Diana Sawyers has spent almost 30 years leading enterprise transformation for the State of Texas. She's also a saxophone player, a guitar student who's played Stubb's and Antone's, a political junkie, and a mom launching two sons into the world. In this episode we talk about all of it, and the books that helped her hold it together along the way.

Diana shares the moment she froze on stage with sticky notes taped to her guitar (and found out later Bob Dylan did the same thing). We talk about teaching inside a maximum security juvenile facility, why she believes music is one of the last truly human things we have left, and what it means to finally be comfortable in your own skin.

Books mentioned in this episode:

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
• The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
• 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think by Brianna Wiest
• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

If this conversation resonates, that's kind of the point. The books that shape us usually show up right when we need them. If you're in a season where you're asking what your own next chapter looks like, I'd love to talk with you. Head to angiesmithsummitconsulting.com to book a call.

Loree Tamayo built a life running hospitals and long-term care facilities, one that looked polished from the outside. Underneath it was a lifetime of psychological abuse she didn't even have language for, generational patterns passed down from her great-grandmother to her grandmother to her mother, and finally to her.

In this episode, Loree walks through the moment she surrendered her life to God with a blank check prayer, and how that same surrender carried her through a devastating marriage, eight years of counseling, and the slow work of learning what a boundary even is. She talks about the anger she didn't know she was carrying, why "no" felt like a foreign language, and how she came out the other side to found Yesterday's Gone, a women's shelter now supported by an army of men who show up to serve the very population abuse once tried to break.

This is a conversation about denial, boundaries, forgiveness, and the belief that God writes the best endings, if you let Him.

Find Loree at yesterdaysgone.org and hiddentreasureteams.org. She was also recently on Michelle Savage's Her Best Chapter podcast, check it out!

Today I'm sitting down with Jennifer Buaas. We first connected at work conferences over the years, and I knew there was a story here worth telling. Jennifer's path took her from driving a beverage cart at a golf course to the Texas Workers Compensation Commission, then to the Texas Department of Information Resources, and now to KPMG. Every door that opened came through a person who saw something in her first.

We talk about mentors who invest their time for no reason other than wanting someone else to succeed, why relationships and connection matter more than we give them credit for, and how public sector workers rarely get the credit they deserve. Jennifer shares the books and voices that shaped her along the way: children's books like Curious George during her early parenting years, Brené Brown's work and her podcast The Curiosity Shop with Adam Grant, the devotional Devotions from the Horse Farm by Kara and Dan Whitney, and Kristin Neff's book on self-compassion, which met her in one of the darkest seasons of her life.

We close on listening as the most underrated leadership skill, why AI will never replace human connection, and Jennifer's own book that's been taking shape in her mind for years.

If this episode encourages you, share it with someone who needs it today. Want to be a guest or explore a sponsorship? Connect with me at AngieSmithSummitConsulting.com.