What if some of the most important leadership in your life happened before you ever realized you were leading?

In this episode of Jam Sessions With Tina Eliana, Tina sits down with educator, editor, writing coach, and podcast host Holly Totten for a conversation about influence, storytelling, and the voices we leave behind.

Holly spent years in the classroom before bringing those lessons into her work with writers. Along the way, she discovered something that reaches far beyond teaching or editing: people are paying attention to how we show up, even when we cannot yet see the impact.

Tina and Holly explore the connection between leadership and everyday influence, why strong leaders sometimes need to step back instead of taking center stage, and what can happen when someone finally recognizes leadership qualities in themselves that others have seen all along.

Their conversation also moves into storytelling and the delicate balance between improving someone's words and editing away the very voice that makes the story theirs. For Holly, helping people preserve that voice is central to writing, legacy, and meaningful connection.

From former students who still remember lessons decades later to writers wondering whether their experiences are worth sharing, Editification is a conversation about what remains after the moment has passed.

Because influence does not require a title, and your story cannot make an impact if your voice disappears from it.

ABOUT HOLLY TOTTEN

Holly Totten is an educator, nonfiction editor, writing coach, and host of The Edit podcast. After a career spent teaching English and writing, she carried what she learned in the classroom into her work with authors, helping writers strengthen their stories without losing the voice that makes those stories uniquely theirs.

Through editing and writing coaching, Holly works with people who are ready to tell their stories, whether they need help getting started, finishing what they have begun, or shaping their words into a finished piece that still sounds like them.

For more information about Holly and her work, visit:

https://www.writelynotable.com

To learn more about Holly and this episode, visit:

jamsessionswithtinaeliana.com/holly-totten

JOIN THE JAM

Subscribe to Jam Sessions With Tina Eliana for weekly insights on intentional leadership, leadership beyond titles, professional growth, communication, self-advocacy, and the ways leadership shows up in everyday life.

To access prior episodes, listen to the Jam Sessions Jukebox, and learn more about each guest, visit:

jamsessionswithtinaeliana.com

ABOUT TINA ELIANA

Tina Eliana is a Leadership and Learning Systems Expert, author, speaker, podcast host, and community builder who helps individuals recognize the leader within themselves and helps organizations build learning and development systems that strengthen leadership across teams.

A four-time WGU graduate and WGU Alumni Ambassador, Tina is also a patient advocate for Visual Snow Syndrome, using education, storytelling, and advocacy to increase awareness and understanding.

Across her work is a simple belief:

Leadership isn’t reserved for people with titles. It lives in the influence of our everyday choices.

Grief does not stay neatly contained in one corner of our lives. It follows us into work, relationships, decisions, identity, and the moments when everyone else assumes we are “back to normal.”

But what happens when normal no longer fits?

In Episode 14 of Jam Sessions with Tina Eliana, Tina sits down with Patricia Freudenberg for a candid conversation about grief, recovery, self-worth, everyday leadership, and what it means to live forward without leaving the people we love behind.

This conversation explores questions many people carry but do not always know how to ask:

What happens when grief follows you back to work?

How can a leader or coworker support someone after a loss without avoiding the subject or forcing a conversation?

Why can simply showing up matter more than we realize?

And what if the role you have called “just” something has been leadership all along?

Tina and Patty make room for grief’s complexity: the awkwardness surrounding loss, returning to responsibilities before the heart has caught up, and the quiet power of presence. They explore legacy without turning it into a polished slogan or a demand to “move on.” How can love move forward with us while life is still being written?

Patty’s story also challenges the language of “just.” She spent years calling herself “just a hairstylist,” even while creating a safe space for people during some of their hardest moments. What influence might we be minimizing because it came without a recognized leadership title?

Whether you are grieving, supporting someone after a death, welcoming an employee back from bereavement leave, leading a team through loss, or exploring how purpose and legacy can coexist with sorrow, this episode offers a compassionate place to begin.

ABOUT PATTY FREUDENBERG

Patricia Freudenberg, known as Patty from New York, is the founder and CEO of Miss-U-Gram, a free social media app created exclusively for memorializing loved ones. She is a certified grief recovery consultant, author, speaker, entrepreneur, and host of the Live Your Legacy podcast.

With more than 33 years of entrepreneurial experience and personal experience with loss, Patty brings practical insight and warmth to grief recovery, remembrance, self-worth, purpose, and legacy. She is also the author of Live Your Legacy: A New Spin on Mourning, a guided reflection book created to help readers engage with grief without becoming overwhelmed.

Explore Patty’s story, Miss-U-Gram, Live Your Legacy, her book, and ways to connect:

https://jamsessionswithtinaeliana.com/patty-freudenberg

CONTENT NOTE

This episode discusses death, grief, bereavement, and the loss of loved ones, including the loss of a child or spouse.

Patty is a certified grief recovery consultant, not a licensed medical or mental health professional. This episode offers perspective, insight, and encouragement. It is not medical advice, mental health treatment, or a substitute for qualified professional support.

JOIN THE JAM

Subscribe to Jam Sessions With Tina Eliana for weekly insights on intentional leadership, leadership beyond titles, professional growth, communication, self-advocacy, and the ways leadership shows up in everyday life.

To access prior episodes, listen to the Jam Sessions Jukebox, and learn more about each guest, visit:

jamsessionswithtinaeliana.com

ABOUT TINA ELIANA

Tina Eliana is a Leadership and Learning Systems Expert, author, speaker, podcast host, and community builder who helps individuals recognize the leader within themselves and helps organizations build learning and development systems that strengthen leadership across teams.

A four-time WGU graduate and WGU Alumni Ambassador, Tina is also a patient advocate for Visual Snow Syndrome, using education, storytelling, and advocacy to increase awareness and understanding.

Across her work is a simple belief:

Leadership isn’t reserved for people with titles. It lives in the influence of our everyday choices.

What happens when being the person everyone depends on becomes the very thing that keeps people from seeing what else you are capable of?

And how do you know when being the go-to person is a strength, a comfort zone, or a role you may have outgrown?

In Episode 14 of Jam Sessions With Tina Eliana, host Tina Eliana sits down with Online Business Manager Chris Cushing for a candid conversation about leadership, professional identity, visibility, self-advocacy, career growth, and the complicated relationship between being needed and being valued.

Because being dependable does not automatically mean being recognized.

Chris Cushing is an Online Business Manager who helps founders step out of the operational weeds and start leading. She manages systems, projects, launches, teams, communication, follow-up, and the details that can quietly become bottlenecks.

Her work offers a unique lens for a conversation about leadership that often happens outside the spotlight.

Tina and Chris explore questions that reach beyond entrepreneurship and into workplaces, teams, and careers:

• What causes highly capable people to become known as the go-to person instead of being recognized as leaders?
• Can someone become so identified with being helpful, dependable, or needed that the role starts shaping how they see themselves?
• What is the difference between being needed and being valued?
• How much do fear, familiarity, acceptance, and other people’s expectations influence the roles we continue to play?
• What happens when everyone around you sees your capability before you fully recognize it yourself?
• How can someone begin advocating for themselves without feeling performative, arrogant, or uncomfortable?
• And if your title does not fully reflect what you actually do, how do you begin examining the gap between the two?

The conversation moves through operational leadership, workplace identity, support roles, career advancement, self-perception, professional visibility, communication, growth, and the assumptions that can form around the people everyone trusts to get things done.

It is a conversation for the reliable one, the fixer, the operations person, the behind-the-scenes leader, and anyone who has ever wondered whether being indispensable is actually moving them forward.

MEET CHRIS CUSHING

Chris Cushing’s philosophy is action over noise: clean execution, clear communication, practical systems, and consistent progress.

Learn more about Chris and connect with her:

jamsessionswithtinaeliana.com/chris-cushing

ABOUT JAM SESSIONS WITH TINA ELIANA

Jam Sessions With Tina Eliana is a leadership podcast hosted by Tina Eliana that explores intentional leadership beyond titles, positions, and organizational charts.

Here, we leave the titles at the door.

Through candid conversations across industries and lived experiences, Jam Sessions With Tina Eliana examines how people lead, influence, communicate, navigate uncertainty, and recognize their own capacity, often long before anyone officially calls them a leader.

No pedestal. No pretending.

Just meaningful conversations about how we show up, what we learn, and the influence we carry.

JOIN THE JAM

Explore prior episodes, listen to the Jam Sessions Jukebox, and learn more about the guests featured on Jam Sessions With Tina Eliana.

Visit:

jamsessionswithtinaeliana.com

ABOUT TINA ELIANA

Tina Eliana is a Leadership and Learning Systems Expert, author, speaker, podcast host, and community builder who helps people recognize the leader within themselves and helps organizations strengthen leadership.

Leadership isn’t reserved for people with titles. It lives in the influence of our everyday choices.

Progress is proof that change is possible. It is not permission to become comfortable.

Every right women exercise, every room they enter, every definition they challenge, and every expectation they outgrow was once unfinished work in someone else’s hands.

Now, some of that work is in ours.

Why Progress Is Not the Finish Line closes the inaugural Jam Sessions with Tina Eliana Women’s Equality Day Series by turning inheritance into responsibility.

The first conversation asked what we received.

The second challenged who gets to define us.

The third asks what we will do now that the work belongs to us.

Ten women from different generations, backgrounds, professions, and lived experiences return to the roundtable with a question that reaches far beyond a single commemorative day:

• What do we owe the women coming behind us?
• How do we celebrate progress without mistaking it for equality?
• What happens when recognition becomes appeasement?
• What must women protect, question, change, refuse, and create?
• How do we make sure the next generation inherits more than access on paper?
• And if equality is not a finish line, what does it mean to keep moving forward?

This conversation takes women’s equality out of slogans and places it where it actually lives: in the choices people make, the voices they use, the communities they help shape, the beliefs they challenge, the support they offer and accept, and the possibilities they create for others.

As the panel considers women’s rights, gender equality, voice, mentorship, community, identity, self-advocacy, survival, and generational change, no single perspective is asked to stand in for all women. Agreement is not the goal. Honest examination is.

Because womanhood does not have one story, and progress does not have one measurement.

This episode holds gratitude and urgency in the same room. It honors the women whose courage changed the boundaries of what was possible while refusing to treat their victories as evidence that the work is finished.

Progress deserves celebration. It also requires stewardship.

Rights can be won and still need protection.

Doors can open without changing who is welcomed.

Voices can be heard without being valued.

History can move forward while people and communities are still left behind.

Why Progress Is Not the Finish Line is an invitation to consider your place in that unfinished story. What did you inherit? Who helped shape your understanding of womanhood? Which definitions have you had to question? What will your life teach the next generation? What are you willing to do with the influence already in your hands?

Your place in this conversation does not depend on having a title.

Whether you are listening as a leader, parent, educator, mentor, advocate, entrepreneur, storyteller, community member, or woman still deciding what progress means in her own life, this conversation asks you to move beyond the easiest answer and consider what you are carrying forward.

THE WOMEN’S EQUALITY DAY SERIES

Episode 10: What Did We Inherit?

Episode 11: Who Gets to Define Womanhood?

Episode 12: Why Progress Is Not the Finish Line

Featuring Allison Wells, Anne Hill, Chris Cushing, Holly Totten, Kris Keppeler, Lesley George, Patricia Freudenberg, Renee Hastings, Sarah Ramsey, and host Tina Eliana.

Meet the women of the Women’s Equality Day Series, explore their work, and continue the conversation at:
https://www.jamsessionswithtinaeliana.com

Jam Sessions with Tina Eliana explores intentional leadership beyond titles, polished answers, and traditional definitions.

Leave the titles at the door.

The Jam Sessions with Tina Eliana Women's Equality Day series is dedicated to the memory of Dolly Parton. We will always love you.

Who taught you what it means to be a woman?

In this next conversation from the Women’s Equality Day Series, Tina Eliana and her guests reflect on the lessons they inherited from the women who raised them, including lessons about compassion, kindness, independence, resilience, excellence, entrepreneurship, self-advocacy, and doing the hard things even when no one else understands.

Some of those lessons were spoken. Many were simply lived.

But what happens when the confidence, strength, and possibility cultivated at home meet a world that does not see or value every woman equally?

This deeply personal, multigenerational conversation explores how race, ethnicity, language, family, culture, and generation shape a woman’s identity, self-worth, leadership, and experience in the workplace. The panel examines what progress has and has not meant for Black women, women of color, and other marginalized groups, including the pressure to work harder, manage stereotypes, and carefully consider how they show up, speak, advocate, and negotiate.

The women also wrestle with a complicated leadership question: Have women genuinely redefined leadership, or have they primarily learned how to succeed within systems and expectations established before they were invited into the room?

As the conversation turns toward women’s health, reproductive expectations, PCOS, endometriosis, fertility, hysterectomy, and workplace dignity, the discussion becomes even more intimate. What happens when society connects womanhood to motherhood, reproductive ability, or particular parts of the female body? And who gets to decide what makes a woman complete?

Featuring perspectives from Allison Wells, Anne Hill, Chris Cushing, Holly Totten, Kris Keppeler, Lesley George, Patricia Freudenberg, Renee Hastings, Sarah Ramsey, and host Tina Eliana.

This episode is about more than how women lead. It is about what women inherit, what they are expected to carry, what they have had to question, and what they are still defining for themselves.

Meet the women of the Women’s Equality Day Series and learn more about Jam Sessions with Tina Eliana at:

https://www.jamsessionswithtinaeliana.com

Follow the podcast, download the episode, and share it with someone who belongs in this conversation.

The Jam Sessions with Tina Eliana Woman's Equality Day series is dedicated to the memory of Dolly Parton. We will always love you.

Before a woman chooses what she will carry forward, she has already inherited something: a story, a warning, a freedom, an expectation, a way of surviving, or a picture of who she is allowed to become.

In the opening episode of the inaugural Jam Sessions with Tina Eliana Women’s Equality Day series, ten women enter an honest, cross-generational roundtable centered on one question: What did we inherit?

The conversation begins with the women whose lives taught us something before we had the language to call it leadership. From there, it widens into the freedoms, expectations, systems, and assumptions women navigate, often without stopping to consider the history beneath them.

This is not a history lecture or a collection of polished answers. It is a deeply human conversation about women’s leadership, generational influence, family legacy, identity, representation, age, voice, lived experience, and the distance between progress made and equality completed.

Who taught you what leadership looked like before you ever called it leadership?

Which freedoms do you exercise without thinking about the women who helped make them possible?

What have you inherited that deserves to be carried forward, and what are you finally ready to question?

This three-episode Women’s Equality Day series is dedicated to the memory of Dolly Parton and to every woman still learning, leading, creating, beginning again, and refusing to be told that her most meaningful years are behind her.

The roundtable features:

• Allison Wells, Author, Publishing Coach, and Editor
• Anne Hill, Coercive Control Advocate and Storytelling Mentor
• Chris Cushing, Online Business Manager
• Holly Totten, Writer, Editor, Writing Coach, and Podcast Host
• Kris Keppeler, Audiobook Narrator, Voice Actor, Actor, and Podcaster
• Lesley George, Publisher, Author, Motivational Speaker, and Confidence Coach
• Patricia Freudenberg, Certified Grief Recovery Consultant, Author, Speaker, Entrepreneur, and Podcast Host
• Renee Hastings, CEO, Inspirational Speaker, Podcast Host, and Philanthropist
• Sarah Ramsey, PR Coach and Visibility Strategist
• Hosted by Tina Eliana, Founder and CEO of Tina Presents, Leadership and Learning Systems Expert, Entrepreneur, Author, Speaker, and Podcast Host.

THE WOMEN’S EQUALITY DAY SERIES

Together, these conversations examine what women received from those who came before us, what life and leadership have taught us, and what we are intentionally creating for the women who will come next.

Meet each woman, explore her work, and continue the conversation at:

https://jamsessionswithtinaeliana.com

Jam Sessions with Tina Eliana explores intentional leadership beyond titles, polished answers, and traditional definitions. These are conversations about influence, identity, relationships, responsibility, and the ways we choose to show up in the lives of others.

Leave the titles at the door.

What happens when leadership is not a position you hold, but a way you think, connect, act, and take responsibility?

And what are people learning from how you show up, especially when you think no one is watching?

In episode 9 of Jam Sessions With Tina Eliana, host Tina Eliana sits down with Bethany Rees, author of Leadership on the Rocks. It’s a candid, funny, faith-rooted conversation about influence, mindset, emotional intelligence, relationships, communication, accountability, family, integrity, and leading when life gets complicated.

Because leadership is not something you switch on after receiving a title.

Bethany Rees is a leadership coach, educator, speaker, author, entrepreneur, and CEO. Drawing from her experience as a teacher, school administrator, business owner, wife, and mother, Bethany brings practical wisdom and plenty of humor to leading people well at work and at home.

Tina and Bethany explore questions that reach far beyond organizational charts:

• When does leadership begin if nobody has given you a title?
• How do our attitudes, actions, and silence influence the people around us?
• What are others learning from how we carry difficult seasons?
• How can leaders interrupt emotional reactions before those reactions take control?
• Why are curiosity and emotional intelligence essential during conflict?
• Why should leadership begin at home before it appears at work?
• How can vulnerability help others navigate leadership for themselves?

The conversation moves through faith, family, difficult work environments, communication breakdowns, workplace email culture, boundaries, follow-through, systems, hard conversations, and the responsibility to model what we expect from others.

There are moments of laughter, honesty, and reflection that may make you reconsider what your behavior is teaching, how your internal dialogue shapes your external leadership, and whether the people closest to you are receiving your best or only what remains after work takes its share.

MEET BETHANY REES

Bethany Rees is the author and host of Leadership on the Rocks. She provides leadership coaching, training, and keynote speaking, with a special focus on new and emerging leaders.

Learn more and connect with Bethany:

jamsessionswithtinaeliana.com/bethany-rees

ABOUT JAM SESSIONS WITH TINA ELIANA

Jam Sessions With Tina is a leadership podcast hosted by Tina Eliana that explores intentional leadership beyond titles, positions, and organizational charts.

Here, we leave the titles at the door.

Through candid conversations across industries, communities, cultures, and lived experiences, Jam Sessions With Tina examines how people lead, influence, build relationships, navigate uncertainty, and shape the lives of others, often long before anyone officially calls them a leader.

No pedestal. No pretending.

Just meaningful conversations about how we show up, what we learn, and the influence we carry into the lives of others.

JOIN THE JAM

Follow Jam Sessions With Tina Eliana for more conversations about intentional leadership, emotional intelligence, communication, accountability, personal growth, relationships, and leading without titles.

Where are you already leading without recognizing the influence you carry?

Explore episodes, guest spotlights, and more:

https://www.jamsessionswithtinaeliana.com/

ABOUT TINA ELIANA

Tina Eliana is a Leadership and Learning Systems Expert, author, speaker, podcast host, and community builder who helps people recognize the leader within themselves and helps organizations strengthen leadership through intentional learning systems.

Across her work is a simple belief:

Leadership isn’t reserved for people with titles.

What stays with a podcast host after the microphones stop recording?

In Episode 8 of Jam Sessions with Tina Eliana, Tina returns for Encore Friday with reflections from her conversation with Dr. Tanya E.E.E. Schmid, a piece of unaired footage, the key takeaways she is carrying forward, and the reveal of “This Week’s Jam.”

This is not a replay of Episode 7. Tina steps back, considers what continued to resonate, and invites listeners to connect the week’s ideas to their own lives.

The full conversation examined intentional living and leadership beyond job titles or one clearly defined path. In this Encore, Tina focuses on what made her pause, challenged familiar assumptions, and deserves more time before everyone moves on.

Listeners will also hear a previously unaired exchange with Tanya. It offers a personal glimpse beyond the formal biography and adds another note to a story filled with unexpected chapters. Listen to discover what Tina asked and where Tanya’s answer leads.

Then Tina pulls together her key takeaways from the week. Rather than giving listeners a checklist or prescribing one correct way to live, she reflects on the questions the conversation leaves behind. What does it mean to make choices with awareness? How do we recognize the values guiding our lives? What can we learn from people whose journeys do not fit neatly inside one title, profession, culture, or season?

The episode closes with “This Week’s Jam,” Tina’s song selection inspired by the conversation. The title remains under wraps until the episode, but the choice brings its own energy and offers one final way to experience the week’s theme.

WHAT IS ENCORE FRIDAY?

Encore Friday is the short, host-led companion episode to the week’s featured Jam Sessions conversation. Tina shares her personal reflections, previously unaired footage or bonus moments, practical takeaways, and “This Week’s Jam.” Each Encore creates space to sit with the conversation a little longer without repeating the full episode or revealing every turn before listeners press play.

Episode 8 is for listeners interested in intentional leadership, intentional living, mindfulness, personal growth, identity, reinvention, life transitions, self-awareness, values-based decision-making, and leadership without titles. It is also for anyone who enjoys hearing what remained with the host after the scheduled questions ended and the real reflection began.

Listen to Episode 7, “The Leadership of an Intentional Life with Dr. Tanya E.E.E. Schmid,” for the full conversation that inspired this Encore Friday episode.

ABOUT DR. TANYA E.E.E. SCHMID

Dr. Tanya E.E.E. Schmid is a writer, former Doctor of Oriental Medicine, environmental advocate, and teacher whose life and work have crossed cultures, disciplines, communities, and seasons of reinvention. Her experiences with Zen philosophy, martial arts, mindfulness, sustainability, and writing shaped the conversation behind this week’s Encore.

Learn more about Tanya and subscribe to her newsletter:
tanyaswriting.com

ABOUT JAM SESSIONS WITH TINA ELIANA

Jam Sessions with Tina Eliana explores intentional leadership through honest conversations about influence, identity, relationships, responsibility, and human connection.

Leadership is not reserved for executives or people with impressive titles. It is practiced through how we show up, the choices we make, the questions we ask, and the way we shape the people and spaces around us.

Hosted by Tina Eliana, Leadership and Learning Systems Advisor, author, speaker, and founder of Tina Presents, Jam Sessions invites guests and listeners to leave the titles at the door and talk about leadership happening in real life.

Learn more:
jamsessionswithtinaeliana.com

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