The Scenic Route with Victoria Steward

What if the exit you keep rehearsing is one you could actually negotiate Julie Harris Oliver was walking into the building to quit her job with no plan, phone pressed to her ear, when her mom said the words that stopped her cold: too bad you can’t negotiate your exit. Julie’s answer, to herself, was instant, "But I can."

That reflex, catching the permission a half-second before she could talk herself out of it, runs through her whole story. Julie arrived in Hollywood as an acting major and left 25 years later as a finance leader who...

What if the path that looks like you can’t make up your mind is actually the most honest thing about you?

Lizbeth Marquez has started more things than most people try in a lifetime: a hair care line born in an oncology ward, an events business, a brand strategy practice, a high-ticket sales career, and now a podcast she co-hosts with her best friend. For years she carried all of it like a flaw. She figured she was scattered, maybe had ADHD, couldn’t settle on the one thing she was supposed to pick. This conversation is a...

Maren Londahl-Smidt did the in-between.

She built her private practice while she was still working her hospital job. First clients on two evenings, then a third day, then a fourth, waiting until she knew her practice could provide the revenue she needed before she let go of anything. She did not leave until the runway had cured.

When people ask her when the right time was, she says there is never a perfect time and you will always be scared, but there is a better time, and there is a better way.

Maren...

What if the thing standing between you and the life you actually want was never the number in your bank account?

Jessica Kleine is a money coach for women, and she will be the first to tell you that the numbers have almost nothing to do with it. She has watched clients double their income and walk straight into problems twice the size. Six and a half years in, she is clear that the math was always the easy part... and that the real work lives underneath it.

Her path here was anything but a...

John Petrozelli has built his whole life around one rule: before you make a big move, prep the ground, study the risks, then leap. He learned it as an Air Force intelligence officer, sharpened it across seventeen years and five different roles in the FBI, and carried it into a career in cybersecurity. So what happens when a man who plans everything tells you about the one time he leapt without a plan?

That is the heart of this conversation. John walked away from the military fast, on anger and instinct, and spent the next...

It’s 2am. You’re three videos deep into someone promising the one protocol, the one supplement, the one secret that big pharma has supposedly been keeping from you. And here’s the part that stings: at 2pm you run a team, read the data, command the room. So why does the magic-bullet pitch land so hard at midnight?

That question sits at the heart of this conversation with Rachel Smith, DNP, FNP-C, CNM, NBC-HWC, a nurse practitioner, former certified nurse midwife, and founder of Aspect Wellness, whose own path to longevity medicine took the scenic...

What if your most devastating breakup was actually the moment your real life began?

Sarah Curnoles thought she’d found her person. Five years together, talking about marriage and kids and growing old. Then one day he said: “I love you. I just don’t see a life with you anymore.” And standing at that crossroads, Sarah made a choice she’d spend the next several years helping others make too: I’m not going down the road where I fall apart. I’m finding the other path.

Today Sarah is a certified breakup coach, a digital noma...

What happens when you get everything right on paper... and still feel like you are running on fumes?

Michelle MacNeil is a Systems Business Coach® running her practice from a small hobby farm in rural Alberta, Canada. She works with small business owners who are doing well by most traditional measures: billing is solid, clients are happy, and on paper things look fine. But “are too successful to quit and too exhausted” to actually enjoy what they have built.

Her take: it is not an ambition problem. It is an infrastructure probl...

Have you ever been doing exactly what felt right... and had everyone around you tell you it was a mistake?

My guest this week is Leslie Ellen Mathews: therapist, divorce and relationship coach, MBSR teacher, podcast coach, and one of the most multi-passionate humans I have ever had the pleasure of sitting down with. Her path has included neuro speech therapy, neuroscience research, law school, a master’s in health administration, staying home with three kids, photography, and eventually clinical social work.

At each turn, the people around her told her to...

Most people leave the 9-5 one of two ways: they quit in a blaze and figure it out later, or they stay until they burn all the way down. Abi Majekodunmi found a third way. She ran the numbers.

Abi is the founder of Freedom Runway™ and a former senior tech marketing manager... a mom of two boys who looked, from the outside, like she had it all handled. Six figures. Good reviews. The promotions. And one morning, driving back from school drop-off, she went right past her own house. She wasn’t running from her...

There’s a version of high-achieving where you absorb everyone else’s everything and call it being chill. There’s a version where you give every part of yourself to your career, and then one day notice the same pattern playing out in dating, in money, in your body, in your business. “A pattern is a pattern is a pattern,” Lilli Bewley says. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Lilli is a Dating Coach for Finding Love and the creator of the Feminine Dating Archetype Quiz. Her framework is the four stages women move through on t...

What does it feel like to check every box, reach every milestone, and still feel like something is deeply wrong?

Coco Duan was a senior leader at a Fortune 500 company, earning over $400k a year, doing everything she was supposed to do. On the outside, high performance. On the inside, running on empty, living in low-grade anxiety she didn't even have a name for, and giving everything to everyone except herself.

COVID stopped the superhighway. And for the first time, the whisper she had been outrunning for years got loud enough to...

What happens when you do everything the right way and still burn out? You try again. And again. Until you finally stop trying to fit yourself into someone else's blueprint.

Katie Fortunato is a Licensed Professional Counselor and EMDR therapist who built her practice the way she was told to... and hit the wall every single time. School counselor. Pivot in an unplanned direction due to COVID. Air Force Academy position. Group practice. Private practice. And at every stop: burnout, because the model she was handed wasn't built for her.

In this conversation, Katie and...

Leaving corporate and building your runway number: why knowing it isn’t the same as feeling ready to go.

You’ve run the numbers. You have the savings. And somehow, you still don’t feel ready to leave.

That’s not a math problem. That’s a missing system.

Victoria Steward, Financial Empowerment Coach and former 20-year Navy engineer, shares why the number alone doesn’t create financial safety, what happened when she left corporate with $100k and no cashflow system, and the one shift that moves you from financial anxiety to genuine delight in p...

You know that feeling when everything looks right on paper but something keeps trying to get your attention?

For Shelby Renae, that “something” wasn’t subtle. It showed up as seizure episodes before she left for the Philippines. As a nervous system that never fully settled through two years in the Peace Corps. As a conservation job that matched her degree perfectly and slowly wore her down anyway.

Shelby did what a lot of us do: she kept pushing through. She was good at it. And her body kept escalating.

In t...

What if the version of you who doesn’t know what comes next isn’t lost... she’s just between chapters?

My friend Chetal Patel has lived her life in eight-year cycles. Eight years on Wall Street. Eight years teaching English to immigrant kids in NYC public schools. Eight years raising her children, including twins who came after a long and hard infertility journey. And now: a fourth cycle, a certified health coach who specializes in change itself, sitting in the in-between and letting herself not know yet what comes next.

We met i...

The output still looks fine from the outside. She is still delivering, still the reliable one, still showing up.

But inside, she is hollowing out.

In this solo episode, Victoria Steward talks honestly about what that actually feels like: the Fridays that feel impossible to finish, the weekends that are just recovery, the exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix. She went to the doctors. The labs came back normal. And somehow that was the most disorienting part of all.

Because it's not a body problem. It's years of misalignment that only gets louder once...

What if your body already knew the way... and the work was just learning to listen to it?

In this episode, Victoria sits down with her friend Abigail Morrissey: holistic RN, yoga teacher, postpartum doula, Vital Mind Reset Coach, twerk therapist, and author of Shattered to Shine: You Put Yourself Together Again. Abigail grew up on what looked like a very clear path: Catholic school, nursing, marriage, family. What she discovered instead was that the plan she'd been handed had almost nothing to do with who she actually was.

What followed...

What would you do differently if you realized the life you've been living was partly scripted for you before you were old enough to choose?

Dianne Tremblay is a number one international bestselling author, entrepreneur, and strategic growth advisor who has spent her career at the intersection of health, technology, and entrepreneurship. But the real turning points weren't the credentials. They were the quiet wake-up calls she almost missed: a $40 hat that stopped her cold, a brain tumor diagnosis that arrived like a voice asking if she'd finally pay attention, and the slow recognition that...

What do you do when you’ve done everything right... and everything still feels wrong?

In this first solo episode of The Scenic Route, Victoria Steward shares the real story behind why she left a 20-year career as a civilian engineer for the U.S. Navy: not because she had a plan, but because her body and her nervous system finally said enough.

Victoria talks honestly about the burnout that didn’t look like burnout from the outside: the $120k salary she somehow couldn’t hold onto, the Fridays she couldn’t finish...