Done Pretending

What if you've been using the Law of Attraction wrong this whole time — not because you weren't believing hard enough, but because you were focused on the wrong question? In this solo episode, Susan brings in fascinating new research from Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Srini Pillay and the Gan & Chen (2017) authenticity study to reframe everything you thought you knew about manifesting, iden...

If you've ever felt guilty for taking a walk while someone you love needed you — this episode is for you. This week on Done Pretending , I'm joined by Lani Almanza, wellness coach, author, and founder of Alakai Associates in Hawaii. Lani has spent decades helping caregivers, women, and midlife professionals rediscover themselves through simple, grounded self-care — not the bubble bath kind...

You did the math. You can afford to leave. So why does walking away from your career feel so terrifying? Because it was never really about the money. In this solo episode, Susan opens with the Tuesday she cried in her car — the day she got everything she'd asked for and realized she had no idea who she was. From there she names the four fears every high-achieving woman over 50 faces when she f...

Have you ever ghosted yourself ? In this powerful episode of Done Pretending , host Susan Houston sits down with Dr. Sarah Jefferis — poet, PhD, yoga instructor, and writing coach — for a conversation that will stop you mid-scroll and make you rethink everything about relationships, authenticity, and self-abandonment. Sarah shares why she believes writing is a full body sport , how yoga unlocks me...

After 43 years of marriage, life as she knew it disappeared in just 24 hours. Most people would tell you to get back to normal, to push through, to stay productive. Bridget Williams-Frazier will tell you that's exactly how you make it worse. In this conversation, she walks us through the moment she cried out to God in a church and felt fire move through her body. She talks about the danger of rush...

Your ego isn't trying to ruin your life. It's trying to save it. But somewhere along the way, it started protecting you from the wrong things: growth, risk, visibility, and the vulnerability required to become who you're meant to be. In this conversation, Allison Manzi, a certified Cognitive Behavioral Specialist and Polyvagal Therapy Practitioner, breaks down the biology behind self-sabotage, the...

There's a text message women send late at night when everyone else is asleep. It usually starts with "I should feel fine, but I don't." The promotion came through. The kids are launched. The marriage is stable. So why does it feel like nothing? I call it what it is: not a breakdown, but a breakthrough. Midlife doesn't take things away from you. It asks you to stop pretending that the things that w...

Amanda Wais thought she had it figured out. Marriage, motherhood, a career as a travel writer. Then her son was born with Down syndrome, and the doctor's words landed like a crack in the foundation of everything she'd been performing. What followed wasn't inspiration. It was survival, then reckoning, then something closer to freedom. This conversation goes to the places most people edit out. The d...

Every time you stay silent to keep the peace, you teach people how to treat you. And somewhere along the way, between being a good wife, a devoted mother, and a reliable employee, you stopped recognizing yourself in the mirror. Irina Shehovsov, founder of Reclaim Your Life and author of “The Gift Inside,” knows this pattern intimately. She's built her work around helping women who've spent years m...

A man-child in a coffee shop told me I was past my prime for launching a podcast. He cited "data" about brain elasticity and suggested I move fast before it's too late. I didn't slap him. But I didn't shrink either. This episode is for every woman who has been handed someone else's ceiling and told it was her floor. I unpack the myth of decline, the science of crystallized intelligence, and the au...

Sally Morgan couldn't make a sound in her recurring childhood nightmare. She screamed and screamed inside, but no voice came out. Years later, as an award-winning singer-songwriter and voice coach, she discovered that dream was a map to something most of us are still living: the suppression of our truest, brightest selves. This conversation isn't about finding your voice in the motivationa...

After years of studying how people make and fail to make life-changing decisions, I discovered something startling: self-doubt isn't a personality trait or evidence of your capabilities, but a governance problem. There's a meeting happening inside your head right now, and you've never questioned who's running it. When I walked away from a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with Lori Greiner (before Sh...

Kristina Campos thought she was doing everything right as a mother and educator until her divorce forced her into her closet to cry and confront a devastating truth: she had completely disappeared. After 20 years of teaching and raising four kids, she couldn't even answer what she wanted for dinner without filtering it through everyone else's needs. The wake-up call led her to quit her teaching ca...

Jan Raeder returns with a conversation that will shift how you see every setback in your life. When a trusted advisor's bad counsel nearly cost her business $289,000, Jan discovered something profound: failure isn't the opposite of success, but data waiting to be decoded. This isn't about positive thinking your way through hard times, but the raw truth that your formative years planted limiting be...

Jan Raeder spent three decades teaching martial arts before discovering that most people have self-care completely backwards. The woman who calls herself the "Self-Care Sensei" isn't talking about wine nights and bubble baths; she's talking about the kind of deep work that makes you show up better everywhere you go. After losing herself for nearly a decade during perimenopause, Jan dove into posit...

Perfectionism has become the most socially rewarded dysfunction in business culture. We brag about it in job interviews, managers secretly reward it, and leaders call it "higher standards." But I cut through the lie we've been sold: perfectionism is fear dressed up to look like success and it kills productivity.  In this episode, I reveal why companies like Amazon built their leadership principles...

Parents think they're protecting their children by avoiding difficult conversations about sexuality and growing up. But this silence creates the perfect breeding ground for shame and leaves kids vulnerable to the very dangers parents fear most. Jennifer Elledge has spent 20 years helping families break through the awkwardness and fear that keeps parents from having the conversations their children...

After 24 years with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Tammy Ward knows the cost of silence. She's responded to tragic calls, lost colleagues to suicide, and witnessed firsthand how "I'm fine" has become society's most dangerous lie. Now she's on a mission to replace superficial pleasantries with what she calls "brave conversations." In a world where two people can sit at dinner both staring at th...

There's a particular kind of guilt that follows caregivers around. It doesn't announce itself loudly, but hums in the background, showing up every time you sit down for five minutes because you think you should be doing more. Most caregivers aren't struggling because they don't care enough, but rather they're struggling because they care so much in a situation that gives them very little room to b...

Lucy Dutton used to hide at the back of photographs and forgot her own name the first time she spoke on stage. Today, she's a certified peak performance coach helping entrepreneurs align mindset, purpose, and strategy for success with ease and fulfillment. This conversation reveals the hidden cost of perfectionism, why vulnerability creates deeper connection than polished presentations, and how th...

Tom Pizio thought he had it all figured out. Four decades in business, a 5x sales increase in an industry that grows at 3%, director-level success. Then the company sold, his health crashed, and he found himself with tubes coming in and out of his body, jobless, asking one simple question: what's next? The external validation was there, but the foundation wasn't. What followed was a journey from c...

We're all desperate to be seen and heard, but most of us are going about it completely wrong. We talk louder, explain more, polish our message, and somehow still don't land. What if the problem isn't that people aren't listening, but that we're speaking from the wrong place entirely? In this episode, I explore the uncomfortable truth about why performing never gets us the connection we crave, and...

What happens when a six-year-old in a pink dress gets told "it's not nice to show off"? For most of us, we learn to shrink. We perform instead of express. We seek approval instead of connection. Faith Rumer, Bestselling Author and Voice Coach to Academy Award winners and global CEOs, reveals why we're living in an epidemic of people not feeling truly seen and heard. She breaks down the science of...

What happens when a struggling artist discovers her true calling isn't in selling her work, but in using her lived experience to help others heal? Sage Homan-Muise shares her powerful journey from navigating invisible disability as a child to becoming a mental health peer support specialist in Portland, Oregon. In this deeply personal conversation, Sage opens up about learning to self-advocate thr...

Family dynamics have a way of following us into adulthood, especially when childhood pressure, unspoken rules, and complicated relationships are part of the story. I open up a real conversation about how those early experiences shape our identity, our choices, and who we trust when things get hard. We talk about why having the right support system is often the difference between staying stuck and...