Heartwork Podcast

Sara and Marisa take ten principles from Unreasonable Hospitality and walk them straight into their own practices, starting with the idea that service is black and white and hospitality is color. The spark is a Dancing with the Stars rabbit hole into the Savannah Bananas, a baseball entertainment company with a ten thousand person waitlist and forty dollar tickets, whose owner refuses to sell because he won't let anyone else dictate the fan experience. That raises a question worth asking of any business, about whether you look at the details because a metric is off or because of the person walking through the door. A team can scan, adjust, and answer the phone perfectly and still leave someone feeling like a number, and everybody inherently wants to be seen.

🔥 In This Episode:

• How to bring color into the everyday moments of your practice so people stop feeling like a number
• Why presence is a decision you make at the door, and the small things that quietly tell someone they come second
• How to turn "how was your weekend" into a real dialogue that adds depth to someone's experience
• Why taking care of your team first is what allows them to take care of everyone else
• How a mistake, owned out loud in the moment, can be more memorable than a perfect experience

Culture builds on itself, and it only holds when it gets repeated. Three of these principles fit into a fifteen minute Monday huddle, and that was enough to start. Choose the one your team needs most this week and teach it, then watch for the moments in your own day where someone walked in and got service when they needed to be seen.

Connect with us:

• Instagram: @drsaranelsongray, @dr.marisa.nicole10, @theheartworkpodcast
• Email: [email protected]

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Dr. Sara is celebrating 11 years with Freedom Chiropractic this October, and she’s sharing the lessons those years taught her, with Dr. Marisa bringing in where each one has shown up in her own practice. It starts with the lesson underneath every other one: a practice can only grow as far as its leader is willing to grow. The lessons follow the arc of ownership, from the early years of doing everything yourself, to building a team and a culture that can breathe without you, to the CEO season of giving your leaders real ownership and letting go. Each season asked for more self awareness than the one before it. The deepest growth came from the hardest place to look: an identity so wrapped up in being a high volume chiropractor that the numbers had quietly become a measure of worth. That is the question underneath all 11 lessons: who are you without your business?

🔥 In This Episode:

• Why your practice hits the same ceiling your own growth hits, and why no new system moves it until you do
• How to spot the task you’re still white knuckling and hand it to a team that can carry it
• What to look for when you hire for heart and train the skill, and why your team is the best read on a new hire
• How to tell a shiny idea born from scarcity from an aligned one, before your patients start questioning your judgment
• The question that untangles your worth from your stat sheet, and where to start when answering it feels icky

If the question of who you are without your business makes your stomach drop, don’t rush past it. That discomfort marks the exact place your next season of growth lives, for you and for every person inside your practice. Get curious about why it feels so uncomfortable, build joy into the parts of your life that have nothing to do with numbers, and then find someone safe enough to hear the honest answer.

Connect with us:

• Instagram: @drsaranelsongray, @dr.marisa.nicole10, @theheartworkpodcast
• Email: [email protected]

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Sara and Marisa get personal about money, worth, and identity, and about how money can become a measuring stick for who you are. When the drive underneath earning it is to be seen, to be noticed, and to feel worthy, it shapes choices that are not always healthy ones. Their own lives are right there on the table, with a move into a new home and a mortgage that roughly tripled, a season of deliberately running lean, and the moment of asking who they are to talk about money on a podcast at all. Getting brutally honest with your numbers means your numbers get brutally honest back, and so does how you feel about them.

🔥 In This Episode:

• Why money turns into a measuring stick for your worth, and how to catch yourself chasing it to be seen or validated
• How a couples money check in turns financial tension into a shared picture, especially when one of you needs a safety number and the other trusts it will always flow
• Why honesty about how you feel about money has to come before the budget, the strategy, or the system
• How someone can have millions in the bank and still feel scarce, and why the dollar amount was never what decided it
• Why abundance was never meant to be a transaction, and how to recognize the provision already in front of you

Money can buy time, resources, and experiences, and it can absolutely move your life forward. What it cannot do is decide whether you are worthy, and getting free with it can take years of honest work. Sit down with your numbers, alone or with your partner, and get clear on what money means to you and what you have been asking it to prove. Then decide whether it rules your world or helps you build the one you want.

Connect with us:

• Instagram: @drsaranelsongray, @dr.marisa.nicole10, @theheartworkpodcast
• Email: [email protected]

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Trying to fix something is a way of grabbing the reins back, and the reflex to get a symptom gone right now leaves no room for God, for intuition, or for rest. Healing does not work that way. It is ongoing and uncertain, it has peaks and valleys, and it never actually stops. Health is not an illusion, but the belief that we control the outcome of it is. This one stays in the middle of that rather than talking about it from the other side.

🔥 In This Episode:

• The difference between fixing and healing, and what fixing is usually protecting
• Why control over your health outcome is an illusion, even when the daily choices still matter
• What "normal range" actually measures, and why a dynamic body was never meant to hold still inside one
• Why the thing showing up in your body now may be older than any change you are making today
• Why being honest about how hard it is opens more than pretending you have peace about it

Fear and peace can both be there at once, and there is no requirement to feel peace right now if you do not. The question at the end is worth sitting with. If none of it got fixed, would you be okay. Life exists inside of all of it, not outside of it.

Connect with us:

• Instagram: @drsaranelsongray, @dr.marisa.nicole10, @theheartworkpodcast
• Email: [email protected]

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Nobody knows what fifty five feels like until they press the pedal, overshoot it, and pull back. That is how you learn to drive, and it is also how you learn to operate as a different version of yourself. This is a theme that has been surfacing with colleagues, friends, and clients lately, and the question underneath it is always the same. Once you can see the pattern you have been running, how do you know whether you are acting from a healthier place or sliding right back into it. The answer running through the whole conversation is that you cannot know from the outside of it. You build the gauge by moving. From there it goes into the exits we take and why we take them, what exhaustion is usually pointing back to, and what happens when the fear of doing it wrong turns into doing nothing at all.

🔥 In This Episode:

• Why seeing the pattern is not the same as knowing how to operate differently, and what actually closes that gap
• How to build the trust that you can catch yourself going too fast and slow down
• The question worth asking before you take a new exit, and how to tell whether you are being drawn or told
• What fatigue is often reporting back about a choice you already knew was off
• Why the fear of repeating an old pattern keeps people swinging between a hundred percent and zero

Shame is what sits underneath most of this. Every should, every replay of why you did it that way, is shame in tidier clothing, and there is nothing shameful about being in process. You get to paint your own lanes, and nobody else gets to paint them for you. Alignment cannot be assessed from the outside of it. Go touch the thing you have been circling, even for fifteen minutes, and let your body tell you what it is.

Connect with us:

• Instagram: @drsaranelsongray, @dr.marisa.nicole10, @theheartworkpodcast
• Email: [email protected]

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Marcia Erickson is a business and executive coach with ActionCOACH in the Quad Cities, and she spent twenty years in healthcare administration before this. Most of this conversation sits on delegation, and on why so many owners say they want a team that takes ownership and then cannot hand anything over. 

Marcia's first answer is practical. She says leaders rarely describe what success actually looks like in a role, so we default to saying we will know it when we see it, and the team is left guessing. Then Sara and Marisa take it underneath the systems, into the beliefs driving the behavior. 

Marcia talks about how a belief has no objectivity in it, and how we go collect every piece of evidence we can find to prove it right anyway. She is candid about her own version of that, including the years she could not put her own face on her own marketing.

🔥 In This Episode:

• What actually blocks delegation, and why it has more to do with what you believe about yourself than what your team can handle
• Why "I will know it when I see it" is not a standard, and what it costs your team when nobody says out loud what success looks like
• Marcia's test before she hands anything off, and what changes when the question becomes whether you can live with the outcome
• What real accountability looks like when your people report their own wins and misses instead of you pulling it out of them
• What it took for Marcia, an introvert, to put her own face on her own marketing, and what she still does to get through it

Marcia says coaching lands hardest when someone is in transition, because that is when we finally stop and take stock of things. The rest of the time we keep doing the thing. What she wants for people is that they get to be successful on their own terms and actually enjoy what they built. That starts with naming the standard you have never said out loud, and handing off the thing you keep telling yourself only you can do.

Connect with Marcia:
 Email: [email protected]
 Website: https://exceledge.actioncoach.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1Bak8WCSPZ/?mibextid=wwXIfr
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@actioncoachmarciaerickson4220

Connect with us:

• Instagram: @drsaranelsongray, @dr.marisa.nicole10, @theheartworkpodcast
• Email: [email protected]

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Marisa took Alex to Italy for ten days and it was his first time in Europe. Rome, Florence, the Amalfi Coast, and almost none of it planned, which she says is the whole reason she actually got to be there. What she keeps coming back to isn't the sites. It's that Alex got to see where her grandparents learned to make pasta and where her mom lived, and after a lifetime of her bringing pieces of that culture into their home in little ways, he finally understood her at a deeper level. Their love went deeper because he saw her in a new light. Then they came home to Iowa and she didn't pick her old pace back up. She stopped prepping six days out at the practice, stopped posting to teach anybody lessons, and started letting a priority be a priority when it's actually a priority, herself included.

🔥 In This Episode:

• What opens up when you stop trying to accomplish something on a trip and let yourself actually be there
• The difference between capturing a moment on your phone and letting it land in your own eyes, and what you give up when you choose the screen
• Why being seen by your partner in the place you come from does something no story about it ever could
• Why Marisa stopped preparing six days out in her practice, and what she means when she says a priority is a priority, and so is she
• How to carry your family's culture forward without it becoming something you shoulder alone

We look to travel for rest or adventure, and then we come home and talk about the views. What actually stays is what your heart got informed in while you were there. For Marisa and Alex, that was him understanding where she comes from and why she loves what she loves, and then wanting to build it into their life together. He's the one at the grocery store now buying mortadella and Italian sourdough. She isn't passing her family's culture down by herself anymore. Take whatever opened up in you somewhere else and let it change your regular week here.

Connect with us:

• Instagram: @drsaranelsongray, @dr.marisa.nicole10, @theheartworkpodcast
• Email: [email protected]

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Sara made a decision this season that looked, on paper, like going backwards. With one of her associate doctors heading into maternity leave, she chose to put herself back into nearly full time adjusting after almost two years of protected CEO time. It was the right call financially, culturally, and for the energy of her practice. And it still stirred up the old story: I'm not moving forward, I'm not good enough, real CEOs don't do this. In this conversation, Sara and Marisa pull apart where that story actually comes from, and it isn't the decision itself. It's comparison, the mastermind metric, the version of success built from everyone else's life but your own.

🔥 In This Episode:

• Why a decision that looks like a step backwards can be the most aligned move for your finances, your culture, and your energy, and how to tell the difference between retreat and stewardship
• The comparison trap that turns aligned decisions into evidence of failure, and why measuring your season against other CEOs will always make you feel behind
• Marisa's discernment question for every big decision: are you gathering information so your heart can feel it through, or is your ego collecting approval
• How "we're in a season of transition" quietly becomes a crutch that stalls momentum, and the question that stopped Sara mid sentence when she caught herself using it
• Your relationship with change is contagious: how Sara realized her team hated change because she was the one saying it out loud, and what that fear cost her practice

The episode ends with a challenge worth taking seriously. Look back at every season of your life, the winters included, and name one beautiful thing that came from each. If you come up empty, that's not a failure. It's a signal to slow down, because you may be moving through your life without actually living in it. And if that's where you are right now, reach out to us. We're in it and we're here for you.

Connect with us:

• Instagram: @drsaranelsongray, @dr.marisa.nicole10, @theheartworkpodcast
• Email: [email protected]

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This episode starts with a hand on someone's back. Marisa walked into an adjusting room, felt something off in a practice member's energy, and asked her twice, are you okay today? The woman broke down. Fresh off a divorce and a morning masterclass about success, she said the thing so many people are circling right now: I've been living my life by society's metrics of success, and I just want to say F the success and take care of myself. What follows is a short, honest conversation about the difference between satisfaction and joy, why the things we do purely for love lose something the moment we turn them into a project with an outcome, and the strange, splitting feeling of looking at the life you built and not knowing if you still love it.

🔥 In This Episode:

• Why a life built on achievement can look successful on paper and still leave you living in constant striving with nothing that feels like arrival
• The research on satisfaction, joy, and meaning, and what happens to people who chase only one of the three
• How turning something you loved for free into a source of income can quietly drain the joy out of it
• The disorientation of realizing you might not love the thing you built, and why that confusion is part of the journey rather than proof you took a wrong turn
• The question Sara was gifted two months ago that reframes everything: what would it look like for you to fall back in love with what you do?

This one is short, and it doesn't tie anything up. If you're in a season where you're questioning what you actually love, whether the thing you built still fits, whether the metrics you've been chasing were ever yours, this episode won't hand you the answer. It hands you the question. What would it look like for you to fall back in love with what you do, not because the P&L says you should, but because there's still something in it worth loving? Sit with that one this week.

Connect with us:

• Instagram: @drsaranelsongray, @dr.marisa.nicole10, @theheartworkpodcast
• Email: [email protected]

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This is not a polished episode. Sara is in the middle of something, not on the other side of it, and she shares it in real time. A health crisis that forced her into the hospital after eighteen years of refusing medical intervention. The badge of honor she had been wearing on purpose, the one she used to say "look at me, look at what I have done." The little girl inside her who had been working overtime to keep her safe. And the conversation with God she had in a hospital bed when she heard herself say "I feel like I am being punished" three times in a row. 

We sit with what it actually means to do inner child work that does not throw away the version of you who got you here, and why some threads of healing do not tie up in a bow no matter how much work you have already done.

🔥 In This Episode:

• What an eighteen year badge of honor was quietly costing Sara, even when she knew she was wearing it
• The moment in a hospital bed when "I am being punished" came out of her mouth and what it revealed about the God she was actually relating to
• Why inner child work is not about getting rid of her, and what it means to start telling her she is safe
• The threads of healing that do not tie up neatly even after years of doing the work
• What it sounds like when one friend gets to be a safe person for another to fall apart in front of

We do not have a clean takeaway for you. Sara is still inside this. What we have is a real conversation between two friends about what it actually looks like to keep doing the work when life forces you to do another layer of it, and the quiet truth that the little girl who got you here is not your enemy. She is the one who has been waiting for you to come back.

Connect with us:

• Instagram: @drsaranelsongray, @dr.marisa.nicole10, @theheartworkpodcast
• Email: [email protected]

Support the show