The Courage Coalition

There comes a moment in life when the whisper becomes too loud to ignore. It isn't always a crisis. Sometimes your life is beautiful. The marriage is good. The business is thriving. The kids are growing. And yet, somewhere beneath the titles, responsibilities, and identities you've carried so faithfully, there is a quiet knowing that says, there is more. More truth. More joy. More of you...

This episode left me thinking about something I have wrestled with for years: the answer to foster care is not simply more homes. The answer is better support, better training, and a system that truly prioritizes the healing and stability of the children it was designed to protect. In my conversation with foster mom Miranda Green, we talked about the realities that so few people see the heartbreak...

In today's fast-paced world, many people find themselves overwhelmed by their finances, often feeling restricted by the idea of budgeting. But what if I told you that budgeting is not about limitations, but rather a pathway to freedom? In this post, we will explore how gaining clarity in your financial situation can empower you to make informed decisions and live a life aligned with your valu...

There are moments in life that don't make sense when we're living them. Seasons of pain. Seasons of striving. Seasons where we are desperately trying to prove our worth, earn our place, or understand why our hearts keep pulling us toward something we can't fully explain. Looking back, though, I've begun to see that life isn't random. The pieces were always forming a pictur...

This episode isn't just about foster care. It's about grief. It's about identity. It's about what happens when a child loses not only their home, but their sense of safety, belonging, and sometimes even themselves. Solange Carlson's story is one that stayed with me long after we stopped recording. As a child, she was removed from her home and placed into a world she didn&a...

There is something powerful that happens when we stop looking at relationships as something we “have” and begin looking at them as something we actively choose, nurture, and participate in every single day. In this episode of The Courage Coalition, I sat down with relationship coach and TEDx speaker Melissa Nanavati to have one of those conversations I believe we need to be having more often. Not...

My heart was so full recording this episode of The Courage Coalition with my dear friend Judy Martin and when I say dear friend, I mean lifeline. Judy was our certifier when Chad and I became foster parents, but she was so much more than a checkbox on a system form. She’s also an adoptee, an adoptive mom, and she’s spent years inside the foster care system as a caseworker and certifier. And when y...

We spend so much of our lives chasing the checklist. Performing. Achieving. Becoming who we think we’re supposed to be so we can finally feel accepted. But what if the real question was never “What do you do?” What if the real question has always been “Who are you?” Because from the moment we take our first breath, we are taught—subtly and loudly—that love, safety, and belonging are earned through...

Some conversations do more than inform us, they remind us that healing rarely looks the way we expect it to. My conversation with Heather Gibson was one of those. What struck me most was not just that we share the foster and adoptive journey, but that her story reveals something so many people miss: behind foster care is trauma, and behind trauma is often a desperate need for connection, safety, a...

There are over 400,000 children in foster care in the United States right nowand if we’re honest, most of us don’t feel that number… because we’ve learned not to. We’ve learned how to look past it, how to believe it’s too big, too broken, too far removed from our own lives to matter. But here’s the truth: these are not statistics. These are children, children who have been moved, uprooted, and res...

There’s a moment, if you’re willing to sit in it, where you realize this was never just about money. It was never just about the numbers, the accounts, or the strategy. It was about safety. It was about what you were taught, what you witnessed, and the quiet beliefs you built along the way about what you are allowed to have. For so many of us, growing money feels overwhelming not because we aren’t...

There are some conversations that remind you why courage matters so much, and this one with Diana Gleason was exactly that. What struck me most was not just the success she has built a thriving remote bookkeeping firm with a powerful team and strong revenue but the path she took to get there. She did not begin in accounting. She began as a dancer. A creative. A woman who knew what it meant to be t...

The word budget has been misunderstood for far too long. For most people, it immediately brings up feelings of restriction what do I have to give up, what do I have to go without, what does this say about me? But what if we flipped that entirely? What if a budget wasn’t about limitation, but about direction? Because when your money has no job, it creates anxiety. It leaves you reacting instead of...

We spend so much time judging how we spend money that we rarely stop to ask a deeper, more honest question: what is my money actually trying to tell me? Because spending isn’t failure—it’s evidence. Every purchase holds a mirror up to something beneath the surface. A need, a belief, a fear, a desire to belong, a moment of survival. And when we rush to label it as “bad,” we miss the opportunity to...

What if the version of wealth you’ve been chasing was never actually yours to begin with?    Most of us were handed a definition early on success looks like achievement, accumulation, recognition. We were shown the path and told that if we followed it closely enough, we would arrive at happiness and security. But very few of us were ever asked the deeper question: Does this definition belong to me...

This episode was one of those reminders that you don’t have to be the loudest voice in the room to make an impact you just have to keep showing up as yourself. I invited Erica Goode on after reading a newsletter that stopped me in my tracks, because she called herself “the 15-hour accountant.” And I thought, wait… what? In a world that worships hustle, long hours, and shiny accolades, Erica’s mess...

Most of us are living inside beliefs we never consciously chose. We inherited them. We absorbed them. We repeated them so many times they started to feel like truth. And when it comes to money, those beliefs don’t just sit quietly in the background—they shape everything. How you earn, how you spend, what you believe is possible for you. But here’s the truth we don’t talk about enough: beliefs are...

There’s something I want you to really sit with: you don’t have a money problem—you have a money story. And that story didn’t start when you opened your first bank account or got your first paycheck. It started much earlier, in the quiet moments you didn’t even realize were teaching you. The tone in your parents’ voices at the checkout line. The silence around bills. The stress, the pride, the ten...

People don’t avoid their money because they don’t care. They avoid it because it hurts. Somewhere along the way, money stopped being just numbers and started becoming identity. It became tied to your worth, your belonging, your safety, your enoughness. So when you struggle, it doesn’t feel like a math problem—it feels like a personal failure. But let me say this clearly: it is not a willpower prob...

This conversation with Mary Fields stirred something deep in me because grief is not a side story in our lives — it is woven into almost every chapter. We have been taught that grief looks like death, like tragedy, like something obvious and dramatic. But grief can be the loss of a relationship you never had, the body you once lived in, the identity you thought you’d become, or the version of some...

We talk a lot about relationships in life marriage, friendships, business partnerships, family. But the relationship we most often undermine is the one we have with ourselves. Recently, something unlocked in me in real time. It forced me to look deeper at a truth I’ve known for years but maybe hadn’t fully allowed myself to feel. If the relationship with self is fractured, every other relationship...

On this episode of The Courage Coalition , I sat back down with one of those humans who makes you feel it in your chest the minute she starts talking, Alani Bankhead. She’s spent over 20 years in human intelligence operations, hunting terrorists, tracking traffickers, and going after the darkest of the dark… not because she hates them, but because she loves people. And that right there is the conv...

One of the questions I’ve been sitting with lately is this: where did you actually learn how to be a business owner? For many of us, the honest answer is we didn’t. We inherited beliefs, borrowed strategies, followed formulas, and tried to fit ourselves into a very narrow box of what success is “supposed” to look like. In American culture especially, success is often measured by numbers alone reve...

Why is perimenopause still treated like a quiet inconvenience instead of the profound transition it actually is? In this episode of The Courage Coalition , I sat down with Dr. Marisa Snyder to talk about the thing so many women are experiencing but few feel permission to name. What struck me most wasn’t just the science (though that matters deeply), but the shared frustration so many of us carry:...

So much of what we call alignment today is actually just another version of pressure. New year, new energy, new goals go, go, go. But what if that pace doesn’t feel right in your body? In this conversation with Aniston Riekstins, we explore what it really means to redefine alignment, purpose, and connection not as something to chase, but as something to remember . We talk about how our culture has...