FINE is a 4-Letter Word

For most of his adult life, Adrian Hale Bishop lived with a quiet, constant question: what happens if people find out? He kept the parts of his life carefully compartmentalized, learned what not to say, and became very, very presentable. For a long time, he thought that was wisdom. Then, just as a business he had spent 22 years building was about to enter a new era, a sudden health crisis nearly k...

Ryan Lavarnway spent ten seasons in Major League Baseball and was called up and sent back down to the minors 26 times over 12 years. He was the slowest player on his high school team, never started a single varsity game at his natural position, and read in old newspaper clippings that every coach he ever had called him both the hardest worker they had seen and an unlikely success. At 17, desperate...

In 1988, Diana Keough came home for Christmas for the first time in three years. She was married, she had a six-month-old baby, and she was determined to finally build the kind of relationship with her mother she had watched her friends enjoy. Within weeks, her family learned that her father, a trial attorney and pillar of a fundamentalist Baptist community, had AIDS and had been living a double l...

On September 6, 1997, the day of Princess Diana's funeral, Jobert Abueva couldn't get out of bed. He was in a Hong Kong hotel room, paralyzed for the better part of 48 hours, unable to touch the club sandwich or hot tea he'd ordered, crying from exhaustion, loneliness, and homesickness. It was, he says, the lowest point of a career that from the outside looked like nothing but success. For most of...

John Azar fled Syria at 16 in the middle of a civil war, arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina not speaking a word of English, and eventually built his way to an MBA in finance and a career in commercial real estate. Then came 2008. His first company collapsed with no clients, no money, and a brand new baby at home. He rebuilt, more than once. Along the way, his own therapist gave him a label he st...

How many things in your life are you currently trying to fix that aren't even yours to fix? An employee who isn't performing the way you want. A team member who keeps making the same mistake. A business problem you've been solving alone for years. A family member whose choices frustrate you. Your own tendency to overwork, overthink, and over-achieve. Recording solo this week from Ideas Fest, a fes...

Shane Lukas built his career on the belief that transparency, done right, protects you. He had spoken about his history in sex work advocacy at national and international conferences for years, and when a highly awarded, LGBTQ-friendly US company hired him, he did what he always did: he was upfront about who he was and where he'd come from. The same day, someone in the sales department Googled his...

Henry Tolbert was sitting at a fire pit behind a rental house, grilling hot dogs for his wife and four daughters because the insurance money for their flooded home was running out, when he finally said out loud what he had been avoiding for months: this isn't fine. A few years earlier, Henry had been leading a small church that grew from 40 people to nearly 200, and had been named bishop over 65 c...

Content Note: This episode includes a brief, non-graphic reference to a personal crisis involving suicidal thoughts. Jim Morris grew up believing giving was the whole equation. His father taught him to give the shirt off his back to anyone who needed it, and it showed up everywhere in his childhood, right down to the night his father pulled a stranger from a burning car outside their home. What Ji...

Suneet Bhatt spent 12 years in private equity and venture-backed businesses, and every job followed the same arc: new and exciting at first, then, faster each time, something felt off, and he went looking for the next one. He never noticed he was the common denominator. It took his wife, after his last business exit, to name what he couldn't see in himself: his happiness at work was getting shorte...

Replaced by Three Employees and Called It a Badge of Honor with Amanda Van Der Heiden Amanda Van Der Heiden could trot on a horse before she could walk. When she fell into a sandpit at age two, her parents put her right back on before she was done crying — no discussion, no choice. That lesson became the operating principle for the rest of her life, including a corporate career that hit the exact...

Content Note: This episode includes discussion of childhood abuse, institutional trauma, and a reference to suicidal ideation, drawn from Cyndy's own published memoirs. Cyndy Etler was 13 when she chose foster care over going home. A month at a Bridgeport youth shelter gave her the first real choices of her life. Then her mother enrolled her in Straight Incorporated, a program later described by t...

Scott Doggett spent 30 years in corporate America, first running hotel and resort operations, then leading learning and development teams up to vice president. He was, by every external measure, successful. Then came his first layoff at the end of 2023, six months of searching that led nowhere, and a panic attack on the exact anniversary of the day he was let go. That night he prayed and, for the...

Content Note: This episode includes discussion of childhood abuse, foster care, and homelessness. Rob Scheer was thrown out at 18 with a trash bag. He spent his senior year of high school homeless, sleeping in the bathroom of the taco restaurant where he worked and on library beanbag chairs after closing. He joined the Navy to have somewhere to go, and was medically discharged after years of child...

Jodi Scott fell off her bike. That's how Green Goo started. Riding the same Texas road she rode every day, her laces caught in the spokes, and she looked up at an overgrown driveway leading to a white Southern colonial estate she'd somehow never noticed before. The next day, a for sale sign appeared. Her realtor grandmother told her she'd never qualify for the loan and that no one goes to Kyle, Te...

What do you do when you get offered the top job in your industry and you turn it down anyway? Will Steel did exactly that. He grew up in rural Yorkshire, delivering milk at the age of three alongside his mother, who ran the family's milk round for 40 years just to cover the grocery bill. He worked for a stonemason from age 12 to 16, digging graves and mending roofs. He talked his way into an engin...

Candice Van Dertholen did not arrive at her work in energy healing by reading about it. She lived through it. In this episode of Fine is a 4-Letter Word, host Lori Saitz sits down with energy practitioner Candice Van Dertholen for an unflinching conversation about single parenthood at 22, a Texas maximum security prison career she stumbled into out of financial desperation, an abusive marriage tha...

Everte Farnell spent seventeen years married to a partner he now believes had borderline personality disorder, enduring verbal, emotional, and eventually physical abuse before everything came to a head in his own kitchen. In this conversation, he opens up about why men rarely report abuse, what changed the night his daughter stepped in, and how he rebuilt his health, his confidence, and his life f...

You're not failing because of lack of skill or effort. You're failing because of patterns you picked up before you were old enough to choose them. Dr. Kevin Mays, leadership coach and author of Lead Yourself First, built a career helping executives see that the behaviors driving their success are often the exact same ones quietly sabotaging what they're trying to build. What You'll Learn Why child...

Scott Lackey grew up as a free-range kid roaming the woods and building forts, convinced he had all the time in the world. Then three questions from three people in the span of two weeks turned everything upside down. What followed was a winding path through the military, a failed invention, a Ponzi scheme, and a long list of promises he kept breaking to himself — until one sleepless night during...

Raised in a household steeped in integrity, respect, and love, Dr. Andrena Phillips credits her upbringing and the strong leadership modeled by her Marine father and telephone company manager mother for shaping her approach to life. Those early foundations became the fuel for a lifetime of showing up authentically, keeping her word, and encouraging others to live by values that go farther than any...

From a childhood shaped by the loss of her father and the blending of deeply religious family values, Kym Coco developed an early appreciation for spirituality as a lived sense of connection and empowerment. Her journey began with the awareness that we are spiritual beings within physical bodies, a notion both comforting and inspiring when navigating life’s difficult moments. As Kym grew older, es...

What if everything you’ve gone through in life — the chaos, the loss, the addiction, the grief — was the exact preparation you needed to save someone else's life? Dan Flanagan grew up surrounded by strong values of integrity, hard work, and loyalty, anchored in the rhythm of small-town Ohio life and Catholic faith. His childhood had a kind of Norman Rockwell quality to it — a baseball field in the...

Welcome to the celebration of five years of fine is a four letter word. I'm your host, Lori Saitz, and man, what a ride it has been. Five years. I don't know that I could have said five years ago that I would expect to be still doing this show five years later. mean, man, that's like another lifetime ago. Think of everything that's happened in your life in the past five years. I mean, I had differ...

What would you do if your business partner, the woman who recruited you, trained you, and believed in you before you believed in yourself, didn't come home from vacation? That's exactly what happened to Nicole Milone, wealth advisor and founder of Solaris Strategic Wealth. Raised as the oldest of three in an entrepreneurial family, Nicole Milone internalized the values of compassion, curiosity, an...