Grace & Grit Podcast

This is not a biohacking episode.

I am not going to tell you to buy a special lamp or track your lux levels. I just want to make the case for something so simple and so free that we have almost entirely stopped doing it: going outside in the morning and letting daylight reach your eyes.

In this episode I share how my nine-month-old Great Dane Tilly accidentally became my most reliable wellness accountability partner, the research on what morning light actually does to your circadian system, cortisol, melatonin, and sleep quality, and the problem...

What if we tracked laughter and play and genuine enjoyment with even a fraction of the enthusiasm we bring to our step counts and protein grams?

In this episode I make the case that fun is not frivolous. It is a sustainability mechanism. And in a long-term health practice, sustainability is everything.

I explore the concept of bringing magic to the mundane: what happens when you approach cooking with presence and music instead of efficiency, when you consider the route of your walk or who you move with or the playlist that actually makes you...

Your body is not asking for a perfect schedule.

It is asking for predictability.

In this episode I explore how the body's circadian rhythm, the internal clock regulating nearly every physiological process, is set and sustained by consistent external cues: light, meal timing, movement, sleep windows. When those cues are reliable, the body can do its work efficiently. When they are scattered, the system has to constantly recalibrate, and that costs energy.

I also share one of the most concrete illustrations I know of how trainable the body actually is: the metabolism. Women...

My husband and I were talking recently about how full and heavy midlife feels right now. The parents to care for, the teenager still at home, the business to run, the relationship to tend. And underneath that conversation was something surprising: the weight of it is also what keeps us going.

In this episode I make the case that having something to look forward to is not a luxury. It is a health variable. Anticipation activates the brain's dopamine system in ways that genuinely support mood, motivation, and engagement with life. When nothing is on the horizon...

You can eat well, exercise consistently, and sleep seven hours a night. And still spend your entire day physiologically rushing.

In this episode I make the case that chronic hurry has a real and measurable health cost that most of us are completely underestimating. When the nervous system is in a constant low-grade state of urgency, it affects digestion, immune function, sleep quality, cognitive performance, and the ability to feel present in your own life.

I also explore what I think is the deeper cost of hurry: the life we miss while moving too fast...

In strength training, if you never increase the challenge, you stop getting stronger. The body adapts and then plateaus.

The same thing happens in your social life.

In this episode I take one of the foundational principles of physical training and apply it to relational health, because a lot of us have been lifting the same relational weight for years. Same people, same conversations, same comfortable equilibrium. And then we wonder why our social lives feel flat or unfulfilling.

I explore what relational complacency actually looks like, why it is so easy to...

After thirty years in the wellness industry and hundreds of conversations with extraordinary health experts, I keep arriving at the same conclusion. Not a revolutionary one. A remarkably unsexy one.

The basics work.

In this episode I share the turning point in my own life that proved this to me beyond any doubt, including my experience with a program called Genesis Transformation, where I watched women deep in perimenopause transform their bodies by doing nothing more exotic than drinking water, strength training, sleeping, eating enough protein, and parenting their brains. What I also share is...

There is a feeling most of us were taught to be ashamed of.

We call it a sin. We hide it. We dress it up as something more acceptable.

But what if envy, honestly examined, is actually one of the most useful signals available to you?

In this episode I draw the distinction between jealousy, which makes me feel small and defensive, and envy, which points at something I desire. I share my own experience following Misty Tripoli, the founder of the Groove dance movement, and how sitting with what I envy about...

I have been alone but not lonely.

And I have been surrounded by people and felt profoundly alone.

Those are two completely different experiences. And understanding the difference between them might change how you relate to both.

In this episode I draw a clear distinction between solitude and loneliness, share my own deep craving for solitude and the permission it took to finally pursue it without guilt, and explore why the loneliness I see most often in the women I work with is not the loneliness of physical isolation. It is the loneliness...

I am very good at giving.

I spent a long time being terrible at receiving.

And I have come to understand that the inability to receive is not humility. It is a wall. And it keeps love out just as effectively as it keeps pain out.

In this episode I share the story of my friend Colleen volunteering at my first retreat and what happened when I finally said yes to being supported. What I discovered completely reframed how I think about receiving. When I refuse it, I am not protecting anyone. I...

There is a voice that most of us know intimately.

The one that says you are not doing enough, not being enough, not achieving enough.

At midlife, that voice often gets louder.

In this episode I share my own evolving relationship with my inner critic, including how I have learned to stop trying to silence her and start turning her questions back around. When she asks why I am not doing more, I have learned to answer: why not me? Why not this version, this season, doing things the way I am doing...

Journaling is not about filling pages.

It is about going somewhere you have not been before.

And the quality of where you end up is almost entirely determined by the quality of the question you start with.

In this episode I reframe journaling as a practice of radical self-inquiry rather than a diary or a gratitude list. I share a collection of less obvious questions worth sitting with, including what am I pretending not to know, what feeling do I keep avoiding and what is it trying to tell me, and what story...

Do you actually need rest right now?

Or is rest the story you are telling yourself to avoid doing the thing?

These are two very different situations. And knowing the difference might change everything about how you approach your days.

A client of mine recently brought this question to me. She said she always feels like she needs to rest, no matter what, and she was starting to wonder whether that was a real need or a habit of avoidance so normalized she could no longer tell the difference. That is one of...

Lindsey Sills is living proof that consistency isn't about perfection—it's about practice.

In this episode, we talk about redefining health beyond weight loss, building non-negotiable habits that anchor you, and navigating "off track" moments with acceptance instead of shame. 

Lindsey shares the mindset shift that helped her stay steady through multiple seasons of life and the powerful moment she realized her work was paying off emotionally, not just physically. Expect inspiration, practical perspective, and a more compassionate definition of success.

Want to keep going? Download the first chapter of The Consistency Code for...

There is a space between who you have been and who you are becoming.

It is not comfortable. It is not certain. And it is not optional.

I call it the hallway.

In this episode I explore what liminal space actually is, why midlife is by its very nature a liminal season, and how I have had to learn to stop treating the hallway like a crisis and start treating it like a classroom. I used to hate not knowing what was next. I wanted certainty and guarantees and forward momentum.

...

A lot of women tell me they have a healthy relationship with their capacity.

And then I look at their schedule.

Those two things do not always match.

In this episode I draw a clear distinction between enduring and thriving, and make the case that a healthy relationship with capacity starts with getting radically honest about the resources you actually have available right now. Not the ones you wish you had. Not the ones you had five years ago. The ones that are genuinely present today.

I can tell a tremendous...

I often say that health is answering the question: how much life do you have in your life?

Today I want to get personal and answer that question myself.

In this episode I share what is genuinely infusing my life with more aliveness right now. The Montana seasons and how much easier it is to be outside. My puppy Tilly, who makes me laugh out loud a dozen times a day and who was such a gift in the season of losing our Great Dane Sully. Befriending cardio in new ways, including jump rope and...

Every time you elevate your life in some way, the problems do not go away.

They change form.

My mom used to say it to me when my son was small: little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems. She was right. And the same thing is true in business, in health, in every arena where you are growing.

In this episode I explore the concept of new level, new devil and why understanding it is one of the most important things you can do to protect yourself from discouragement. When you are...

Not every chapter of your life is supposed to run on forever.

And the chapters that have ended are not asking you to grieve them indefinitely.

They are asking you to close them, honor them, and walk into what comes next.

In this episode I lead with the invitation to close rather than the grief of ending, because I see too many women lingering in chapters that have clearly concluded and paying a real health cost for it. The open loop of an unfinished chapter takes up psychological and emotional bandwidth whether you...

I have recommended the book The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga to almost every woman I have ever worked with.

Because so many of the women I work with are doing enormous amounts of invisible labor in service of not being disliked.

We say yes when we mean no. We stay in things we have outgrown. We dim ourselves so others are not uncomfortable. We apologize for taking up space.

In this episode I explore what becomes possible when you start developing the courage to be disliked, and...

What if the way you think about your health and your life shifted from self-improvement to stewardship?

From fixing what is broken to honoring what you have been given?

I think that shift changes everything.

In this episode I explore stewardship as the deeper intention beneath all of the work I do. You have been given one body. One life. The work is not to fix yourself. It is to take extraordinary care of what you have been entrusted with.

I also share how stewardship and self-leadership work together, one as...

Bryan Johnson has spent an estimated two million dollars a year trying to reverse his biological age.

He tracks everything. Optimizes everything. Submits to more medical testing than most people experience in a lifetime.

And recently, he was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition.

I am not sharing this to pile on. I am sharing it because I think it illustrates something important that we need to talk about. Health is not a problem to be solved through enough data and enough precision. The human body is a living system in constant relationship with...

We love a clean answer.

We love to know exactly how we feel and exactly what something means.

But life is almost never that simple. And insisting that it should be is one of the quietest ways we make ourselves suffer.

In this episode I make the case for both/and thinking as one of the most sophisticated and health-promoting capacities a human being can develop. I can be deeply grateful for my life and also exhausted by it. I can love someone completely and also need distance from them. I can be...

Most of us have been told that resilience is the goal.

To bounce back. To withstand the hard things.

But what if there is something beyond resilience?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduced a concept in his book Antifragile that I have not been able to stop thinking about. Some systems do not just withstand stress. They actually get stronger because of it. He calls this antifragile. And it goes beyond resilience in a way that I think every midlife woman needs to understand.

In this episode I explain the three categories of...

Not every relationship is meant to last forever.

And treating one that has run its course as a failure may be one of the most unnecessary sources of suffering we create for ourselves.

In this episode I introduce the idea of a relationship being complete rather than broken, and why that distinction changes everything about how we move through endings. A relationship that helped you through your twenties may not be the relationship you need in your forties. That does not mean it was not real or valuable. It means it did its work.

We spend a lot of energy chasing happiness.

But what if happiness was never the deepest goal?

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who spent years in Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. What he observed there, about the difference between the people who survived and those who did not, became the foundation of one of the most important books ever written about being human.

That book is Man's Search for Meaning.

In this episode I explore the distinction between happiness and meaning, why meaning is a stronger predictor...

I heard a quote years ago that I have never been able to shake.

I have no idea who said it, but here it is: life is one long series of problem solving, and the sooner you accept that fact, the less you will suffer.

In this episode I make the case that problems are not the interruption to your life. They are the content of it. The women who age most gracefully are not the ones whose lives have fewer problems. They are the ones who have made peace with that fact and invested...

When I was a personal trainer, one of my favorite techniques was to ask clients to do the exact opposite of their habitual movement pattern.

Not because the opposite was right. It obviously was not.

But because the experience of the extreme helped them find the middle. The most functional place was almost always somewhere between the two. And they could not find it until they had felt what was on the other side of their habit.

In this episode I take that principle far beyond physical training and apply it to how...

We talk about minimalism like it is a design trend.

Something you see in a magazine. Clean lines. Empty shelves. The five coffee cups you actually love instead of the forty you have accumulated.

But that is not what I want to talk about today.

In this episode I make the case for minimalism as something your brain and nervous system actually need. When your environment is cluttered, your nervous system is working. It is processing and filtering everything around you whether you ask it to or not. That work has a cost...

If you've been blaming your hormones for the exhaustion, mood swings, stubborn weight, and "I don't feel like myself" fog of midlife—this conversation will change the way you see what's really happening. 

In this episode, Jenn Pike and I pull back the curtain on the hidden drivers behind burnout in perimenopause and beyond: overfunctioning, people-pleasing, carrying the mental load, and trying to "fix" your body while your nervous system is still stuck in survival mode. 

We talk about what sustainable healing actually looks like (without perfectionism), where women give their power away in the well...

My eight-month-old puppy Tilly recently chewed through my jump rope.

She has also excavated my gym bag, destroyed a hip roller, and shown zero remorse for any of it.

And I love her completely. Not one bit less.

In this episode I use that gap, between what she does and how I feel about her, to explore the concept of unconditional love. Most of the love in our lives is conditional. We have unwritten manuals that govern who gets our warmth and when. Unconditional love is something different entirely. And asking yourself the...

Nir Eyal wrote that time management is really pain management.

I think there is profound truth in that.

But what I am even more passionate about these days is energy management. Because managing your time means nothing if you have no energy to spend in it.

In this episode I make the case that at midlife, most of us have more responsibility than we have ever had and less energy than we used to. If we do not put serious forethought into how we spend our energy each day, life runs us. And...

Health is not the absence of disease.

I feel strongly about this, and I want to make the case for it today.

In this episode I share why I believe health is not binary. Your physical health being compromised does not mean your health as a whole is gone. It means one dimension is under strain. And there are other dimensions still available to you.

I have coached women navigating cancer, Parkinson's, ALS, and many other serious diagnoses. I would not have been doing that work if I believed the diagnosis was the...

I teach self-leadership.

I just happen to use health as the arena.

Because if you can learn to lead yourself here, you can learn to lead yourself anywhere.

In this episode I make the case that the skills required to build a consistent health practice are the exact same skills that build a successful business, a thriving relationship, and a financially stable life. The principles are identical. Only the arena is different.

If you have ever felt disciplined in one area of your life but completely unable to get it together...

I wrote The Consistency Code to help people live more consistently.

But here is what I have learned: consistency toward what?

Before the principles mean anything, you have to answer that question.

In this episode I make the case that getting radically clear on your values and standards is not optional. It is the only foundation from which meaningful consistency can actually be built. Without it, you are being disciplined toward things that were never truly yours to begin with. You are chasing rainbows.

I also share the questions worth sitting...

We are all building a case for something every single day.

The question is whether you are building a case for what you are capable of, or a case for why you cannot.

In this episode I name the ways we argue for our own limitations, often with impressive precision. We have evidence. We have history. We have a courtroom's worth of justification for why change is not available to us.

I also speak to the label trap, the way certain words or diagnoses can become the closing argument in a case for...

There are seasons in life that ask you to rest.

And then there are seasons that ask you to rise.

I have been living in the first one for a while. And I can feel the second one coming.

In this episode I talk about what a season of grit actually is and what it is not. It is not punishment. It is not grinding yourself into the ground. It is the deliberate decision to turn the dial of discipline up in a specific area of your life, knowing that you will be...

I read something recently that stopped me cold.

The idea was this: you don't become what you aspire to. You become what you tolerate.

I have not been able to stop thinking about it since.

In this episode I explore how the standards we keep, or fail to keep, quietly shape the life we are actually living. What we tolerate in our relationships, our work, our habits, and our own inner dialogue is not neutral. It accumulates. It becomes us.

I also share why midlife may actually be the perfect season...

What if the goal that scares you most is the one that's most worth pursuing?

Not because you're guaranteed to achieve it.

But because of who you'll become in the process.

In this episode, I revisit a concept I've taught for years: impossible goals. The goals that require you to grow beyond your current identity, habits, and comfort zone.

Using my decade long journey of writing The Consistency Code as an example, I share why the pursuit of a meaningful goal often matters more than the outcome itself.

You...

Modern life has become incredibly comfortable.

And that's not always a good thing.

We can avoid effort, discomfort, uncertainty, boredom, and challenge with the push of a button.

But something important gets lost when life becomes too easy.

In this episode, I draw on Michael Easter's work in The Comfort Crisis and explore why growth, vitality, confidence, and meaning are so often found on the other side of discomfort.

The choice isn't between comfort and discomfort.

It's between the discomfort that helps you grow and the discomfort...