A Category of One

Most of the career decisions we regret weren’t really decisions. They were shoulds. In this episode of A Category of One, I sat down with Meredith Masse, an executive and career coach for accomplished mid-career women, to talk about what it takes to stop shoulding on yourself and choose the career you actually want. Meredith’s turning point came on a muggy DC morning. She walked to the bus stop, w...

David Gambill spent years as a corporate aerospace engineer, including time at Boeing, moving to a new project every couple of years because he couldn’t stand doing the same thing twice. He didn’t want a career of slapping brackets on aircraft and waiting forty years for a retirement check. Today he holds a patent for an electric vertical takeoff aircraft design and runs his own firm, GNG Aero Con...

David Rush and I met in a breakout room during an online networking group, and the conversation flowed so easily we kept it going. On this episode of A Category of One, David, host of the Unleashed podcast and founder of The Morning Rush, shares what it has looked like to unleash himself and let his light shine, and how often it took someone else seeing it first. One of those mirrors came from som...

In this episode of A Category of One, I sat down with Bri Seeley, creator of Subconscious Success Optimization, who uses hypnosis to help entrepreneurs reprogram their subconscious for success. A mutual friend told us there was no world where we didn't know each other. She was right, and this conversation picked up right where our friendship started. Bri describes the subconscious as the operating...

In this episode of A Category of One, I sat down with Scott Parker, a leadership consultant and team building facilitator who uses improv and juggling to help people communicate better. Scott and I know each other from Steamboat Springs, and we hadn't talked in years. It came out early in the conversation that we both went to college in Buffalo. Scott's business is called Just Go For It, which is...

Liz Brown Morgan lost her mother, her marriage, and her job in the same six months. What she didn't lose was the instinct to keep moving. In this episode, Liz talks about the one-way flight to Athens that started nine months of travel across eight countries, the six weeks she spent in a sober co-living house outside Valencia, and what it took to feel like herself again after everything familiar wa...

Jayne Sanders spent years cycling through successful careers that never quite fit, until a Google search led her to scientific hand analysis and changed the direction of her life. She talks with Leslie about what this practice actually reveals, how it differs from palm reading, and why she believes fulfillment matters more than happiness. This conversation moves through the mechanics of the work i...

Jenn Adamson built a career that doesn't fit into a single job title. She's a registered nurse, an executive coach, a TEDx speaker, and an author, and on this episode of A Category of One, she explains what all of it actually has in common. Jenn spent years on the front lines of healthcare, including leading a team of 75 nurses through some of the hardest days of the pandemic. That experience shap...

Carey Overstreet spent years helping people with disabilities live fuller, independent lives before her body forced a different kind of education: a misdiagnosed thyroid condition, a medication reaction no doctor explained, and a realization that healing was hers to build. That search became her five pillars: mindset, macros, muscle, me, and sex. Carey walks through what preserves strength and ene...

Mariette Frey has moved 20 times in 24 years. She built a framework out of it, not because moving got easier, but because she kept relearning the same lessons. This conversation is about the difference between a move that solves something and a move that just relocates the problem. Mariette walks through her FRED framework (finances, robustness, ecosystem, dreams) and the question she asks every c...

Heather Roberts didn't set out to write a book. She started a Substack because she needed somewhere to put twenty years of lessons, and what came out was The Nurture Method, a framework built on something she noticed almost by accident: business and parenting run on the same clock. Infancy. School age. Adolescence. And eventually, the moment you have to decide whether to let go. This conversation...

In this episode, I sat down with Quinn "Coach Q" Harwood, a credentialed coach and author of Growth Time. This conversation started with a book about identity and ended up somewhere more personal, about what happens when the story you were building your life around stops working. Q talks openly about the year everything fell apart. A corporate layoff. A company that went under. A divorce. All in t...

In this episode of A Category of One, I sat down with Jimi Gibson, VP of Brand Communication at Thrive Internet Marketing Agency and author of Uninvisible. Jimi spent the first part of his career as a professional magician, performing at venues including the MGM Grand, before moving into digital marketing. That background shows up in everything he does now. We get into why personal visibility has...

In this episode of A Category of One, I sat down with Erin Berry Bliss, a relationship and intimacy coach and the creator of the Secure Love Soul Method. We started talking about emotional safety, and it turned into a much longer conversation about how we relate to ourselves first. Erin's work is body-based. She believes lasting change in relationship happens at the nervous system level, not just...

In this episode of A Category of One, I sat down with Elijah Evynn, who spends his days helping small and medium businesses build AI automations without losing the human parts of their work. This conversation started as a discussion about tools and quickly became about what AI is actually for and what it should never touch. Elijah has spent years managing large tech organizations, and now runs Gui...

Somewhere between childhood and retirement, play gets treated as something you're supposed to grow out of. The decades in the middle are for being productive and serious. Lara Galante doesn't buy that. In this episode of A Category of One, I sat down with Lara Galante, the founder of Find Your Inner Parakeet, where she runs creative workshops that help grown adults remember how to play. Her events...

In this episode of A Category of One, I sat down with Grace Secker, a somatic trauma therapist and nervous system coach who healed herself from years of chronic pain and fatigue before building the work she does now. We start with the nervous system, the part of you running in the background of every symptom and reaction, often saying no before your mind has caught up. Grace's view is that most ch...

Most marketing advice assumes you already have something exciting to sell. Shawn Teasley is a marketing and social media strategist and the founder of Social Tonic, and some of her most interesting projects are the ones nobody would call flashy. One of her clients sells energy efficient building products, the kind of thing that lives behind the drywall where no one ever sees it. No drone footage,...

In this episode I sat down with Vivian Butler, a licensed therapist turned event planner and founder of Vivian Butler Events. We started with how a counselor ends up running an events business, but it kept circling back to something bigger: what it actually takes to build a room where people feel safe enough to be themselves. Vivian's path didn't follow a plan. She moved through restaurants, socia...

I met Janne Robinson years before this podcast existed. Then, back when I joined the first cohort of her year-long program, Your Truth Is Your Medicine, I was rebuilding myself after a codependent marriage, and she was the first person who truly gave me permission to be who I am. Janne is a poet, author, facilitator, and keynote speaker, and she has built a business by refusing to narrow herself d...

In this episode of A Category of One, I sat down with Jessica Millhiser, the founder of J.Mills Consulting and an operations strategist who helps service-based entrepreneurs build businesses that are clear, organized, and intentional. Jessica's work sits at the intersection of structure and intuition, and that combination is rare. We talked about what it actually takes to build a business you can...

In this episode of A Category of One, I sat down with Kelly O'Connell, founder of the brand studio Kind & Funny, to talk about creativity, self-expression, and what it looks like to stay connected to the version of yourself that existed before the world started shaping you. Kelly is one of those people who walks into a room and gives everyone else permission to take up more space. She runs a b...

In this episode of A Category of One, I sat down with Paula Friedland, licensed counselor, certified life coach, actress, singer, and creator of Soul Speaks, a program she's been teaching in some form for nearly 20 years. Paula's work starts with public speaking but doesn't stay there. It opens into something most people don't expect: a practice of being fully yourself, with one person, in any roo...

Gabby Jockers is a boudoir photographer based in Colorado, but that description doesn't really cover it. What she actually does is help women figure out what's standing between them and feeling at home in their own bodies, and then create an experience built around that. Not around what a boudoir shoot is supposed to look like. Around what each person actually needs. This conversation goes a lot o...

Marie Mack showed up to one online networking event, and that's where Leslie met her. One time. The universe was paying attention. In this episode of A Category of One, Leslie sits down with Marie Mack, a business strategist, partnerships expert, and operations consultant who runs two complementary businesses entirely remotely. This conversation covers a lot of ground: how Marie went from blogging...