ICMM: Living Life Unpaused

What if the life you've worked so hard to build is actually keeping you from living the life you want? We often think of money as the thing that gives us freedom, security, and choices. But what happens when the lifestyle we've created becomes the very thing keeping us stuck? And how do we know when money is truly the barrier to making a change—or when it's become the excuse we use to avoid the un...

Courtney Gard describes herself as fiercely independent—the kind of person who figures things out and handles things herself. Then, in September 2020, moving a china cabinet just one inch changed everything. A falling vase shattered and severed nearly every major structure in Courtney's dominant wrist. What followed were surgeries, years of rehabilitation and chronic pain, and the unexpected chall...

We hear it all the time: focus on what you can control. But what if the harder part isn't knowing what you can control — it's recognizing when you've crossed the line into trying to control something that was never yours? In this solo episode of ICMM: Living Life Unpaused, Abby digs into the idea at the heart of ICMM: I Can Manage Myself. After five rounds of insurance submissions for a new medica...

What happens when the reason you think you should wait becomes the exact reason you decide you can’t? In this episode, Abby sits down with Meg Dieter, founder of Whimsi Beans, to talk about the winding path from corporate marketing to motherhood to building a product that didn’t exist yet. After her daughter Chloe received an autism diagnosis, Meg began learning about adaptive tools and sensory ne...

Season 2 starts with a question: What if the thing making you uncomfortable isn’t a warning sign—but information? In this episode, Abby explores the necessity of challenge: the people willing to tell us what we don’t want to hear, the ideas that get stronger when someone pushes back, and the unexpected circumstances that force us to see our lives differently. From the difference between boundaries...

We all have a version of “Starting Monday.” Starting Monday, I’ll get serious. Starting Monday, I’ll make the change. Starting Monday, I’ll finally do the thing I keep saying I want to do. But what if “Starting Monday” isn’t always a plan? What if sometimes it’s the story we tell ourselves because the truth underneath it is harder to admit? In the Season One finale of ICMM: Living Life Unpaused ,...

What happens when the plan you made no longer fits the life you're actually living? A chance conversation with a phlebotomist got me thinking about the difference between building your dream life and actively living your life — and why one may actually be how you get to the other. In this episode, we're talking about why plans should be directions, not promises; how the things we call “detours” ma...

This week didn't go the way Abby planned. A quiet autoimmune condition flared back up, a medication that's worked for eight years is suddenly in question, and one unanswered question in another part of her life sent her imagination straight to the worst-case scenario — the kind where she's somehow always the problem in the plot. For a minute, she almost let all of it talk her into rethinking every...

What if “I'm just tired” isn't actually normal? This week I'm joined by Dr. Michelle Retz, NMD — a naturopathic medical doctor who's been part of my own health journey — for a conversation about everything traditional medicine tends to skip: adrenal fatigue, the hormones nobody checks at your annual physical, the real difference between naturopathic and functional medicine, and why chronic stress...

A friend recently apologized to Abby for something she didn't even realize she'd done — she never really understood what Abby had been living with, until it started happening to her too. That conversation is why this episode exists. This is Abby's full medical story, told start to finish for the first time: 16 years of irregular labs, dismissed symptoms, negative tests that didn't match what her b...

Everybody wants to be their own boss — until the business becomes the boss. This week I'm joined by Shannon Hoffmann, who grew up inside a family business in Wichita, built her own grocery store from scratch in Kansas City the year before the economy crashed, helped her family more than double in size overnight by acquiring five competing stores, opened a second business right as COVID hit, and ev...

We expect eighteen-year-olds to have their whole future mapped out — and then we're surprised when the plan doesn't fit twenty years later. This week, Abby unpacks why the “perfect plan” so many of us are still quietly waiting to finish writing might be the exact thing keeping us stuck. Drawing on her own scrapped pre-law track, a devastating detour through infertility, and the phone call that fir...

My friend Marci didn’t set out to become an astrologer — she spent two decades in corporate finance, raising three kids, and quietly wondering if there was something more. In this episode, she opens up about the “messy middle” of her pivot: the funeral that cracked something open, the astrology course she couldn’t fully explain to her husband, and the moment she realized this wasn’t just a hobby....

I know I'm not happy — I just don't know what I actually want. If you've ever said some version of that, this one's for you. In this solo episode, I get into the quiet trap so many of us live in: waiting to feel certain before we're willing to move. And here's the thing — we've got it backwards. You don't think your way into clarity. You move your way into it. Clarity was never a lightning bolt th...

Chance Lemos drove past the same building on 39th Street every morning for two years. Big building, great neighborhood, a for-sale sign that kept blowing over in the wind. And for two years he told himself he couldn't. Then he turned his brain off and signed the papers. In this episode I sit down with Chance, owner of Blue Collar Barber Co, about making the leap most of us only talk about — what i...

What if the midlife crisis isn't a crisis at all? We've all heard the phrases — the quarter-life crisis, the midlife crisis — and most of us picture the same thing: someone buying a sports car, blowing up their whole life overnight. For years, I rolled my eyes at the idea. My life was "normal"… until it wasn't. In this solo episode, I get honest about the season that forced my own realization — lo...

My very first guest! I sit down with my friend Jim Wiegand, who spent more than twenty years climbing to the top of the finance world — all the way to CFO — and then walked away to open his own Discover Strength studio. We talk about how he knew it was time, how he made the leap with a family and a mortgage on the line, and then he gives a practical, no-excuses guide to why and how you should star...

Episode 2 — You Are Not Your Job We've quietly agreed, as a society, that what you do for money is the same thing as who you are — and this week Abby pushes back on that. Starting from the most ordinary question in the world ("So, what do you do?"), this episode makes the case that you are so much more than your job, and that it's completely okay for a job to be just a job — a means to fund a life...

What if the thing keeping you stuck isn't a lack of clarity, but the belief that you need clarity before you can move? In the first episode of ICMM: Living Life Unpaused , Abby shares the story behind the movement, the podcast, and the simple idea that changed everything. After a year marked by job loss, grief, health challenges, and more than a thousand rejections, she found herself asking a diff...