Golden Moment with Rebecca Montgomery

What do you do when someone looks you in the eye and decides who you are before you’ve had a chance to show them? If you’re Dominique McCain, you sign the paper anyway, with tears running down your face. Then you go prove him wrong.

Dominique McCain is President and CEO of Educational First Steps, an early education nonprofit expanding access to high-quality early childhood programming across Dallas and Tarrant counties. She is also the founder of The ConnectED Agency. Over 20+ years in education and nonprofit leadership, she has impacted more than 100,000 Texas children and 50,000 Texas educators. Fourteen of those years were spent teaching middle school science, and she’s a mother to many.

Topics include:

• Identity: knowing who you are when someone else gets you wrong
• “Put your pride to the side”: when pride fuels you, and when it gets in your way
• The question that grounds every decision: “What is the outcome you seek?”
• Why she thanks God for the ability to forget, and keeps only what moves her forward
• Choosing the calling you ran from, even when your family pushes back
• Why early childhood is prevention, not intervention
• “Be grateful when people listen to you, because they don’t have to”
• Anxiety and excitement are the same emotion

Stay to the end for the affirmation she says with her grandgirls every morning before school.

Relevant for women in education and early childhood, nonprofit leaders, first-generation college students, women who’ve been underestimated, and anyone learning to trust who she is.

Take the Excited Challenge: strike “anxious” and “nervous” from your vocabulary and replace them with “excited.” Same feeling, different story. Tell us you’re in on social with #AGoldenMoment, and send this episode to a woman who needs the reminder.

“You know who you are, you know what’s in you, and even if others can’t see it, you know it’s there. Lean into that.” — Dominique McCain

Connect with Dominique:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominiquemccain/
• Educational First Steps: https://www.educationalfirststeps.org/

Moment-Makers, new episodes drop every other Tuesday.

What happens when the thing you built your whole life around comes to a pause? If you're Deborah Jung, you wake up at 3:11 in the morning and tell your husband, "I've become extinct." Then you get up, fix your frothy coffee, and ask a friend to lunch.

Deborah Jung is the founder of Kids Who Care in Fort Worth, a performing arts company that spent more than 35 years inviting children from around the world to sing and dance about things that matter. Before that, she spent 14 years on stage at Casa Mañana, walking down the aisle as the Queen of Hearts to 1,500 screaming kids. She noticed two things: a lot of the adults working with children didn't love children, and a lot of the children watching her didn't know they could be her. So she started a summer company in her church basement, and it took over her life.

Rebecca and Deborah go back to where the magic started: a grandmother who was both a CPA and a professional storyteller, who told stories in a tent made of sheets while the grandkids drank from champagne glasses topped with whipped cream. Then they go to the hard part. Deborah opens up about pausing her life work - Kids Who Care, the grief that comes when a life plan changes and feeling invisible again, and the taco lunch where she “asked for the front porch, but got the house instead.”

Topics include:

• Why grief lives right next to joy, and fear is part of every yes
• Feeling invisible after decades in the spotlight, and the one small step that brings you back
• Finding your village: people who say "Yes, and?" instead of "That's not possible"
• How actors walk into the light when they're scared, and how you can too
• "Ask for the porch": why the worst thing anyone can say is no
• It's never too late to begin, and you don't have to quit your job to start
• The Cloud Card: Deborah's simple exercise for naming your dream and making it real

And yes, Deborah names her horse, Cecilia. Stay to the end for what we discovered about that name after the interview.

Relevant for women in transition, women rebuilding after a career change, loss or retirement, creatives, nonprofit founders, and anyone with a dream written somewhere inside her.

Take the Cloud Card challenge: write your dream on a cloud card, then post a photo (turned over is fine) with #GoldenMoment. Download here.

"Whatever you have in your heart that you were born to do, the world needs it." — Deborah Jung

Moment-Makers, new episodes drop every other Tuesday.

What do you do when you're good at your job, respected, well paid, and still know there's something bigger to build? If you're Laura Davis, you leave a secure job in the Texas Senate, start working out of an Austin apartment, and build the fix yourself.

Laura Davis is co-founder and Chief Business Officer of USLege, an AI-powered legislative intelligence platform that now tracks all 50 state legislatures and Congress. She spent 10 years in and around the Texas Capitol, watching brilliant people do impossible work with terrible tools. She knew the problem firsthand: spending hours hunting for a 20-second clip from two sessions ago. So she took the biggest risk of her career. Within nine months, USLege had taken over the Texas market and passed $1 million in revenue.

Rebecca and Laura go back to where her steel came from. She was born in England, fell in love with Texas, and moved here at 17 to chase a career in government. She spent a freshman year at military school, where she learned how strong she could be and stood up for the women around her. And she had a mom whose simple question, "Do you like it? Then it is cool," taught her to stop waiting for the crowd's permission.

Topics include:

• Leaving a secure career to start a company, and why you only regret what you don't do
• Being underestimated as a young woman in politics and tech
• "Chewing glass and staring into the abyss": the reality of early-stage startup life
• What to do when your first customer walks out the door
• Women supporting women in the Capitol community
• Why she stopped ruminating, and the problem-solving mindset every founder needs
• "Ride the tiger": her company's motto for pushing through discomfort toward growth

And yes, Laura names her horse. She's burgundy, she's sparkly, she rides through the desert, and her name is Champion.

Relevant for women entrepreneurs, female founders, women in government affairs and public policy, and anyone standing at the edge of her own leap.

"Start it and do it, but don't give up. Usually it's right at that time that you're ready to give up that everything shifts." — Laura Davis

Moment-Makers, new episodes drop every other Tuesday.

Rosa Navejar — founder and president of Fort Worth utility-engineering firm The Rios Group and the first woman to lead a chamber of commerce in Fort Worth — on being the only woman in the room, taking risks late in your career, and why you don't wait for a seat at the table when you can build your own.

Told in high school that "girls like her" were meant to get married and have babies, Rosa turned that into fuel: 25 years in banking, 11 years transforming the Fort Worth Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (from 250 to nearly 1,400 members), and — at 56, in a church pew, deciding she didn't want to be 70 thinking what if — the leap that grew The Rios Group from $5.3M to over $12M.

In this episode:

• Why she tells women to "make your own table" instead of waiting to be invited
• "Do your homework so you can tell the story instead of being told the story"
• Handling being talked over, dismissed, and underestimated in the room
• The good, the bad, and the ugly — and why we learn more from failure than success
• Taking a career-defining risk at 56

A conversation for women in business, aspiring entrepreneurs, and anyone ready to stop waiting and go for it.

New episodes of A Golden Moment with Rebecca Montgomery drop every other Tuesday. If this one gave you a nudge, share it, leave a review, and subscribe!

Six years old. A cold winter night. A knock that would define the rest of her life.

Kenya Rashard — founder of On Track Truck Driving School, the first African American to open a commercial driving school in Arlington, and a woman known across North Texas for giving second chances to people the world has written off — sits down with Rebecca for a conversation unlike any other on this show.

Kenya calls herself "God's favorite." After you hear her story, you'll understand exactly why she means it.

This episode goes to places most podcasts don't go — a loss no child should carry, a rebellion that nearly cost her everything, and a decades-long climb back toward a life she built entirely on faith, grit, and one unshakable belief: that she is not what happened to her.

There's a bank loan that shouldn't have been possible. A landlord who saw something in her before she ever said a word. A dream about trucks that turned into a business built from nothing. And a metaphor about the cape every woman wears that we haven't been able to stop thinking about since we recorded it.

Kenya is a woman who defies the odds - inspiring us to break past the excuses and go for it!

A note before you press play: this conversation touches on themes of domestic violence and loss. Kenya shares it with grace, but listener discretion is advised.

Moment-Makers — bring tissues, and bring an open heart. This one will stay with you.

📥 Download "Take the Cape Off" — a reflection guide and let this be your permission slip to “Take the Cape Off” with Kenya. -> https://bit.ly/CapeOff

She built a name in Fort Worth long before advertising even allowed it — Doc Holliday, dentist, entrepreneur, fixture of Sundance Square. But behind the name is a woman who once had to solve the hardest equation of her life, one variable at a time. This week on Golden Moment, Marie "Doc" Holliday sits down with Rebecca to talk about the motto her father gave her — the one that turned every hard season into something she could walk through instead of around. Moment-Makers, this is a conversation about reinvention, identity, and what it actually takes to become fully yourself.

Marie "Doc" Holliday is a Fort Worth dentist of 23 years and the entrepreneur behind two Sundance Square businesses, Marie Antoinette Perfumery and Flower To Go. A wife, mother, and longtime community volunteer, she's known throughout Fort Worth as "the Doc Holliday of Sundance Square."

She woke up one morning and her entire world changed before she even got out of bed.

Dana Compton — Director of Business Development at Ridgemont Commercial Construction, two decades deep in a male-dominated industry, and a woman who was, by her own account, living the most perfect chapter of her life — got news that day that would have broken most people.

Instead, it became the thing that taught her how to actually live.

In this episode, Rebecca sits down with Dana for a conversation that goes places you won't expect — from a sealed room and symptoms her doctor couldn’t explain, to a decision made in a parking lot that changed the entire trajectory of her story, to the words her husband said that still stop her in her tracks today.

Dana talks about growing up with nothing and dreaming anyway. About the diagnosis most people never recover from — and the choice she makes with it every single morning instead. About the moment intuition saved her life, and why she believes it can save yours too.

This is a conversation about fear, and about the astonishing thing that happens when you stop being afraid of it.

And yes — you'll meet her horse. Silver as moonlight, and named exactly what you'd expect.

Moment-Makers, this is the one you send to the woman you love most.

She applied to her dream school, but didn't get in.

On the other side of devastation she committed to a new path, and persistence landed her in a better position than if they had said yes the first time.

Dr. Rachael Capua, Vice President for External Operations and Dean of Tarleton State Fort Worth, and one of the most impressive women in North Texas education, has built her entire career on a philosophy she wrote for herself during her doctoral program: live life inspired, not intimidated.

In this episode, Rebecca and Dr. Cap sit down like the old friends they are and go deep. Dr. Cap talks about growing up with a single mother who ran her own business and showed her grit in the most organic way — not by what she said, but by what she did. She talks about her uncle, Roy P. Benavidez, a Medal of Honor recipient whose story of surviving the unsurvivable and choosing to fight for education — especially for young people who look like him — still moves her to tears. She talks about impostor syndrome, ageism, the power of just one true friend, and what it really means to be grateful for the no.

And her horse's name… well, you'll just have to listen to find out.

If you're sitting in a no or a rejection right now — this episode was made for you.

If Dr. Cap's story of Uncle Roy moves you — go visit the National Medal of Honor Museum in Arlington, Texas. Just named America's #1 new museum AND one of the world's most beautiful. Roy P. Benavidez's story is there. It's worth the drive.

"Be grateful for the nos — they get you closer to the right yes." — Dr. Rachael Capua

What do you do when a door slams in your face and it's completely unfair?

If you're Becky Renfro Borbolla, you cry for a week. Then you get up, go back to night school, and walk through the door that was actually meant for you.

Becky is the Senior Vice President of Renfro Foods and a third-generation leader of one of Fort Worth's most beloved family businesses: Mrs. Renfro's Salsa. Her grandparents started the company in their garage in 1940 during the Great Depression. Today, Mrs. Renfro's is in all 50 states and 30 countries including Dubai, South Africa, and the UK. And the woman on the label? That's Arthurine Renfro - a woman so strong she wouldn't even put her own first name on the jar.

In this episode, Becky and Rebecca sit down like the old friends they are and go there. Becky talks about getting fired in her 20s for saying no to a marriage proposal from the boss's son (yes, really), the winding road that led her to the family business, what it's like to walk into a room in the Middle East as a woman and realize the fear was bigger than the reality, and why she founded Women Steering Business to invest in the next generation of young female leaders.

She also shares something she's kept in her desk for over a decade — a list of rules for life she heard from Cynt Marshall, CEO of the Dallas Mavericks, that she pulls out every week. It's the kind of list you tape to your bathroom mirror. Rebecca loved it so much she's sharing it with the whole herd.

📥 Download "Show Up and Dance: Rules for a Remarkable Life" — the free one-page guide inspired by this episode. -> https://bit.ly/ShowUpAndDance

And yes — Becky's horse is named Genevieve. She always bets on the gray horse. Listen to find out why.

Moment-Makers, this one is going to stay with you.

"Behind a successful woman, there's a great group of girlfriends." — Becky Renfro Borbolla

A conversation on slowing down, leading with humanity, and resisting the false sense of urgency. Are you rushing through your career, or are you ready to slow down and lead with true impact? Listen to this episode of A Golden Moment as host Rebecca Montgomery sits down with retiring Visit Fort Worth CEO Bob Jameson to discover why kindness, patience, and authenticity are a leader's ultimate power moves.

About the Episode

In this inspiring episode, Rebecca Montgomery welcomes Bob Jameson, the retiring President and CEO of Visit Fort Worth. Under his 13-year leadership, Fort Worth became the fastest-growing tourism destination in the country, driving a $700 million convention center expansion and a $1 billion film industry. But beyond the extraordinary numbers, Bob’s true legacy is written in the words of the women he led, who praise his kindness, patience, and unwavering integrity over any title or result. Whether you are a rising professional or an established executive, this conversation offers a masterclass in leading with a servant's heart and staying true to yourself.

Key Highlights

• The Power of Kindness: Bob reflects on why choosing patience and integrity was never a career risk, but rather his greatest strength in earning loyalty and building collaboration.
• Slowing Down to Hurry Up: Unpacking the false sense of urgency in an instantaneous world, Bob shares why pulling on the reins gives leaders the vital space to think and evaluate human impact.
• Joining the "Moment Makers" Movement: Discover how Bob’s core philosophy that "every single person matters" perfectly mirrors the Moment Makers mission to lift each other up, respect diverse voices, and ensure everyone is fully seen in the room.
• Lessons from Local Icons: Bob shares powerful insights from working alongside legendary female leaders like Kay Granger and Irma Johnson Hadley, highlighting the importance of taking leaps of faith and speaking hard truths.
• Navigating the Storm: A candid look at managing a demanding career alongside family, supporting team boundaries in an always-on digital world, and overcoming the universal hurdles of imposter syndrome.

Take Action: Find Your Freedom

• Name Your Horse: Born in the Year of the Wood Horse, Bob joins the herd's ongoing exercise and names his horse Freedom—capturing the liberating transition into retirement and the joy of choosing his own pace.
• Trust Your Gut: Stop waiting until you hit a certain age or title to believe your voice is worth hearing; raise your hand and bring your ideas to the table today.
• Build Your Circle: Establish a safe, trusted circle of allies where you can be vulnerable, speak your thoughts out loud, and get honest feedback.

Rapid-Fire Fun

Hear Bob’s favorite spot to take first-time visitors in Fort Worth, the single word he uses to describe the city's current era, and the most ridiculous, microplastic-conscious guest request he ever encountered during his 50 years in hospitality.

Enjoyed this golden nugget? If this conversation gave you the nudge, reframe, or reminder you needed today, please leave a review and share it! Pass it along to a woman in your life who needs a little encouragement or needs to name her horse.

Listen now, find your voice, and go for it!