Not All Business

You still have meetings. You still have deadlines. But a story in the news has hit close to home, and you're carrying it through all of them. Heather, Blakely, and Clay have an honest, sometimes uncomfortable conversation about the heaviness women bring into work after reading the headlines. They discuss the Cornell sexual assault allegations, the Lindsay Clancy case, and the shame, fear, and...

Your friend helped you land a vendor. Now your company wants to end the contract, and you get to deliver the news. Who's talking, the friend or the person doing her job? Fresh from the Women of Pavilion summit in New York City, Heather and Blakely revisit the sticky situations women brought into the room. Rachel Johnson, founder of MoJo Marketing and co-lead of Women of Pavilion, joins them to...

Heather and Blakely made a promise in Episode 1: after hearing how pole dancing changed Jamie Cole's confidence and leadership, they would try it themselves. One year later, they finally showed up at Rockstar Pole Fitness with heels in hand, seven friends beside them, and no idea what they were getting into. The class was physically harder and emotionally more vulnerable than they expected. Th...

What happens when the business you built for freedom becomes another job you cannot escape? Michelle Kuan, founder of MLKMEDIA, joins Heather Cooper and Blakely Graham to share how she built a fast-growing marketing agency and why she eventually had to make it smaller. She opens up about burnout, values-aligned leadership, and learning that every yes comes with a no. Michelle also shares how stren...

What if your best career story is the one you keep trying to hide? Britt Hunter, leadership speaker and founder of Be The Exception Coaching, joins Heather Cooper and Blakely Graham to explain why young professionals and seasoned leaders alike need to hurry up and fail. Britt shows how mistakes build clarity and confidence when you stop protecting a perfect image and start getting honest about wha...

Why is it so easy to offer help and so uncomfortable to ask for it? Melissa Moody, co-founder of Wednesday Women, joins Heather Cooper and Blakely Graham to explain why your career is bigger than your day job. She shows how to build a portfolio career around what matters in this season without turning your life into an endless list of obligations. Then Melissa introduces the give and the get. She...

Your highest-producing employee refuses to delegate, never comes to team day, and has become the office joke. Is she still your top performer? In Part 2 of the Arcadia conversation, Heather Cooper and Blakely Graham bring more anonymous S ticky Situations home from the Arcadia Leadership Experience in Bozeman. They explain why individual output is not the same as leadership, why special rules for...

You built the career. You reached the milestone. So why does it no longer feel like enough? Fresh from recording Sticky Situations live at the Arcadia Leadership Experience in Bozeman ( https://www.arcadialeadershipexperience.com/ ), Blakely Graham and Heather Cooper bring the audience’s hardest career questions home. They unpack the strange lull that can follow achievement, the difference between...

Leadership sounds exciting until you're the one who has to deliver the bad news. What do you say when you have to fire someone and can't stop thinking about their family, bills, and future? How do you honestly review a friend whose performance is below expectations? And what happens when your boss tells you to be more assertive—after previously criticizing you for being too intense? In thi...

There isn't an employee handbook for the awkward parts of work. What do you do when your boss hugs you every morning and you hate being hugged? What's the right move if your boss asks you to lie about something? And what does "business casual" even mean anymore? How can you fashion-judo a dress code to empower you at work? This week, we're pulling together some of Heather and...

Louise Allen spent over a decade in her career without telling a single coworker she'd played professional tennis. Eleven years on tour. Every Grand Slam. Ranked as high as No. 70 in the world. She kept it quiet because she was afraid of one label: the aggressive female athlete. This week on Not All Business, Louise — now Chief Product Officer at Planview — joins Blakely and Heather to talk ab...

Dr. Molly Ware is a cardiologist at Boulder Heart, and she's used to being one of very few women in the room. Nineteen years ago, she was the first woman in her practice group, and when she asked to work part time after having her first child, no one had ever made that request before. This week she tells us what that negotiation taught her, and why the data suggests female doctors may actually...

Kathryn O'Day, Partner at Atlanta Ventures, spent five years building a personal brand in an industry that didn't expect her to. This week she tells us how she found a lane nobody else in venture capital was standing in, why she still doesn't love the spotlight, and what changed when she stopped trying to be everywhere. The conversation moves into the harder stuff too: the guilt that c...

Most of us think our meetings fail because of bad ideas. They usually fail because of bad communication, and most people never learn the difference. This week on Not All Business, communication expert Brittany Hart returns to break down the four communication temperaments (fire, wind, earth, and water) and reveal exactly how Blakely, Heather, and Clay show up in every meeting, every text, every di...

Most of us know the feeling: hitting snooze, going through the motions, wondering if this is really it. This week on Not All Business, transformational coach Jayne Robinson joins from Australia, the show's first guest calling in from outside North America, to talk about the difference between your real inner voice and the fear-driven noise that tries to pass for it. Jayne knows the cost of sta...

What if all those years you spent at home — the ones that don't fit neatly on a LinkedIn profile — were actually building the best resume in the room? Heidi Calmus knows. Before she joined forces with her husband Taylor on the nationally recognized YouTube channel Dude Dad, she spent years managing outreach and emergency intake for homeless and trafficked youth. She ran an entire family operat...

Women have been legally allowed to get a mortgage for just about 50 years — and the gap that was created is still closing. This week on Not All Business, we sat down with Lane McLeod, founder of West Lane Lending, a mortgage brokerage built around one very clear mission: helping women build wealth through homeownership. Lane has watched the data play out in real time — single men buying homes in t...

When you can't give someone what they're asking for — and you know you might lose them — what do you actually do? And what happens when two great employees with totally opposite work styles are making each other (and their manager) miserable? This week on Not All Business, Heather, Blakely, and Clay take on two real sticky situations from the NAB community, then close out with a rapid-fire...

What do you do when the person who was supposed to love you unconditionally just... doesn't show up? If you're Kait Dinunzio, you build yourself from scratch — and then you spend the rest of your career helping other people do the same. This week on Not All Business, we sit down with Kait Dinunzio — executive coach, field operations leader, competitive bodybuilder, and author of Unbreakable . Kait...

Most businesses skip the foundation and wonder why everything feels muddy. Mission. Vision. Values. Purpose. Turns out there's a big difference between writing them down and actually knowing what they mean. This week on Not All Business, brand strategist Cindy Frigard of Yours Truly comes back for her second appearance and does something we've never done on the show before: walks Heather a...

Boundaries at work are complicated. Setting them is hard. Getting them crossed is harder. And knowing what to do when something happens faster than your brain can process? That's what this episode is about. This week on Not All Business, it's a Casual Friday sticky situations episode — no guest, just Heather, Blakely, and Clay diving into your real workplace dilemmas. The theme is boundari...

What happens when the very thing that got you to the top — perfectionism, over-preparation, the need to prove yourself in every room — becomes the thing you have to unlearn? This week on Not All Business, Bridget Winston, a 3x Chief Revenue Officer with over 20 years of experience scaling companies from early-stage disruptors to global brands, gets into all of it. From growing up in all-girls scho...

Your space isn't just where you live. It's shaping how you think, how you lead, and how you feel the moment you walk in the door. This week on Not All Business, we sit down with Leslie VanDerven, founder of Welcome Home Organizing, Staging & Feng Shui. Leslie is a certified feng shui practitioner, decluttering coach, professional organizer, and home stager with 18 years of experience —...

What does it actually take to say yes when you're not qualified, not expected, and not invited? This week on Not All Business, we sat down with Ginger Graham — former President and CEO of Amylin Pharmaceuticals, former interim CEO at Walgreens Boots Alliance, Harvard Business School faculty, and founder of Ginger and Baker in Fort Collins, Colorado. Ginger has spent a career being the first an...

Most leaders think they're communicating. Their teams think otherwise. The gap isn't about words. It's about environment. This week on Not All Business, we sat down with Brittany Hart, Founder & CEO of Communiscape, a communication consulting and coaching firm built on the belief that most leadership failures aren't strategy failures - they're communication failures. After...