Your Favorite You

What happens when you step away from your everyday responsibilities, give yourself permission to focus on your own growth, and spend five days surrounded by women doing the same? Today, I'm bringing back one of my favorite episodes from 2025, featuring five of the incredible women who joined me for my very first retreat in Tulum. As I prepare to take another group of women to Tulum in 2027, I...

If you’ve been to therapy, read self-help books, or listened to podcasts (maybe even this one) and still find yourself saying yes when you mean no, staying quiet when you want to speak up, or overexplaining yourself, you don’t need more information. You need practice. Insight is not the hard part. You may already know what you want to change and understand what doing things differently looks like...

What have you written off as something you hate or just can’t do, even though you only try it in your most depleted window? Maybe it’s the difficult conversation you keep putting off until the end of a draining day or the exercise you attempt after work when you're exhausted. In this episode, we’re talking about how sometimes it’s not the task itself, but the timing, that keeps you stuck in t...

How bad does something have to get before the pain of dealing with it finally outweighs the pain of just living with it? I had to think about this question recently after spending hours taking care of a fruit fly infestation, to the point of doing full-on science experiments in my kitchen. In hindsight, it would have been easier to take care of the first two flies I saw days before it became a big...

Not every good decision can guarantee a good outcome, and the idea that it can is quietly torturing you over decisions using a measuring stick that was never fair to begin with. In this episode, we’re talking about a trap that’s easy to fall into: judging a decision by how it turns out in the future instead of judging it by what you actually knew and had available when you made it. An outcome is n...

You don’t need to spend hours sitting in silence to experience the benefits of mindfulness. In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Nirali Dubal, who shares how meditation helped her cultivate a deeper sense of peace in her life and how she now helps others do the same. You’ll hear how small moments of intentional attention can become part of your everyday life, from taking a breath before you enter a...

What if you could find the places where your personal energy is quietly leaking away? Just like a drafty window can go unnoticed because you’ve lived with it for years, emotional and energetic drains can become so familiar that they fade into the background. In this episode, we explore how doing an energy audit can help you identify the leaks in your own life. We’ll walk through five common energy...

It can be exhausting to try to make a decision about your own life when everyone around you has an opinion about what you should do instead. How do you trust yourself in the middle of all that noise? The opinions aren’t going to stop. Your family will keep having them, strangers will keep sharing them, and the internet will keep contradicting itself about the “right” answer. You can’t always turn...

Resentment. It’s a feeling that can be hard to admit to, especially when you’ve been taught to be ashamed of it, talk yourself out of it, or convince yourself that you shouldn’t feel it in the first place. But resentment is not a character flaw. It is not proof that you’re petty, ungrateful, or a bad friend, partner, or mom. Resentment is a messenger. It can show up uninvited to tell you something...

What can remodeling your home teach you about remodeling your life? More than you might think. As I’ve been remodeling my home, I’ve noticed all the ways the process mirrors the transformation of becoming your favorite version of yourself.  When you remodel your home—or your life—you get to choose the scope. You can make a small change or take it all the way back to the studs. You can uncover thin...

Have you ever thought of yourself as “the strong one” in your life? The one who is always available, always fine, and who always holds it together so nobody else has to.  It’s a job that no one applies for, but that most of you are working anyway with no pay, benefits, sick days, or end date on the contract. In this episode, we’re talking about what it looks like to retire from that role when it s...

I'm really fucking good at my job. And before you decide I’m an egomaniac, I want you to notice how uncomfortable that sentence may have just made you. I felt it too, that urge to soften it, qualify it, or follow it up with a joke so that nobody would think that I am getting too big for my britches. But here’s the thing: the work we do is not an accident. I spent more than two decades in medi...

Think about a younger version of you who had no idea what was coming next. What would you tell her? Not to fix her or warn her, but to let her know that she makes it and it’s better than she could imagine. I recently learned that someone I know will be attending my alma mater this fall and moving into the exact same dorm room I lived in as a freshman. It got me thinking about 18-year-old Melissa,...

What happens when you shift your focus from trying to make everyone else happy to finally listening to yourself? In this episode, I’m joined by one of my amazing clients, Katie, who graciously shares how coaching helped her learn to rock the boat and transform her relationships. When Katie started coaching with me in late 2024, her goals were to get to know herself better and figure out what she r...

I’m so excited to introduce you to today’s guest, whom I’ve known and admired for the past 25 years. I met Dr. Bonnie Pugh during residency, and we've been friends ever since. Bonnie is a pediatrician at Central Ohio Primary Care, where she also serves as president of the board of directors. I wanted to bring Bonnie on to talk about leadership and how she transitioned from just caring for pat...

I named this podcast Your Favorite You because I believe your favorite version of yourself already exists within you. She's not someone you have to build from scratch—she's someone you uncover one choice at a time. For this milestone episode, I’m talking about what your favorite you actually looks like in the quiet of an ordinary life. Because after 200 episodes, here’s what I know: Bein...

Feeling comfortable in your body can be challenging when so much of what you’ve learned is incomplete, inaccurate, or shaped by shame. That’s why I’m welcoming back Dr. Nina Deep to help deepen our understanding of women’s bodies and tackle questions about anatomy, the existence of the G-spot, self-pleasure, and the myths many of us have carried for decades. We explore real-life examples, but thro...

We spend an extraordinary amount of our lives preparing to live them: working toward the thing, achieving the next milestone, building toward a future version of ourselves and our circumstances that will finally feel like enough. We’re so focused on the arrival, but grief—real, irreversible, stopping-you-in-your-tracks grief—has a brutal and clarifying way of revealing that the moment we’ve been w...

We spend so much time talking about how to achieve success—how to work toward it, how to stay motivated, and how to push through the tough parts—but we don't talk nearly enough about what happens when success actually arrives. And on the flip side, what happens when you've been riding high and then things get hard again? Success can be just as destabilizing as struggle. And when you&apos...

What if you thought about boredom not as a problem you need to fix, but fertile ground from which insight, self-knowledge, and genuine rest can grow? Think about this: When you have an unexpected opening in your day—a canceled meeting, an hour with nothing scheduled, or a to-do list that's actually manageable for once—what does it feel like? For some of you, there is an exhale of "oh, th...

When was the last time you did something to take care of yourself and actually felt better after? Not just distracted or temporarily relieved, but genuinely, truly better. We have a cultural obsession with self-care. The idea is everywhere—on t-shirts, coffee mugs, and Instagram—yet so many of the things we call self-care are actually ways of numbing. Today I’m unpacking the difference between the...

My nice little life—morning walks, easy Saturdays, and time with the people I love—would not be possible if I were still seeking validation and gratification from things outside of myself. Today I’m talking about a book that helped me put that into perspective. In We Are the Luckiest , Laura McKowen writes about getting sober, but the book is not really about alcohol. It's about the ways we l...

Today, I’m doing something I’ve never done before on this podcast: I’m dropping you into the middle of one of our group coaching calls. We had about three weeks left in the current group container when this was recorded, and as we wind down, I offer coaching to anyone who’s having difficulty deciding whether they want to continue or if they feel complete for now. As I coached them through their de...

When you try to rest—genuine rest, not productive rest, strategic recovery, or resting to recharge—what do you hear in your head? Maybe your mind immediately starts firing back with thoughts like: you’re wasting time, other people are working right now, or you haven’t earned this . Those voices are not the truth. They are parts of you shaped by systems that were never designed with your well-being...

If you think back to all of your years of formal education, was the clitoris ever mentioned, let alone discussed or explained? For most of us, the answer is no. My guest today is here to talk about why that matters and what we can do to correct it. Dr. Nina Deep is an award-winning physician and a nationwide speaker who has built an entire mission around one radical idea: that women deserve to und...