The Designed Life

You earned the title, delivered impeccable results, and some part of you still wonders whether you have done enough. Shelmina Abji grew up in Mwanza, Tanzania, in a town where school ended at tenth grade. She became the first in her family to graduate college, then rose to Vice President at IBM, leading global teams that delivered over a billion dollars a year, while raising two children as a sing...

Last week's guest named the fear that comes with choosing to leave a career: what people will think while they watch you do it. This week is about the woman who never got the choice. Ameera shares the day a calendar invite turned into a restructure at 50, what a title carries for you, the meaning you give it, and why rebuilding identity can take longer than replacing the work. You will hear t...

Kristina Bartold walked away from a corporate career she had spent years building - a career that by every external measure looked like exactly where she was supposed to be. In the five years since, she co-founded The Social Snippet, a done-for-you marketing and podcast agency serving seven-figure brands, and High Vibe Women, a community and events platform for women in business. In this conversat...

Are you saying yes to goals you picked up from someone else's life?  In this solo episode, Ameera walks through: The goals she let go of after a layoff at fifty and diving head first into her business Why the goal of owning a beach house she would never use stopped making sense The two-question test she uses to tell a borrowed goal from one that's truly hers.  If no one was watching and...

Louisa Jewell, founder of the Canadian Positive Psychology Association and author of Wire Your Brain for Confidence, has spent twenty years inside the science of well-being. In this conversation she makes the case that resilience, the ability to return to where you were, is not enough for a world being rewritten faster than our brains can track. The skill she teaches now is psychological adaptabil...

You know the relief. The call goes to voicemail, the proposal goes out by email, the price gets typed into a DM instead of said out loud, and for a day you don't have to hear the no. Ameera used to pray for voicemail. In this solo episode, she pulls the threads from last week's episode with Gazzy Amin, on buying conversations, and shares how she rebuilt her sales mindset, from a 15-year-...

In her first year of business, Gazzy Amin had 113 buying conversations. Eighty-six of them ended in a no. Before founding Sales Beyond Scripts, Gazzy spent nearly a decade running national-level campaigns for Canadian prime ministers, premiers, and cabinet ministers, often as the youngest person and the only woman at the decision-making table. Today she teaches women founders to sell in a way that...

You said the goal out loud and waited for the room to rise. Some rose. Some went quiet. One asked if it was smart, this close to 50. This solo is about the part of change nobody warns you about: the people. Ameera shares leaving a secure job with a pension, getting laid off 18 months later in a restructuring, and choosing to go further into the work instead of back to safe. Inside is the one quest...

Chelsea Andreozzi connected one job to the next for years: bartending through college, interning at a nonprofit that funds small businesses for women recovering from war, spending ten years as a restaurant beverage director, before she built her own consulting business, First Call Imports.  Just as that business started to scale, she found out she was expecting her first child, and she and her hus...

You reached a goal you'd wanted for years, the promotion, the relationship, the money, and you couldn't quite hold it or feel at home with it. This episode is about why, and what to do about it. This is the finale of Ameera's three-part series on why change feels so hard. If you're new to the show, start with the Episode Titled: The Wiring, then come back here. In this one she...

You think of a friend and they text you an hour later. You wish for a parking spot and it opens up. You glance down and there's money at your feet. Coincidence, or something you had a hand in? This episode is about what happens when you stop letting your brain scan for what might go wrong and point it, on purpose, at what you want to receive and create. Ameera walks through the science first,...

You commit to a change with everything you have. You hold it for a few weeks. Then life gets busy and you drift right back to where you started, and you quietly decide you just do not have the discipline. This episode is about why that happens, and why it was never about discipline . Ameera walks through the wiring underneath every habit: the thermostat your nervous system keeps resetting, why a n...

What if rest belonged at the start of your day instead of the reward you finally earn at the end of it? This week Ameera sits down with Azia Ranea, a TEDx speaker, coach, and the founder of Pause with Azia Ranea, who teaches ambitious, high-functioning women how to slow down without guilt. Azia shares how she moved from running on empty to building a life with room to breathe, and she walks throug...

Some anniversaries ask you to look forward. This one asked me to look back, and to count what a single year of honest conversations can hold. In this solo celebration of one year of The Designed Life, I walk you back through the conversations that stayed with me, and with so many of you.  Nadine Allaham on healing your relationship with food and your body.  Katherine Dudtschak on the courage to fi...

At seventeen, Michelle Weger started falling asleep in her university classes. She wanted to be a doctor. Instead, she spent five years hearing that her tests were normal while her body told a different story. At twenty-two, she was diagnosed with narcolepsy, a rare neurological sleep disorder with no cure. This week, Michelle joins Ameera to talk about what she built next. She’s the founder and C...

There is a piece in your closet you glance over every single morning and quietly think, that is not me anymore. You do not wear it or release it. It is not only taking up space in your closet. It is taking up space in your attention, which might be the most expensive thing you own. In this solo episode I share the seasonal closet edit that started as a story I told a room full of women and turned...

What happens when the moment that was supposed to define your career finally arrives, you give it everything, and the payday never comes? In this solo episode, Ameera shares the story of chasing a legendary speaker for her family's events business, the sixteen hour days it took to pull off the event of a lifetime, and the financial payout that never arrived. For years she filed that season aw...

Have you ever hit the goal and still felt broke inside? The income is good, the title looks right on paper, and something in you keeps whispering that there is more. This week, Ameera sits down with Danielle Amos, the Mystic Millionaire Mentor and one of Bob Proctor's direct protegees, who went from over $100,000 in debt to $100,000 months. When Bob asked her on stage what she did, she answer...

There is a win you have not told anyone about. Maybe a promotion, the best month your business has ever had, or a vision you are almost afraid to say out loud, because saying it might cost you something. In this solo episode of The Designed Life, Ameera Virani names the fear we don't often admit: that if you keep growing, you will outgrow the people you love. So you only offer them the high l...

Some women wait for the room they want to walk into. Ashley Lougheed built hers. In this episode of The Designed Life, Ameera sits down with the founder of Girl Time Inc., a women’s leadership facilitator, educator, community builder, and bestselling author whose work began with a feeling instead of a solid plan. Ashley shares how she turned a single gathering into a community, a physical space ca...

When was the last time you walked into a room and didn’t make yourself smaller? Smaller in your body, your voice, your ambition. In this episode of The Designed Life, Ameera sits down with Zenab Ansari, founder of Saheli Sisterhood, a community for curvy, mid-size, and plus-size South Asian women reclaiming self-love on their own terms. This is a conversation about taking up space. Zenab shares wh...

Important Note:  The content of this episode is for informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult with a healthcare professional before making any changes to your health or wellness routines. Never alter your medical treatment plan without professional guidance. In this episode, Ameera explores how modern self-care has drifted from being a replenishing practice...

Some conversations leave you where they found you. This one will expand your heart and mind. Katherine Dudtschak spent nearly four decades inside one of the largest banks in the world. She served as CEO twice. She led twenty-five thousand people. For almost fifty years, she also carried a truth she’d held since childhood, while building a life that, from the outside, looked exactly right. In this...

If you've been  holding your breath about a number. whether it's three years away or three years behind you, this one is for you. In this solo episode, Ameera opens up about what she carried as her own 50th birthday approached, including the quiet fear that she might not see fifty at all after losing people she loves. She shares why she left a safe job in her late forties, went all-in on...

When is the last time you felt genuinely good and fully alive in your body? If you’re struggling to remember, this conversation was made for you. Monique Took is a functional health practitioner and researcher who was told at 21 that she would never have children. She decided to become her own answer, healed herself from the ground up, and now helps high-achieving women do the same. In this episod...