Tiny Brave Steps: Real Women. Real Fear. Real Courage Stories.

Send us Fan Mail You know that moment when someone asks you to name one good thing about yourself, and your mind goes completely blank? Pennie knows it well. After her second divorce, sitting in her sister’s basement with an assignment to list ten things she liked about herself, she cried for half an hour and managed one. Her feet. When I asked her how she got from there to where she is now, she d...

Send us Fan Mail On a rainy night, ten-year-old Julie Fairhurst was home babysitting her three younger brothers when strangers came to the door and took all four children away.  Two weeks later her mother appeared. Julie ran to her sobbing, and her mother raised both hands and said, “get her off me.” There had been a car accident, and her mother's closest friend had died.  No one talked about...

Send us Fan Mail When addiction entered her home, Jen McCutcheon did what mothers do.  She fixed.  She researched treatment centres. She planned interventions.  Held the family together with whatever she could find.  And she kept going until her body shut down. Then came a night on the living room couch, crying in front of a blank wall, when something inside her said: you are the common denominato...

Send us Fan Mail Mirna knew what burnout looked like. She’s a psychologist. She had helped other women recognize unhealthy workplaces, trust what they were feeling, and find their way through. Then it happened to her. She stepped into the biggest leadership role of her career, excited and ready. But within the first month, her body was already telling her something wasn’t right. Then came the ques...

Send us Fan Mail For years, two things ran Sarka’s life without her seeing them: she didn’t believe in herself, and she thought she had to be perfect.  It took a hard question — where will you be in 20 years? — before she turned around and looked to see what her life was becoming. She became an entrepreneur with no savings and no plan, learned to answer her own fear instead of fighting it, and sai...

Send us Fan Mail Lonna found the answer to her prayers — a faithful man, a fresh start in a new state — and still ended up more alone than she’d ever been.  Two wounded people with no tools, ten hard years, and a marriage on life support.  What turned it around wasn’t willpower.  It was a care pastor who told her she’d never even had words for what she’d survived, a counseling room where she rewro...

Send us Fan Mail Sharon could do anything. Give her a job nobody knew how to do, a problem no one could crack — she’d figure it out.  Then she adopted a little girl whose early wounds no amount of trying could reach, and the woman who could do hard things came apart.  This is the story of what happens after the control runs out: the guilt, the melt, the radical choice, and a rainy night when a fri...

Send us Fan Mail Erica had just walked back through a door she thought was closed for good — teaching, after seven years away.  It was the fall of 2020. Twelve-hour days. New everything.  And then, in the space of a few weeks... her brother was diagnosed with cancer, she caught COVID, her mom got COVID and her dad went into the hospital alone and came home on hospice.  Days later, her mom had a br...

Send us Fan Mail   Some women learn early that the safest thing to do is disappear.  Kylyna learned it in a house where her father’s drinking was the weather — always there, never her fault, impossible to fix.  So she got the good grades. She kept the peace. She stayed in her room. She made herself easy to overlook. And then she grew up and had a baby. And something in her said no. This is the sto...

Send us Fan Mail Nadine spent decades helping other women find themselves — as a relationship counselor, NLP trainer, and self-esteem facilitator.  But for 19 years inside her own marriage, she was quietly losing track of who she was. It wasn't dramatic. It was the slow accumulation of small surrenders: preferences set aside, choices made around someone else's moods, a voice that used to...

Send us Fan Mail At 44, Cheryl Ilov walked into a doctor's office and walked out changed.  When the people she trusted most refused to believe her, she buried it. For a year and a half, she held herself together.  And then she didn't.  What pulled her back wasn't therapy or time. It was an acupuncturist who wouldn't stop talking about ninjas.  This is the story of a fussy girl...

Send us Fan Mail In January 2019, Mary Beth went in for a routine appointment and came out with a cancer diagnosis. Ten days after her own surgery, her husband received a diagnosis with a five percent survival rate.  What followed was a year that asked everything of her — and she showed up for all of it. This is a story about what you do when the weight is too heavy to carry alone. About the song...

Send us Fan Mail For twenty years, Kelly Schuknecht was the woman behind the vision.   Two CEOs. Two decades. She made everything happen — the platforms, the books, the speaking events, the brand.  She was exceptional at it. And she was invisible doing it.  Then, a company acquisition decided she wasn't needed anymore. The layoff hit her harder than she expected. Not just professionally. Deep...

Send us Fan Mail She called herself a cliché. A woman in her mid-40s who needed to find herself.  But there is nothing clichéd about what Saoirse Temple actually did.  She left a relationship that had been slowly shrinking her — not with drama, but with years of quiet courage, one small step at a time. She packed one box. She asked the hard question. She walked through a door she had chosen for he...

Send us Fan Mail Kristin was 33 years old when a routine doctor's appointment changed everything.  The diagnosis: colon cancer.  The prognosis: unknown.  She drove home alone, in the rain, through Orlando traffic, trying to figure out how to say the word out loud to the people she loved. What happened in the two to three days that followed is not what you'd expect. This is a story about...

Send us Fan Mail She had built a thirty-year marriage on commitment, love, and the belief that if she just tried hard enough, things would get better. They didn't. What Julie Lamphear couldn't have known — not yet — was that the hardest thing she would ever do wasn't leaving. It was learning that she couldn't fix what she couldn't control. That needing a sober environment...

Send us Fan Mail What do you do when the life you dreamed of — the one constant picture you held in your heart since you were a little girl — just doesn't happen? Jill wanted to be a mom to a house full of kids. That was the dream. Simple. Pure. The kind that settles into a little girl's heart and never leaves.  Then she lost three babies, and with each loss, something darker than grief...

Send us Fan Mail On her very first day as a firefighter, the men on her team pulled her aside and told her: If you get into trouble, we’re not coming to save you. For fourteen years, Lynnette walked into burning buildings carrying that weight. She fought literal fires while a fire-breathing Fear-Fred raged inside her head, whispering Don’t mess up. Make sure you’ve got an out. You’re on your own....

Send us Fan Mail September 23rd, 2021. Stacey Ansley walked into what should have been a simple outpatient knee surgery. A few hours, some discomfort, home by dinner. She woke up in intensive care. A severed artery. Emergency surgery that destroyed the nerves from her knee down. Months of heavy medication that stole her vision, her clarity, and nearly her will to keep going. Her husband got two ph...

Send us Fan Mail What does courage look like when the hard thing doesn’t end? When there’s no dramatic finish line, no moment where you dust yourself off and say “I did it” - just today, and tomorrow, and the day after that, carrying a weight you never asked to carry? When Bari’s husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, her entire future shifted without her permission. The life they’d plann...