Becoming Your Best Version

Meta Wagner is the author of What’s Your Creative Type?: Harnessing the Power of Your Artistic Personality and of the fabulous Substack newsletter, Page Fright, which is a great resource for writers. She is a writing and creativity professor at Emerson College in Boston, and has also taught at Boston University, Wheelock College and Grub Street creative writing center. Meta is the creator of an original model for creativity, the Five Creative Types, and has given talks about it at TEDx, creativity conferences, and corporate events and webinars. Meta has been a contributor to The Boston Globe opinion pages and a columnist for PopMatters, and has had articles published in The Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe Magazine, Wall Street Journal custom content and others. She is a writing coach and writing workshop leader.  

Meta inspires creators of many types. She frequently speaks on claiming one's power and drawing motivation from what worked for the masters, like Ernest Hemingway.  Meta helps people understand their creative type, accept it and use it to one's greatest advantage. She admonishes people not to "should" themselves, but to explore their authenticity. She believes in the catharsis of telling one's truth via creative endeavors.

Learn more about Meta's work and follow her at the links below.

Website:  http://www.metawagner.com/

Buy her book:  https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781580056373

Page Fright Newsletter:  https://metawagner.substack.com/

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/meta.wagner

Facebook author page:  https://www.facebook.com/metawagnerwriter/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/meta_wagner1

LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/meta-wagner-5b541861/

Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/creativelymeta/

TEDx talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGttCeMK9NU&t=9s

Lizzie Moult is a Confidence Coach, Cognitive Behavioral Therapist and writer, who illuminates the energetic dance between our minds and bodies and what it takes to trust ourselves fully.  She aims to wake up people’s feelings to get them in touch with the boundaries they need to draw.

Lizzie is an Australian country gal who broke the rules and dedicated her life to the journey of self-exploration.  She is an expressive, down to earth soul, who leads with heart and seeks to expand minds.  After healing her own stories, beliefs and patterns that kept her feeling small, stuck and prioritizing everyone else, Lizzie is now a radiant and humbling example of how you can turn your story around and do life your own way!

Her mission is to empower people to connect to their truth and trust their gut to be able to confidently express themselves fully and freely, encouraging them to go for the life they desire, without self-doubt, hesitation or seeking approval.  Lizzie is passionate about sharing her wild adventures to inspire others to speak their truth and think bigger!

Lizzie currently lives and works from her home in Scotland, UK.

Links:

https://lizziemoult.com/

https://www.instagram.com/lizzie_moult/

https://www.facebook.com/lizziegmoult

Erin Mathis, cofounder of The Style Core, is a Style Coach for women in midlife who feel stuck in a rut and want to empower themselves to take charge of their future. She helps women up-level their personal style so they show the world who they really are and align their image with the impact they want to make. She applies the same process she used to transform her own image to help her clients reinvent themselves so they can confidently show up as the captivating women they are and tell the world who they are through their look. She has more than 15 years of experience in helping professionals reinvent themselves with the purpose of aligning their image with the impact they want to make.

Some people might dismiss style transformation as “just a makeover,” but as a style coach, Erin understands how image has the power to transform your entire life. She shares more about this in her TEDx Talk "The Power of Image to Transform Your Life.”

From her home town in Northern California, Erin coaches women around the world online through her transformational style coaching program, Your Million Dollar Look.  Erin graciously has offered her free guide My Top 5 Secrets to Up-level your Style to the Becoming Your Best Version audience: https://erinmathis.com/top5.

Website: https://erinmathis.com

Michela Fantinel joined the podcast from beautiful northeast Italy.  Michela is a life and mindset coach and entrepreneur, based in Italy, who has pivoted a few times in her career and life.  At age 44, she swapped a manager's life for a less ordinary life and became a travel blogger and publisher.  At 56, she started her coaching practice with the mission to help women over 50 step out of an unfulfilling life, get unstuck, set clear goals and achieve success beyond their realistic expectations.  Michela is passionate about healthy living and the art of growing young and sharing her knowledge with like-minded women who are ready to open up to limitless possibilities.  She shares in the podcast about choosing a path that aligns with your values, learning to tune into one's intuition, and discerning out your passions and values so that you can pursue a lift in alignment with them.  She maintains that, once you can determine your what and why, that you can more easily pursue your how.  Michela observes that we are all works in progress, that she strives to work on areas in which she has become stuck, and that she continually asks herself how she is serving others.  She uses mindfulness and varying forms of meditation and healing modalities to address obstacles in her life.  Michela encourage us to ask ourselves, "What is my soul telling me to do?"  Everything is in motion and evolution.  We must embrace change and pace our progress in our individual ways.  Michela helps women in midlife do just that, both in persona and online.  

Learn more about Michela (and book a free coaching consultation) at https://magicfifty.com/.  Learn more about solo travel for women, particularly in Italy and Australia, at https://www.rockytravel.net

Follow Michela at:  

FB: https://www.facebook.com/MagicFifty/

IG: https://www.instagram.com/magic.fifty/

LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikifantinel/

See www.MariaLeonardOlsen.com for more information on Maria's work, and follow her on @fiftyafter50 on social media.  Reviews and subscriptions appreciated.

#amplifyingwomensvoices #womensupportingwomen #podcast #fiftyafter50 #becomingyourbestversionpodcast #magicfifty #rockytravel #solotravel #coaching #lifecoaching #solotravel #inspiringwomen

Tessa Krone, MA, Speaker, Educator, Podcaster and Coach, is the co-founder of The Open Nesters Podcast.  Tessa and her partner Amir have a successful podcast in which they discuss the stage of life as kids become adults, as ACT III, or the OPEN, rather than empty, NEST.  They have created new lives for themselves in many ways and, as their adult kids say, they are "living [their] best lives!"  The Open Nesters Podcast (available wherever you get your podcasts) has a mission to empower and inspire others whose children are now adults.  They seek to imbibe this stage of life, ACT III, with curiosity about the new possibilities and surprises yet to be experienced.  Their personal goals are also a part of their mission as they believe that being open minded and open hearted, and connecting more deeply, as well as uniquely, to new experiences and people will keep them healthy and vital.  They welcome others to integrate these goals into their lives, as individuals, and a couple.  Another aspect of their mission is to inspire more fun, exploration and the building of a new community of open nesters around the world.  By hearing about the possibilities others are exploring as Open Nesters, they hope you will be inspired to live at the edge of your curiosity.  

Tessa teaches a wide range of offerings around the world, many of which incorporate the aspect of play.  Tessa helps women, men & their partners embrace their sexual desires, and awaken the playful dimension of love, touch, and creativity in and out of the bedroom.  

She suggests that we think back to what we used to do to spark joy when we were children, and incorporate those activities into our lives.  Dance, creating art, laughing in the mirror, laughing yoga and playing games are examples.  She observes that, when we laugh, we surrender from our bodies and release natural feel-good hormones.  Because hugging can have similar effects, Tessa created "hum-hugs" as a modality for increasing good feelings.  She had participants, in a recent seminar at a Burning Man event, hug on the left, so that they could feel the heartbeats of the person whom they were hugging, and simultaneously hum while hugging.  Humming, she maintains, neurologically clears space within.  Worth a try!

Tessa encourages us to become our best selves by sharing our light with others, and accepting ourselves with compassion.  She suggests we become "permissionaries."

See https://theopennesters.com/ to learn more.  Connect with Tessa on @theopennesters on Facebook and Instagram and search for Stacey Tessa Krone Battat, M.A. on LinkedIn.  To check out some of the resources Tessa mentioned, see https://theopennesters.com/open-nest-resources/.  To learn more about her next event that she spoke about during the show, the Radiant Women's Day Long Retreat: Gathering Mothers & Daughters for Embodied Holiness, go to https://www.facebook.com/events/534171515041927.

Andrea Koppel coaches young people in how to find their professional passions.  She shares, through personal experiences in allowing herself to fail and explore new opportunities, that the best way to finding a fulfilling career is to experiment with different iterations.  It is by working through one's fears that we may uncover our true passions and evolve into the most authentic versions of ourselves.

Andrea is a former award-winning CNN correspondent, who followed a path for years along the trail blazed by her esteemed father, veteran news broadcaster and "CBS Sunday Morning" correspondent, Ted Koppel.  Andrea currently is an Ed Tech start-up entrepreneur, career coach, and Founder and CEO of the College2Career Academy, which helps confused college students and grad students find careers they will love.  She urges students to explore the tangible hard and soft skills they have that are applicable to many different career paths.

Andrea models for her students, as well as for all of us, how to live a life without regrets.  While, at age 43, her identity was caught up in being a CNN correspondent, she is living a life true to who she is now, a person who had a son at age 40, who has different priorities and who no longer relishes the 24/7 stress of the high-powered job she once held.  She is still "mission driven," but her current work resonates more with her values.  She reframed her setbacks as opportunities, remarking that getting fired as a CNN correspondent was "an incredible gift," because it allowed her to launch into the great unknown and to pursue ultimately more fulfilling positions during various stages in her life.  She was able to explore how to use her transferable skills in different industries.  While the learning curve was sometimes steep, she appreciated the growth she experienced in various positions she tried, and encourages others to do the same.

She reminds us that fear is an indication that something is new.  It is an emotion that can trigger a flight, fight or freeze reaction.  Yet it is through leaning into our fears that we evolve.  Andrea learned how to "drop into her heart," as opposed to following her brain's messages in every situation.  She now emphasizes her mental, physical and spiritual wellness, noting that food is medicine, movement is healing, and meditation is more than managing anxiety and stress.  Andrea views meditation as a way to drop into our intuition.  She reads voraciously and encourages listeners to manifest in their lives what they truly want.

In 2021, Andrea was named a Top Job Search Expert to follow on LinkedIn.  She is also the host of the Apple TOP 100 podcast, Time4Coffee (on which she has interviewed more than 300 people about how they uncovered their career passions), and founder of Time4Coffee LLC, a company with a mission to empower 1 million students to turn their degrees into careers they will love.  Prior to becoming an entrepreneur and podcaster, Andrea zigged and zagged her way across three different industries.  She started out her professional life as a journalist where she spent 20 years, the last 14 of them with CNN.  She then pivoted from journalism into public relations; and eventually moved into the nonprofit world, leading global affairs and policy for Mercy Corps, an international humanitarian and development organization.  Andrea has a B.A. in political science, Asian studies and Chinese from Middlebury College and never studied any of the industries she ended up pursuing. 

Her resiliency, brilliance and insight will inspire you!

Follow Andrea's work at https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-koppel-caffeinated-career-coaching/

and https://Time4Coffee.org

Alicia Dara is an amazing woman who shared multiple pearls of wisdom with our listeners about how to find your voice, how to become the protagonist in your own story, and even how to truly connect with one's emotions to fully enjoy classical music!  She is a nationally recognized speech and presentation coach based in Seattle. She has helped thousands of people including CEO’s, Global VPs, Executive Directors and Presidential candidates break through blocks, find their Power Voice, and put it to work.  "What we allow is what we encourage," she shares, in describing how she helps women learn how to set appropriate boundaries in the workplace.  Her most popular group training is "Power Voice for Career Women," which helps women strengthen their voices, clarify their messaging and push back against workplace sexism. Corporate clients include Microsoft (where she is a vendor), Amazon, Kimpton Hotels, Planned Parenthood, The Riveter and Carhartt. Private clients include the National Women's Political Caucus, the Female Founders Alliance, and members of Facebook, Merrill Lynch, Seattle Trade Commission, Windermere and Twitter. Alicia is currently working on her first book about strengthening women’s voices in the workplace.  Learn more about Alicia's work and access her fantastically helpful resources, which include YouTube instructional videos about how to be a better public speaker, at www.aliciadara.com.

Ellen Warner's career as a photojournalist spans more than 50 years. Her photographs have been pub­lished in numerous newspapers and magazines and exhibited extensively. Over the years, she has developed a specialty of author portraits and has worked for most publishing houses in New York and London. She has also writ­ten travel articles, which have been published in The New York Times and Travel and Leisure in the U.S.A., and in The Traveller in the U.K.  Ellen’s recently published book, The Second Half: Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty (Brandeis University Press, March 8, 2022), explores, in photographic portraits and interviews, how the second half of life is experienced by women from many different cultures. From a French actress to a British novelist, from an Algerian nomad to a Saudi Arabian doctor, and an American politician, Ellen Warner traveled all over the world to interview women about their lives.  She asked them what they learned in the first half that was helpful in the second, and what advice they would give to younger women.  Their revealing and inspiring stories are enlightening for all readers, and are illustrated by Warner’s stunning portraits, which tell their own stories.  I wrote a review of Ellen's excellent book for The Washington Post:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/03/04/second-half-advice-ellen-warner/.  As I wrote in my review, "Paring away the less essential, being generous, practicing gratitude, staying in the present moment and finding purpose are ways of living urged repeatedly [by the women interviewed for] the book."  Learn more about Ellen's work at https://www.ellenwarner.com.

Ulrika Sullivan, who is originally from Sweden, is a former scientist turned author, intuitive spiritual life coach, yoga teacher and energy healer.  She is passionate about helping busy women to connect with their intuition, energy and true selves to find inner calm, self-love and life balance so that they can live from the heart with more ease and flow.  Ulrika is the author of Wisdom Beyond What You Know: How to Shift from Being Driven by the Mind to Living from the Heart and Intuition, the creator of the podcast New Light Living - See Your Life in a New Light and founder of the Beyond the Mind membership community.  See https://ulrikasullivan.com/ for more information.

Debra Sabatini Hennelly was the student government president and my UVA Law School class president for the class of '88.  She teaches organizations ethical leadership, including how to create psychological safety in the workplace, so that employees will feel empowered to speak up, as an early warning about problems that can be prevented and addressed early.  Employee wellbeing is crucial to organizational health.  The pandemic's "Great Attrition," or "Great Resignation," underscored the importance of creating an ethical culture in an organization, so that employees feel like they belong, that their voices are heard, and that they are doing work that matters.  Debbie also penned a book, Presence in Chaos – 365 Mindful Moments, that contains inspiring daily quotes set against her beautiful original photography, and describes how the book grew out of her experiencing burnout and reaching a personal low point in her life.

Debbie helps executives and boards create cultures of integrity and inclusion, which are essential to the resilience of organizations and their people. She uses stakeholder-focused frameworks for managing compliance, ethical and ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) risks and opportunities and helps integrate them into operations and culture. She also coaches legal and compliance professionals, helping them lead effectively and develop strategies for personal resilience. For more than 25 years, Debbie has been creating innovative approaches to managing compliance and fostering ethical leadership—from boardrooms to break rooms—with organizations ranging from small entities to some of the largest multinationals. Her expertise is rooted in her multi-disciplinary background in engineering and law, cultivated through her decades of corporate leadership roles and consulting experience. Her passions for learning, teaching and "connecting the dots” fuel her ability to inspire authenticity, engagement and accountability. Debbie founded Resiliti in 2004 (originally, as Compliance & Ethics Solutions), to provide ethical leadership, culture and compliance consulting and training. Resiliti offers a comprehensive suite of services, including holistic risk management, ESG strategies, culture mapping and experiential learning. They help bring to life organizational values and build cultures of integrity that support the perspectives and dignity of each individual in a team and across an organization.

Debbie is an adjunct professor in Fordham University School of Law’s Program on Corporate Ethics and Compliance. Debbie spent almost 15 years in legal and compliance leadership roles—AT&T; Lucent Technologies; Avaya; BP; Avon Products; as well as general counsel and chief compliance officer for two privately-held chemical companies, reporting to their CEOs and meeting quarterly with their boards of directors. Her experience holding senior in-house roles in public and private companies, as well as working in two ethics and compliance service providers, has enabled her to acquire an uncommon perspective from both sides of the client/vendor relationship. Prior to her corporate experience, Debbie practiced law with two major law firms in Washington, DC, and New Jersey. Before practicing law, she was a civil and environmental engineer, supervising construction for Exxon. Debbie is a member of the Society of Human Resource Management and the Society of Corporate Compliance & Ethics. She speaks frequently at conferences and writes on several platforms.  Debbie earned her B.S.E. in Civil/Environmental Engineering from Duke University and her J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.  

Learn more about her work at Resiliti.com and PresenceInChaos.com, and follow her on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.