Shefali Sharma knows how to build a brand. Johnson & Johnson. L’Oréal. IKEA. SAP. She’s spent her career helping some of the biggest names in the world figure out what makes them different.

Then she had to do it for herself.

“The hardest thing to brand is yourself,” she says. “It is the hardest thing to do.”

Building her personal brand wasn’t the first time she faced doubt. Even her move from beauty and advertising into tech came with doubt. When she joined SAP, she “didn’t think I had any valuable skills to add.” She stayed almost a decade.

Leaving corporate to start Protégé Advising was a bigger leap. Shefali had watched people burn out, check out, and quit for years, and she couldn’t stop asking why companies can say exactly what sets them apart while the people inside them can’t. That question pulled her out on her own. The first stretch looked nothing like a polished campaign. “I’m just crying every day... how am I going to make it work? When’s the next client coming in?”

She kept going because the mission mattered more than the paycheck. She’s still working on the patience part. (“I’m the most impatient person on the planet.”)

If you’re in a job that pays well and feels empty, and you’ve lost track of what you’re even good at, Shefali starts with this: that’s normal. And the thing you do every day without thinking about it might be the thing most people can’t do at all.

Connect with Shefali Sharma, Protégé Advising

🌐 Website: www.protegeadvising.com

✉️ Email: shefali@protegeadvising.com

💼 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/protegeadvising

📅 Free 30-minute consultation: calendly.com/shefali-protegeadvising/30min

Amy Hager started her first career at nine years old, racing go-karts.

She was meeting with sponsors, talking with fans, and learning how to hold her own in rooms full of adults. In fifth grade, she took her go-kart to elementary schools so she could tell third graders they didn't have to wait until they grew up to chase a dream.

From the track, Amy zigzagged into radio, then TV, both behind the camera and in front of it. When she left racing and radio, she had no idea what came next, and she was moving halfway across the country. She took a job selling plasma TVs right when they first came out, back when (as Amy tells it) they cost $42,000 apiece. She didn't love it. She wasn't great at it, either, and she gave herself permission to admit that and go find the next thing. That path ran through the nonprofit world and into entrepreneurship. Today Amy is a marketing mentor and community curator at Joyful Business Revolution and an international speaker.

Looking back, she sees the signs showed up long before she acted on them. She got sick. Her skin broke out. "My body is telling me that something is out of alignment," Amy says. "There were so many signs so much earlier than when I actually got my brain involved."

In this episode, Amy shares how she runs every decision through her top five lifestyle values (if it doesn't check at least three, she stops and asks why she's doing it), why it's okay to leave a situation whether you've been there 30 minutes or 3 years, and where to start when you feel stuck. Her answer is simpler than you'd expect. A list of what you love and what you don't. A good friend across the table. A real conversation.

"We get clearer through conversation."

You may not be in third grade anymore. Your dreams didn't age out with you. And Amy's message to those third graders still holds: you don't have to wait.

If your body has been trying to tell you something about your job, this one's for you.

Connect with Amy

🌐 Website: joyfulbusinessrevolution.com

✉️ Email: amy@joyfulbusinessrevolution.com

🎧 Podcast, Grow Your Business for Good: joyfulbusinessrevolution.com/podcast

📘 Facebook: facebook.com/amy.hager.58

💼 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/amy-hager-cae-iom

Cait Fenello loved her job. She left it anyway.

Cait's path started with a digital media degree from Messiah College and a job as a promotions producer in local TV news. Then she wanted work that happened offline. So she moved into agriculture, working for farming nonprofits in Buffalo and Pittsburgh, where she got to "put my hands in the dirt." She loved it. But for most people, that path doesn't pay well over the long haul. So although she loved the work, she pivoted her career again, working for the Clear Thoughts Foundation, a nonprofit that raises money for dementia research. Her skills learned over both her marketing and agriculture careers came with her every step of the way.

Then came the Airstream. She had rebuilt a vintage Airstream camper and she wanted to drive it across the country.

Cait describes herself as all-in: "You either get 100% of me, or you get none of me." She couldn't straddle both the career world and the RV'ing across the country dream. So she had honest conversations with her employer, stepped away from a job she loved, and stepped into the Airstream, not knowing whether that job would be there when she got back.

She finished the trip, sold the Airstream in California, and flew home. Her zigzag brought her right back to the foundation and the work she loved.

Before every pivot, Cait carried the same fear most of us do. What if the newness wears off and I realize I made the wrong move? Her answer to whether she regrets it: "I would have lost a part of me if I had never gone for it."

If you've been polling everyone you love about what you should do next, listen for Cait's advice near the end. Nobody can know you like you.

Connect with Cait

👤 Cait Fenello, Executive Director, Clear Thoughts Foundation 💼 LinkedIn (her preferred way to connect): https://www.linkedin.com/in/caitfenello/ 📧 Email: cait@clearthoughtsfoundation.org 🌐 Website: https://clearthoughtsfoundation.org

🎰 Clear Thoughts Foundation's biggest fundraiser of the year, a Monte Carlo casino night, happens the first Saturday in November. This year that is November 7, 2026. 🥂 For tickets or to learn more about the champagne dress, go to: https://secure.qgiv.com/event/ctfrollforareasongala/

Sarah J. Pitts started coaching at 13. She spent the next 35 years in the fitness industry, building a career, reinventing it, then rebuilding it again when other trainers turned openly hostile toward her methods. (One of them went on a rant so long that it took Sarah 20 minutes to find a pause and say she needed the bathroom.)

Then COVID hit. Her business, and her clients' businesses, disappeared overnight.

She woke up one morning and thought: who the hell am I? Why am I here? What do I want to do with my life?

Sarah is now an international bestselling author and business strategist. Her whole job is helping people stop catastrophizing a problem and find the real one underneath it. But when her own life fell apart, she couldn't do that for herself.

"I didn't need therapy," she says. "I needed a plan."

In this episode, Sarah talks about what it actually took to rebuild: the fear of starting over, forcing herself to do things she hated, and the four-step process she eventually built to get herself out, the same one that became the backbone of her book, Stop Doing It All.

If the ground has ever given out from under your career, Sarah's been exactly there. And she made it to the other side.

Connect with Sarah:🌐 Website: https://sjpbusinessdevelopment.com 📖Book: https://stopdoingitallbook.com 📧Email: mailto:sarah@sarahjpitts.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahjpitts/ FB Messenger: SJP Business Development

Alexis Gosik's first job was lead store accountant at Giant Foods. Ten years, all through high school and college. She learned exactly one thing from it: she never wanted to do numbers again.

So she went back to school for social work, then spent the next several years in drug and alcohol treatment and criminal justice work in the nonprofit sector, before moving to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, helping people rebuild their lives after incarceration. She was there seven and a half years, until a detached-duty assignment landed her in the Bureau of Information Technology, and something clicked that a social worker with an accounting background never expected.

Somewhere in there, she also managed a scuba shop. That's actually where she and Marie met. Marie walked in as a total beginner, and Alexis was the one who knew what to do.

Every one of those moves, Alexis says, followed the same pattern. She was underqualified on paper. The youngest person in the room. Often the only woman. In corrections and in tech, both male-dominated fields, she carried the same question into every interview: will they believe I belong here?

Her answer wasn't to get more credentials. It was to stop hiding behind other people's success and own that the skill in the room was hers.

Today, Alexis is President & CEO of the Technology Council of Central Pennsylvania.

If you've ever sat in a meeting wondering if you're the only one who doesn't quite fit, this episode is proof that not fitting yet doesn't mean you don't belong.

Connect with Alexis: Technology Council of Central Pennsylvania, President & CEO 🌐 Website: https://www.tccp.org 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexis-gosik/ 📧 Email: alexis@tccp.org

Johanna Danaher spent 25 years in corporate talent — recruiting, career development, culture work — inside a pharmaceutical company. Then the role was eliminated. Not her choice.

What came next wasn't just a job search. It was grief.

"I don't know who I am anymore," she remembers thinking. Unmoored. Untethered. Asking herself, in her mid-50s, who she wanted to be when she grew up.

Two years into building her own coaching practice, a role opened up at a company she'd always admired. So she rewrote her resume. Three times. She reached out for referrals. She practiced what she'd say.

Then she never hit submit.

She sat with herself and asked one question: will this bring me joy? The honest answer was no. It was fear talking, not purpose. The second she said no to the job, she felt relief.

That's the moment this episode is built around. If you've ever caught yourself chasing the safe choice instead of the right one, this conversation is for you.

Johanna is a life and leadership coach who helps people through moments exactly like this one. She's also built two free quizzes — on self-sabotage and imposter syndrome — to help you spot your own patterns before they cost you another year.

Connect with Johanna:

🌐 anchortoaspire.com

📧 johanna@anchortoaspire.com

💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/johannadanaher/

This is the last episode of Season 1. And it felt right to close it out with a story about not having to blow up your whole life to build something new.

Tracy Buikema spent over 20 years as a massage therapist, expert enough that she went on to teach it at the college level for over a decade. But somewhere along the way, her sessions started turning into something more. Clients weren't just talking about sore shoulders. They were talking about their stress, their lives, what was keeping them stuck.

Then one client — someone she'd seen for over a decade — said something that stuck with her: "I would pay double for this session, because I feel like I got so much more out of it."

That was the moment Tracy realized coaching wasn't a departure from what she'd built. It was already happening.

So she went back to school. And found out that starting over, even when you're bringing 20-plus years of expertise with you, is still hard. "It was going from being considered an expert in my field... to then, okay, now I'm going to switch into this coaching aspect," she told me. Even when something comes naturally, learning to be a beginner again is its own kind of hard.

What I love about Tracy's story is what she didn't do. She didn't walk away from massage therapy to become a coach. She built something that holds both — coaching and somatic bodywork, together. She gets to keep what she's always loved, and expand it into something bigger.

If you're sitting with the fear that changing careers means giving up everything you've already built, I want you to hear this one.

Tracy is the owner of Heal(thy) Self Wellness LLC. She's offering a free 30-minute Transition Clarity Session — uncovering what's keeping you stuck, reconnecting with what matters most, and identifying one meaningful next step. She's also offering 20% off a first session for new clients through the end of September 2026 — just mention this podcast.

Website: healthyself-wellness.com

Text: (717) 756-4950

Instagram: @healthy_self_wellness

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracy-buikema/

Cathy Derksen spent 25 years in medical genetics, in hospital labs and toxic environments. Twenty-five years of trusting the data over her gut.

Then, in one stretch of her life, she blew up almost everything at once: she left that 25-year career and her 23-year marriage, together, with two teenagers watching.

She'd told herself she was staying — in the marriage, in the safety of routine — for her kids. Then she saw what it was actually doing to them. That's what finally moved her.

"I describe it like throwing my life up in the air and reinventing it on the way back down," she says.

She landed in financial planning next, working with numbers and data, but now focused on helping women. A decade of commission-only paychecks in a male-dominated industry, learning as she went. It wasn't wrong. It just wasn't it.

Then, almost by accident, Cathy stumbled into multi-author books — and the scientist who'd spent decades trusting data started trusting stories instead. Today she's the founder of Inspired Tenacity, helping midlife women get published, one chapter at a time.

If you've ever wondered how someone goes from spreadsheets and lab reports to publishing other women's stories, this is that episode.

Connect with Cathy:

🌐 InspiredTenacity.com (free PDF downloads of many of her books + a Zoom accelerator session)

📧 cathy@inspiredtenacity.com

💼 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/cathyderkseninspiredtenacity

📘 Facebook: facebook.com/cathy.derksen.3

📸 Instagram: instagram.com/inspired_tenacity

▶️ YouTube: youtube.com/@inspiredtenacitypublishing