Traveling Companions: Stories of Becoming

Kirk has come to think of the hardest moments in his life as unplanned detours rather than a broken road. When asked how they'd shaped him, he gently pushed back on the word itself — they didn't shape him, he says, they unlocked something.  In this conversation, Kirk traces a journey that meanders through a fundamentalist upbringing, a heart diagnosis he was never expected to survive, an...

Stephanie Goodell has spent her career recognizing and developing potential in other people — first in higher education, then with high-growth entrepreneurs, and now in leadership and career-transition coaching.  In this conversation, we sit inside the space between stability and freedom — the settled life in Boston against the pull of a creative one in Vermont, and what it might look like to hold...

Lance Huffman spent thirty-one years as an educator. When retirement came, he walked through that threshold with intention. In this conversation, Lance reflects on what it cost to carry a version of himself that no longer fit — and what it took to finally put it down. He traces the weight of an inherited legacy, the parts of himself that got buried along the way, and what is slowly being uncovered...

What does grief ask of us? And what does it open? Momo (Monica Escobedo) has lived close to both questions — through her mother's death, her own cancer diagnosis, and the slow discovery of who she was becoming on the other side. In this conversation, we walk through grief as a threshold — the surprise of it, the importance of community, and the opening to vulnerability that loss, over time, c...

Corinne Hart spent nearly a decade at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), building a career around advancing women's rights and gender equality around the world. When the agency was shut down in 2025, the ground shifted beneath her — and what came next wasn't clear. What held her back wasn't the lack of clarity. It was learning to trust what she already knew. To car...

When Vanessa Wedderburn was laid off, the professional disruption was only the beginning. What followed was something harder to name — a slow unraveling of the identity she had built around her work, and what opened up in its place.  In this conversation, Vanessa talks about what it's like to sit inside that uncertainty — the disorientation of not knowing who you are beyond what you do, the g...

Ten years into teaching, Kellie Sanders heard a woman at a backyard party mention that she had been a middle school principal. Her head whipped around. In all her years in education, she had never seen a woman in that role. That moment — what Kellie calls her "unicorn" — set off a chain of crossings she never could have mapped in advance. In this conversation, Kellie traces the arc of he...

There are moments when you know you can't go back. And what's ahead isn't clear yet. In this episode I'm turning the lens inward — sharing a threshold that shaped me, what it asked, and what it made possible. Not quick fixes. No shortcuts. Just the honest territory of what it asks of us to put something down and step anyway. "We cannot hold on to things and enter. We must...

There are moments in every life when you can't go back to who you were — and who you're becoming isn't yet clear. Traveling Companions: Stories of Becoming is a podcast about that in-between space. Come join us. Say hello. I'd love to hear from you. I'm Jennie Snyder, a leadership coach and the host of Traveling Companions. I created this podcast for anyone standing in that...