Beyond the Draft

What does it take to survive cancer, Lyme disease, a stroke, diabetes, a heart attack, and hypoxia, and come out the other side as a practitioner helping others find true root-cause healing? Magic Barclay is a single mother of two, a Mould Toxicity Master Practitioner, and an expert in the PNEI of Trauma. After surviving a harmful childhood, disordered eating, alcoholism, and an abusive marriage,...

What does it take to hike 2,200 miles at 72 years old, with an artificial knee, alongside your 71-year-old brother? Rand Timmerman is a retired attorney, recovered alcoholic, and combat veteran who did exactly that, hiking the entire Appalachian Trail with his brother Ron. He documented the journey in his book, A Spiritual Passage, filled with 500 photographs and stories of grief, addiction recove...

From Blocked to Bestselling: Liz Mugavero on Cracking the Mystery Novel Code What happens when a writer loses her creative spark for nearly two decades — and then finds her way back to not just one, but three bestselling mystery series? In this episode, I sit down with Liz Mugavero (who also writes as Cate Conte), author of the Pawsitively Organic Mysteries, the Cat Café Mysteries, and the Full Mo...

What if some children identified as needing speech therapy could actually thrive with the right support at home first? Jeaneen Tang is a speech-language pathologist with over 20 years of experience working with children from early intervention through the elderly. She's also a mother whose son, Che, suffered a traumatic brain injury and stroke at just 13 months old after a fall, doctors told her h...

What happens when a single mother of eight, working full-time in high tech while finishing her degree, finally stops trying to prioritize her way out of overwhelm? Margaret Agard is an award-winning author, former high-tech executive, and mother of eight, sleeping less than four hours a night while juggling work, school, and family. When her old strategy of prioritizing tasks stopped working, she...

Why do some team members act like gold medal winners while others behave like aliens from another planet? Sheila Glazov is a best-selling author and personality expert whose book, What Color Is Your Brain?®, has sold over 41,000 copies. A former elementary school teacher, she developed her color-coded framework while facilitating creative problem-solving sessions and watching talented people dismi...

What if most people are settling for the back row in life, when there's a front parking spot waiting for them? Jennifer Bosma is a Christian children's book author and host of the Front Parking Spot Podcast, ranked among the top 100 Christian family podcasts. Married for 36 years and a former elementary school teacher known as "Mrs. Bosma" to over 500 students, she's the author of three award-winn...

What does it take to film in Iraq, Cuba, the Congo, Burma, and over 100 other countries, covering everything from voodoo rituals to sex trafficking to divine miracles? Craig D. Forrest is an award-winning TV director and documentary filmmaker who has traveled to 160 countries across 6 continents, producing content for CBS, ABC, Discovery Channel, HBO, and dozens of other major networks. He was par...

What if the chapter you thought was the end of your story was actually the beginning of something beautiful? In this episode of Beyond the Draft, I sit down with author, storyteller, podcaster, and adventurer Teri M. Brown to talk about starting over, discovering your worth, and having the courage to pursue a dream later in life. Teri shares her journey through an emotionally abusive marriage, reb...

What happens when the world isn't built for you, and instead of waiting for it to change, you teach yourself how to build it differently? Maxwell Ivey, known around the world as The Blind Blogger, lost his sight at age 12 due to retinitis pigmentosa. Rather than let it define the limits of his life, he taught himself HTML to build an online business brokering used carnival and amusement park rides...

What happens when the mental toughness built for one race unknowingly prepares you for the fight of your life? Dr. Jeffrey Reynolds is an Ironman triathlete, two-time cancer survivor, and nonprofit executive from Long Island, NY. When cancer struck twice in two years, prostate cancer followed by Stage 3B colorectal cancer, he discovered that every early morning swim, every grueling bike ride, and...

Can AI make a logo in four seconds? Sure. So what exactly are you paying an agency for? Cat How is the founder and Executive Creative Director of How&How, a B-Corp certified global branding agency with studios in London and Los Angeles. A former award-winning journalist and design critic, she later studied Communication Design at Central Saint Martins before launching the agency in 2020. She's als...

Can you really buid a real business in just two hours a week? Ken Chester is a nationally syndicated automotive journalist, tech communicator, and CEO of TechMobility Productions, with a media career spanning over three decades. In 2026, he published Two-Hour Entrepreneur: Build a Real Business in Two Hours a Week, a step-by-step system drawn from 35 years of building companies from scratch, most...

What does holding a paratrooper unit together under pressure have to do with holding a marriage together? Eric Williams spent five years as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne, serving through 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, before earning his master's in Marriage and Family Therapy. He's the creator of Origin Code and DCIA, Done Carrying It Alone, a coaching framework built to identify the root cause...

What's really stopping most fiction writers from finishing their novel, and is it actually the story itself? Elyse Seal is a fiction book coach trained by Author Accelerator who helps sci-fi and fantasy authors get unstuck and finish their novels without spending years rewriting the same draft. She helps writers build solid story foundations before they write, and coaches authors through revision...

What actually separates a book that builds real authority from one that just sits on a shelf collecting dust? Kristin Clark is the founder of Elite Content Creation and its publishing imprint, Cheval Press, and the best-selling author of [Your Book] Written, Published, and Sold: A Complete Guide to Bringing Your Big Idea to Life. Her ghostwriting has appeared in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Fa...

What happens when someone who wasn't raised around horses decides their dream job is becoming a horse veterinarian? Matt Evans is a horse veterinarian, stand-up comedian, and author of Chomping at the Bit: How I Became a Horse Vet (Against All Common Sense), a comedic memoir publishing through Simon & Schuster's Permuted Press. Inspired by reading too much James Herriot as a child, Matt chased a d...

Fiction Born from a Search for a Birth Mother

What happens when a search for your birth mother turns into a historical novel spanning generations? Mark Jamilkowski is a historical fiction author, co-founder of a healthcare start-up, and the author of The Road to Moresco, inspired by his personal search for his birth mother, and Mask of Romulus, exploring the relationship between ancient Rome and India. Critics have praised his deep research a...

What happens when you return to teach at your own high school nearly thirty years later, and it's been transformed from nearly all-white to one of the most diverse schools in Virginia? Lee Knapp is an award-winning history educator and author of the memoir I'm History...but do I repeat myself?, which weaves her own fraught Southern history into America's complicated story of race, religion, and re...

What does it take to keep multiple creative projects alive while working retail and caring for a grandmother full-time? Michael Stangeland is the author of the science fiction novel Junkworld: The Ballad of Leroy Brown and the children's fairy tale The Taming of the Moon Dragon, both published through hybrid publishing services. Beyond his published work, he has a growing folder of unpublished boo...

Co-author Section

Darlene Franklin Campbell is a Kentucky author, artist, and national award-winning poet whose work explores the intersection of mythology, philosophy, religion, and psychology. She's the author of The Zhandarian Chronicles, an epic fantasy series that uses an imagined world to explore deeply human questions of identity, belonging, memory, and transformation. In this episode, Darlene shares what fi...

Louis Swart has spent over 35 years building, scaling, and selling companies, managing more than 450 staff along the way. He's the founder of Ironbrij, a human-AI-powered virtual assistant company helping coaches avoid burnout and build self-sustaining businesses, and a published author who was a top 50 finalist in the Next Top Speaker competition. In this episode, Louis breaks down the biggest mi...

Russell Anders has been telling stories since he was four years old, interrupting his mother's bedtime reading to ask "Then what happened?" After a decade spent finishing a manuscript that publishers praised but never bought, he let it go, restarted, and finally received an offer letter a year later, with a new approach: give yourself permission to suck, you can always fix it later. In this episod...