The TrailblazeHers

Dr. Brittany McGeehan trained as a pediatric neuropsychologist before deciding kids were the harder audience. Now she works exclusively with high-achieving women, guiding them through nervous system regulation, identity work and the patterns they've mistaken for personality. Brittany starts with the body and what to actually do when you're wired, flatlined, or holding rage you haven't named. From...

Kaitlyn Carlson built more than 300 financial plans at UBS and advised a private wealth team looking after over $600 million. Not one of her clients was a self-made woman. The industry that trained her also harassed her, twice, until she started to wonder whether success in private wealth might cost her her safety. So she left, and built the firm she couldn't find. Kaitlyn is now founder and CEO o...

Johanna Voss is a fractional COO and operations strategist with 15+ years of building businesses from the inside out. She works with female founders who've already made something great and are ready to stop running it like a one-woman show. She helps them turn big visions into the systems, teams and operations that let a business run without the founder approving every last thing. Her own start wa...

Melanie Spring spent 25 years as a brand strategist and speaker trainer, helping people show up as themselves on stage and in business. Now she's in what she calls The Reclamation. She’s consciously uncoupling, dissolving her business, going nomadic, and stepping into a new identity as a Medicine Muse and author. She finally decided to build a life around what she wants. This conversation goes to...

Most founders think they've completed the values piece. They ran the exercises, they stared at words and picked out the ones that spoke to them and put them on the wall. Brittany and Disha would argue that that's where the real work should begin. In this episode, the two podcast hosts and co-founders of The TrailblazeHers get into what it takes to build a values-led business, starting with this: d...

Lauren Chiren left a high-flying financial services career convinced she had early-onset dementia, her diagnosis was premature menopause at 37. This experience became the foundation for a global movement. Now CEO of Women of a Certain Stage and menopause strategist to Amazon, Nike and Mercedes F1, Lauren has trained practitioners in 36 countries and advised over 400 of the world's top employers. S...

Jackie Kuiper is a lawyer, yogi and self-described introvert who co-founded The Founders Office after spending years watching founders make the same avoidable mistake: building something valuable, then discovering too late that it couldn't sell without them. In this conversation, we explore why 80% of businesses never transfer, what it really means when a founder is the business and how de-risking...

Tina Forsyth coined the term "Online Business Manager" with a friend in 2003 because no existing title fit what she did. Six years later, she built a certification programme around it and one week before this recording, she officially exited that business. It comes 17 years after the first cohort and with minimal fuss and the honest belief that her community probably won’t even notice she’s gone....

Christine Kloser is the founder of Seshat Press, a publishing company she has led for over 22 years and an intuitive facilitator for female leaders. The story she tells in this conversation is one she has rarely shared publicly: the 19 years she spent running her business while living with debilitating chronic pain that no conventional or alternative treatment could touch. Christine traces the ori...

Melissa Sue Methven is a registered dental hygienist, breathwork facilitator, author, and speaker. After 17 years in the dental profession and after losing her husband, a dentist, to suicide in 2022, she channelled her understanding of nervous system science into a mission to change how healthcare providers approach their own wellbeing. This conversation covers the cost of high-pressure clinical w...

Rebecca Harding has spent 25 years in rooms where most people are still waiting to be invited in. She left a prestigious corporate career at 30 (against everyone's advice) built Salt Whistle from the ground up and went on to advise organisations including Deloitte, PwC, BP, and Shell on how to communicate and win. She did all of it by learning, slowly and not always easily, to stop waiting for per...

Dr Kim Dang's early drive was built on rage not passion. The rage of feeling unseen, undervalued, and determined to prove everyone wrong. That fuel carried her through a dual degree in mathematics and film studies at the University of Zurich, a PhD in mathematics, and a professorship at Yale. Then it broke her. What followed is one of the most honest accounts of reinvention you'll hear. Kim walked...

Marcia Martin's childhood was marked by chaos—an alcoholic father, domestic violence, and a home where survival meant excelling elsewhere. That early trauma became the foundation for something extraordinary: a five-decade journey at the forefront of human transformation that would help build what we now know as the $48 billion self-help industry. From her early mentorship with a mystical aunt to c...

Melissa Bernstein was born with what she calls "dark existential angst" and spent years channeling that darkness into more darkness. Then she discovered something that changed everything: she could choose to channel that same energy into light. As co-founder of Melissa & Doug, she built a billion-dollar toy empire not by overcoming her struggles, but by transforming them into purpose. In this...

Joan Brothers built a global real estate empire by refusing the safety of corporate life, but her story reveals a counterintuitive truth about high performance: steady state isn’t safe, it’s actually where things start to stagnate. Ironically, the moment you feel most comfortable in your success is often the moment you need to make your boldest move. From dreaming of escaping to Asia in her early...

Kirsty Tait thought she was building a business plan when she accidentally took too much acid and experienced what she calls “the biggest awakening” of her life. Not exactly the strategic planning method most founders recommend, but sometimes clarity shows up in unexpected ways. What followed wasn’t a glamorous transformation story, but five years of navigating the messy middle between who she use...

Most founders think their next breakthrough comes from better strategy or more capital. Chelsea Myers has spent years in the rooms where $5M–100M decisions get made, and she’s discovered something far less flashy but far more powerful: the founder’s internal state quietly determines everything: valuation, culture, scalability, long before investors can articulate why something feels “off” or unden...

Success used to look like being booked out for months, rocking the highest heels, and stacking up impressive titles. But then you hit those milestones, and surprise, they’re stealing your peace instead of adding to your life. We’re lifting the veil on the success markers we’ve ditched and the ones that actually make life sweeter now. From dropping the "I’m so busy" badge of honor to choosing cozy...

Jené Luciani Sena has spent 25 years as "The Bra Expert," but her journey reveals something far more complex than sizing charts and underwire. From covering 9/11 as a news reporter to accidentally discovering her life's calling through a magazine assignment, she's learned that it's never really about the bra. It's about the deeper stories women carry but rarely voice. In this raw conversation, Jen...

Jasmine Chambers had built what looked like a faithful life: leadership roles, four children, community respect. But beneath the surface, she was dreaming of disappearing. Raised in a highly-controlled religious environment that would later be classified as a cult, Jasmine had learned to silence her inner voice and follow external authority. Until the night she and her husband loaded their four ch...

What happens when the very traits that make you a successful entrepreneur- pushing through, managing crisis, never stopping- become the barriers to your own healing? Janelle Bruland built a multi-state company with over 500 employees while navigating abandonment, single motherhood, and undiagnosed PTSD. For years, she thought she had moved past her trauma, until a routine flight triggered a comple...

What happens when the woman who holds everything together finally admits she's running on empty? In this raw conversation, Disha reveals the hidden cost of being the "responsible one" and why so many ambitious women think there's something wrong with them for wanting more. Rather than focusing on productivity hacks or time management tips, this conversation goes deeper into a question many high-ac...

Have you ever felt like you’re carrying too much, dreaming too big, or just trying to do it all at once? Today, we get real about what it actually takes to show up as a high-achieving woman while juggling motherhood, business, and all the invisible load that no one talks about. We share the messy moments, the lessons about saying no, and why you don’t have to shrink to fit someone else’s expectati...

Sometimes being a high-achieving woman feels like running a marathon alone while everyone else seems to have a map you don’t. We’re talking about why finding your people and the right community can completely change the game. In this episode, we share what it’s like to navigate ambition, connection, and the quiet pressure to conform, and how that can leave even successful women feeling isolated. B...

Success looks polished from the outside, but behind it many high-achieving women are running on fumes, juggling ambition, expectations, and quiet burnout. In this origin episode, we share why The TrailBlazeHers exists and what listeners will actually gain from being here. We talk honestly about the pressure to hold it all together while building meaningful businesses and full lives. This relaunch...