FINE is a 4-Letter Word

Mark Reynolds took a job on a promise to stay for one year. At the ten-year mark, he looked up and realized he had what he calls "all the trappings of success": good money, reasonable hours, a meaningful mission at a large nonprofit, and plenty of time for his family. He chose the word "trappings" on purpose, because he felt trapped.

A military kid raised on Navy bases from Japan to Iceland, Mark grew up wanting nothing more than to serve, until seizures forced him out of the Army shortly after 9/11. He rebuilt a career in public...

For most of his adult life, Adrian Hale Bishop lived with a quiet, constant question: what happens if people find out? He kept the parts of his life carefully compartmentalized, learned what not to say, and became very, very presentable. For a long time, he thought that was wisdom.

Then, just as a business he had spent 22 years building was about to enter a new era, a sudden health crisis nearly killed him. The business collapsed, he left the life he had built over 12 years in Las Vegas, and he was left, in his words, with a...

Ryan Lavarnway spent ten seasons in Major League Baseball and was called up and sent back down to the minors 26 times over 12 years. He was the slowest player on his high school team, never started a single varsity game at his natural position, and read in old newspaper clippings that every coach he ever had called him both the hardest worker they had seen and an unlikely success.

At 17, desperate to be seen, Ryan raised his hand when his high school coach wondered aloud who would bat fourth. The coach didn't laugh. He asked, "Why not you?"...

In 1988, Diana Keough came home for Christmas for the first time in three years. She was married, she had a six-month-old baby, and she was determined to finally build the kind of relationship with her mother she had watched her friends enjoy. Within weeks, her family learned that her father, a trial attorney and pillar of a fundamentalist Baptist community, had AIDS and had been living a double life for 27 years. Three weeks later, her mother tested positive for HIV.

Diana was trained as a journalist, so she did what journalists do. With her mother's permission, she...

On September 6, 1997, the day of Princess Diana's funeral, Jobert Abueva couldn't get out of bed. He was in a Hong Kong hotel room, paralyzed for the better part of 48 hours, unable to touch the club sandwich or hot tea he'd ordered, crying from exhaustion, loneliness, and homesickness. It was, he says, the lowest point of a career that from the outside looked like nothing but success.

For most of his thirties, Jobert had been living the frenzied pace of a global marketing career, opening new markets for Herbal Essences across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, jumping...

John Azar fled Syria at 16 in the middle of a civil war, arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina not speaking a word of English, and eventually built his way to an MBA in finance and a career in commercial real estate. Then came 2008. His first company collapsed with no clients, no money, and a brand new baby at home.

He rebuilt, more than once. Along the way, his own therapist gave him a label he still carries: toxic optimist. He believes, almost unshakably, in people's capacity to change, and he's had to learn what that belief costs him...

How many things in your life are you currently trying to fix that aren't even yours to fix? An employee who isn't performing the way you want. A team member who keeps making the same mistake. A business problem you've been solving alone for years. A family member whose choices frustrate you. Your own tendency to overwork, overthink, and over-achieve.

Recording solo this week from Ideas Fest, a festival in a field about 45 minutes outside London with 6,000 other founders, entrepreneurs, and investors, Lori Saitz breaks down why fixing feels like responsibility but is actually about control, and...

Shane Lukas built his career on the belief that transparency, done right, protects you. He had spoken about his history in sex work advocacy at national and international conferences for years, and when a highly awarded, LGBTQ-friendly US company hired him, he did what he always did: he was upfront about who he was and where he'd come from.

The same day, someone in the sales department Googled his name and called HR. He was terminated immediately, for something that had nothing to do with his job performance.

On this episode of FINE is a 4...

Henry Tolbert was sitting at a fire pit behind a rental house, grilling hot dogs for his wife and four daughters because the insurance money for their flooded home was running out, when he finally said out loud what he had been avoiding for months: this isn't fine.

A few years earlier, Henry had been leading a small church that grew from 40 people to nearly 200, and had been named bishop over 65 churches. Then, without warning, discord broke out with the leader who had brought him in, and he was forced to resign from everything at once. In...

Content Note: This episode includes a brief, non-graphic reference to a personal crisis involving suicidal thoughts.

Jim Morris grew up believing giving was the whole equation. His father taught him to give the shirt off his back to anyone who needed it, and it showed up everywhere in his childhood, right down to the night his father pulled a stranger from a burning car outside their home.

What Jim didn't learn for a long time was how to receive. It took a high-stakes business risk, a $240,000 self-funded conference that lost $112,000, and a moment of real...

Suneet Bhatt spent 12 years in private equity and venture-backed businesses, and every job followed the same arc: new and exciting at first, then, faster each time, something felt off, and he went looking for the next one. He never noticed he was the common denominator.

It took his wife, after his last business exit, to name what he couldn't see in himself: his happiness at work was getting shorter each time, his exits were getting more acrimonious, and he needed to stop and figure out what actually mattered to him.

On this episode of FINE...

Replaced by Three Employees and Called It a Badge of Honor with Amanda Van Der Heiden

Amanda Van Der Heiden could trot on a horse before she could walk. When she fell into a sandpit at age two, her parents put her right back on before she was done crying — no discussion, no choice. That lesson became the operating principle for the rest of her life, including a corporate career that hit the exact same burnout pattern three times in three different companies.

At 27, working 20-hour days with a team spanning two continents, she left on...

Content Note: This episode includes discussion of childhood abuse, institutional trauma, and a reference to suicidal ideation, drawn from Cyndy's own published memoirs.

Cyndy Etler was 13 when she chose foster care over going home. A month at a Bridgeport youth shelter gave her the first real choices of her life. Then her mother enrolled her in Straight Incorporated, a program later described by the ACLU as a concentration camp for throwaway teens, where Cyndy was held for 16 months for having tried marijuana three times.

She came home brainwashed, isolating in bathroom stalls at lunch, telling...

Scott Doggett spent 30 years in corporate America, first running hotel and resort operations, then leading learning and development teams up to vice president. He was, by every external measure, successful. Then came his first layoff at the end of 2023, six months of searching that led nowhere, and a panic attack on the exact anniversary of the day he was let go.

That night he prayed and, for the first time in his life, truly surrendered. The next morning, a LinkedIn job posting he almost didn't open led to a director role at a Christian nonprofit that matched...

Content Note: This episode includes discussion of childhood abuse, foster care, and homelessness.

Rob Scheer was thrown out at 18 with a trash bag. He spent his senior year of high school homeless, sleeping in the bathroom of the taco restaurant where he worked and on library beanbag chairs after closing. He joined the Navy to have somewhere to go, and was medically discharged after years of childhood abuse caught up with his body.

He spent 28 years building mortgage companies before he looked at his four children in designer clothes and realized he had never taught...

Jodi Scott co-founded Green Goo, a plant-based first aid brand, after a bike fall led her past an abandoned Southern estate and a first aid cabinet she could no longer justify during her pregnancy. What started as herbs grown in an Idaho backyard and sold at farmers markets grew into a national retail presence.

Then she sold the company to what looked like the right financial partner. Weeks later, that partner's founder was raided by federal investigators, and Jodi had less than 24 hours to lay off her entire team — her mom, her sister, her husband, her brother-in-law, an...

Will Steel could ride along on a milk delivery route before he could read. His mother ran the round for 40 years, seven days a week, just to cover the grocery bill. Decades later, after a stonemason apprenticeship, dual engineering qualifications, and a stint flying formation for the Royal Air Force, Will was offered the most prestigious flying job in the country: a 747 captain's seat at British Airways.

He turned it down for a job starting at the bottom, doing personal development work, with a 75% pay cut.

On this episode of FINE is a 4-Letter Word...

Content Note: This episode includes discussion of domestic violence, a suicide attempt, and complicated grief.

Candice Van Dertholen was a single mother at 22, a corrections officer at a Texas maximum security prison in her twenties, and, at her lowest point, a woman who woke up in a hospital bed angry that she had survived.

She had spent years running toward whatever the moment required — raising three kids alone, taking a corrections job because the pay was better than waitressing, staying in a marriage that turned abusive because the chaos felt familiar. It took a violent ca...

Everte Farnell spent seventeen years married to a partner he now believes had borderline personality disorder, enduring verbal, emotional, and eventually physical abuse before everything came to a head in his own kitchen. In this conversation, he opens up about why men rarely report abuse, what changed the night his daughter stepped in, and how he rebuilt his health, his confidence, and his life from the ground up.

What You'll Learn

You're not failing because of lack of skill or effort. You're failing because of patterns you picked up before you were old enough to choose them. Dr. Kevin Mays, leadership coach and author of Lead Yourself First, built a career helping executives see that the behaviors driving their success are often the exact same ones quietly sabotaging what they're trying to build.

What You'll Learn

Scott Lackey grew up as a free-range kid roaming the woods and building forts, convinced he had all the time in the world. Then three questions from three people in the span of two weeks turned everything upside down. What followed was a winding path through the military, a failed invention, a Ponzi scheme, and a long list of promises he kept breaking to himself — until one sleepless night during Covid changed the trajectory of his life.

In this episode of Fine Is a 4-Letter Word, host Lori Saitz sits down with Scott to unpack the stories be...

Raised in a household steeped in integrity, respect, and love, Dr. Andrena Phillips credits her upbringing and the strong leadership modeled by her Marine father and telephone company manager mother for shaping her approach to life. Those early foundations became the fuel for a lifetime of showing up authentically, keeping her word, and encouraging others to live by values that go farther than any resumé line or professional accolade.

And Dr. Andrena carried all of that — through a nursing career, through raising three kids as a single mom, through earning her doctorate, through building a business that cer...

From a childhood shaped by the loss of her father and the blending of deeply religious family values, Kym Coco developed an early appreciation for spirituality as a lived sense of connection and empowerment. Her journey began with the awareness that we are spiritual beings within physical bodies, a notion both comforting and inspiring when navigating life’s difficult moments. As Kym grew older, especially after her father’s passing, she felt compelled to internalize and reinterpret her spiritual upbringing, seeking an authentic alignment with her own experiences and needs.

This was the foundation she leaned on when...

What if everything you’ve gone through in life — the chaos, the loss, the addiction, the grief — was the exact preparation you needed to save someone else's life?

Dan Flanagan grew up surrounded by strong values of integrity, hard work, and loyalty, anchored in the rhythm of small-town Ohio life and Catholic faith. His childhood had a kind of Norman Rockwell quality to it — a baseball field in the backyard, dirt bikes, snowmobiles, his mom ringing a bell to call the kids in for dinner. But underneath that idyllic surface, something harder was brewing.

Dan's dad, his...

Welcome to the celebration of five years of fine is a four letter word. I'm your host, Lori Saitz, and man, what a ride it has been. Five years. I don't know that I could have said five years ago that I would expect to be still doing this show five years later. mean, man, that's like another lifetime ago.

Think of everything that's happened in your life in the past five years. I mean, I had different cats, I lived in a different state. I've had so many adventures in the past five years and met...

What would you do if your business partner, the woman who recruited you, trained you, and believed in you before you believed in yourself, didn't come home from vacation? That's exactly what happened to Nicole Milone, wealth advisor and founder of Solaris Strategic Wealth.

Raised as the oldest of three in an entrepreneurial family, Nicole Milone internalized the values of compassion, curiosity, and resilience from an early age. Helping run her family’s shoe store, she learned firsthand the value of hard work, adaptability, and the complexities of money.

After studying finance and spending years in...

What would you do if you woke up one day to find the California Attorney General was suing you for $60 million — and you hadn't done anything wrong? That's exactly what happened to Shane Barker, digital marketing expert and founder of TraceFuse.ai, and the way he navigated it says everything about who he is.

Shane was shaped by the loving, free-spirited energy of his family in Sacramento, California. It was a household with hippie leanings where kindness and connection were valued above all. Though he acknowledges that no childhood is perfect, Shane credits his upbringing with teaching hi...

What if the secret to being an exceptional leader isn't about being stronger, working harder, or having all the answers — but about being the first one in the room to say *I need a break*?

Sounds counterintuitive, right? Maybe even a little reckless. But stick with me here.

Vanessa McDowell-Atlas grew up deeply rooted in the values of faith, family, and community, shaped by her upbringing in Madison, Wisconsin. The McDowell household instilled a strong connection to God, encouraged giving back, and fostered authenticity. These ideals were lived out every day.

Authenticity, though of...

What happens when your life looks successful and you keep telling yourself it is… but then you find yourself pulled over on the side of the highway with clammy hands and unable to breathe?

Growing up in a loving, hard-working family deeply rooted in farming traditions, Melissa Coloton learned early on the importance of honesty, compassion, and the power of expressing love. Unlike most families, hers openly verbalized affection. “I love you” was the punctuation to every goodbye. This warmth, however, was balanced with discipline and high expectations. Because Melissa’s mother became a parent at sixteen, she was...

What happens when the thing you pride yourself on most… is the very thing quietly breaking you?

Janice DaCosta grew up in a world where excellence wasn’t optional. You hold it together. You don’t fall apart. You make it work—no matter what.

Until one day, standing in front of a mirror with scissors in her hand, she couldn’t hold it together anymore.

What followed was a complete Control, Alt, Delete reset.

Raised in a family of serial entrepreneurs with deep roots on Wall Street, Janice DaCosta grew up learnin...

We’re more connected than ever… and more lonely than ever. Because connected online is very different than connected offline.

In this solo episode, I'm exploring the quiet epidemic of loneliness and why it shows up in places most leaders overlook.

If you’re interested in being successful – whether you’re running a business or working for someone – no matter what your definition of success is… and you want to amplify or upgrade your abilities, this episode is for you. If you’re interested in living longer without having to eat kale and work out two hours a day...

Shaped by a childhood of resourcefulness and grit, Barry Bradham’s story moves beyond your usual rags-to-riches narrative. Raised in a family where money was often scarce, his parents displayed both strong work ethics and unconventional life choices. Barry started honing his sales skills at just eight years old; he was trading toys and selling bubblegum and baseball cards from a table on the corner. These formative experiences not only instilled the value of integrity but also introduced him early to both the highs of self-sufficiency and the lessons that come when the money in play isn’t as inno...

If your body pulled the emergency brake tomorrow, would you wish you’d slowed down sooner?

Growing up on a dude ranch in the remote town of Utica, Montana, Lindsey Korell was immersed in a world where hard work, family, and a curious eye toward the wider world set the tone for her upbringing. Surrounded by international guests drawn by her grandfather's innovative marketing and her father's relentless entrepreneurial drive, Lindsey developed a deep-rooted wanderlust and a respect for building success through grit and persistence. Early lessons included watching her dad make cold calls every evening after fa...

What if the moment you tell yourself “I’m fine” is the exact moment you should be paying closer attention?

Rooted in the core values of hard work, family, and emotional restraint, Emma Collyer grew up with the unspoken rule to “just get on with things.” This principle followed her well into adulthood. Raised in the UK and now residing in Canada, she learned early how to be dependable, observant, and low maintenance. The kind of person organizations love. The kind of leader who listens deeply, carries a lot, and rarely asks for help. This early belief of not cau...

What happens when the life you worked relentlessly to build suddenly stops feeling like you belong in it?

From the outside, Ali Brown had it all. An epic brand. Massive influence. Serious revenue. The kind of success most people spend their lives chasing. But from the inside, something was missing.

Growing up, Ali Brown was surrounded by the stability of a working father and a creative, stay-at-home mother who filled her days with books, crafts, and art. She credits her self-sufficiency and drive for entrepreneurship to this blend of independence and encouragement. With no explicit...

What happens when you get everything you thought would finally make you feel okay… and it doesn’t?

Anthony Spark grew up in chaos, learned independence early, and chased financial freedom with relentless focus. He did what so many people are told will fix everything: worked harder, made more money, built businesses, climbed the mountain. And then he discovered something he didn’t expect. Success doesn’t save you from yourself.

As a child, Anthony witnessed the challenges of a single-parent household and the consequences of generational dysfunction. From his mother, he learned independence and personal...

Growing up in Iowa, Allie Jones was immersed in a culture of “Iowa nice,” a brand of politeness defined by being helpful, agreeable, and perpetually pleasant. So not surprisingly, niceness became a core value for Allie, one that was reinforced by her community, but also complicated by its shadow: the tendency to avoid hard conversations and uncomfortable truths in favor of small talk and surface-level connections.

Early in her career as a third-grade teacher, she poured herself into her students, striving to live up to the expectations of hard work and service. But as she recounts, supportive word...

Raised in a hardworking, Catholic family that seemed picture-perfect from the outside, Andrew Quebbemann learned early on the value of self-reliance and doing things for yourself. But it was during a pivotal moment at age sixteen—choosing not to get confirmed into the church—that he first exercised the courage to honor his own convictions over societal or familial expectations. That decision, viewed as rebellious by his parents, was also his first bold step toward living authentically and questioning what really worked for him, rather than simply following the script laid out for him.

This early demonstration of i...

Stef Warlick grew up with the kind of values that leave a lasting imprint. Guided by a mother who came from a strict Catholic upbringing and believed deeply in championing the underdog and showing relentless kindness, Stef was immersed from a young age in principles of empathy, hard work, and accountability. “If you can’t change something, change your mind about it” was a guiding family mantra.

Those early teachings became the blueprint for how Stef approached life and work. Stef's career in government contracting and corporate environments taught her invaluable lessons about gathering complete information before making...

Kathryn Eipl spent much of her professional life doing exactly what she was trained to do: keep everything together, move forward no matter what, don’t feel too much, and definitely don’t let anything fall apart.

Raised in a household where emotions were weaponized as jokes and communicating risked having your vulnerabilities shared with the entire extended family, Kathryn learned early to guard her feelings. She joked that she had "a black heart" and simply "didn't feel."

This emotional armor served her well in the notoriously cutthroat entertainment industry, where she thrived managing complex proj...