The Honest Mic

Josh Block knows the weight of responsibility. At 29 years old, he was named president of his family's business over a weekend. No roadmap. No warning. Just everything to figure out. Over the next 14 years, he helped grow that business from $30 million to $215 million and from 50 to more than 400 people. In this episode of The Honest Mic, Josh talks about what went through his head when he got the...

Jenny C. Cohen says many successful women confuse adaptation with identity. Years of meeting expectations, managing pressure, and showing up for everyone else can quietly replace who you actually are underneath all of it. Jenny helps high-achieving women stop overriding themselves. She's the creator of the TRUST™ Method, a board-certified Integrative Neurosomatic Practitioner, and the host of...

Jai Roza hit the lowest point of his life as a teenager. He concluded life wasn't worth living. Then something redirected him. A phone call. A flash of hope in the darkness. Enough to course-correct his walk from an early grave to a lifelong journey of gratitude. What followed was 18 years of building toward a card game called Eden's Conflict — created specifically to reach people who stru...

Jacqueline Kelly says the mind is the ultimate performance multiplier. Not effort. Not talent. Not the hours in the gym. The thing that separates athletes who reach their potential from those who don't is what happens between their ears. Jacqueline is a Certified Mental Performance Coach and Strength and Conditioning Coach. She works with athletes from high school competitors to elite performers,...

Jaclyn Strominger spent two decades in corporate leadership before recognizing that talented professionals don't stall from lack of ability — they stall from lack of alignment. Vision without strategy creates frustration. Strategy without mindset creates burnout. That realization led her to build three interconnected systems: LEAP — Leveraging Communication, Energy, Action, and Performance; 2 Step...

Eva Palladino spent more than 20 years leading organizational change for Fortune 100 companies. She helped others navigate disruption. And then she faced the kind of disruption that really stings: unexpected job loss. That moment forced her to ask a hard question: 'Who am I without the title, the role, and the corporate identity I built for so long?' Instead of rushing back into another executive...

Brett Ashby paints portraits while riding a skateboard. He's painted Barack Obama in Washington DC. Princess Diana. He's built a global creative practice across London, Melbourne, New York, and beyond. And in the middle of all of it, he survived cancer. In this episode of The Honest Mic, Brett talks about how creativity can become a lifeline through trauma, what it means to build an unconv...

Daniel Hodges was born blind, with other disabilities as well. Growing up, the school system assumed he was incapable of learning enough to become a fully functioning adult. He actually missed grades 7 through 11 entirely. The idea that he would end up with multiple advanced degrees was inconceivable to most of the adults in his life. And yet, he went on to earn a Juris Doctorate and a Master's in...

Carolyn Hatton spent years battling her weight, her confidence, and even an eating disorder. She felt stuck, defeated, and like her best years were behind her. Then one day, she made a decision. She decided she was not ready to give up her joy, her health, or her future. She wanted more. What followed was a journey of mentors, books, setbacks, and moments of doubt. And one day, in Coach Anastassia...

Brett Gallant weighed 349 pounds. He was burned out, buried in his business, and losing himself. And he chose to rebuild everything at once — his body, his operating system, and his company. Since then, he's released 130 pounds. He's transformed his health. And he's built one of Canada's top cybersecurity-first IT firms, protecting more than 100 organizations across the country. In this episode of...

Billy Seol was a software engineer at Apple, Disney, and Foursquare. Cornell CS graduate. He was good at it. And then he walked away to train under Buddhist monks and become a life coach. But here's what makes him different: he wrote mathematical formulas for why people can't change, even when they desperately want to. Not metaphors. Actual formulas with variables you can plug your life into. In t...

Andy Campbell survived childhood sexual abuse. An assault at eleven that required multiple corrective surgeries. Losing his mother young. Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. And the loss of his youngest son to suicide. Any one of those would be enough to break most people. The fact that he is still here, still engaged, and still trying to offer something useful to others is not resilience as a concept. It...

Bill Derrick spent five years leading his company through the Great Recession in the construction and real estate industry. He navigated the storm, kept his people employed, and finally got to a point where he could breathe again. And then the second storm hit — an incurable blood cancer called multiple myeloma. That's not one storm. That's two back to back. And how you navigate those seasons reve...

Anna Machkalov spent over 23 years in cosmetic medicine, sitting with people at some of their most vulnerable moments. She saw firsthand how deeply the stories we tell ourselves about our worth, our appearance, and our value shape the way we experience life. That proximity to human insecurity and self-perception led her somewhere deeper. During the pandemic, she trained at the Hypnosis Motivation...

Amrita Kolay has spent over 14 years watching the same pattern play out across engineering, recruitment, resume writing, and career coaching: capable, hardworking, talented people consistently struggle to articulate what they actually bring. She's a Certified Professional Career Coach, Certified Master Résumé Writer, and Certified Professional Résumé Writer based in Riyadh, working with profession...

You can work harder than everyone else, deliver real results, and still watch someone else get the promotion. Not because you lack skill. Not because you lack confidence. Because nobody ever taught you how to turn your hard work into the language leadership actually recognizes and rewards. Rosie Zilinskas spent 32 years in corporate America before she uncovered what most career coaches completely...

Most professionals are told to follow the rules, climb the ladder, and hope their hard work pays off. But that advice rarely holds up in today's workplace. You can do everything right and still feel stuck, burned out, or invisible. Julia Toothacre is a Career Coach and Strategist with over a decade of experience helping high-achieving mid-career professionals take control of their careers. She...

Terry Whalin has written more than 60 books and contributed to more than 50 magazines. He's spent decades working with hundreds of authors. And he's seen the same thing play out over and over: most authors have unrealistic expectations about what happens after their book comes out, and much of the publishing process is outside anything they can control. In this episode of The Honest Mic, T...

Kimberly Miller's father asked her one question near the end of his life: if God had sent you to the woman at the well, would you have gone? That question didn't come from ambition. It came from a charge that someone she loved handed her. And she chose to carry it. Today, Kimberly is the founder and primary Bible teacher of Woman at the Well Ministries. She's a minister, evangelist, Ch...

Diane Lampe had just gotten a promotion. She was doing great by every measure. And she walked into her backyard, stood there alone, and said out loud to nobody: 'What is wrong with me?' Successful by every measure and still knowing something was missing. That moment cracked something open in her. She couldn't sleep that night. She turned on the TV and there was Tony Robbins on an infom...

Theresa Evans spent years as an ICU nurse, witnessing death and dying on a regular basis. She considered it a privilege and an honor to be with someone when they died. And then her own mother chose a date with death after years of suffering at the hands of end-stage heart failure and COPD. November 15th. Her 80th birthday. That was the day. In this episode of The Honest Mic, Theresa talks about wh...

The moments that shape a life rarely arrive with fanfare. They show up quietly. In family conversations. Unexpected detours. Even in a woodshop, shaping a piece of maple. Chip Scholz describes himself simply as a man with a lathe, a pocketknife, and a few stories. Over the course of a long career in business and coaching, he's come to see that the small decisions accumulate over time, changing...

Being told you have a serious health condition can change the way you see your own body overnight. For Shelli Galvan, being told she had lupus brought fear of symptoms, fear of the future, and fear of what her own body might do next. But after seeking further answers, she discovered she had been misdiagnosed. What stayed with her was something deeper: the transformation in how she understood fear,...

Connie Davis spent 25 years in payments and fintech before walking away from corporate finance to sit with people whose experiences the financial system rarely accounts for: survivors of human trafficking, trauma, abuse, and violence. What she found changed the way she understood commerce. Behind financial distress, money wounds, and economic vulnerability were stories of human value that couldn't...

Magic Barclay knows what it means to fight for your life, and not just once. After surviving cancer, Lyme disease, a stroke, diabetes, a heart attack, and hypoxia, Magic eventually realized that surviving wasn’t the same as being truly well. Years of trauma, stress, and harmful relationships had taken a profound toll on both her body and her relationship with herself. But instead of accepting that...