What if you’re not failing—you’re just in the messy middle?

This week, Erin is talking about the space between where you started and where you’re going. The part where things don’t always look like you thought they would, the wins aren’t obvious, and you have to keep showing up without knowing exactly how the story ends.

Inspired by Benny Blanco’s book Fck Failure*, Erin shares some of her favorite lessons from his career and connects them to her own season of change—especially the way she’s redefining success after years of tying it to money, achievement, and security.

Maybe success isn’t just what’s in the bank account. Maybe it’s being happy, healthy, and excited for the future.

In this episode:

• Why the messy middle can feel like failure—even when you’re growing
• Redefining success beyond money and achievement
• Why failure, rejection, and bad seasons are part of winning
• What Benny Blanco’s career teaches us about staying in the game
• The surprising story behind Rihanna’s “Diamonds”
• The heartbreak behind Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself”
• Why a detour can take you somewhere better than the original plan
• Learning when to pause, pivot, and keep going
• Why relationships and the people you build with matter
• How to stop moving the goalpost and recognize the life you’ve already built
• The simple “one inch forward” exercise for going after what you really want

You don’t have to have the whole thing figured out. You don’t even have to know exactly where you’re going. Sometimes you just have to keep moving one inch forward.

Because the messy middle isn’t where the story falls apart. It might be where everything starts coming together.

Submit listener questions or share your story as a possible pod guest at www.laylowpod.com

Thanks for laying low with me. ❤️

What if there’s more happening around us than we can see?

In this episode of Lay Low, Erin sits down with her personal psychic and medium, Meg, ([email protected]) for an open-minded conversation about intuition, energy, signs, the people we’ve lost, and the things in life we may never be able to fully explain.

Meg shares how she discovered her abilities, what it actually feels like to connect with someone who has passed, and the difference between being psychic and being a medium. She also explains why she doesn’t believe a reading should tell someone what to do with their life—but can instead offer clarity, healing, closure, and a different perspective.

The conversation also turns to the world right now: why everything seems to feel faster and more intense, the energetic shifts Meg believes are happening, and how self-awareness, perspective, and intuition can help people navigate seasons of uncertainty.

And then the conversation gets deeply personal when Erin’s late friend Amberly comes through with a message for her four boys.

Whether you believe in psychics and mediums, are completely skeptical, or simply find yourself curious about the things we can’t explain, this episode isn’t about telling anyone what to believe. It’s about staying open to the possibility that life may be bigger than what we can see.

In this episode:

• The difference between a psychic and a medium
• How Meg discovered and developed her abilities
• What it feels like to connect with someone who has passed
• Why loved ones may send signs from the other side
• The role intuition plays in everyday life
• Why Meg believes the energy of the world is shifting
• Creating your reality without giving away your personal power
• Finding peace and perspective in things we can’t explain
• A beautiful message from Erin’s late friend Amberly
• Why curiosity may matter more than certainty
  

Come curious. You don’t have to understand everything to leave room for something to bring you peace.

Submit listener questions or share your story as a possible pod guest at www.laylowpod.com

Thanks for laying low with me. ❤️

Sometimes being selfish is exactly what saves you.

In this episode of Lay Low, Erin sits down with her friend Ryan Gregerson—a divorce attorney, business owner, and host of the Yes And Land podcast—for an honest conversation about divorce, relationships, business, and what happens when choosing yourself means changing the life everyone else expected you to live.

Erin shares how Ryan became part of her story during a pivotal time in her life. At their very first mastermind meeting, a vulnerable moment opened the door to conversations and decisions that would eventually change the direction of her life.

The conversation turns to a word Erin heard often during her divorce: selfish. What if being selfish isn't always a bad thing? What if there are seasons when taking care of yourself, setting boundaries, making a change, or walking away is actually necessary to save yourself?

And because Ryan's podcast finds life lessons through Disney, they even turn to an unlikely source of inspiration: Cruella de Vil. Because maybe there's something to be learned from a woman who knows exactly what she wants, walks into a room like she owns it, and isn't afraid to take up space. Just…leave the puppies alone.

In this episode:

• When choosing yourself gets labeled as selfish
• Why sometimes you have to save yourself first
• The vulnerable conversation that helped change Erin's life
• Learning to trust yourself through major life changes
• Why divorce doesn't automatically mean a marriage failed
• What Erin and Ryan learned from their own divorces
• Parenting and co-parenting through change
• Why kids may be more adaptable than we give them credit for
• Dating, relationships, and knowing yourself better the second time around
• The importance of communication, kindness, and curiosity in relationships
• Entrepreneurship, loneliness, and finding people who understand the weight you carry
• What Cruella de Vil can teach us about confidence, authenticity, and owning a room
• Finding the lesson in the chapters of life you never planned for
  

There are times when choosing yourself will disappoint people. There are times when someone may even call you selfish for doing it.

But sometimes being selfish isn't about caring less about everyone else.

Sometimes it's about finally caring enough about yourself to make the change that saves you.

Submit listener questions or share your story as a possible pod guest at www.laylowpod.com

Thanks for laying low with me. ❤️

Sometimes life changes slowly. And sometimes something happens that shakes everything you thought you knew about yourself, your relationships and the life you thought you were going to have.

Hayden Panettiere calls these moments “life quakes” in her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning—and after listening to her tell her own story, Erin couldn't stop thinking about the life quakes that shape all of us.

Erin dives into Hayden's deeply personal memoir and discovers far more connections to her own life than she expected. Hayden spent virtually her entire childhood performing, becoming famous before she was old enough to understand what fame meant. Her story moves through childhood fame, family turmoil, sexuality, motherhood, a traumatic delivery, postpartum anxiety, addiction, rehab, custody, abusive relationships and the complicated ways we sometimes try to survive feelings we don't know how to carry.

In this episode:

• The Lindsay Clancy trial and postpartum mental health
• Why appearing “fine” tells us very little about what's happening underneath
• Hayden growing up in Hollywood and never really knowing life without performing
• Childhood fame, identity and authenticity
• Sexuality and sharing the parts of ourselves we've kept hidden
• Family turmoil, divorce and why “a broken home is still a home”
• Erin's experience creating a new version of home for her boys after divorce
• Hayden's traumatic birth and postpartum experience
• Erin's anxiety after her newborn son was hospitalized with RSV
• Motherhood and the enormous pressure women can carry
• Alcohol, pills, addiction, rehab and attempts to quiet emotional pain
• Motherhood, custody and making painful decisions for your children
• Domestic violence and why leaving isn't always as simple as it looks from the outside
• Shame, survival and finally telling the parts of our stories we'd rather hide
• Why another woman's bravery can make us brave enough to tell our own truth
• “Life quakes” and the experiences that divide our lives into before and after
• Letting go of old versions of ourselves and moving toward a more aligned life

Our hardest experiences don't have to disappear for us to move forward. We can acknowledge the choices we're proud of, the ones we aren't, the things that happened to us and the things we wish we'd done differently—and decide what we're taking with us into the next version of our lives.

Sometimes someone else's bravery gives us permission to be brave too.

Life is short. And a life of alignment is priceless.

Submit listener questions or share your story as a possible pod guest at www.laylowpod.com

Thanks for laying low with me. ❤️

• How Erin and Janene met at work over 20 years ago, and how they found their way back to each other post-divorce

• Growing up Mormon in Utah County vs. being Mormon-adjacent — and why that distinction actually matters

• The embarrassing bishop's office story Erin has never told Janene before

• Janene's experience at 16 that taught her exactly how shame gets assigned in these communities

• What it felt like to move into a small town as a divorced mom and be treated like an outcast

• The real reason Janene believes pornography played a role in her marriage

• How "no" turned into pressure, turned into a threesome, turned into swinging
• Erin and Janene's genuinely different takes on porn — and why they can disagree without it becoming a fight
  

Erin and Janene don't wrap this one up with a bow — there's too much left to say, and they both know it. What they land on instead is the thing that's held their friendship together for two decades: telling the truth, even when it's messy, even when it doesn't make you look good.

Submit listener questions or share your story as a possible pod guest at www.laylowpod.com

Thanks for laying low with me. ❤️

This week on Lay Low, it's just Erin — sitting down to say some things she's needed to get off her chest for a long time. She's spent almost two decades in survival mode — financially, personally, in her work — and she's finally ready to leave that version of herself in the past.

Before diving in, Erin catches listeners up on the week it's been: eclipse season energy, football season, and a documentary she cannot stop thinking about. But the episode goes deeper, too. She opens up about where survival mode actually started — an investment that cost her family everything back when her kids were little, the divorce that followed, and the relationship after that where she finally saw a red flag she'd been missing for years. She talks about what she actually needs from a partner going forward, why hustle isn't the same thing as healing, and the small, intentional changes she's been making lately that are quietly adding up to something bigger.

This episode includes:

• Riding out eclipse-season energy instead of fighting it
• Forty-eight hours with her son Colt, a Zach Bryan concert, and the moment she wanted more of
• Where her survival mode really started — and the two decades it took her to notice
• The investment that set her first marriage back in a way she never fully recovered from
• The red flag she didn't see until it became the biggest lesson of her last relationship
• What she actually needs from a partner going forward
• Small, intentional changes: pink shoes, cutting a ten-hour-a-week habit, and leaving an office she's outgrown
• Why "more moments like this" might be the most powerful thing you say to yourself all year
• A challenge to shake up one thing in your routine this week
  

Maybe the version of herself that's been surviving for so long doesn't have to be the version she brings into what's next.

Submit listener questions or share your story as a possible pod guest at www.laylowpod.com

Thanks for laying low with me. ❤️

This week on Lay Low, Erin sits down with one of her best friends, Tiffany Alder-Bown, for the kind of conversation that happens when two women have known each other through marriages, divorces, raising boys, career changes, unforgettable trips, and a whole lot of life.

Tiffany is a successful real estate broker, mom of three boys, self-proclaimed introvert—and someone Erin wishes could see herself the way the people who love her do.

They talk about growing up before smartphones, social media, location sharing, and security cameras—when dating meant calling someone’s house phone, friendships were built through handwritten notes, directions came from an atlas, photos had to be developed, and your teenage mistakes weren’t permanently documented online.

But the conversation goes deeper, too. Tiffany opens up about getting married young, feeling pressured into decisions before she had fully found her own voice, divorce in a small town, motherhood, friendship, and learning to give younger versions of ourselves a little more grace.

And naturally, there are stories: baseball trips with five boys, espresso martinis in Florence, an impulsive fur coat and diamond purchase, getting separated on the last train of the night, teenage sneaking out, AOL chat rooms, cassette tapes, pagers, and more.

This episode includes:

• Growing up before smartphones, social media, and location sharing
• What dating was like when you had to call the house phone
• Tiffany opening up about marrying young and feeling pressured into a life-changing decision
• Divorce, judgment, and being misunderstood in a small town
• Raising boys and trying to give our kids permission to make mistakes
• The kind of friendship that can survive disagreements, different seasons, and different paths
• Why our younger selves deserve forgiveness instead of judgment
• Pagers, handwritten notes, answering machines, MapQuest, mixtapes, and disposable cameras
• Erin's teenage sneaking-out stories—and why she could never get away with them today
• The infamous Florence night involving espresso martinis, fur, diamonds, wine, and one very unfortunate train ride
• Why some of the best friendships are the ones where someone knows the whole story—and stays

It’s nostalgic, vulnerable, funny, and exactly what Lay Low is about: telling the stories behind the version of ourselves everyone else thinks they know. Maybe growing up before everyone was watching gave us something we didn’t realize we had—the freedom to figure out who we were in private.

Submit listener questions or share your story as a possible pod guest at www.laylowpod.com

Thanks for laying low with me. ❤️

What started as a weekend full of unexpected frustrations—turned into one of the most important moments in Lay Low's journey. In this solo episode, Erin reflects on how losing an entire 45-minute recording forced her to pause and ask a bigger question: What is this podcast really meant to be? The answer surprised her.

Inspired by the overwhelming response to last week's guest, Ed, and witnessing the healing that came from him sharing his story, Erin realizes that Lay Low is becoming much more than a place to tell her own story. It's becoming a safe space where people can release shame, find peace, and discover the freedom that comes from speaking their truth.

In this episode, Erin shares:

• The unexpected lesson hidden inside a weekend where everything seemed to go wrong.
• Why losing an entire podcast episode ended up being exactly what she needed.
• How last week's conversation with Ed transformed her vision for Lay Low.
• Why people don't just need advice—they need permission to tell their stories.
• The importance of honoring your own perspective, even when others experienced the same events differently.
• How shame, guilt, and unspoken experiences can quietly shape our lives until we're ready to release them.
• Erin's vision for creating a community built on honesty, grace, growth, and healing.
• An invitation for listeners to consider whether there's a story in their own lives that could help bring peace—not only to themselves, but to others.
• A look ahead at the future of Lay Low and Erin's hope to leave every person she meets a little better than she found them.

Whether you're in a season of sharing your story or simply listening to someone else's, this episode is a reminder that healing looks different for everyone—and that your hardest chapter never has to become your identity.

Submit listener questions or share your story as a possible pod guest at www.laylowpod.com

Thanks for laying low with me. ❤️

This week on Lay Low, Erin is joined by her friend Ed Terris for one of the podcast's most honest and vulnerable conversations yet.

Ed shares his journey through addiction, rehab, jail, divorce, and ultimately finding his way back to himself. Together, they explore the lies addiction tells, the impact it has on families, why recovery is about so much more than getting sober, and how trust can slowly be rebuilt.

Whether you've struggled with addiction yourself, love someone who has, or simply believe in second chances, this episode is a reminder that our hardest chapters don't have to define the rest of our lives.

In this episode:

• The early warning signs of addiction
• How addiction affects relationships and families
• The role of honesty in healing
• Setting boundaries without giving up on someone you love
• Why your worst decision doesn't have to become your identity
  

If this episode resonates with you, consider sharing it with someone who may need a little hope today. You never know whose life a conversation can change.

Submit listener questions or share your story as a possible pod guest at www.laylowpod.com

Thanks for laying low with me. ❤️

• Why even successful people are still figuring things out

• Learning to trust yourself after making mistakes

• The story of finding the therapist who changed Erin's life

• Books and tools that helped during difficult seasons

• Why growth often begins when your identity changes

• The importance of responding instead of reacting

• Protecting your peace while embracing new opportunities

• Why your next chapter starts before you feel completely ready

Submit listener questions or share your story as a possible pod guest at www.laylowpod.com

Thanks for laying low with me. ❤️