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Glow Up, Gyrl
Glow Up, Gyrl episodes
- Betting on Yourself: Building a Wellness Brand from Idea to Retail Shelf with Madison Vrbnjak
What if the real test of your idea is whether people come back and ask for more?
Madison Vrbnjak had one rule before launching JUSTYOU, her daily gut health and energy supplement. She wouldn’t launch until friends and family were texting her for more samples. That took a while. Madison spent six years building JUSTYOU alongside a marketing agency she co-founded, launched about a year and a half ago, and is now on her first retail shelf at Pop Up Grocer in New York City. Kyra talks with the Dallas-based founder and mom of two about what building a brand really looks like, and what kept her going when it got hard.
In this episode:
- Why Madison waited to launch until friends asked for more samples
- Friends and family support you, but they aren’t your customers
- Why “do A and B to get to Z” rarely works on schedule
- Becoming a professional problem solver
- Why founders should know every part of their business
- “If you ever want to become patient, start your own business”
- Knowing when to pivot and when to keep going
- Finding your why, and why money alone won’t hold you
- Her red flag for overwhelm: “It’s all up to me”
- How her team landed JUSTYOU its first retail spot
- Monthly check-ins and the 10% everyone can improve on
Whether you are sitting on an idea, a few years into building something, or leading a small team that’s carrying a lot, this conversation will meet you right where you are.
Learn more: justyouco.com
Follow JUSTYOU: @justyoucoStay connected to Glow Up, Gyrl:
Website: glowupgyrl.com | Email: [email protected]Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn: @glowupgyrl | Facebook: @glowupgyrlatlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
55 min - The Authority Shift: Stop Waiting to Be Chosen and Start Leading with Shirley Sutton
What if the promotion you keep waiting for is waiting on you to act like you already have it?
Shirley Sutton knows the feeling from the inside. She once watched a colleague mention her idea in passing, get the credit for it, and get promoted, while she stayed put as “the reliable one” who always got things done. Today Shirley is a leadership coach and People and Culture leader with years in talent, recruitment, and HR, and the creator of the Managers to Leaders program. Kyra sits down with her to talk about why so many women wait for permission to lead, and what changes when they stop.
In this episode:
- The meeting where someone else got credit for Shirley’s idea
- Why being “the reliable one” can keep you right where you are
- Why waiting feels safe, and what it costs you
- Outsourcing your worth to someone else’s timeline
- What the Authority Shift actually means
- Why becoming a parent is the best analogy for stepping into authority
- The day Shirley asked “who normally does this?” and the answer was “you do”
- Reading the room and knowing when to take it offline
- Why you should apply for the role even if you might not get it
- The one small step to take if you feel invisible at work
- Inside the Managers to Leaders program
Whether you are a manager eyeing your next role, already holding the title but not quite feeling it, or the person everyone counts on but nobody promotes, this conversation will meet you right where you are.
Learn more: ascendly.online
Follow Shirley: @ascendly_career_coachStay connected to Glow Up, Gyrl:
Website: glowupgyrl.com | Email: [email protected]Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn: @glowupgyrl | Facebook: @glowupgyrlatlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
43 min - Dress for Who You're Becoming: Style, Confidence, and Visibility Without a New Wardrobe with JenniLee
What if the answer to "I have nothing to wear" is already hanging in your closet?
This week on the Glow Up, Gyrl Podcast, Kyra sits down with JenniLee, a celebrity stylist and image consultant with more than 20 years of experience dressing stars like Greta Gerwig, Chris Pratt, Lauryn Hill, and Gloria Estefan. She started her career on movie sets, where she learned that clothes help tell a story. Today she helps ambitious women build wardrobes that reflect who they are and where they are going, through a philosophy she calls more styling, less shopping.
In this episode:
- Why your closet stops reflecting you, and the three-month check-in that fixes it
- The department store homework where you try on the expensive version and buy nothing
- How the haul economy filled our closets and left us wearing a fraction of what we own
- The client with 50 white button-down shirts, and how to keep only the best
- The photo album in your closet for pieces you love but will never wear
- Dressing for the body you have today, and why jeans get an exception
- Why your body has its own weather, and the two-outfit rule for big days
- Why she does not believe in color analysis
- Size labels, gendered clothing, and why every woman needs a tailor
- Her free Style Archetype Quiz and the Spark Framework
- Her three takeaways, starting with stepping back from the mirror
Whether you are pivoting into a new role, standing in front of a full closet with nothing to wear, or trying to refresh your style without spending much, this conversation will meet you right where you are.
Learn more: jennileestylist.consulting
Follow JenniLee: @jennileestylistStay connected to Glow Up, Gyrl:
Website: glowupgyrl.com | Email: [email protected]Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn: @glowupgyrl | Facebook: @glowupgyrlatlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
48 min - Life-Synced Success: AI, Ayurveda, and Building a Business Your Body Can Sustain with Arjita Sethi
What if the business you are building is one your body cannot actually survive?
This week on the Glow Up, Gyrl Podcast, Kyra sits down with Arjita Sethi, serial entrepreneur, physical therapist, certified yoga teacher, and Ayurveda practitioner working at the intersection of AI and wellbeing. She founded Shaanti, an AI-powered wellness platform now ranked fourth in AI wellness in the US, along with New Founders School and Build With AI Club. She sits on the advisory board of the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center and teaches entrepreneurship at San Francisco State.
She started her first company at 16 in India, a vocational school that reached 100,000 people. Then came a venture-backed AI company in San Francisco, twenty-hour days, and by 2019, burnout so complete she says there was not a functional bone left in her body. COVID shut everything down, and she and her husband moved to three acres surrounded by redwoods in Northern California. They stayed two and a half years, and it changed what success meant to her.
In this episode:
- Why AI is your first hire, not a magic trick
- What most people get wrong about training it, and why every input has a memory
- Whether using AI is cheating, and why your input is the part nobody can copy
- How burnout became a badge of honor, and what she saw in Silicon Valley that normalized it
- The forced pause in the redwoods that rebuilt her definition of success
- How AI made a six-month paid maternity leave possible, in a year that outperformed the one before
- What Ayurveda actually is, and why the same advice does not work for everyone
- Vata, pitta, and kapha, and why your body already knows what it needs
- The nervous system as a founder's real operating system, with Jensen Huang as the example
- The free thing she recommends over every product: sleep, water, and breath
- Her three takeaways, including the question she thinks everyone should be asking
Whether you are running on empty and calling it ambition, curious about AI but sure you are behind, or quietly wondering whether the version of success you are chasing is even yours, this conversation will meet you right where you are.
Learn more: findshanti.com
Also from Arjita: newfoundersschool.com and buildwithaiclub.comFollow Arjita: @arjitasethiStay connected to Glow Up, Gyrl:
Website: glowupgyrl.com | Email: [email protected]Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn: @glowupgyrl | Facebook: @glowupgyrlatlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
44 min - From Artist to CEO: Building a Seven-Figure Beauty Brand by Reinventing Yourself with Tanny Diep
What if the career that finally fits is one you have not thought of yet?
This week on the Glow Up, Gyrl Podcast, Kyra sits down with Tanny Diep, founder of Sway Brows, a permanent makeup academy and studio in Los Angeles. She is a master artist, educator, and beauty business coach who built a seven-figure brand. She is also 41, and she started this career at 35.
Before any of it, she sold cell phones at AT&T through college, dropped out of business school, went back for fashion design, and spent nearly a decade in the fashion industry. She took a pay cut from forty dollars an hour to nine, bartended and served sushi to cover the gap, and worked her way from design assistant to nearly every role a small company has. Then she hit a wall.
What got her out was a 200-hour yoga teacher training she only signed up for because a friend asked. She never taught yoga. She came out of it having put down a victim mentality she had been carrying, and that is the version of her who eventually looked at microblading and thought, maybe.
In this episode:
- Leaving a stable sales career for a nine-dollar-an-hour internship, and why she did it anyway
- The yoga training that changed everything, and why it was never about yoga
- Her first model, which went so badly she nearly quit on the spot
- The eleventh client who made her understand what this work actually is
- Why the beauty industry she feared turned out to be nothing like she expected
- The back room of a hair salon, a hundred square foot studio, and what came next
- The month she made ten thousand dollars and assumed it was a fluke
- What the shift from artist to CEO actually required
- Why confidence comes from repetition, not from thinking about confidence
- The expensive experiments that did not work, and why she keeps trying anyway
- Her answer for anyone who thinks it is too late
Whether you are eyeing an exit from something that no longer fits, talented at your craft and lost on the business side, or just wondering if starting over in your thirties or forties is allowed, this conversation will meet you right where you are.
Learn more: swaybrows.com
Follow Tanny: @swaybrowsStay connected to Glow Up, Gyrl:
Website: glowupgyrl.com | Email: [email protected]Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn: @glowupgyrl | Facebook: @glowupgyrlatlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
50 min - Why Isn't Everyone Dancing? Reclaiming Instinct, Joy, and Your Own Humanity with Jo Kelly
What if there is nothing about you that needs healing, and the problem is that you were never honored in the first place?
This week on the Glow Up, Gyrl Podcast, Kyra sits down with Jo Kelly, an instinct and truth resetter who has spent close to thirty years helping people move back through their conditioning toward instinct, freedom, and their own humanity. She works with artists, creative leaders, and athletes, and she describes what she does simply: helping adults be kids again.
Jo is also the director of the documentary Why Isn't Everyone Dancing? It started during her cancer treatment. She caught sight of herself in the mirror one morning, naked, about to shower, on her way to radiation, and dancing. She kept dancing. In the car with the windows down. Through the hospital corridor. In front of the radiation room door. When the nurses opened it, they told her they had watched the whole thing on camera, and she saw more joy on their faces than she had seen in weeks.
In this episode:
- Why the pacifier is the first thing we hand a crying baby, and what that teaches
- How school trains children out of their own instincts
- Why the pressure to please falls harder on women
- Feelings are not to be fixed or healed, they are to be honored
- The tree with no branches, and what happens when a human gets the same treatment
- Being interested versus trying to be interesting
- Why cutting the weeds never works if the root stays
- Dancing through cancer treatment, and the instruction that became a documentary
- The strangers who joined her, and the ones who crossed the street
- Why twenty people end up hugging by the end of her first workshop day
- Presence instead of confidence, and why the difference matters
Whether you have been performing rather than living, carrying feelings you were taught to swallow, or just curious what you were like before the world got hold of you, this conversation will meet you right where you are.
Learn more: tobeornottoact.com
Follow Jo: @tobeornottoact_jokellyStay connected to Glow Up, Gyrl:
Website: glowupgyrl.com | Email: [email protected]Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn: @glowupgyrl | Facebook: @glowupgyrlatlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
52 min - Strategic Networking: Building Relationships That Actually Open Doors with Dr. Elizabeth Fried
What if the reason networking feels awful is that you have been doing the wrong thing first?
This week on the Glow Up, Gyrl Podcast, Kyra sits down with Dr. Elizabeth Fried, executive coach, author, and founder of N. E. Fried and Associates, who has spent more than four decades with senior leaders, business owners, and professionals working on clarity, confidence, and executive presence. She is also 78, plays pickleball with a 33 year old partner, acts in commercials for active aging, and writes a children's fantasy series.
Her book started with Navy SEALs. Elizabeth coaches for The Honor Foundation, which helps special operators move into the civilian workforce. She says many of them would rather go back into a firefight than walk into a room of strangers. Their program requires 50 cups of coffee with people they do not know, so she built them a protocol in the language they already spoke: mission, target, reconnaissance, plan. It worked, and it turned into Strategic Networking: A Practical Playbook.
In this episode:
- Why the first step is not meeting people, it is knowing your objective
- The five situations in her book and why each one needs different questions
- Relationship capital instead of collecting business cards
- The AI prompts she wrote to research someone before you ever meet them
- Mirror neurons, oxytocin, and what actually happens when two people connect
- Why asking permission drops defenses, and the exact phrasing to use
- The No Wallflower Rule, and the mindset shift she gave her terrified niece
- How to gracefully exit a conversation and still get the contact
- How to join a group already talking without saying a word at first
- The handwritten note, the follow-up article, and why most people quit too early
- What she learned about influence after four decades of coaching
Whether you are dreading a conference next month, rebuilding a network after a career change, or walking into rooms where you do not know a soul, this conversation will meet you right where you are.
Learn more: executivecoachingfirms.com
Follow Elizabeth: @nelizabethfriedStay connected to Glow Up, Gyrl:
Website: glowupgyrl.com | Email: [email protected]Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn: @glowupgyrl | Facebook: @glowupgyrlatlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
49 min - Change Starts With Choice: Rebuilding Self-Trust and Moving Forward Without Certainty with Ev Foster
What if you are not waiting for more information, and you already know exactly what you want to do?
This week on the Glow Up, Gyrl Podcast, Kyra sits down with Ev Foster, author of Change Starts With Choice, intuitive psychology coach, and operating principal of Keller Williams Scotland. As Regional Champion for Scotland with WIEA, she mentors real estate agents building profitable, intentional businesses. She is a mum of four, splitting her time between Glasgow and Edinburgh.
The book traces back to one year in her early twenties. Ev left an abusive relationship, lost her grandmother, and watched her father have a debilitating stroke at 58 that put him in a wheelchair. She was 24, and what stayed with her was that her parents had spent their whole marriage waiting for his retirement. Rainy day. Someday. We will be happy when.
In this episode:
- Why people react before they breathe, and what leading through it taught her
- The moment capable women reach for one more opinion instead of trusting themselves
- Self-trust as a muscle, not a personality trait
- The conscious mind is five percent, and what the other ninety-five is holding
- Deep intuitive trust, the eyes-closed technique she walks clients through
- Shadows, and the schoolyard comment you forgot but your body did not
- The beach ball you have been holding underwater, and what comes back when you let go
- Why outgrowing your life feels worse than failing at it
- Not every room wants you to rise, and what that costs women who sense it
- Losing friends as you grow, and making peace with reasons and seasons
- Viktor Frankl, and the one freedom nobody can take from you
- The answer for the woman waiting to feel confident before she acts
Whether you are sitting on a decision you already made, carrying something you pushed down years ago, or leading well on paper while second-guessing yourself in private, this conversation will meet you right where you are.
Learn more: changestartswithchoice.com
Follow Ev: @evfoster_choicecoachStay connected to Glow Up, Gyrl:
Website: glowupgyrl.com | Email: [email protected]Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn: @glowupgyrl | Facebook: @glowupgyrlatlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
33 min - You Are Already a Leader: Confidence, Faith, and Showing Up as Who You Are Becoming with Sharonda Holland
What if you have been waiting for a title to make you a leader, and everyone around you already sees you as one?
This week on the Glow Up, Gyrl Podcast, Kyra sits down with Sharonda Holland, founder of Higher Ground Leaders and a hospitality leader with more than 15 years in the industry. Sharonda says the organization was born out of what she calls failure. There were seasons when nothing was going according to plan, and she was questioning whether she was even on the right path. What she found on the other side was that the encouraging she had been doing for emerging leaders in her community was not a side thing. It was the work.
In this episode:
- Why Higher Ground carries that name, and what constantly climbing actually means
- Leading before the title, and why leadership is smaller and simpler than most people think
- The mold most of us picture when we hear the word leader, and how wrong it is
- Why women struggle with confidence, and the comparison trap social media keeps setting
- The brag folder that turns a bad day around
- What to do when you feel stuck, and why analysis paralysis keeps you frozen
- Pivoting is not failure, and how to spot burnout before it flattens you
- Active listening as a leadership trait nobody puts on the list
- Opportunity areas instead of weaknesses, and why the language matters
- How faith and surrender show up in the way Sharonda builds and leads
- Her three takeaways: do not be afraid to pivot, do not be afraid to fail, and keep climbing
Whether you are waiting on a promotion that has not come, rebuilding after something did not work out, or leading a team without the title to match, this conversation will meet you right where you are.
Learn more: highergroundleaders.com
Follow Sharonda: @highergroundleadersStay connected to Glow Up, Gyrl:
Website: glowupgyrl.com | Email: [email protected]Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn: @glowupgyrl | Facebook: @glowupgyrlatlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
59 min - Excellence Without Exhaustion: Leading Fully Without Burning Out with Tian Philson
What if the reason you are so tired has nothing to do with how much sleep you got and everything to do with a belief you have never actually examined?
This week on the Glow Up, Gyrl Podcast, Kyra sits down with Tian Philson, leadership transformation and decision-making coach and the founder of LSF Wellness. Tian spent more than 20 years in corporate strategy before building a practice around one idea: help people go inward so they can go upward. She works with high-achieving women who are succeeding by every external measure and paying for it with their energy and their peace. Her partners include Kroger, Junior League Cincinnati, and 84.51°.
In this episode:
- Why there was never one moment, just a lot of small ones she kept ignoring
- Crying on the drive to work at her first job out of college
- Coming home at night and no longer recognizing herself, even while she kept moving up
- The difference between exhaustion and burnout, and why rest only fixes one of them
- When it is time to stop coaching yourself and talk to a mental health professional
- The beliefs running below conscious awareness that keep you saying yes
- People pleasing, over-delivering, and the promotion where the goalposts keep moving
- The question Tian asks every client: how is that serving you now
- Why you are a leader even if you have never managed a single person
- The Moana and Spider-Man story that changed how she answers her husband
- Inside the VOICCE® framework and why the desired outcome comes first
- Letting a decision be good enough, and the fatigue that perfectionism creates
Whether you are the dependable one everyone piles work onto, the person who says yes before you have even thought about it, or a woman who looks fine on paper and knows something is off, this conversation will meet you right where you are.
Learn more: lsfwellness.com
Follow LSF Wellness: @lsf.wellnessStay connected to Glow Up, Gyrl:
Website: glowupgyrl.com | Email: [email protected]Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn: @glowupgyrl | Facebook: @glowupgyrlatlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
58 min
About Glow Up, Gyrl
From the publisher's feed
Get ready to embark on an uplifting journey with host Kyra Mitchell Lewis as she introduces you to inspiring guests, shares empowering stories, and provides practical tips and information. Glow Up,…
Gyrl is more than just a podcast - it's a supportive community where women can come together to learn, share, and connect. Join us as we help you find and live purpose-filled lives, uncovering your ultimate GLOW-UP!