The Scenic Route with Victoria Steward
What if the detour was never a wrong turn?We get handed one map early on: the superhighway. Pick the career, hit the milestones, stay in the fast lane somebody else drew for us. And one day a lot of us look up and realize it's been heading somewhere we never actually chose.This is a show about the people who got off it.I'm Victoria Steward. I spent 20 years as a federal civilian engineer/project manager before I left on a gut feeling and started taking my own scenic route. Every week I sit down with interesting people who...
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Falling Apart or Falling Together? Amanda Pieraldi on Grief, Reinvention, and Resilience
<p>Amanda Pieraldi is the host of the Spiritual Gangster Podcast, co-host of Bees on a Mission, and the author of three books! None of this was the original plan. Amanda's identity was built around being a wife and a mother, and when her marriage ended in 2017 she went back to school full time as a single mom. <br /><br />Then came a run of loss that would flatten most people: her mom passed away on Christmas morning in 2019, her grandmother 13 months later, and then she lost the job she thought was the one.<br /><br />While she kept looking...
Why Do I Care So Much What Everyone Thinks? Valerie Marston on Learning to Trust Yourself
<p>Valerie Marston is a mental health and mindset coach and a full-time HR professional. She helps women worry less about what other people think, stop letting other people's opinions and moods decide their self-worth, and start trusting their own internal voice. She does this work because she was that woman for most of her life.<br /><br />Val first saw what coaching could do when a colleague offered to coach her while earning her own certification hours. Her own intensive life coach certification became the turning point, and she has been coaching for over seven years since, letting the...
The Warrior of Balance: Sasha Larkin on Strength, Service, and Self-Discovery
<p>Sasha Larkin knew she wanted to be a police officer from the time she was a kid watching CHiPs, and she never wanted anything else. She spent 26 years with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and retired as Assistant Sheriff. She is also a yoga teacher, a third degree black belt, and a mom of three teenagers.<br /><br />At year twenty-five, with the sheriff running for a second term and her pension topped out, she sat in meditation and asked for a sign. The next day LinkedIn suggested a job: Director of Intelligence for the FIFA World Cup 2026...
Manisha Sahni on Why Your Biggest Growth Comes From Being Uncomfortable
<p>Manisha Sahni was convinced her career had been a straight line. Predictable. One sensible step after another.<br /><br />She grew up in India with two career options, doctor or engineer, and chose computer science without ever having watched anyone do it. Out of college she landed in a startup instead of a big company like everyone else in her cohort. She moved to the US in 2008, which she calls the worst possible time to arrive, and every year of experience she had built was erased.<br /><br />She volunteered to build a website for a neighborhood plumbing company...
Danielle Boone on Emotional Reset: Why Grief Is Not a Straight Line
<p>Danielle "Bird" Boone has been writing since she was four, when her mom taught her that words on paper could say what she could not say out loud. She spent her career behind the scenes in Chicago television and live production, happiest producing while somebody else took the stage.</p><p>Then a writing partner challenged her to write for thirty days with no structure, and what came out was the grief she had never processed: her mom, who had passed the year before, and her dad, gone seven years earlier. That writing became her book, (In) The Absence...
Shalini Patel on Why It Doesn't Have to Be Miserable to Be Effective
<p>Christmas vacation, about eight years ago. Shalini Patel’s youngest had fallen asleep on her shoulder, so she took a selfie to show her husband. Then she looked at the picture and thought: whoa, what happened to me?<br /><br />She had spent twenty plus years in corporate operations, taking care of everything except herself. She started with a vague New Year’s resolution and took the long way around, through fasting, detoxes, and a lot of weight lost the hard way, before landing on the approach she now coaches busy professional women through.<br /><br />Here is the part...
Deemed Ready to Lead: Heather Quigley on the Invisible Rules of STEM Leadership
<p>Heather Quigley found out she had been selected for sponsorship to move further up the leadership ladder. It should have felt validating.<br />What came up instead was no.<br /><br />She had a PhD in chemical engineering, a postdoctoral fellowship at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, and more than a decade at a Fortune 500 chemical company, the last stretch of it leading people. From the outside the path ran perfectly straight. From the inside, things had been shifting for years.<br /><br />She left in May. She now coaches women in STEM through the move from individual contributor into...
What Matters to You Now: Laura Shepherd on the Question That Starts Every Career Change
<p>Laura Shepherd's mother sat her in front of the moon landing when she was four years old. She wanted to be an astronaut. Laura was not good at science, so that dream fell away.<br /><br />But the the explorer did not. It is still the strongest driving force at 61.<br />It is why mid-career she left a six figure marketing job to make forty bucks a day plus tips teaching scuba in the Caribbean.<br />Why she left that too when it had given her what it had to give.<br /><br />She is a leadership and transitions...
Why "Pick a Lane" Is Terrible Advice for Multi-Passionate Founders: Angela Gerber
<p>Angela Gerber was the kid who was going to be a shark biologist, then a fashion designer, then an anesthesiologist. She started college pre-med and was in art school one semester later.<br /><br />Today she runs The Marketing Apothecary, where she goes by Chief Chemist and builds systems for founders who are good at too many things to fit in anybody’s box.<br /><br />Here is the part I did not expect: leaving corporate did not fix it. She walked out of one box and landed straight in shinier ones, wearing other people’s frameworks and titles unti...
Ali Reznikoff on the Question That Changed Her Career: How Did I Get Here?
<p>Ali Reznikoff was offered a promotion. A good one, steady, the kind you take. She freaked out and went to woodworking school in Maine instead.<br /><br />What followed was not a plan. It was a chain of things she said yes to: convincing day laborers to pick up litter at a racetrack, which turned into a staff of over two hundred and eighteen hour days. Running cleaning departments across seven hospitals. Building an industrial machinery company from a guy in a car into an actual operation. A jewelry business running underneath all of it.<br /><br />Then she...
