Sure, you may have divorced your ex, but you raised kids with him co-parenting for twenty years and then unexpectedly, he dies.

A hole is left in your life, but mourning can be complicated, and perhaps your current partner doesn't understand. Or your job doesn't see that as an immediate family member and expects you to show up for your job.

What about the grief when you child gets a diagnosis of Autism or OCD and you realize that they will have to work harder than other kids to get through life. Or that it will be more on your plate as a mom, juggling two other kids.

Or someone you knew in recovery commits suicide due to addiction, and it hits you square in the heart, but feels bigger than it should?

As women, we are navigating so many complex seemingly (to society mourning standards) minor losses and griefs every day, but we are expected to just take them on in our bodies and shoulder forward to all our responsibilities. To even stop for a moment and breathe can seem like too much time in our busy schedules but if we don't face the trauma and pain, we can get derailed in other emotional ways.

Speaking today with Krista Hellman, a social worker and founder of the Trauma and Grief Institute in Ottawa, Ontario, I learned a lot about how we need to process attachment and mourning in our bodies.

Krista wrote a book about the loss of her dog called Over ther Rainbow: The Love, Loss & Legacy of Your Dog, but it is about more than pet loss. She speaks of how connection can be continued beyond loss.

Please rate and review this episode if you enjoyed it.

I have a newsletter, Live Your Delicious Life, where you can learn more about my events, The Exhale: Put Yourself First where we discover ways to bring more Delicious into your life.

Susan Landers, M.D. tells us that perfectionism comes from our childhoods. Be good girls. Play well in a group. Don't be too bossy. Or if we didn't get the mothering or love we needed, then we try and receive that unconditional love by the praise we get from society. A lot of working moms fall into the perfectionist trap because they feel like they have to do all the things perfectly from work tasks to the birthday parties.

And of course social media has made this worse.

Susan talks about going from a 80 hour job in the NICU with three little kids to identifying her burn out and making changes in her professional life to better enjoy life more deliciously. She learned to block out time just for herself to do what she wanted on her calendar whether it was take a walk or call a friend. In fact, she admits that she has experienced burn out twice in her career - the second at age 62.

She also breaks down the Eisenhower Matrix which identifies what in your life is urgent, or what you can delegate or get rid of. Without a tool like this, we can think its all-important and lose our perspective in the weeds of responsibility.

Susan admits she was 50 years old when she learned how to say no. And silencing the inner critic, setting boundaries and practicing self-compassion is the key to get out of the perfectionism trap.

Susan has a wonderful Substack Mom's Matter.

She has written several books and we discuss Good Enough is Your Super Power: Overcoming Perfectionism for Women by Silencing Your Inner Critic and Settting Boundaries on the show.

Enjoyed our interview and the podcast as a whole? Please rate and review as that helps us get the word out to more "sandwich generation" women. I also have a newsletter liveyourdeliciouslife.kit.com. Join our community for a wealth of information and events.

How many of you are willing to walk away from a toxic job, pursue a passion project and be in naïve optimism while you do it? I know from my personal perspective, we tend with our careers or how we lead our kids to be in hard love, or face reality. Or we work ourselves to the perfectionist bone, having zero fun while we strive to "get it right."

But with Dr. Vicki Johnson, she gives a solid sell on the idea of optimism, but also chipping away at projects with high effort. This in itself will lower the potential of being a perfectionist.

She provided so many insightful takeaways in our interview, especially coming from a place where she juggled jobs, side hustles (built her platform ProFellow) and young kids, all crammed in a small apartment in San Francisco.

Currently she lives in Bend, Oregon and has recently published her book, Pitch Your Potential: The Formula for Winning Dream Jobs, Awards, and Elite Opportunities.

Would you like to be a part of the Delicious Life community where we are building events and connections? Please join me at liveyourdeliciouslife.kit.com where you can download for free my PDF Seven Acts of Self-Kindness.

If you enjoyed today's podcast, please rate and review. It helps us to get the message out that we don't have to be burned out exhausted women to achieve dreams and goals.

You would think with all the fancy initials after De Shell's name, we would be talking about female leadership, or coaching but that is not what this podcast is about.

In fact, if you stay in the interview for at least 22 minutes, De Shell will mesmerize you like she did me. She will lull you into belief you deserve a gentle life and no longer need to feel like you are drowning inside.

De Shell and I had a shared language of leaning deliciously into our expansion of self-knowledge in an area that is not necessarily to our professional advantage. Why not? Who told us that is not beneficial? The system, that is who, and its all a bunch of lies. How you feed your soul is how you show up everywhere in your life, including how you self-serve.

For De Shell this was yoga. She learned after decades of practicing asanas that the lifestyle is so much biggest than exercise. As a life long learner, she wanted to do something deeper that helped her calm down. What it meant for the mental and energetic and emotional space. She signed up for a teacher training which also gave me permission to validate my desire to take a yoga teacher intensive one day because I too have been doing yoga my whole life thinking I want a better understanding of what's deeper. I have learned more than ever lately, if you just stay in child pose your whole time, it is okay.

Why can't we do something just to learn? Why are we always in the hustle? Women always need an outcome, but what if the outcome is it feels good and you are curious.

I share with De Shell I found out a lot of what I believed in, what I felt I had to prove, was a lie. She nailed in on the head when she said, it's the overfunctioning. The badges we think we need to win, and the conditioning to place more value on what we do versus who we are. Women who don't have self-trust use the real masculine language and think "if I could just…", but at the same time, it's magical thinking to say we don't need to make money. There is a happy medium. De Shell works with a lot of women on boards with high position, and she thinks of herself a decade ago. She would defend the lies based on how she defined herself. Self-care for example, relaxation versus rejuvenation. You don't rest when you die! You need to nap on a hammock! Stop trying to think looking good is self-care!

De Shell takes off into the mountains, and travels alone. She doesn't want to be concerned with what you want to eat and what activity you want to engage in. She wants to rejuvenate!

In the Fun Segment she suggests:

1. Journal by candlelight, do yoga poses, sink into oracle witnessing and reflecting on becoming.

2. Go on trips on your own and make discoveries.

3. Eat at new places and savor what's local. What's the story behind the food?

4. When you travel, see how the poor and impoverished live beyond your resort parameters.

5. No schedule, no check in. 8 hour book days.

If you loved our podcast, I would love to have you as part of our Delicious community by joining at liveyourdeliciouslife.kit.com

If you want to learn more about the work De Shell is doing, check her out at https://leveragingtruth.com

New here? Start with this one. This is my story — and probably a little bit of yours too.

At 44, I was a single mom with two kids, no savings, and everything to prove.

So I did what so many of us do - I worked harder, gave more, pushed further. I overworked. I overpleased. I said yes when I meant no and kept producing results to prove I was worthy, capable, enough.

And then my body said: not so fast.

The panic attacks started. Not as a breakdown - as a message. My nervous system was waving a white flag, telling me I had been last on my own list for so long I had forgotten I was even on it.

So I started small. I looked at trees in the sunshine. I danced in my apartment. I laughed with friends. I started stealing tiny moments back for myself - what I now call Delicious Moments.

This is that story. And if you're in the messy middle right now, running on empty, holding everyone else together - this one is for you.

Start here. 🌻

Loved this episode? Join Live Your Delicious Life — my free weekly newsletter for women in the messy middle. One story. One act of self-kindness. Every Tuesday. → Sign up here: liveyourdeliciouslife.kit.com.

Over the last decade of coaching women, speaking to women, and my own personal experiences, our most fraught constructs are time and money.

So many of us have these old money stories we have brought into adulthood and we are almost paralyzed by conversations and transparency with money, nevermind having fun with it to de-stress and be expansive.

Meghan Dwyer, a certified Financial Planner, and podcast host of Money Isn't Scary, joined me to talk about money. Why can't we love money and be proud of money, and also be intentional with it at the same time?

What would it feel like if we were in our joy with money and created fun with money? What if you created a fund to do something guilt free for yourself?

Whether you are a mom of little kids navigating Disneyland, or a solopreneur looking at your bottom line for Q2, the money we have can be a representative of our inner worth. Instead, how about we have inner worth and self-trust and let the money follow suit!

I find that money becomes a barrier for women, and we have a hard time being transparent with money because we think we are bragging or making someone else uncomfortable. When instead, we could be helping another woman be less alone with her money stress and instead see abundance!

We give some Delicious Fun Money Tips on the show!

Listen in to learn how to:

Save up $20 a week for a fun account.

Check your bank balances each week instead of being ruled by fear

Take the emotion out of communication with money using AI.

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it, rate and review.

I would also love if you could come join my Delicious Life community through my newsletter at https://liveyourdeliciouslife.kit.com where I will be sharing weekly tips on how to have more random acts of self-kindness in your life.

You know that dream you have to write a book? The one that shows up uninvited while you're in the shower or staring out the window on a Tuesday?

Once it hits, it won't go away.

I got to talk about that dream recently, and why the women who have the most to say are so often the ones who keep waiting to feel ready.

Samantha Hawley invited me onto her Beyond Awareness podcast, and honestly, it became one of those conversations I didn't want to end. We talked about what's actually in the way of your book.

It's trust. Trust in yourself, your story, and the version of you that already knows what she wants to say. But in order to have that trust, you need to give yourself those little delicious moments in other areas every day or you are going to continue giving your energy away to everyone else, and not have any left for your creative freedom.

We also got into identity shifts, why perfectionism is just fear wearing a blazer, and why writing the book you have right now is what shapes you into the writer you'll be in five years.

The woman you want to be with a voice, a passion and purpose... not minimized by all the areas of your life pulling at you (that can make a false sense of importance.)

I felt this podcast episode with Samanta was so delicious that I built a whole This Delicious Life™ episode around our conversation.

In this honest and frank interview, you will learn:

How to know if you have a book versus just a complaint dump.

How a book can help you put voice to your feelings.

You'll receive guidance on how to stop clinging so tightly to your book ideas.

I wrote one book on permission and then at the guidance of a book professional, evolved it to something more akin to this brand. I tossed that book and wrote a new one, and then found a book agent because the newest book was more aligned to the joy and purpose that was bubbling out of me.

We can wear our book journey lightly, not like some mission we can never get done. We can let expand and flow, and how you do time in your life is going to dictate how you find time to be in the book process.

Listen to, Subcribe and rate Samantha's Beyond Awareness podcast.

And of course, do the same for This Delicious Life™ so we can grow!

I would also love if you could come join my Delicious Life community through my newsletter at https://liveyourdeliciouslife.kit.com where I will be sharing weekly tips on how to have more random acts of self-kindness in your life.

On today's episode, I chat with Lauren Young Durbin, a Career Strategist for Midcareer Women. She is dishing out the goods for all of us who are thinking about our next career move.

While a lot of advice is floating out there in this category, what I found unique about our talk is what a straight-shooter Lauren is.

Some of the takeaways right at the top of the talk include gems like:

- Your vision might not be your vision. It might be someone else's you adopted.

- We are the biggest wardens of our careers.

- Start by thinking bigger and then think bigger than that.

Lauren lived the advice she coaches. She was struggling in a job working 60 hours a week with two neurodivergent twins, while also building her own business. She straddled as long as she could, and finally left her job to focus on her business.

The end product? She was no longer upset or crying herself to sleep.

When we get the hit to make a career shift, it can be scary to make the move and the leap but the benefits are vast when we listen to what our soul is telling us.

Then how about when we think we want to do something that is more out of the box than what we have been doing? We get to make that gradual shift and it's not a complete toss it over. We can lean into both and observe what we are trying to make work and ignoring the signs.

We think since we are already doing everything for everyone, the idea of doing seven companies seems implausible and we limit our expansion. Lauren says we need to think out of the box – we can demolish the box or expand it since we created it in the first place.

And wouldn't it be nice if we could vision board all the time with all the crafts and glue? With four-year-old twin boys Lauren doesn't have time to do the visualization she wants to do and pepper the walls with vision boards, so she takes time during the day to visualize and think about what she wants.

Ask yourself if something is important, and if you discover it isn't, let it go. Just make room for what your vision truly is.

And the truth is, many women just need to re-configure how they are showing up for themselves at their job, and want to stay. They stay at the company and get promoted, perhaps, because they don't know what that transition is yet.

Lauren's Delicious Advice?

Light one of the 50 candles you have from Ross, and do the small things for and only yourself.

Who is Lauren?
Lauren Young Durbin, Esq. is a career strategist and founder of Tyche Career Coaching, where she helps midcareer professional women stop spinning and start moving. Her specialty? Helping high-achieving women figure out what's actually wrong, how to fix it, and what they want to do next—without burning everything down in the process.

A licensed attorney (JD, New York Law School) and proud Wellesley alum, Lauren has made four career pivots herself, from legal publishing to litigation support to contract management to coaching. She's been the woman in the wrong job, the toxic environment, and the "this looks great on paper but I'm dying inside" situation. Multiple times. She figured it out. Now she helps other women do the same.
Lauren is known for her direct approach, sharp questions, and zero tolerance for the corporate lies that keep smart women stuck.