We're back. I put on makeup today. Seriously, that's where we are right now.

I took a break — a self-imposed silent hiatus you probably didn't know about, because I had a backlog and I'm nothing if not someone who runs her mouth into a microphone first and asks questions later. But the break is over, and I was not ready to come back today. I was very, very not ready.

And yet here we are, because I can do things scared, and apparently that includes walking downstairs and getting in front of the microphone when all I wanted was my best friend. (My kids confirmed my best friend is my bed. They weren't wrong.)

In this episode, I'm talking about:

— Odin, my 175-pound Great Dane who has exactly one person in this house and it is not me. Until he got scared. Then it was very much me.

— A listener question from Talia in Berkeley about how you grieve versions of yourself you never got to become — the careers, the relationships, the risks you didn't take.

— My dad's passing in 2016 and what happened in the four months after: every service line that was paying our business's bills disappeared. Every. Single. One. The universe was done with that chapter before I was.

This episode is 18 minutes. It's also a little unplanned, a little raw, and exactly what it needs to be. Come back with me.

CHAPTERS:

00:00 — War Paint On: We're Back (Armed with Makeup)

01:30 — What Counts as a Break When Your Brain Never Stops

02:09 — Content Brain Doesn't Take Vacations

02:50 — I Was Not Ready (But Here Anyway)

05:44 — Odin the 175-Pound Great Dane Who Only Loves Me in Crisis

09:02 — I'm the Safe Parent, Apparently

09:55 — What It's Actually Like Having Giant Dogs

12:24 — Small Talk: Grieving the Life You Didn't Live

Mentioned in this episode:

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I'll just say it: don't send me a video.

Not because I'm technologically challenged — I literally make video content for a living — but because if I need information fast, I need it in a format I can actually consume. Scrollable. Skimmable. Mine to move through in the order my brain needs. Send me a video and you have just given me homework, and I am not paying you to give me homework.

That's the rant that opens this episode, and I stand by every word of it.

But then we get into something that I think matters even more. I'm sitting down with Joanna Strober, the CEO of Midi Health — a women-focused healthcare company doing what the standard system has historically refused to do: actually start with women's biology instead of working around it. Joanna spent years watching herself and women like her get handed SSRIs and sleep studies when what they actually needed was someone to check their hormone levels. So she built the company that does that. Insurance covered. All 50 states. Actually available.

We talk about perimenopause, the diagnostic desert most women wander through on their own, what it actually takes to build a healthcare company that investors have no existing pattern for, and why AI might finally be the thing that cuts through the prior authorization bureaucracy that is eating your doctor's time alive.

Then Alison is back for Small Talk with a question from Omar in Dearborn, Michigan, about how to ask for help when even the ask feels overwhelming — and why needing help is never the failure it feels like.

If this one lands for you, share it with someone who could use it. Leave a review.

Different, Not Broken is hosted by Lauren Howard. New episodes drop weekly.

In this episode, I talk about what it actually looks like when you prioritize people-first leadership — not the inspirational poster version, but the version where you're paying someone's salary while they're out sick, covering their workload yourself, and looking at your bank account like it personally offended you.

I share two real stories — one from a friend, one from inside my own company — about what happens when you commit to putting humans first, and applying compassionate leadership, even when the business case doesn't make immediate sense.

What happens to the employee who needed care she could actually afford.

What happens to the friend who finally called back to say... well, you'll have to listen to find out what he said.

The suck is temporary. The loyalty isn't. This episode is for anyone building something — a business, a team, a life — who's in the middle of the hard part right now.

Plus: Allison brings a question from Becca about replaying conversations at 2am and whether that's anxiety, rumination, or just your brain refusing to behave.

⏱ Timestamps

• 00:00 — Intro & the friend who never calls
• 02:31 — What people-first leadership actually costs
• 06:25 — This is temporary. I promise.
• 09:51 — The reward is real. I just can't tell you when.
• 11:03 — He called back. He saw it.
• 13:07 — The employee story. The health insurance bill. The reason.
• 19:52 — Oh. That's why.
• 20:33 — What you get on the other side of the suck
• 23:13 — Small Talk: replaying conversations at 2am

Mentioned in this episode:

Build Your Better course

Build your better course - https://stan.store/elletwo/p/build-your-better

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