ICMM: Living Life Unpaused

What if the life you've worked so hard to build is actually keeping you from living the life you want?

We often think of money as the thing that gives us freedom, security, and choices. But what happens when the lifestyle we've created becomes the very thing keeping us stuck? And how do we know when money is truly the barrier to making a change—or when it's become the excuse we use to avoid the uncertainty that comes with it?

This week on ICMM: Living Life Unpaused, I'm joined by Laura Rotter, founder of True Abundance Advisors and host of the Making Change with Your Money podcast.

After nearly 30 years working on Wall Street, Laura had built what many would consider a successful life. She had the career, the income, the big house, and the vacation home. But she was miserable. It took an unexpected layoff for her to finally step away and begin rethinking not just her career, but her entire relationship with money.

In this conversation, we explore what it really means to have enough, how our beliefs about money shape our decisions, and the balance between preparing for our future and actually living our lives today. We also talk about how understanding your finances can help you make more intentional choices—and why financial awareness is an act of self-care, not punishment.

Because money is a tool. The question is whether you're using it to build the life you want or allowing it to determine the life you live.

Connect with Laura Rotter:

• True Abundance Advisors
• Making Change with Your Money podcast

Tools Laura mentioned in this episode:

• Values worksheet - https://www.think2perform.com/shop/#
• Tiller https://tiller.com/
• Monarch Money https://www.monarch.com/

Remember, ICMM stands for I Can Manage Myself. You don't have to change everything today. Just do one intentional thing to keep moving your life forward.

Living Life Unpaused.

Courtney Gard describes herself as fiercely independent—the kind of person who figures things out and handles things herself.

Then, in September 2020, moving a china cabinet just one inch changed everything.

A falling vase shattered and severed nearly every major structure in Courtney's dominant wrist. What followed were surgeries, years of rehabilitation and chronic pain, and the unexpected challenge of relearning everyday things most of us never think twice about—from cracking an egg to opening a door.

But this isn't really an episode about Courtney's hand.

It's about what happens when the version of yourself you've always relied on no longer works in the same way.

Courtney joins Abby to talk about trying to get back to “normal,” grieving the life she had before, living with an injury other people couldn't always see, and eventually realizing that moving forward didn't require her to become who she was before the accident.

Most importantly, she shares what happened when she stopped trying to prove she could do everything herself—and learned that asking for help didn't make her any less independent or capable.

Because sometimes managing yourself doesn't mean doing everything yourself.

Sometimes strength looks like letting other people help carry what you're holding.

We hear it all the time: focus on what you can control.

But what if the harder part isn't knowing what you can control — it's recognizing when you've crossed the line into trying to control something that was never yours?

In this solo episode of ICMM: Living Life Unpaused, Abby digs into the idea at the heart of ICMM: I Can Manage Myself.

After five rounds of insurance submissions for a new medication, Abby found herself in one of life's familiar hurry-up-and-wait seasons — doing everything she could while having absolutely no control over the outcome. But that experience opened up a much bigger conversation about where our responsibility actually ends.

Why do we keep checking, worrying and replaying when there's nothing left for us to do? When does explaining ourselves turn into trying to manage someone else's reaction? When can “I can't control this” become an excuse to avoid the part we actually can? And just because something is within our control, does that mean we have to act on it right now?

This episode explores the difference between control, influence and responsibility — and why managing yourself isn't about responding perfectly or controlling every piece of your life.

It's about learning to recognize what is yours, what isn't, and where you still have agency when the outcome was never yours to decide.

Because controlling the controllables isn't a command to control everything you can.

It's permission to stop trying to control everything you can't.

What happens when the reason you think you should wait becomes the exact reason you decide you can’t?

In this episode, Abby sits down with Meg Dieter, founder of Whimsi Beans, to talk about the winding path from corporate marketing to motherhood to building a product that didn’t exist yet.

After her daughter Chloe received an autism diagnosis, Meg began learning about adaptive tools and sensory needs—and saw firsthand what the right tools could unlock. Eventually, an everyday struggle around feeding her young daughters sparked a simple question: Why couldn’t vitamins come in sprinkle form?

That question became Whimsi Beans.

Meg shares what happened next: finding manufacturers, seeking funding, pitching an idea people had never seen before, hearing plenty of no’s, navigating production challenges, and building a company while raising four daughters.

But this conversation is about more than entrepreneurship. It’s about what happens when life doesn’t follow the plan, why you don’t have to wait for the “right” time to begin, and how remembering your why can help you keep moving when you have no idea what comes next.

Sometimes your why is also the answer to: Why now?

To preorder, visit their website https://whimsibeans.com/

Season 2 starts with a question: What if the thing making you uncomfortable isn’t a warning sign—but information?

In this episode, Abby explores the necessity of challenge: the people willing to tell us what we don’t want to hear, the ideas that get stronger when someone pushes back, and the unexpected circumstances that force us to see our lives differently.

From the difference between boundaries and walls to the danger of mistaking comfort for safety, Abby challenges the idea that protecting our peace should mean protecting ourselves from discomfort. She also looks at the challenges we never choose—the diagnosis, the loss, the plan that suddenly changes—and why finding meaning in what happens isn’t the same as believing it happened for a reason.

Sometimes challenge tells us to keep going. Sometimes it tells us to change direction. Sometimes it exposes what we’ve been avoiding. And sometimes it shows us just how badly we want something.

The goal isn’t to seek out hardship. It’s to stop assuming that discomfort automatically means something is wrong.

So, what is the friction in your life trying to tell you?

We all have a version of “Starting Monday.”

Starting Monday, I’ll get serious. Starting Monday, I’ll make the change. Starting Monday, I’ll finally do the thing I keep saying I want to do.

But what if “Starting Monday” isn’t always a plan? What if sometimes it’s the story we tell ourselves because the truth underneath it is harder to admit?

In the Season One finale of ICMM: Living Life Unpaused, Abby explores what it really means to be honest with yourself — about what you want, what you’re afraid of, what you’re willing to change, and the choices you may have convinced yourself you don’t have.

From a high school performance of a play called Starting Monday that took nearly 30 years to fully understand, to losing a career that had become part of her identity, Abby looks at the stories we tell ourselves to stay comfortable, why fear can sound remarkably like truth, and why sometimes you need to diagnose before you demolish.

Because you can read the books, listen to the podcasts, ask for advice, and gather all the information in the world — but nobody else can decide what you do next.

Before you build the plan, make the change, or promise yourself you’ll start Monday, there’s one thing you have to do first:

Tell yourself the truth.

What happens when the plan you made no longer fits the life you're actually living?

A chance conversation with a phlebotomist got me thinking about the difference between building your dream life and actively living your life — and why one may actually be how you get to the other.

In this episode, we're talking about why plans should be directions, not promises; how the things we call “detours” may actually be giving us information we couldn't have had before; and why focusing so intensely on one goal can sometimes leave the rest of our lives sitting on pause.

And when life does change the plan — whether by choice or without asking our permission — sometimes pausing is exactly what we need. The key is knowing the difference between an intentional pause and one that quietly becomes indefinite.

Living Life Unpaused doesn't mean perpetual motion. It means staying an active participant in your own life — paying attention, taking in the new information, and consciously deciding whether it's time to continue, change direction, or let something go.

This week didn't go the way Abby planned. A quiet autoimmune condition flared back up, a medication that's worked for eight years is suddenly in question, and one unanswered question in another part of her life sent her imagination straight to the worst-case scenario — the kind where she's somehow always the problem in the plot. For a minute, she almost let all of it talk her into rethinking everything she's built.

Instead, this episode is about catching that pattern in real time. Abby digs into the difference between appreciating validation and requiring it, why "is this working" and "is this worth doing" are two completely different questions, and how much of our decision-making runs on imaginary criticism nobody actually voiced. She talks about the pull to copy someone else's results instead of trusting your own reasons, revisits a line from a recent Taylor Swift interview about writing for yourself first, and circles back to last week's conversation with Dr. Michelle Retz about permission. Then she hands out a permission slip of her own — and an assignment: do one thing this week purely because you want to, and don't tell anyone about it.

No guest this episode, but Abby ties it directly back to Episode 11 with Dr. Michelle Retz, so if you haven't listened yet, start there.

Topics covered:

• Why quitting on yourself rarely sounds like fear — it usually sounds responsible
• The difference between "is this working" and "is this worth doing"
• How an unanswered question turns into an entire imagined story, and why we always cast ourselves as the problem
• Chasing someone else's results vs. doing the work because you actually love it
• Rejecting your own idea before anyone else gets the chance to
• Learning to give yourself permission instead of waiting for someone else's
• This week's assignment: one thing, purely for you, untracked and unposted

What if “I'm just tired” isn't actually normal?

This week I'm joined by Dr. Michelle Retz, NMD — a naturopathic medical doctor who's been part of my own health journey — for a conversation about everything traditional medicine tends to skip: adrenal fatigue, the hormones nobody checks at your annual physical, the real difference between naturopathic and functional medicine, and why chronic stress can wreck your thyroid, your gut, and your immune system without a single “abnormal” lab result.

We also get into something I didn't expect from a medical conversation — boundaries. Why they're not a therapy topic, they're a health topic. What early warning signs actually look like before you hit burnout. And why so many of us are walking around in a low-grade stress state we've just learned to call “busy.”

If you've ever felt dismissed, told you're “fine” when you know you're not, or just plain tired of being tired — this episode is for you.

Find Dr. Retz at anuesthetics.com or 816-359-3310.

A friend recently apologized to Abby for something she didn't even realize she'd done — she never really understood what Abby had been living with, until it started happening to her too. That conversation is why this episode exists.

This is Abby's full medical story, told start to finish for the first time: 16 years of irregular labs, dismissed symptoms, negative tests that didn't match what her body was doing, a decade of infertility, hospitalizations with no follow-up, a rheumatologist who wouldn't treat her without a "significant" clot, and the moment a doctor looked her in the eye and said, "You are not crazy."

It's a story about invisible illness, the loneliness of the diagnostic odyssey, and what it costs — physically, emotionally, and relationally — to keep advocating for yourself when the answers haven't caught up yet. It's also a story about functional medicine, and why Abby now believes healthcare works best as a both-and, not an either-or.

If you've ever felt like your friends don't quite believe you, or your doctors have stopped listening, or your own body has become a stranger — this one's for you. And if you love someone living this story right now, this episode might change how you show up for them.

Next week: Abby sits down with Dr. Michelle Retz, the functional medicine doctor who helped her get her life back.