Leadership With a Twist

Your inbox is full of AI-written pitches that open with "I know all about you" and follow up with "just in case you didn't see my last three messages." Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler have had enough. In this episode of Leadership with a Twist, they argue that human kindness is the competitive advantage most businesses are overlooking right now. This one gets personal. Barbara talks about...

Do you know your birth time, and have you ever looked up what was rising on the horizon when you arrived? In this episode, Barbara continues sharing the language of astrology through the element of Fire and its three signs: Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius. We begin by examining the qualities these signs share as expressions of the Fire element, exploring their common expressive approach to life. From...

Setting the Table: Authentic Branding, Community, and the Story Behind Your Business with Mieko Ozeki Barbara Schindler sits down with fellow Vermonter Mieko Ozeki, founder of Radiance Studios LLC and co-founder of Vermont Womenpreneurs. They talk about what it takes to build a business, and a community, that people trust. Mieko's business began while she was still at UVM's Office of Sustainabilit...

In this episode Barbara introduces the language of Astrology beginning with the 12 Zodiac Signs. The signs are grouped within the four elements (Fire, Earth, Air and Water) to understand the characteristics of influence and expression of the signs. The modalities of each sign indicates the natural way of expressing their energy, taking action and handling change. The signs in their element groups...

Andie Asacker was laid off in December 2020, and by the day she registered her LLC she already had clients. On this episode of Leadership With a Twist, Barbara Schindler talks with Andie, digital strategist and founder of Whirlybird, a one-woman marketing agency in the heart of Vermont, about what happens when a business grows faster than the plan behind it. Andie spent nearly 15 years in sales an...

Your Birth Chart Isn't Good or Bad (It's Just You) Every birth chart is built on the same structure. In this episode, Barbara Schindler breaks down the foundation every astrologer works from, whether they lean into moon cycles, outer planet transits, or classic chart reading: the 12 zodiac signs, the inner planets, the outer planets, and the 12 houses of the wheel. Barbara draws the line between t...

Barbara Schindler opens Astro Vibes with the question she comes back to again and again: where does the sky begin? We stand rooted on the ground and still live among the stars, and that tension is the whole point of this podcast. Barbara introduces the idea of the birth chart as an inner self map, a blueprint drawn from the exact moment you were born, and explains why understanding it builds real...

Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler open this conversation with an idea that sounds backwards until you sit with it. Real authority, the kind that actually builds team performance, comes from following your team instead of running ahead of them. When you hold decision-making power on a project, in a department, or across an entire company, the instinct to speak first and set direction fir...

Barbara sits down with Chanie Wilschanski, a mom of four, leadership advisor, and founder of Schools of Excellence. Chanie works with school owners and organizational leaders who have built genuinely successful businesses and still find themselves carrying an amount of invisible responsibility that never shows up on a balance sheet. Her book, This Can't Be Normal, gets its title from a question sh...

Barbara sits down with Pam Langord, founder of Simply Magic Marketing and a fractional COO who spent over 30 years in marketing and operations, including years inside one of the fastest-growing online coaching companies in the country. That experience showed her exactly what scaling without heart does to real client relationships, and in 2023 she built Simply Magic Marketing to prove the opposite...

Every entrepreneurial business starts as one thing: the founder's brain and the business are fused together. Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler open this episode by naming the moment that fusion breaks apart. As a company matures, the business develops its own identity, its own reputation, its own momentum in the marketplace, separate from the person who built it. That separation isn't a prob...

For decades the model was simple. One brilliant leader sits at the top, holds every answer, and the team waits for direction. Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler open this episode by naming exactly why that model breaks down in a business moving at today's pace. When change outruns what one person can track in their own head, authority has to move too, out into the team. Barbara shares a coach...

Heather McGonigal opens this episode by naming energy as a resource with real limits, and Barbara Schindler builds out the framing they use at Leadership With a Twist: mindset, intention, and self-awareness. The conversation grew out of coaching a client returning to work after maternity leave, someone who suddenly had to get specific about where her hours and attention were going, work versus fam...

Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler open this episode from opposite coasts, one in a Vermont rainstorm, one in a California heat wave, and use the weather as an entry point into something bigger. Disruption is the current condition of business and life, not a phase to wait out. AI is only one piece of it. The political climate, the economy, your family, your role, your company's response to ma...

Overwhelm rarely announces itself. It creeps in through the meeting that keeps repeating the same way, the fix that keeps resurfacing under a new name, the sense that you're pulling something off again without knowing how many more times you can pull it off. In this episode, Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler name what they're seeing across their coaching work right now: leaders and teams sus...

AI can gather your data and organize your options in seconds. It cannot tell you when something feels off. Coach Heather and Coach Barbara sit down for a conversation about inner wisdom, the intuition and gut instinct that partners with strategy and data , and why it belongs in your leadership decisions. They unpack why entrepreneurial teams build unsustainable habits under pressure, how a five-mi...

Being nice is quietly weakening your leadership. In this episode, Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler name a pattern they see constantly in coaching: leaders who soften their message, pull back after one rejection, or take on responsibility for how someone else feels about a hard decision. Heather and Barbara unpack the difference between courageous confidence and self-protection, why your job...

Your team is not an infinite resource. Neither are you. In this episode of Leadership With a Twist, Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler dig into the human element of leadership, the people, the time, and the knowledge that actually get the work done. They name why “this isn’t sustainable” has become background noise in so many businesses instead of a call to action, and what happens when teams...

Is your team holding decisions for you every time you step away? You come back from a day off and find a pile of 97%-done work just waiting on your sign-off. The frustration is real. And it is not a team failure. It is a development moment. In this episode of Leadership With a Twist, Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler break down exactly what is happening when a capable, well-developed team st...

Most leaders aren't failing because they lack skill or effort. They're failing to lead themselves first. In this episode of Leadership with a Twist, Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler dig into the difference between moving through your week with intention versus reacting to whatever lands in front of you. This conversation is for high performers who are getting results but feel like they're r...

Change is the one constant in life — but that doesn't make it easy. In this episode of Leadership With a Twist, hosts Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler dig into why change feels so hard, how transitions actually work, and what leaders and professionals can do to navigate them with more clarity and confidence. Drawing on William Bridges' classic book Transitions: Making Sense of Life Changes,...

Proactive communication builds trust by making sure people always know they'll be informed when it matters. Are you waiting to be asked — or are you leading the conversation? In this episode of Leadership With a Twist, Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler dig into one of the most powerful and often overlooked leadership communication skills: proactive communication. If your boss is coming to yo...

What is your leadership intention right now—and does your team actually experience it? Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler discuss how intention helps entrepreneurial leaders move beyond task-focused “doing” and reconnect to bigger business outcomes, relationships, and leadership reputation. They invite you to ask, “What am I really going for?” and use that intention as an anchor for how you s...

What's one responsibility you're currently holding that, if you're honest, probably belongs to someone else? Are you a high-performing entrepreneur or business leader who always steps in, fills the gaps, and gets it done — even when it means taking on more than your share? In this episode of Leadership With a Twist, hosts Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler unpack the hidden cost of over-respo...

What does it actually mean to lead the whole person — and why does it matter more than ever right now? In this episode of Leadership with a Twist, Heather McGonigal and Barbara Schindler dive deep into one of the most important — and most overlooked — principles of effective leadership: caring for the whole human being in your organization, not just the role they fill. You will hear why the outdat...