What does ambition really cost when you are a woman building a career in a world that was never designed for you?

In this powerful episode of the Catch her Spark Podcast with Jen Maldonado, Jen sits down with Bunmi Bashiru, an engineer, project manager, sustainability expert, entrepreneur, and energy consultant whose career has taken her through more than 13 years in the demanding, male-dominated energy industry.

Growing up in Nigeria, Bunmi saw communities surrounded by natural resources yet struggling to access reliable energy. Instead of simply accepting the problem, she decided she wanted to help solve it. That decision led her to study chemical engineering and eventually build a career spanning downstream energy, gas distribution, oil production, automation, sustainability, and renewable energy.

But Bunmi's story is about much more than career success.

She shares what it took to walk into rooms where women were often underrepresented and make sure her voice was heard. She talks about learning office politics, finding sponsors who would advocate for her when she wasn't in the room, preparing relentlessly, building relationships, and learning how to "fail forward."

Bunmi also opens up about a side of ambition that rarely makes it onto a résumé.

While pushing herself to deliver projects and advance her career, she experienced pregnancy losses. After returning quickly to work following her first loss, a second loss forced her to confront something she had spent years ignoring: her body needed rest.

That experience changed the way she thought about success.

Bunmi began giving herself permission to grieve, rest, travel, read, rediscover the things she loved, and find herself outside of her career. Her message to ambitious women is simple but important: there are seasons when you have to choose rest, and taking care of yourself does not erase your ambition.

Today, Bunmi is bringing everything she has learned into her own business, Energy Connoisseur. Her work focuses on helping solve operational and sustainable energy challenges while thinking about a future where traditional and renewable energy sources can work together more responsibly.

This conversation is for the woman who has ever felt invisible in the room, afraid to speak up, pressured to prove herself, or worried that slowing down will somehow put her dreams out of reach.

Bunmi reminds us that resilience isn't about never falling. It is about learning, recovering, speaking again, and knowing when your body and your life are asking you for something different.

Be a Guest Are you a successful business owner, entrepreneur, or professional with insights to share? Apply to be a guest at https://catchherspark.com/guest and share your expertise with a wide audience eager to learn about you...

Guest: Grace McCubbin

Everyone says they want to grow. But what happens when growth costs you the version of yourself you thought you had to be?

In this powerful conversation, Jen Maldonado sits down with Grace McCubbin, a founder, author, TEDx speaker, congressional witness, mother, and self-described reformed perfectionist.

Grace shares how becoming a mother as a teenager shaped her drive to achieve and how growing up with high expectations connected her identity to accomplishment. She also opens up about learning one of the biggest lessons of her life: two things can be true at the same time.

Someone can love you and still hurt you. You can be strong and vulnerable. Something can be painful and still lead to something meaningful.

Grace shares the life-changing story of the day her 16-year-old son, Maddox, suffered sudden cardiac arrest at school. After six minutes without a heartbeat, four rounds of CPR, and two shocks from a defibrillator, he survived.

But Grace was changed forever.

That experience led her into advocacy and eventually to the halls of Congress, where she worked to bring attention to sudden cardiac arrest and the importance of CPR training and access to AEDs in schools.

Through it all, Grace discovered something we rarely talk about when we celebrate personal growth: growth is paid for.

Growth can hurt. It can ask us to leave behind old identities, beliefs, relationships, and expectations. It can make us uncomfortable before we ever see what is waiting on the other side.

Grace is now bringing these lessons into her upcoming book, Two Things Can Be True, which explores the complicated truths and dualities we experience throughout life.

This conversation is for the woman who is in the middle of a hard chapter and wondering whether any of it will make sense someday.

As Grace reminds us, the moment you are living through today does not define your entire life. There can still be magic inside the misery.

In this episode, Jen and Grace talk about:

Becoming a mother as a teenager and learning to carry enormous responsibility early in life

How perfectionism and fear of failure can become tied to identity

Why separating your own goals from other people's expectations can be painful and freeing

What Grace means when she says "two things can be true"

Why people find it easier to see heroes and villains than to accept life's gray areas

The sudden cardiac arrest that nearly took her son's life

How trauma changed Grace's understanding of strength and vulnerability

Turning a deeply personal experience into advocacy and meaningful action

Why growth is often born from painful experiences

Learning to see both the "magic" and the "misery" in life

Why becoming more may mean you no longer fit inside the old version of yourself

Be a Guest Are you a successful business owner, entrepreneur, or professional with insights to share? Apply to be a guest at https://catchherspark.com/guest and share your expertise with a wide audience eager to learn about you...

What happens when you give your best to a company, quadruple the business, and still get fired by text?

For Laura Campbell, that painful moment became a turning point.

In this episode of The Catch her Spark Podcast with Jen Maldonado, Laura shares how getting fired pushed her to stop depending on someone else to recognize her value and start building something of her own.

Laura has spent more than 26 years working in animal health and nutrition. She has built trusted relationships with farmers, producers, feed mills, and nutritionists, and she is a professional animal auditor helping ensure animals are treated with care and respect.

But Laura's story goes far beyond her career.

She opens up about becoming a single mother at just 24 years old, rebuilding her life, navigating career setbacks, starting her own business, and learning to trust the intuition that told her when something wasn't right.

Laura and Jen also explore what it means for women to take up space instead of constantly trying to earn it.

One idea runs through Laura's entire story: excellence is her brand.

Whether she is auditing a facility, working with a customer, raising her daughters, or rebuilding after a setback, Laura believes in showing up with integrity, doing what she says she will do, and helping people become better.

You'll hear how Laura turned auditing from a process of finding what's wrong into an opportunity for continuous improvement. She shares why she wants the people she audits to see her as a partner—and why one client telling her, "You're tough, but you make us better," meant so much to her.

You'll also discover the invisible world behind the food on your table and why Laura wants consumers to better understand the farmers, producers, nutritionists, and auditors working every day to keep animals healthy and America's food supply resilient.

This conversation is about resilience, intuition, integrity, financial independence, and what can happen when a woman decides to build a life on her own terms.

About Laura Campbell

Laura Campbell has more than 26 years of experience in animal health and nutrition. Her work includes animal nutrition, sales and commercial leadership, animal welfare, auditing, and working directly with professionals throughout the agriculture and food supply chain.

After career setbacks—including being fired after helping quadruple a company's business—Laura pursued professional animal auditing and eventually built her own business. Today, she continues working in the industry while maintaining the skills, certifications, and business that give her the ability to support herself on her own terms.

Be a Guest Are you a successful business owner, entrepreneur, or professional with insights to share? Apply to be a guest at https://catchherspark.com/guest and share your expertise with a wide audience eager to learn about you...

In this powerful episode of the Catch her Spark Podcast with Jen Maldonado, Jen sits down with Yildiz Burger for an open conversation about toxic workplaces, survival mode, rebuilding self-trust, and finding the courage to create a new chapter.

Yildiz shares her deeply personal journey through childhood challenges, loss, toxic work environments, and moments that left her questioning herself and her own worth. After years of pushing forward and trying to survive, her body and mind began telling her something had to change.

But leaving a toxic environment was only the beginning.

Yildiz had to learn how to trust herself again. She had to remember the ambitious woman she had been before fear and self-doubt took over. Little by little, she began asking herself important questions: What do I want? What do I need? Who do I want to become?

That clarity eventually became something bigger. Yildiz began using what she had learned to help other women recognize their skills, rebuild their confidence, and create a path toward greater independence.

Be a Guest Are you a successful business owner, entrepreneur, or professional with insights to share? Apply to be a guest at https://catchherspark.com/guest and share your expertise with a wide audience eager to learn about you...

What if the twists, mistakes, and unexpected turns in your life aren’t taking you off course—but preparing you for what comes next?

In this episode of the Catch her Spark Podcast with Jen Maldonado, Jen sits down with Anisa Aven, a fourth-generation entrepreneur, leadership coach, and AI transformation leader whose career has been anything but a straight line.

Anisa started working in her family’s business as a teenager, sold her first business by 21, tried stand-up comedy at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, and eventually built a career helping people and organizations unlock their potential. Today, her work brings leadership, coaching, human transformation, and AI together.

Anisa shares how growing up in an entrepreneurial family taught her to make decisions, take risks, recover from mistakes, and find her voice—even when she was the only young woman in the room.

She and Jen also talk about the importance of fun. Anisa explains why success is not worth much if the work leaves no room for family, joy, or the things that make you feel alive.

The conversation explores resilience, self-confidence, values, failure, and the courage to walk away when something no longer fits. Anisa shares why she believes you can't fail if you never quit—and why mistakes can become some of our greatest teachers when we're willing to learn from them.

Be a Guest Are you a successful business owner, entrepreneur, or professional with insights to share? Apply to be a guest at https://catchherspark.com/guest and share your expertise with a wide audience eager to learn about you...

What happens when the life you worked so hard to build no longer feels like the life you’re meant to live?

In this episode of the Catch her Spark Podcast with Jen Maldonado, Jen sits down with Dr. Amanda Lewis, dentist, longtime entrepreneur, and founder of LUI, to talk about what it really looks like to start over.

By the time Amanda approached 40, she had built what looked like a successful life. She owned two dental practices, had grown a team of about 20 people, was raising two children, and had spent nearly two decades building her career.

But behind that success, Amanda knew something needed to change.

She went through a divorce, navigated the uncertainty of the pandemic, sold the dental practices she had spent years building, moved from a small town in Illinois to Dallas, and eventually made another huge decision: stepping away from dentistry full-time to bet on an entirely different business.

That business became LUI, a smile-care brand inspired by Amanda’s 20 years of experience looking beyond teeth and seeing how deeply a person’s smile connects to confidence, beauty, and overall wellness.

The road was anything but simple. Amanda shares the setbacks behind building LUI, including an early product that could not scale, manufacturing challenges, stolen product molds, the sudden death of her mother, and the difficult decision to leave the career that had given her stability and success.

She also shares how her parents helped shape the entrepreneur she became. Her father inspired her drive to own and build businesses, while the loss of her mother gave Amanda a new sense of urgency and confidence to pursue what came next.

Jen and Amanda also explore why resilience has played such a big role in her life. Amanda compares it to distance running: when you fall miles from home, you still have to get back up and keep going.

The conversation then goes beyond entrepreneurship and into Amanda’s vision for changing the way people think about their smiles. She explains why she believes smile care belongs alongside beauty and wellness, and shares how her own dental and health journey changed the way she thinks about breathing, sleep, confidence, and oral care.

This episode is for the woman who has built a life she thought she wanted but is beginning to wonder whether there is something more waiting for her.

Sometimes starting over doesn’t mean everything you built was wasted. It means you get to take everything you learned with you into what comes next.

About Dr. Amanda Lewis

Dr. Amanda Lewis is a dentist, entrepreneur, and founder of LUI. After nearly two decades in dentistry and building successful dental practices, Amanda shifted her focus toward creating smile-care products designed to fit into everyday beauty and wellness routines.

Her goal is to help people think differently about their smiles—not simply as something to care for at the dentist, but as an important part of confidence and overall wellness.

Be a Guest Are you a successful business owner, entrepreneur, or professional with insights to share? Apply to be a guest at https://catchherspark.com/guest and share your expertise with a wide audience eager to learn about you...

In this episode of the Catch her Spark Podcast with Jen Maldonado, Jen sits down with Monica Duperon, whose remarkable career took her from law enforcement and undercover narcotics to hostage negotiations, SWAT, investigations, and executive protection for ultra-high-net-worth families around the world.

But Monica’s biggest transformation did not happen on the job. It happened at home when she found an old box filled with the things she once loved—painting, drawing, poetry, and music.

That box reminded her of something she had almost forgotten: Monica herself.

She had become a mother, wife, police officer, protector, and professional. Somewhere along the way, the woman underneath all those roles had become smaller.

Monica shares how that realization forced her to look at the stories she had been telling herself—stories about being a Latina, coming from a poor family, not belonging in certain rooms, and needing to stay in her lane.

She also shares what she learned while working closely with some of the wealthiest people in the world. Her biggest observation? Their relationship with money, time, setbacks, and possibility was often very different.

Monica explains why she sees money as energy, how fear of lack can influence our choices, and what she observed about the routines and mindsets of wealthy people. For Monica, wealth is not simply about what someone has. It is also about how they think, learn, use their time, and respond when things go wrong.

Today, Monica is taking the lessons from her extraordinary career and using them to help other women identify limiting beliefs, find their confidence, and discover what she calls their “glow within.”

Be a Guest Are you a successful business owner, entrepreneur, or professional with insights to share? Apply to be a guest at https://catchherspark.com/guest and share your expertise with a wide audience eager to learn about you...

What happens when the doctor becomes the patient? In this powerful episode of Catch Her Spark, Jen Maldonado sits down with Dr. Ruby Rose, an emergency physician who transformed her own health struggles into a mission to help others uncover the root causes of illness. From growing up in the fashion world to practicing emergency medicine, surviving a life-changing car accident, navigating physician burnout, and facing a breast cancer diagnosis, Dr. Ruby's story is one of resilience, curiosity, and hope.

Rather than accepting "everything is normal" as an answer, Dr. Ruby continued asking questions that eventually led her into integrative and functional medicine. Today, she helps patients who have been told their symptoms are "all in their head" or that nothing is wrong, guiding them toward understanding their bodies and addressing the underlying causes of their health concerns.

In this conversation, Jen and Dr. Ruby discuss the importance of trusting your intuition, advocating for yourself, building resilience through life's unexpected challenges, and treating the whole person—not just the symptoms.

Dr. Ruby Rose is a board-certified emergency physician and certified functional medicine practitioner based in Austin, Texas. After experiencing burnout, chronic health issues, and later breast cancer herself, she dedicated her career to helping patients uncover the root causes of illness through an integrative approach that combines evidence-based medicine with lifestyle, nutrition, hormone health, gut health, and nervous system regulation.

Be a Guest Are you a successful business owner, entrepreneur, or professional with insights to share? Apply to be a guest at https://catchherspark.com/guest and share your expertise with a wide audience eager to learn about you...

What happens when the physician who has spent her career fixing broken systems is forced to face a deeply personal challenge she can't solve with medicine alone?

In this heartfelt episode of the Catch her Spark Podcast, Jen Maldonado sits down with emergency physician Dr. Shannon Markus to explore a journey that goes far beyond the emergency room. From improving healthcare equity and advocating for underserved patients to navigating infertility, pregnancy loss, IVF, and surrogacy, Dr. Shannon shares how life's hardest seasons reshaped her definition of success.

Throughout the conversation, she explains how years of working in emergency medicine revealed patterns that pointed to larger healthcare disparities. Instead of simply treating patients, she began asking why they kept returning and worked to create solutions that addressed the root causes of those challenges.

The conversation then shifts to one of the most personal chapters of her life. Dr. Shannon opens up about multiple pregnancy losses, the emotional impact of infertility, and how those experiences transformed her priorities. She discusses how ambition evolved from climbing the professional ladder to creating a life centered on purpose, family, health, and meaningful work.

Jen and Dr. Shannon also explore:

Be a Guest Are you a successful business owner, entrepreneur, or professional with insights to share? Apply to be a guest at https://catchherspark.com/guest and share your expertise with a wide audience eager to learn about you...