BECOME Empowered

What if courage isn’t something you wait to feel, but a question you ask?

In this solo episode, Sabine takes you on her journey through Germany and Italy, a trip she called Traveling with Gumption. She walked into the Frankfurt Book Fair with no appointments, no roadmap, and one copy of her memoir in her bag. She left with a stack of publishing contacts and an offer to translate GUMPTION into German. That offer didn’t come from a pitch. It came from noticing a tired stranger at the very last booth and starting a real conversation.

Told in four acts:
🎭 Act 1 – Frankfurt Book Fair: How curiosity opened more doors than any pitch
🎭 Act 2 – Italy: A first vacation with a friend of 60 years
🎭 Act 3 – Coming Home: The quiet courage of slowing down with family
🎭 Act 4 – Hamburg: Back to the theater where Sabine first played Pippi Longstocking, and the backstage door that opened

You’ll walk away with:

• Why the feeling of courage shows up after the action, like applause after the song
• The ASK framework: Approach, Speak your curiosity, Keep the door open
• A 7-day gumption challenge you can start today

Your story deserves to travel. Sabine is gathering a circle of entrepreneurs for her next book, Become Empowered Entrepreneur, with a chapter waiting for you: sabinekvenberg.com/resources

📖 Get GUMPTION: amazon.com/dp/B0HCW45FXJ
🌐 SabineKvenberg.com

What if the biggest thing standing between you and more clients isn’t your budget but your willingness to be seen?

In this episode, Sabine (recording from Germany, fresh from the Frankfurt Book Fair!) sits down with Jill Lublin: publicity strategist, international speaker, consultant, and four-time bestselling author. Jill went from law school to the rock-and-roll world of independent record labels, where zero-budget promotion taught her the creative “guerrilla” tactics she now teaches entrepreneurs worldwide.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• The #1 publicity mistake (hint: it’s doing nothing)
• Why “you” statements beat “I” statements when pitching media
• How to use National Day Calendar to create timely, newsworthy angles
• The “Use Everything You’ve Got” principle, and how one client landed in the Denver Post twice
• How a conversation with a yawning stranger at Frankfurt opened the door to a German translation of Gumption
• The “Who Question” and Jill’s “meet three, deepen three” networking rule
• Return on Kindness (ROK) and why kind companies create more abundance
• Why publicity is now how AI, podcast hosts, and event planners find you

Connect with Jill Lublin:
Join her Publicity Challenge: jilllublin.com/start

Connect with Sabine Kvenberg:
SabineKvenberg.com

Your message matters. Share it, share it, share it. 💛

AI is moving fast, but your voice, your story, and your human presence are still what make you unforgettable. In this episode, I share how entrepreneurs, coaches, authors, and creators can stand out in the age of AI, and why this moment is not a time to hide, but a time to rise.

AI is changing the world at lightning speed. For many of us, that feels exciting, overwhelming, and uncertain all at once. It can feel like standing in a fog, unsure which way to step next. I believe the answer isn’t to wait in the wings until the fog clears. It’s to prepare, adapt, and build your brand now, while so many others are holding back.

I talk about why AI should be embraced, not feared, and why human storytelling will matter even more in a world that becomes more automated. AI can generate content. It can’t generate your lived experience, your voice, or the way you make people feel.

I also share one of my most personal lessons: my “$35,000 Harvard experience.” It shows why chasing the wrong opportunity, even one that looks smart on paper, can pull you away from your true path. With so many shiny AI programs and tools competing for your attention, that lesson matters more than ever.

🎭 In this episode, you’ll discover:

• Why AI should be embraced, not feared
• Why your uniqueness can never be replaced
• How storytelling sets you apart in a crowded marketplace
• Why visibility and brand clarity matter more than ever
• The “fog” metaphor and what it means for entrepreneurs today
• How to know whether an investment is aligned or simply attractive
• Why learning, growth, and contribution still matter in a changing world

Ready to clarify your message, strengthen your visibility, and create the assets that set you apart? Let's talk: talktosabine.com

Resources: https://sabinekvenberg.com/resources
Become a contributing author in Become Empowered Entrepreneur: https://sabinekvenberg.com/book-application

He had it all. He had a suit and tie and an office on the 15th floor of the most recognizable building in Rochester, New York. Inside, though, Ben Albert was quietly miserable. Then the pandemic hit, and overnight he was laid off, broke, and officially "non-essential."

In this raw and generous conversation, Ben takes us backstage to the months when he was lost. He talks about binge drinking, losing his father, his mother's illness, and doing morning affirmations with a twitching eye after a night with an empty bottle of whiskey. From that low point, he discovered a powerful idea: disintegration. He didn't need more habits. He needed to remove the ones muting his best self.

Ben shares how a podcast called Rochester Business Connections turned into peers, mentors, and clients all at once. He also explains how he now guides podcasters to treat their show like a media business.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• Why "shedding" is a necessary act before you rebuild
• Disintegration vs. integration: why removing bad habits can matter more than adding good ones
• The 15-minute rule, about 1% of your day, and how small cuts compound into big change
• Hal Elrod's SAVERS morning routine (Silence, Affirmations, Visualization, Exercise, Reading, Scribing)
• The LinkedIn alumni strategy Ben used to land guests and build a business network from scratch
• Why a podcast guest can be a peer, a local connection, a mentor, and a potential client
• Building a Brand Bible: your "category of one," contrarian viewpoints, and contradictory values
• Case study: how the Rebel Roots podcast found its true audience

Connect with Ben Albert:
🎧 Real Business Connections podcast: realbusinessconnections.com
🤝 Grow Getters Only community: weallgrowtogether.com
💼 Find Ben on LinkedIn and Instagram

Connect with Sabine Kvenberg
https://sabinekvenberg.com/resources

If this episode moved you, please rate, review, and share it with someone standing at the edge of their next chapter. 💛

What are you still waiting to feel ready for?

The book you haven't written. The stage you haven't stepped onto. The bold move you keep postponing. Waiting feels safe, but it's costing you more than you think.

I know, because I waited too. Until one sentence on a Hamburg sidewalk changed everything: "What a shame, Sabine. You are so talented." Within a week, I had auditioned for acting school.

In this solo episode, I share that moment and what it can teach you about the cost of waiting. I also take you inside my upcoming trip to Germany, where I'm flying alone with my memoir GUMPTION in my suitcase: the Frankfurt Book Fair, Hamburg bookstores, the crew of MJ the Musical, and time with family and friends.

And I show you why the story you've been sitting on might be the most valuable thing you own. In a world where AI makes content cheap and endless, your real story is the one thing no one can generate, copy, or fake.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• Why waiting to feel ready costs you more than you think
• The one sentence that got me to stop waiting, and what it means for you
• Why doing the bold thing alone is worth the stress
• Three things that change when you become an author
• Why your real story matters more than ever in the age of AI
• How to become a contributing author in my next anthology, Become Empowered Entrepreneur

Follow the journey: Starting the day I land, I'll share the trip on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, day by day, with GUMPTION traveling right alongside me.

LINKS 📖 Get GUMPTION at your favorite bookstore or here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HCW45FXJ

✍️ Apply to become a contributing author in Become Empowered Entrepreneur: https://sabinekvenberg.com/book-application

▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/SabineKvenberg

📸 Instagram: [https://www.instagram.com/sabinekvenberg/

👍 Facebook: [https://www.facebook.com/sabine.kvenberg.2025/

🌐 sabinekvenberg.com

If this episode gave you a little extra courage, please follow the show and leave a rating or review. It brings Become Empowered to more people who need to hear it.

Be fearless. Be heard. Be visible. Become Empowered.

Sandra Bargman popped out of the womb singing, dancing, and acting — and never stopped. But underneath three decades on Broadway, national tours, cruise ships, and cabaret rooms, she carried a quieter question: how could she be of service in a bigger way? One day, scrolling a life-coaching website, she saw two words stacked in the corner — life coach and interfaith minister — and a light bulb went off that changed everything.

In this conversation, Sandra takes us from Carnegie Mellon conservatory to the Broadway National Tour of Cinderella, through a two-year seminary journey that collided with her mother's terminal illness, to the extraordinary ask of officiating her own mother's funeral in her first year of training. She shares how her theatrical training carried her through that "baptism by fire," how the concept of "the edge" — the rough, generative middle ground between polarized extremes — became the heart of her own podcast, and why she now coaches podcasters and speakers on voice presence and storytelling using actor techniques and spiritual counseling.

Connect with Sabine:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/SabineKvenberg

IG: https://www.instagram.com/sabinekvenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabine-kvenberg/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sabine.kvenberg.2025/ 

RESOURCES:  https://www.sabinekvenberg.com/resources  

In this episode, Sandra shares:

• The moment two words on a website sparked her interfaith journey
• What it actually means to be an interspiritual minister (and why she's moved from "interfaith" to "interspiritual")
• Officiating her mother's funeral in her first year of seminary — and what that "baptism by fire" taught her
• Why she calls her one-woman show a "cabaritual" and how it became a podcast
• Her simple, actor-trained framework for showing up with more presence as a podcast guest or host
• The two most underused tools in confident communication: the pause and the breath

A line worth writing down: "Every single thing is an opportunity — a learning opportunity. And everybody's a teacher."

Connect with Sandra:

• Website (weddings & ceremonies): sandrabargman.com
• Coaching (voice, presence, storytelling): magicthreadmedia.com
• YouTube: Sandra Bargman — On the Edge of Every Day
• Podcast: The Edge of Everyday, streaming on all platforms

What do you do when life falls apart at 54 and you're convinced there's nothing left for you? If you're Teri M. Brown, you climb onto a tandem bicycle and ride 3,102 miles across America.

In this episode of Become Empowered, author and speaker Teri M. Brown joins Sabine to trace an extraordinary arc — from an emotionally abusive marriage that left her doubting her own worth, to a cross-country tandem ride from Astoria, Oregon to Washington, DC with her husband Bruce, to the grief of losing him to glioblastoma, and finally to the slow, brave work of finding herself again.

Teri shares why worth is intrinsic and never has to be earned, what a tandem bike teaches you about real partnership (you can't go faster than each other), how she rediscovered her humor writing Peg, Unhinged, and why joy and sorrow can live inside the very same moment. It's tender, funny, and deeply human — and it ends with a piece of advice that might change how you look at your own life.

In this conversation:

• Why "you already have value" is the belief everything else is built on
• What riding a tandem across the country reveals about partnership and trust
• Loving and losing Bruce — and what caregiving taught her about herself
• How writing brought her voice, and her laughter, back after loss
• Why happiness and grief don't cancel each other out
• The one piece of advice: get rid of the bucket list and start today

Get in touch with Teri: https://www.terimbrown.com/

Get your copy of Gumption on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HCW45FXJ

Apply to become a contributing author for Sabine's next book: Become Empowered Entrepreneur.

SabineKvenberg.com

There’s a stage somewhere in your life with your name on it — a talk, a camera, a Zoom box, a conversation you keep rehearsing but never walk into. And every time you get close, you slip back into the wings and whisper, “not yet.”

In this solo episode, Sabine takes you back to opening night in Hamburg, where she stepped out as Pippi Longstocking with her mind gone completely blank… and the lines came back. Drawing on thirty years on stages, she hands you a four-part map for stepping into the light before you feel ready — because ready is a feeling that shows up after you move, not before.

Inside this episode:

• The courage to be S.E.E.N.™ — See the Spotlight, Evidence over Emotion, Embody Before You Believe, Now, Not Ready
• How to name your specific stage — because confidence in the abstract goes nowhere
• Why your fear is loud but “a terrible historian” — and how to trade its story for your track record
• The breathing reset that overrides stage-fright nerves in seconds
• The Competence–Confidence Loop — how one tiny “entrance” this week rewires your subconscious for the next one

If you’ve been circling a stage you know is yours, consider this your permission slip.

▶ Ready to name your spotlight and your very next move? Book a 20 minute clarity call with Sabine: talktosabine.com

Resources: https://sabinekvenberg.com/resources

Share your story in Sabine's new book: Become Empowered Entrepreneur: https://sabinekvenberg.com/book-application

When Emma Victoria Johnson sat across from her surgeon in March 2025, the script had already been written for her: stage 4 breast cancer, no surgery, no chemo, no radiation — just two tablets and roughly 18 months. She tore that script up.

Connect with Emma: https://www.instagram.com/emma_victoriaj/

Connect with Sabine: SabineKvenberg.com

https://liveyounger.com/healthyandwealthy

In this deeply moving episode of Become Empowered, host Sabine Kvenberg sits down with Emma, joining "from the future" near Sydney, Australia, to talk about the moment a diagnosis became a decision. Emma shares why she refused to accept a palliative-only prognosis, how her "inner warrior" put her on a plane to seek alternatives, and what it took to close the hair salon she had built and loved for nearly a decade — choosing herself over the business.

This is a conversation about belief, responsibility, and the quiet power of taking your health into your own hands. Emma and Sabine talk candidly about the daily discipline of healing — clean eating, movement, red light, infrared saunas, oxygen, and a home she turned into her own "little wellness clinic" — and the truth that stress is the enemy of healing. And they land somewhere unexpected: purpose. Today Emma wakes to 150+ messages a day from people around the world, walking beside them through their own diagnoses as an ambassador and advocate.

If you or someone you love is standing at a crossroads, this episode is a reminder that when one door closes, another opens — and that belief, backed by action, changes everything.

In this episode:

• Why Emma refused the "18 months" prognosis and went looking for another way
• The moment surgery was taken off the table — and how she responded
• Turning a home into a personal wellness routine on a real-world budget
• Why she closed the business she loved, and how she made peace with it
• How stress works against healing — and what she protects her energy for now
• Finding new purpose in service after one chapter closed

This episode is a personal story, not medical advice. Please consult qualified professionals about your own care.

Connect with Emma: https://www.instagram.com/emma_victoriaj/

Connect with Sabine: SabineKvenberg.com

https://liveyounger.com/healthyandwealthy

What if the problem isn't that you need more stages — but that your message isn't clear enough to earn them?

In this episode of Become Empowered, Sabine sits down with speaker, author, and coach Marta Spirk — a fellow performer who traded the entertainment stage for a mission of guiding women to find their voice and own the spotlight.

Marta shares her remarkable journey: growing up singing in her mother's church in Brazil, building a career in translation and interpreting, singing the national anthem for pro sports teams across Colorado, and the 2016 "plot twist" that changed everything — learning five weeks into her first pregnancy that she was carrying triplets.

Together, Sabine and Marta explore the abundance mindset that says there is room for every voice, why believing you have something valuable to say is the real starting line, and the patience it takes to build something that lasts.

In this conversation:

• Why "what got you here won't get you there" applies to every speaker
• The most common belief blocking women from the stage
• Why clarity — not more eyeballs — is the key to being remembered
• How defeat and lost control became Marta's greatest teachers
• Her father's one-word wedding-day advice that still guides her business

Connect with Marta Spirk:
Website: MartaSpirk.com
LinkedIn, Facebook & Instagram: Marta Spirk

Connect with Sabine:
Website: sabinekvenberg.com
Book a call: calendly.com/coachsabine/connect-with-sabine

Order Gumption: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HCW45FXJ