss the negative views of aging and how we can refrain from it as a natural part of life. Dr. Corinne shares the challenges of retirement, particularly for the baby boomer generation. Tune in to learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Embracing a Positive Mindset Towards Aging with Dr. Corinne Auman Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we're going to talk about a topic that I have yet to really truly bring up or focus an episode around, which is aging. Now, we all know that aging is happening. Some people approach it quite differently than others. You've heard me talk a bit about the generations and the different generational experiences, but what happens to us as we get older? What does that mean? And what does it mean for the people that we love and care about as we get older? And also, how can we approach it a little bit differently? You probably know that I am a little bit skeptical or let's say not fully on board with the traditional ways that we have viewed aging in the past and even treat it mostly today. To talk about this topic, I would like to introduce you to my guest for today, Corinne Auman, and she is the founder of Choice Care Navigators as well as the author of a book called Keenagers, which gives us a different new approach to aging. ---   Corrine, welcome to the program.   Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.    Oh, yeah, thank you for hopping on and talking about this important topic because, as we know, everyone out there is getting older, we all have ideas around aging, and we have a lot of different ideas. What are the ideas that you usually encounter, say, in today's society about what it means to get older and what it means to have your loved ones get older?   So I think we are in a pretty ageist society, in the sense that the messaging you typically get around getting older is don't do it, which, of course, we can't avoid, so we've got this thing that is happening to all of us all the time, we're going to be older at the end of this podcast than we were at the beginning, and yet we get this messaging from our culture around us that is constantly anti-aging, negative viewpoints on it, prevent it, if at all possible, look as young as you possibly can, which, I mean, it's a multibillion-dollar industry. People are making a lot of money off of your fear of growing older. So, I think that is the predominant view. When you get to actual like retirement years, people typically view those years in one of two ways. They either view it as kind of a time of earned relaxation where you do a lot of vacationing and you spend time with the grandkids, or they view it as a time of just inevitable decline, the end is nigh and there's nothing we can do about it and it's just all downhill from here. So, those are the typical kind of viewpoints you see about growing older.    And I have to admit that I've kind of succumb to it a little bit. Mostly, it's because I think that that's what's pushed by our society. I think about what happens when people grow from their 20s into the 30s and 40s and stuff like that and it's pretty emphasized to me this loss, this loss of the adventure, this loss of the independence, whereas I've actually experienced a little bit of the things that you actually do gain, like I think people sometimes start to become more self-confident, they start to reduce their give-a-fucks, to be able to just like not freak out over small little things anymore. Is that messaging, is someone turning 30 today hearing just overwhelming negative commentary about where their li...

When starting a business, there are several key things to consider, like marketing strategies and financial planning. In the early stages, it's crucial to reach a wide audience to make your business known. What are some effective ways to make an impact and connect with potential clients? Join us in this episode with Nicole Grinnel, an entrepreneur, CEO, and podcast host. We discussed the benefits of guesting on podcasts, especially for early-stage businesses for growth and connection, as well as having an entrepreneurial mindset and remote work flexibility, such as virtual assistants.  Tune in to gain valuable insights! --- Listen to the podcast here: Podcasting as a Business Growth Strategy with Nicole Grinnell Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I've advocated quite a bit on this podcast about kind of embracing a new way of thinking and I think one of the things that we've often thought about in the past is that when someone is doing something similar to what you're doing, you see them as a competitor, as someone that's kind of possibly occupying your space. But there's a saying that the market's only saturated when you're trying to be someone else and it's not necessarily saturated with you. So, I'm always here to support other people on the same journey, and the journey I'm talking about today is showcasing the stories of people who start their businesses or showcasing the stories of people who follow their passions very much here. So, my guest today, Nicole Grinnell, is the host of Mic'd Up, another podcast, as well as a two-time business founder. ---   Nicole, welcome to the program.   Thanks so much for having me, Stephen. I'm excited to be here.    Well, thank you so much for popping on. And let's first start by talking about Mic'd Up. Now, your podcast has been around for quite some time, even longer than this one.   Yeah. So we have, obviously, like our actual show, and then we really serve as a booking agency to get other people on podcasts, which is a way that we've actually grown multiple businesses and supported a lot of businesses in that effort and so we really want to do much like the purpose of your show is show other ways that businesses can grow through different avenues and what other people have done and that's what Mic'd Up plans to do.    Nice. And so I guess the first question I have for you about that is, if someone is starting a business or trying to get any of their initiatives noticed, and I want to be all inclusive, not every initiative is a business but want to get something noticed, how should someone be thinking about podcasts? I hear people have advocating, say, start your own podcast or try to be on other podcasts. What's the best way for someone to think through a strategy as far as building their business that involves the podcasting medium?   So, it's funny because I always say there's a time and place for either of those. It really depends on the stage you're at in business. So, when you are just starting out and you're really trying to build your name, build pipelines, build relationships, that's a great time to be in a guesting space because, really, what happens is the show is all about you. So, I compare it to having someone over for dinner. What's easier, being the guest or being the host? When you're the guest, it's all about you, they're doing all the prep, the legwork, they're promoting it, they're all of this, that's really what guesting can be. When you're in the hosting space, that's a great time for when you are a seasoned entrepreneur, a seasoned professional, business is running, you've got some great pipelines and now you're kind of at that stage that you want to give back and you want to be able to naturally connect. That's a great time to be a host. So it really depends on that scale that you're in and what that looks like for you.  

As human beings, we all encounter problems in our lives. Some may be traumatic, and it's just a fact of life. These experiences can make it hard to focus on our daily tasks, especially at work. How can we create a workplace culture that supports employees during these times? In this episode, I sit down with Tamara Fox, a coach and head of consulting at LOEB Leadership. We discussed the impact of trauma on both personal and professional life, and the need for workplaces to address employees' trauma, and the future of their work. Tamara shared about the approaches to leadership development and the benefits of prioritizing employee's mental health. Tune in to learn how we can build a more supportive workplace --- Listen to the podcast here: Prioritizing Employees' Well-Being in the Workplace with Tamara Fox Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. On this particular podcast, I've talked quite a bit about our work culture and about how many things about our culture that we all encounter at work need some adjustment in our thinking. And one of the topics that I was recently introduced to at the Boulder Startup Week last month is the topic of what happens when one of your coworkers, one of your employees has a traumatic experience. Now, we're all going to have traumatic experiences in life, it's just a fact of life that something major is going to happen to you and something major is going to happen to you that's going to cause you to maybe even focus on that particular aspect of your life a little bit more, even a little bit more than your work, and we need to find a way to, on a broader scale, allow people to be coworkers but also human beings. Today, my guest, Tamara Fox, is a coach and a consultant, and she was the speaker at this particular event on workforce trauma. ---   Tamara, welcome to the program.   Thanks for having me.   Yeah, thank you so much. So, I want to first start off talking about your particular story, your particular journey, when you talk about what made workplace culture something that really interested you and then what made specifically how people endure these traumas at workplaces something that you want to kind of lean into with your career.    Yeah, absolutely. So I'm definitely one of those people that I took my own personal experiences and made it into something I'm actually passionate about and doing in the workforce today. And I always start my story back in 2011, when I was 19, I always age myself now when I do podcasts, I think that was 13 years ago, it was wild. But in 2011, I was 19 years old and I woke up and I was living in an apartment in Denver, Colorado, and I woke up to a masked man standing over my bed with a gun who raped me and actually physically assaulted me as well, like dislocated my arm, did a whole bunch of stuff to me that, you know, won't go into details. I truly saw my life flash before my eyes, thought I was going to die, never see my family again. So that was 19 years old.    Wow. Pretty life changing experience, that was the catapult into my experiences with personal trauma myself, like going through something traumatic. Pretty shortly after that, my dad had been battling with an opioid addiction, most of my childhood, it just didn't really come to the surface or I wasn't really aware of it at like more conscious level until after my trauma and I think my trauma actually catapulted him a little bit, made him a little bit worse, because when your family experience something like that, of course it has an impact on the family around them so his opioid addiction got to the point that he was verbally abusive, he was blacking out and not remembering things, and he was abusing opioids illegally. So then that happened and he became suicidal and his mental health was just awful. So that had an impact for me on a trauma perspective. Then, from 2016 to 2024, I had nine deaths,

Change is about becoming different in various parts of our lives triggered by our internal desires or external events. Through change, it helps us see new things and grow as a human being spiritually, mentally, and physically, which are all interconnected. How do these aspects of change come together to shape our life? Join us in this episode with Brian de Castro, founder of The Domestic Athlete. Our conversation focused on how we can maintain work-life balance, prioritize well-being, and explore creative projects. We also talked about how to align our passions to achieve fulfillment and avoid burnout through intentional management. Brian shared the benefits of exercise, mindfulness, creativity, and self-awareness. Listen to this episode and start transforming your life today! --- Listen to the podcast here: Achieving Work-Life Balance and Fulfillment with  Brian de Castro Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We all reach that point in life where we want to make some kind of a change and there's so many different catalysts for change. Probably, if you've been listening to the podcast, you've heard several episodes with people who have had events such as health scares or even just getting laid off from a job perpetuating a new way of thinking, a new line of, “Okay, what change do I wanna make? What do I think through what do I really want?” However, there are so many components to it. There's obviously the mental stuff, some of the spiritual stuff that's been on in the last few episodes, but I've also covered on some episodes the physical aspect of it and it all kind of, in a way, goes together. And here to discuss how that goes together, I have the founder of The Domestic Athlete, Brian DeCastro. ---   Brian, welcome to the program.   Thank you. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.    Definitely. I want to start by orienting our audience here. So what is The Domestic Athlete all about?   Yeah, good question. Back in 2016, I was actually working, I was on my probably 15th, 16th year working in the same organization. For the last, say, nine years, I was actually employed managing the entire fitness department that consisted of 40 trainers, 20 staff, multimillion-dollar department, there's a lot of moving parts. It was a very exciting position. We went through a $50 million expansion at the time and we cut the ribbon and then, after that, it was kind of like, “Now what?”   Yeah.   Ironically, the universe responded and they were actually phasing out people in sort of that middle management position as well. My position got phased out. I drove off the lot with a big smile on my face. I can move on to the next thing but also not with the risk of, you know, I had a family and everything so responsibility and all that stuff. When I started The Domestic Athlete within a month of leaving the club, my passion was in working with regular folks in the grind, day to day, parents, professionals perhaps with families that are trying to keep all the balls up in the air that also need the life force, the inspiration, the excitement. They still want that. You don't want to wait 'til you're retired to actually start living your life so how do we keep it all together and keep our life force but also manage all those moving parts, the dance class, the hockey practice, all that stuff, and then paying your bills and then you also have a marriage or relationship or something, right? So there's so many different things going on. So Domestic Athlete is basically people like you and I operating in the sport of life, like I like to call it, so what do you need to operate at your best?Share on X Oh, wow. A lot to unpack there. Maybe let's start with a little bit about your story because you said that you spent 16 years working with the same company, overseeing personal trainers and stuff like that.

We are all trying to build the life we really want, balancing what we are doing with the lifestyle we dream of. However, are we truly making a life that matches our deepest values? How can we be sure our path fits our real goals? In this episode, we have Molly Lou Hollows, founder of Strategy Sculptors. Her business focuses on both the practical stuff we need to build and understanding our true selves, so what we create aligns with the life we genuinely desire. Today, we will explore what human design strategy is for business consultant clients. Molli shares what Unified Field Theory and Morphogenetic Field is and how it actually attracts opportunities and experiences by just being themselves with purpose. Join us and align with your true self! --- Listen to the podcast here: Human Designed Strategy for Personal and Professional Fulfillment with Molli Lou Hollows Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I've been doing a bunch of these podcast interviews and I've witnessed a whole bunch of different motivations, a whole bunch of different reasons why we all build our businesses and/or passion projects of any kind. Some of it's based on certain specific circumstances and others based on something that we're called to do, but at the core of everything that we're trying to do, the journey that we are all on right now, is trying to build the life that we really want. Then there's kind of a juxtaposition, a meetup of the physical thing that we're building, what we're actually doing as well as the lifestyle we're trying to achieve, whether it be escaping something we don't want or whether it be feeling really in touch with having our lives be in alignment with who we truly are. My guest today, Molli Lou, is the founder of Strategy Sculptors, and her business actually works at that intersection of physical, tangible thing we need to build as well as understanding who we are at a course that what we're building actually matches the life that we really truly want. ---   Molli, welcome to the program.   Hey, Stephen. Yeah. I'm excited to be here. Super awesome.    Oh, that's amazing. Now, first of all, let's get a point in time out. How long have you been at it with Strategy Sculptors? Well, in 2020, that's when I really started my full-time entrepreneurial journey. I think a lot of us did. We were all home so we all were questioning things and really looking at ourselves in a different way. We were all at home and so I really started to be like, okay, I've always wanted to do this. So I dove into it and I started going to school for hypnotherapy. I already had gone through and was a certified breakthrough coach, specifically, and I just felt like I needed something more tangible to use than coaching just for me. Coaching is great but I have always felt like I was going towards a framework that I was creating on my own, that I was going to enter the framework eventually.Share on X I ended up working towards other things. I felt limited, actually, by the hypnotherapy. I wanted to use it as a tool but I wanted to be able to make it scalable so that I could make as much income as I wanted and I wanted it to be more flexible because the one on one, it gets old. I didn't want to trade my hours for dollars. I wanted that to be, for sure, part of the solution, part of my entrepreneurial journey was to find that, and I ended up working with a lot of entrepreneurs to begin with, and I realized maybe I just loved entrepreneurship and then it was kind of this delicate balance of finding a way to have both, to have both entrepreneurship and spirituality merge. And then I ended up where I am now, where, finally, I've figured it out.   Coming into 2020 when you started rethinking a lot of things, what were you doing? Did you have a full-time normal job? Were you just trading your dollars for hours through this hypnotherapy coaching or was there somethi...

Have you ever felt lost in your own life? Wondering who you truly are beneath all the roles and expectations? How do you rediscover yourself and build the confidence to live authentically? In this inspiring episode, I am joined by Leah Beltz, a passionate Co-Active coach and skilled facilitator with over 23 years of experience across global organizations. She is the founder of Honor The Space and creates a space for people to feel seen, heard, challenged, and supported in their growth, helping them live with more clarity, confidence, and connection to their purpose.  Today, Leah shares her journey of self-discovery, how she found her authentic self through The DigⓇ method, and how she now helps others do the same. She discusses the importance of knowing your history to understand your path, the unique process of The DigⓇ, and how creating space for yourself and others can lead to personal growth. Leah's story is one of overcoming fear, embracing vulnerability, and stepping into her true self. Listen now to start your journey toward living a more authentic and confident life! --- Listen to the podcast here: Rediscovering Your Authentic Self To Thrive with Leah Beltz Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I'm a big fan of music. I'm a particularly big fan of Pitbull, I listened to his Globalization channel on XM Radio. I'm a fan of him as a person as well. He has a lot of things he says on the channel, one of them is if you don't know where you're coming from, you don't know where you're going. Similar to what Bob Marley said, when you know your history then you know where you're coming from. And so I want to talk to you today about a process that I underwent several months ago around kind of taking my life experience, my life story and trying to distill it down into kind of an easily digestible piece of information for me to keep with me, and there's a process called The Dig that was administered to me by my guest today, Leah Beltz, the founder of Honor Your Space. ---   Leah, welcome to the program.    Hi, Stephen, welcome. It's nice to be here again.    Yeah, it's wonderful to have you. And, first of all, tell us a little bit about The Dig, since I kind of started that whole thing. I know you're a facilitator, you've worked with a lot of clients on this program.    I can give you a short answer and I can give you a long answer. The short answer, if I were to describe it in only two words, I would describe The Dig as self-discovery. So similar to what you said with Pitbull, kind of understanding where you've come from to understand where you're going. I would say the longer version of that, The Dig is a one-on-one facilitated method of self-discovery that helps you get epic clarity on who you are and how you operate so that you can then live with more confidence and connection to your life's purpose.    So, we're talking about clients here and people who have had a lot of life experiences because most people do and most people have a lot of things they've gone through in life that just ends up being confusing, because it's like, “Why this? Why that?” So, what's the journey, the customer journey, for anyone who speaks product, around that person who comes to you and just like, “Okay, well, I had this happen, I had that happen, and I've had these experiences, and WTF?”?   Right. What I love about The Dig, what makes it unique is the actual process that we go through. So, I want to acknowledge there are a lot of tools and processes like this. The Simon Sinek Find Your Why or the Pursuit of Happiness, all these different things, but what makes The Dig unique is the process which we go through and it's done through a matter of storytelling and reflection and it's all based on capturing different words, so it involves language and we capture words throughout the conversation and then those words, I work with the client,

Have you ever experienced that one life event that completely changes everything? That moment where your life shatters and you're forced to go deep within yourself to rediscover who you are. How do you navigate such a transformation and come out stronger on the other side? In this empowering episode, I am joined by Elizabeth Soto-Baez, the founder of Launch Your Life Coaching. Elizabeth is a life coach, women's empowerment coach, and trauma-informed breathwork facilitator specializing in helping divorced or separated women. With nearly two decades of experience building communication lines between children and families, she now focuses on empowering women to reconnect with themselves and others.  Today, she shares her own story of realizing her marriage was over, the challenges she faced, like financial struggles, loneliness, and finding herself again outside of marriage. She also shares how she helps her clients through similar journeys, using mindset coaching and breathwork to turn grief into empowerment and growth. Listen now and start your journey toward a more empowered life! --- Listen to the podcast here: Coming Out Stronger After Life's Toughest Moments with Elizabeth Soto-Baez Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Now, I want to talk to you all about something that a lot of us are going to encounter in one form or another in our lives, and that is that one life event that really changes everything, that one life event that really shatters what your life was and forces you to go inside, look a little bit deeper into kind of who you are in order to create what's new in order to discover yourself on a whole new level. My guest today, Elizabeth Soto-Baez, specializes in helping women going through divorce, which is oftentimes a situation where they have their world that was just completely shattered by this event and suddenly no longer with their partner and need to kind of learn who they are outside the context of their marriage. She is the founder of Launch Your Life Coaching. She is here today to talk to us about her experience with her clients. ---   Elizabeth, welcome to the program.   Stephen, thank you so much. I'm excited to be here and to chat with you.    Definitely. And so you started your business based on a personal experience.    I did, I did. So, in 2019, I realized that after 13 and a half years of marriage, it wasn't working. It hadn't been working for a really long time. When I got married in my early 20s, I committed to being a married person. I really wanted what the idealized marriage is projected as, a partner, someone you grow with, your best friend, someone that you do all the hard things and all the wonderful things with and celebrate with. And I came from a family background where divorce was prevalent. All of my aunts and uncles had been divorced except for one.    Wow.   Many of them had been divorced more than one time. And I thought, okay, my family doesn't understand how to do relationships. Cool. I'm going to be better. What I didn't account for in my own thinking and my commitment to do marriage well was that the person you marry has to also be committed to that.    Yeah. They also have to want to grow and change and celebrate and work through hard things and be open and that wasn't the experience that I had. And, in 2019, I had a revelation and I was like, this is not what I thought it was going to be and I've done every single thing that I know of to make it good, but if he doesn't cooperate, whatever that looks like, I'm just dragging myself through the mud. And so I let them know I'm really done, there's no saving this anymore. We're all done, and similar to the conversation we're just having. Then he was ready to go to therapy with me. Then he was ready to talk about what was it, and I thought, I hand wrote you many, many, many letters,

Loneliness and feeling disconnected are common experiences today, affecting how we feel about life. The longing for real connection is stronger than ever. But it's not just about having lots of friends; it's about having meaningful connections that make us feel understood and valued. How do we close this gap and build relationships that truly matter? In this episode, I have the pleasure to chat with Coach Lee Hopkins, the founder of Patterns of Possibility. Coach Lee Hopkins is an expert in helping people build more meaningful connections in both their personal and professional lives. Throughout the episode, Coach Lee guides us through understanding the nuances of genuine connections, both online and offline. He talks about the complexities of modern-day interactions, offering actionable strategies to enhance the depth and authenticity of our relationships. Learn how small, intentional steps can lead to profound shifts in our relationships, bringing us closer to a life filled with genuine connection and fulfillment. --- Listen to the podcast here: Building Real and Meaningful Connections with Coach Lee Hopkins Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you selling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about loneliness, lack of connection. Now, you probably heard a lot of talk about the loneliness epidemic. One of the decisions I often cite in some of my presentations is that a survey was conducted around how many close friends people have, because loneliness is not just about how many people you're around, it's not just about isolation, it's also about the meaningfulness, the depth of the connection. A survey conducted in 1990 showed that over 60 percent of all people said they had five or more close friends, how they would define as close friends. That same survey conducted in 2021 put 48 percent of all people in the one to four category for how many close friends they had and an alarming 12 percent actually reported having zero close friends and this is impacting just our quality of life in general so it's good for us to kind of regroup and think a bit more about how we actually form meaningful relationships with other human beings. And to that topic, I bring you my guest today, Coach Lee Hopkins. Coach Lee Hopkins is a social connections coach, founder of a company called Patterns of Possibility. With this company, he uses a simple three-step process to help his clients find and maintain closeness in their friendships. ---   Coach Lee Hopkins, welcome to the program.   Thank you so much for having me here. I'm so glad to talk about this topic because it affects so many people.    Let's start with what's affecting people. What are you observing in the world today, like right now, regarding the quality of our connections we're making between human beings?   The quality of our connections. What I observe is there's all kinds of statistics out there. As you pointed out, there's some statistics about the relationships that my own observations is searching through TikTok and being on social media, listening to what other people are experiencing as well as watching and seeing my own experiences is that we're not as connected as we were before and I would love to just tackle that and look at it from a different angle because what I define as connection is a little bit different than what most people do. They think simply because we are focused on being online so much that we're disconnected.Click To Tweet Of course, that keeps us separated but even when we're in person, we're also not making the intentional kind of connections there too. We're just like in spaces with people and not being connected. The phenomenon that I've noticed is we're disconnected online and then we're so unattached to people that when we get into spaces with people, we don't know how to be either. And so disconnection is just pretty rampant.   

Chronic diseases are on the rise, affecting millions globally. How can we handle and even reverse the progression of these chronic conditions? Our guest, Oliver Eehn is the Founder of Optimum Fitness Systems and brings over 40 years of expertise in health and fitness, specializing in diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and stroke recovery. He holds several certifications, specializing in athletic/sports conditioning, injury/post-rehabilitation, bodybuilding, powerlifting, senior fitness, and other areas.  Throughout the episode, Oliver discuss the ways of managing various chronic diseases, from physical injuries to mental conditions like Parkinson's and dementia. He also shares his plans to expand his impact on public health, reaching out to both the general public and fitness professionals. His goal is to raise awareness, educate, and empower individuals and businesses to prioritize health and wellness. Tune in to learn how small lifestyle changes can make a big difference in your health journey. --- Listen to the podcast here: Reversing Chronic Disease & Recovery Strategies with Oliver Eehn Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of the problems that we've observed quite a bit today and had a really big uptick over the past, say, half a century is the prevalence of chronic diseases. This is something we haven't talked about quite yet on this podcast but we have talked generally about health, both mental and physical health, and health can definitely get in the way of you being able to follow whatever dream, whatever passion that you're trying to pursue. Today, my guest, Oliver Eehn, who is the founder of Optimum Fitness Systems, is going to talk a little bit about what we can do about chronic diseases, both from the recovery and prevention side. ---   Oliver, welcome to the program.   Thank you, Stephen. It's a pleasure to be here.   Well, thanks for joining and thanks for talking to us about a topic that we have yet to really talk about these chronic diseases. So, obviously, you've seen this, you have a passionate about it. What is making some of these chronic diseases so prevalent today?   Unfortunately, it's just lack of activity, poor food planning, dieting, and everything that ties along with that, and it's just, of course, not to mention just the quality of the foods that are available today, along with all the added preservatives and processing that goes into it. And so you put all that together, yes, that is definitely an equation for disaster down the road. My quest, if you want to call it that, is to now help educate the public about this as well as to encourage them to just better lifestyle and healthy living.Click To Tweet   Yeah, it is disturbing to see how many people are living with some kind of chronic disease. What brought you into this particular pursuit? What did you observe that made you decide that Optimum Fitness System is what you wanted to do?    It wasn't planned that way, it's just kind of as a lot of your other fellow business people, some of your other guests have talked about, this is kind of how life --- as life just kind of flows along, we just move along and then it's --- some of it, it's just more by default, if you will, because that was kind of your tip, growing up as an athlete myself, and endure a lot of my own injuries, football being my main sport, of course, you play football, yeah, you're asking for injuries over the years, just become my own patient. And then just through that process, just became a weightlifting, fitness enthusiast through that process and just made sense to now, it's obviously tried to do something business wise in that regard. And so, as I started just working with folks and just the typical like most personal trainers do early on is help people lose weight and just kind of get back in shape and that's, 'til this day, I mean,

Despite being underrepresented, the truth is, women can thrive, excel, and lead. Their resilience, creativity, and determination often outshine the barriers they face.  In this empowering episode, our guest, Rhonda Skallan founder of Spark Alchemy, is here to prove just that. She shares valuable insights and strategies on how women can not only survive but thrive in these challenging environments. Rhonda's passion lies in empowering women to not just join the conversation but to lead it with confidence and authority. Through her work, she ensures that women have a seat at the table and are equipped to make impactful contributions. Listen in as we discuss typical male-dominated industries, the experience of women in these fields, leadership barriers, and the power of building supportive networks. Tune in now and empower yourself to rise above limitations! --- Listen to the podcast here: Taking Their Seat: Women Leading in Male-Dominated Industry with Rhonda Skallan Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Now, we all have our dreams, we all have our passions, we all have what we want out of life, and, hopefully, some of the episodes you've already listened to is giving you a good idea of how to figure out what it is that you actually want. But once you figure out what it is you actually want, there's many different barriers that can get in our way. Nothing is really that easy, especially developing a life that's a little bit outside the box or outside of what's expected. Some of these barriers could take the form of feeling like you don't belong, feeling like you don't really have the right to communicate. So, today, my guest is Rhonda Skallan. She is the founder of Spark Alchemy and she helps women in male-dominated industries. ---   Rhonda, welcome to the program.   Thank you, thank you, and thank you so much for having me here today. I really appreciate it, Stephen.   Well, thank you so much for taking the time out to talk to me and my audience today. So, first of all, I want to start off by asking what is a typical male-dominated industry and what does that feel like for some of your clients?   That's a great question because most industries are male dominated. My background tends to specifically be in construction, technology, finance as well as education, healthcare, and entertainment, and I would say all of those have a healthy dose of male dominance, especially when you think about combining them. So doing healthcare construction and technology construction. I decided I could go ahead and double down on that male dominance in a couple of those industries.   Now, are there industries that are female dominant or are there industries that are balanced, that have found a way to kind of work through some of this?   I really haven't seen a balanced industry as much as maybe some female-dominated industries, maybe in the younger children, preschool, elementary-type education spaces, some of the service spaces of retail, sales, things like that, but I really haven't seen a balance as much as I've seen one or the other. I will say what I know from some of the research that I've done with the Bureau of Labor Statistics for Women, the only industries where women make more money than men tend to be in childcare or those type of service-oriented businesses, which are also some of the lowest paying businesses.   Now, you also talk a lot about how a woman feels in a male-dominated industry. Are there any industries out there that just the percentages work out one way but do a better job of preventing making people feel like outsiders, like a woman in construction versus technology versus a finance industry?   Maybe healthcare, where you're dealing with a lot of more traditional nurses, especially pediatric healthcare, which I have a pretty strong exposure to. I think, at some point,

Ever struggled to decide between doing what you love and finding the right way to do it? Do you wonder about the differences between a standard company and a nonprofit journey? These questions lie at the heart of our discussion today as we talk about the nuanced decisions that shape career trajectory, and influence our creative endeavors, and aspirations. In this episode, I sit down with Hanna Yaritz, a passionate advocate for philanthropy and impact-driven work. Hanna shares insights into the unique aspects of choosing to work in nonprofit versus for-profit entities, emphasizing the role of mission alignment and personal connection to a cause. We touch base into the concept of conscious capitalism and conscious business, where organizations focus on both profitability and social impact. She emphasizes the importance of finding alignment between personal values, career goals, and the organization's mission. Listen in for insights that inspire change! --- Listen to the podcast here: Deciding Between Non-Profit and Standard Company with Hanna Yaritz Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. So, perhaps you have your idea or you have your passion, you figured out what you want to bring into the world, and then you get asked a couple of other questions come in, what kind of venue you want to pursue your idea in, and one of the key questions a lot of people ask that has yet to be covered on this particular podcast is the whole standard company versus nonprofit path. A lot of people, whether it is what kind of job you want or what kind of business you want to build, there is a big question, do I want to build it in one format, a standard LLC to start out, or do I want to build a nonprofit? So, here to talk a little bit about the nonprofit space and what that could potentially mean for you, your career, your business, your ideas, your passions, we have Hannah Yaritz, a nonprofit fundraising consultant. ---   Hannah, welcome to the program.   Thanks, Stephen. I'm really happy to be here.    Well, it's wonderful to have you, it's wonderful to finally cover this topic as we haven't covered it quite yet on this particular podcast. Let's start with your passions, what made you decide that the nonprofit route was the space that you wanted to be in this world?    Yeah, thanks. This is one of my favorite questions to answer because, for me, it really is about one of my strongest values, which is being of service to others and I really was inspired, I had the privilege and honor of going to college. I think that that truly is a privilege in our country and I was the first person in my family to do so so there was a lot of weight on my shoulders to be able to --- yeah, to pursue something that was bigger, would provide more opportunities to me and my family. And while I was in college, I volunteered a lot. I got really connected with a number of volunteer groups, learning about social justice, being exposed to different communities, different ways of living, different ways that people are trying to make a difference in our community and uplift others, and so it was through my volunteerism and activism while I was at college that I really started to hone in on what I wanted to pursue as a career. During school, I actually studied television broadcasting and while I loved that, I wanted to do something that really aligned my skill set in broadcasting and media and communications and marketing with volunteerism, with nonprofits, with making a difference so I started to pursue communication opportunities at nonprofit organizations. I thought that would be a really great alignment with my skill set and with my passion. So that's for me where it really started.   So then what brought you to fundraising for nonprofits as opposed to, say, becoming the leader or CEO of a specific nonprofit?   Yeah, so fundraising was something I always did on the pe...

Perhaps you've heard of spirituality but aren't sure what it means. Spirituality is a broad concept that provides meaning, purpose and connection to something greater than ourselves. It cultivates a deeper sense of self-awareness and can serve as guiding light during the storms. But have you ever wondered how spirituality shapes our relationship and perception of the world? In this episode, I have Wendy Watson, CEO and Founder of TBR Spiritual Health. We discuss how spiritual therapy works that helps clients tap into their spirituality. Wendy discusses several self-care practices, meditation, energy communication and how peoples' spiritual practices can change over the course of time. Tune in and connect with your spirituality today! --- Listen to the podcast here: Connecting with Your Spirituality with Wendy Watson Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. In the last episode, we briefly touched a bit on spirituality and on how we're at a time period where things may be changing, may be evolving, we may be changing the way we're even thinking about spirituality and how it relates to everything else that we're doing in life. Today, I would like to bring on Wendy Watson, who is the CEO and founder of TBR Spiritual Health, to talk a little bit more specifically spiritual therapy.  ---   Wendy, welcome to the program.   Hi. Thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate it.    Beginning with what you do with your spiritual therapy, I know you have a few different offerings with your business and a few different manners in which you work with your clients, but tell us about what it means to go into spiritual therapy and how it relates to any of the endeavors that we all have in our minds.    Yeah, so I really focus on getting the individual person in touch with their spirit, their higher self, their intuition, and whatever is above and beyond that for them I have no judgment on whether or not you call it God or Vishnu or Freya or whatever vocabulary, whatever name you use, I just want to get you in touch with it so that you can communicate and develop your individual relationship with yourself and whatever is above and beyond for you rather than what people tell you your relationship with God should look like. And so your clients, when they come to you, are most of them in a place where they already have some sort of a spiritual tradition or do you commonly get people who come with absolutely no, purely like everything's just logic, science, and how atoms come together, blah, blah, blah?   No, I get more --- I get people that already have some sort of relationship already established, whether they grew up Catholic or Christian or very much into the spiritual world, more on what people call the woo-woo side. I get all walks of life. Really, all I do is I try and build on what they've already cultivated for themselves and get them to look at that more on their own, helping them to define it for themselves. Like, okay, what does that mean to you versus what has somebody else told you that it means and how can you use that in alignment with yourself and how can we set up a self-care routine in order to keep your spirit clean, in order to keep you in connection with spirit, with God, with whatever you want to call it?   We can get really caught up in our day-to-day lives and get really busy so most people that come to you, are they people who just generally have the time, are they generally too distracted, are they generally constantly busy? I'm from New York where everyone's constantly busy all the time and that's a code of honor, what state is that relationship with the spiritual usually in when people come to you?   So, I get a lot of people with high anxiety, depression, suicidal tendencies or suicidal thoughts. They're so focused on the right here and the right now that they're in fear of the future or they just f...

Pivoting in life and business can result in growth. The thing is, making decisions on it is challenging. Moreover, knowing the right time to make changes in our path is quite difficult. How can we be able to confront these uncertainties that lie ahead when we decide to pivot our directions to change? In this episode, I talk with Mike Laezer, Founder of Astrology Wolf. We discuss how pivoting in business and life can lead to new paths and growth. With Mike's experience, he highlights the importance of trusting your guts, intuition, and facing your fears to overcome problems ahead. Additionally, he points out to follow our intuition for career pivots, even if the path is unclear. Join us to learn how to pivot with the expert! --- Listen to the podcast here: Thriving Through Change in Business and Life Through Pivoting With Mike Lazear Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about pivoting, because what we all know about really building anything, whether it be founding a business or starting something else on your own, is that you need a little bit of stick-to-itiveness. You need to stick to it, you need to not give up right away, because it is not an issue of instant gratification as so and so our culture is right now. However, there are times when it does become time to pivot, whether you need to find a new way to promote your business, try a new business, or just try something new in general because the time has come to move on. And one of the challenges that we all have is when is it time to move on and when is it that you're giving up too soon? Today, my guest is Mike Lazear. He is the founder of Astrology Wolf and also the founder of a business he recently sold, 515 Media, to talk a little bit about all the pivots he has made in life. ---   Mike, welcome to the program.   Hi, thanks, Stephen. It's good to be here.   It's good to have you as well. Now, obviously, you've done a lot of pivoting in your life so let's just start with your story from the beginning. When did you first decide that you wanted to found your own businesses as opposed to what I usually describe as living by the script?   Yeah, thanks, and it's so funny because when I actually did start my first real legitimate business, I wasn't even necessarily trying to do it. I had always wanted to before I went that direction in my life sort of live more independently and I had this whole thing of like if I could find a way to just have enough time to do as many creative projects as I could and not have to spend all my time earning a living and it felt like it was almost an obstacle or a problem to solve so that's kind of what got me first into it. When I graduated from the University of Minnesota, I had a degree that didn't really have a lot of translatable skills with the bachelor's, I was a psychology graduate. So, I was always interested in programming, computer stuff, got into that. I took some courses at Portland State, mainly HTML, CSS, and I got a job out there working for a really great company called One Economy. They're wonderful, but I don't think they exist anymore.    Oh, that's too bad.    The area where I worked, I don't even remember exactly what happened but a bunch of us got laid off kind of at once and I had started kind of getting my own clients doing web development, doing frontend coding, CSS, HTML. This was back in the days too where CSS was kind of a newer thing and I was learning — when dev is a lot more complicated today. It certainly became that way. So it was sort of by accident. I just was getting so many clients that I was kind of frantically looking for another job and I'm like I'm actually making enough now where I can almost see this just continuing. Then I started thinking about my dream of not having to go to a nine-to-five and just do what everyone else is doing.

In the past, the process of finding a job was often laborious and time-consuming, especially in the tech industry where specific skills were in high demand. However, with the rapid advancements in technology, the landscape has shifted dramatically. Today, job seekers have access to a plethora of online platforms and tools that streamline the search process. But how can we easily navigate or get a job with the use of AI? In today's episode, I have Vilas Tulachan, Founder of JobsGuru AI. We talked about the challenges of the current job search process and how Jobs Guru AI aims to help address these challenges using artificial intelligence. Moreover, we discussed how the application tracking systems, cognitive biases and how Jobs Guru AI analyzes resumes and job descriptions to determine good job matches, generates customized cover letters and interview questions, to help streamline the job search process and reduce frustration for job seekers. --- Listen to the podcast here: Streamlining Job Applications Using Generative AI  With Vilas Tulachan Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. How many of you out there listening has searched for a job lately? And, lately, I mean, since the pandemic, it's gotten even crazier than it was before. It's a really tough process and a process that I've seen frustrate a lot of people, myself included, as you may have heard about in one of my past episodes. My guest today, Vilas Tulachan, started a company called JobsGuru.ai to help with this process that's really become frustrating for so many people. ---   Vilas, welcome to the program.    Thank you, Stephen. Great to be in your podcast. I'm excited to share some of the ideas I have on how to help people get jobs faster with you today.    Yeah, so let's start with where the process is right now. Right now, a lot of people are frustrated by the job search process. What do you think is going on that's making it so cumbersome, such a hard process when all people really want to do is find a job and then work it?    Stephen, great question. It's amazing. We are living in an amazing time. As Charles Dickens said, the best of times, the worst of times. The best of times, because unemployment rate in the US is the second lowest in the history of 3.7 as of end of last year.    Wow.    It's amazing, right? So there's 1.7 jobs opening for every job seeker. That's the stats, that's the economic news. But on the ground level is a different ballgame for job seekers. I've talked to job seekers that have applied at 50, 100, 200, 500 job application, they hardly hear anything back. Or they get a good thank kind of response from email back and maybe they've gotten maybe two or three interviews and they get ghosted by the employer. It's been a really weird kind of job market.    Yeah, for sure.    Yeah. And there are a couple of things I see, and the reason I got into this whole idea was as — I met you when you did the startup at Denver a year and a half ago and then I was looking to applying the AI and the ML into helping smaller businesses implement an AI in their businesses. And then I talked to a lot of people who were having issues with jobs, I'm wondering this sounds like a crazy idea, when there are so many jobs and I really did some research and found that a lot of people have a couple of challenges. Number one is called, it's a cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger effect. So you must have heard about this where people either overestimate or underestimate their skill sets.    Oh, yeah.    Yeah. And it's strange. So, if you look at the industry stats, about 73 percent of the job application, according to LinkedIn, are rejected right away before even a human sees the resume, and mainly because the resume doesn't match fully the job requirements. So that's the first thing. So you only get 30 percent chance of ever getting a resume ...

The subconscious mind is like a hidden library in our brains, quietly influencing our thoughts and actions. When ideas are consistently reinforced, they sink into the subconscious, becoming automatic responses. Positive or negative, these beliefs influence our decisions and behaviors without our conscious awareness. Have you ever wondered how your subconscious beliefs might be guiding your choices without you even realizing it? In this week's episode, I have Austin Tani, Founder of Bringing Balance Back. Today, we discussed how negative beliefs are often formed in childhood based on experiences, and how those beliefs can then impact our lives unconsciously. He also shared transformative techniques for clearing subconscious beliefs, including breathwork and somatic therapies to release emotional charges from the body. Ready to transform your beliefs? Tune in now! --- Listen to the podcast here: The Power of the Subconscious Mind With Austin Tani Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I am confident. I am competent. I am smart. I am good enough. I will make things happen. How many of you out there have said things like this to yourself in the mirror? How many of you wake up every day or have some sort of regular ritual around saying things like that? And what kind of results have you gotten from these affirmative messages that you said to yourself? Now, chances are, those results are kind of mixed. Maybe some of you start to notice a difference as you repeat these mantras to yourself, but maybe some of you did not get the results that you desired. Maybe some of you, for some reason, one reason or another, tried it for a while and still kept falling back into some of the same patterns and some of the same beliefs. My guest today, Austin Tani, of Bringing Balance Back, has a different approach to some of these instances in which this set of affirmations may not have particularly worked. ---   Austin, welcome to the program.    Thanks. Thanks, Stephen.   Thank you. How are you doing today?   I'm doing good. Doing good. Had a slight headache this morning but it's starting to go away.   Well, not bad. Now, Austin, have you ever initially before starting a business tried this set of affirmations, kind of those repeated mantras, whether they be in the mirror or meditation or anything like that?   Yeah, I've tried some affirmation stuff but it didn't really help me too much, but, yeah, I've given them a try.   And what kind of experience that you have with these affirmations?   Kind of just scratching the surface, you're using your conscious mind and you're hoping that you impregnate the subconscious mind with that affirmation and it becomes your belief. But with what I've learned and what I've seen through experience, a lot of times when we're trying to drop an affirmation in, that usually means we're carrying the opposite belief in our subconscious mind. If you're trying to say, “I'm worthy, I'm worthy, I'm worthy,” probably means you're carrying the belief of unworthiness in your subconscious mind. That's why you're trying to drop that information in and that's why that worthiness came up as an affirmation for yourself. So I'll explain it like this. So if you're trying to drop in, “I am worthy,” into your subconscious mind, which is actually your body, the body is your subconscious mind, so if you're trying to drop in, “I'm worthy,” in your subconscious mind but you have a big bubble of unworthiness stuck in your body, it's just going to bounce right off you and you're going to still feel unworthy, until you remove that feeling of unworthiness out of your nervous system and then you can drop in, “I'm worthy.”    So let's talk a bit about this feeling of unworthiness and talk about a little bit from the standpoint of a personal journey. A person you encounter that has this feeling of unworthiness in their subconsci...

Living a scripted life is like going through the motions, you know? It's when you're not really calling the shots in your own life. Everything's laid out in this script, and the main goal is to make things super comfy and easy, not necessarily exciting or purposeful. It's like we're all on autopilot, just doing what's expected rather than what we really want. So, are you cool with sticking to the script, or are you itching for a life with a bit more personal flair and purpose? In this week's episode, I have Daniel Aaron, the visionary Founder of The Art of Vibrant Living. As a transformational coach, Daniel guides people in elevating their vibration and embracing empowered actions across mindset, health, and emotions. We explored the essence of vibrant living and delved into practical strategies for transitioning from a routine existence to a life filled with genuine vitality. Daniel shared his concept of an 'invincible mindset' and shared valuable insights on breaking free from limiting beliefs. Tune in and unlock your vibrant life now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Breaking Limits and Living Vibrantly With Daniel Aaron Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote mindset that keeps you settling for less. One thing I talk about quite a bit is living by the script, and what I mean by living by the script is being in a state where you're not really creating your own life, you're not really creating anything that you actually personally decided on because the script itself, as of the beginning part of 2024, the script is really created to maximize comfort and convenience as opposed to maximizing, say, enjoyment, maximizing purpose, maximizing excitement. And that's where my guest today comes in. Daniel Aaron is a transformational life coach and the founder of The Art of Vibrant Living. ---   Daniel, welcome to the program.   Cool, Stephen. Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here.   It's an honor to have you here, Daniel, and thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me and talk to my audience. Let's first by starting a basis. Now, when you talk about vibrant living, what does that look like in your view? Okay. Well, let's start with what it doesn't look like and what it doesn't look like is it's kind of like Emerson said that the masses of people are living lives of quiet desperation, or what I call sometimes the cult of meh, it's mediocre, monotony. It's people just going through the motions of life. And I came to this as a little boy, I remember being three years old in the front yard of my family home and back behind me inside the home, it was like just chaos and pain and drama. My family was all kinds of dysfunctional. That's why I was hanging out in the front yard as much as I could. Across the street, I saw my neighbors and they were slump shouldered and just going through the motions and I thought there's got to be more to life than this, and so that awareness just stayed with me. So what is vibrant living? It's living with passion and joy and excitement and taking ownership for one's life. So I've thought about the cult of meh quite a bit. One we're just like crazy, living by the script is meh or the idea of escaping of meh and my story behind that is when I talk about 7:15 a.m. on a Tuesday at a train station and you see everybody commuting to work, the same way you observed it as a kid, you don't see that excitement from that many people. Maybe you see one person, somewhere here and there but the vast majority of people, you don't see life, in a way, you don't see that excitement about living life. How do you think it came to be that state? Do you think that's a natural state of humanity or do you think something happened in our culture to bring us into a world where so many people are living by the script and living by what you would call the opposite or what vibrant living is not?   The question is how did we get into this predicament?    Yeah.  

Everyone possesses a personal brand, often unconsciously, and authenticity is the cornerstone of its development. To construct a compelling brand, delve into understanding your target audience, studying competitors, and identifying the unique aspects that set you apart. But the question remains: how can we embark on this journey? In this week's episode, I sit down with Kim Russo, Founder of On Brand Designs. We explored her journey, starting with packaging design and transitioning to a full focus on branding. We discuss the lessons she learned along the way about establishing systems and processes to run a successful business. Additionally, we delved into the importance of connecting with people and joining a mastermind group that can help take the business to the next level. Tune in for insights that will elevate your branding designs! --- Listen to the podcast here: Taking Your Brand to The Next Level With Kim Russo Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we're going to generally talk about branding. I think we've all heard the phrase, “You are your own brand,” or some kind of iteration on that. My guest today, Kim Russo, is founder of On Brand Designs and also an expert in transitioning people from one level to another in general. ---   Kim, welcome to the program.   Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.   And thank you for taking time out. So what is that phrase, I know I didn't probably say it right, the idea that each one of us is a brand of some capacity?   Basically, what we're saying is we're all our personal brand so when you're talking about small business, especially when you're growing a business, building a business, and being the face of your business, your brand is your personal brand as well, and that's something that I do strive to bring into account with my clients. So I do a whole strategy process. And, in that, I'm looking at target audience, I'm looking at competitors, but I'm also looking at you, what are your likes, what do you love, who as you as a persona, that shows up in your brand.   So, does it ever work out that someone is trying to be a brand that just isn't them? So, for example, someone might say, “I wanna do this,” but if it's too much in conflict with their natural personality, you kind of have to tell them, “Hey, wait a second, I know this is the brand that's gonna sell this product but, sorry, that ain't you. That's not who you are. You might wanna go back to the drawing board and think it through again.”   Yeah, and I think it goes both ways. There's that and there's also pushing too hard to be like somebody else.    Yeah.    So it's maybe not following your own brand but it's also trying to mimic somebody else without pulling in your own self to it is sometimes something I come across, because, at the end of the day, you have to love it and you have to feel it and you have to live it. It definitely helps with the cliché, like know and trust. They're going to get to know you and know and trust you with how you're showing up in your brand.Click To Tweet I do often work with a lot of uplevels so when people are kind of stagnant in where they are with their brand and need kind of a refresh or there's too many things going on with it that's confusing, too many fonts, too many colors, and you're just confusing who you're trying to attract and who you are, is a lot of times, I am going to have to come and kind of simplify and really hone in on who they are but also I like to keep an essence of their original brand. So I always say to people who are starting out there's going to be something in your brand that is going to hold true to you, to be cohesive and give you longevity, but you can always uplevel it, you can always change it. So, if I'm redesigning something that is just not working for somebody, it's not who they are,

Navigating a career change is often challenging; it's about breaking free from the confines of a single job title. When you're not passionate about your current role and it doesn't bring a sense of pride, contemplating change becomes crucial. It involves self-reflection, identifying your true interests, and embracing the courage to pursue something new. How do you navigate the complexities of transitioning to a career that better aligns with your passions and values? In this week's episode, I talked with Elizabeth Burke. She shared her journey from feeling disconnected and unsatisfied in her career to making a significant change. She took us through the disconnection and dissatisfaction she experienced in her career to the pivotal moment when she decided to make a substantial change.  But that's not all – she also offered valuable insights on navigating the lows of life, whether in your career, relationships, or family. Tune in for a candid conversation filled with inspiration and practical wisdom. --- Listen to the podcast here: Journey of Transformation, Growth, and Fulfillment with Elizabeth Burke Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One question I think so many people are tired of being asked is, “What do you do?” Now, I want you all to think about that question for a second because, first of all, no human being really only does one thing so it's really kind of compartmentalizing people into just job titles. But, also, how do you respond to that question, “What do you do?” when you're not exactly in love with what you do right now? When you're not exactly proud of what you do, you don't exactly feel it, and it's not the thing that you want to talk about? I know what it feels like to be in that situation and my guest today knows what it feels like to be in that situation and she even presented a wonderful speech at the recent Denver Startup Week, recent as in two and a half months ago now.  ---   Elizabeth Burke, welcome to the program.   Thank you. I'm so excited to be here, Steven. Really appreciate getting to share.    Well, I'm glad you're here to share this wonderful story because I think that a lot of people listening and a lot of people in the world, in general, out there aren't necessarily content. They're not seeing all the purpose as well as the alignment. “I'm doing this for this reason and it's aligned with how I live my life,” and stuff like that. So, well, let's start off by telling us a little bit about your story about how you made the career change from when you were in that situation, how it felt and what you did to get to where you are now?    Yeah, so I'm happy to share about that. And we're kind of like not going to start with what I do first purposefully so that you can hold the tension of how does it feel to not know what I do as a first part of my story but you definitely will get to hear that. So, yeah, I have a background in public education and I think, for me, I went into that career and I loved it, I loved working with high schoolers, I taught high school art, built up an amazing program, taught four levels, and always felt like there was room for me to just find new parts of myself as I was teaching. And I started to notice a shift. I think there are times in our life when we maybe have been doing something for a while and we've gotten really good at it and we're kind of looking for that next step, that ability to expand, and I began to just not be able to find it anymore. And I think, for me, that was starting to happen but what really kind of just became a catalyst for really seeing some things that I could no longer unsee was being a teacher during the pandemic and being a teacher during, specifically, the fall of 2021 to the summer of 2022 school year. That school year was my eighth year teaching and it was just truly like the worst school year that any teacher on record has probably ever had.