What happens when you know you want to take a next step, but you have no idea where to place your foot?

In this episode, Mike talks with Carrie Donker, a learning experience designer and executive coaching consultant, about a pattern that keeps showing up across her life: stepping into the unknown, from moving to a foreign country alone to volunteer, to leaving a leadership firm she loved at thirty, often before she felt ready. Carrie shares how a season of quiet burnout led to a sabbatical, a hard conversation, and an ending that felt chosen for her more than by her, and the self-trust she had to build in its wake.

She also returns to a prayer she first learned as a nightly ritual in Guatemala, one that later found its way back to her through an unexpected gift. A conversation about choosing instead of waiting to be chosen, and learning to trust your own wings more than the branch you're standing on.

What do you do when the path you're insisting on working just isn’t working... because life has something else in mind?

In this episode, Mike sits down with Jeff Rosick — composer, actor, graphic artist, and the producer behind this very podcast — to talk about the years that took him from a Gonzaga stage to Friday Night Lights to a decade of quietly resisting what life was trying to tell him. Jeff shares the story of being with his mother in her final weeks, a moment with a hospice nurse that changed how he understood letting go, and a lifelong return to a favorite film and its final act of surrender.

A conversation about resistance, release, and what it means to stop steering, start listening, and witness the beauty and awe in allowing life to unfold.

Linda Latto has spent her career asking one question: what is being asked of me right now?

She has answered it from Alaska to Georgia to Seattle to Portland to Southern California, across roles in real estate, healthcare, government, and now coaching and consulting. But the through-line was never the job title.

In this conversation, Linda traces a world-cracking moment in her mid-twenties, the slow healing that followed, and how a Catholic school she never expected to feel at home in, a cassette tape, and a week in Florence each quietly reoriented the course of her life.

She also reflects on what it means to walk beside someone who is struggling without needing to know their story first — and why that has become the heart of her work.

What if the greatest obstacle to your growth was never your circumstances — but your certainty?

Laura Miner spent much of her life in a world where questioning wasn't allowed. She learned early that you defend what you see — or else. It wasn't until her mid-40s, with no bachelor's degree and a funny argument with her husband, that everything began to shift.

In this conversation, Michael Carey sits down with Laura Miner — leadership coach, scholar, and PhD in organizational leadership — to trace the arc of a woman who rebuilt her thinking from the ground up. Laura shares how a string of bad leadership examples pushed her out of corporate America for good, how a mentor she never expected pointed her toward her next ascent, and why seven words at the heart of her dissertation took everything she’d been through to truly understand.

Along the way, they explore what it means to pause long enough to actually see something, why a book Laura reads every few years feels like a different book every time, and how the Socratic art of asking questions became her primary tool for helping others discover what they already know.

This is an episode about intellectual humility, the slow work of becoming, and giving yourself permission to think again.

Joel Junker was always told that leaders get results, and that leaders are measured based on the results that they get. But, after decades of building an identity around results — Army officer, Notre Dame grad, and a 27-year career helping military leaders transition into business, he realized it all came with a cost that he didn't fully see until life stopped cooperating with his plan.

In this conversation, Joel traces the slow erosion of a control-driven leadership model and the unexpected forces that accelerated it: a Gonzaga master's program that quietly rewired how he thought about people, his wife's breast cancer diagnosis, a climb up Mount Adams, and a Jesuit priest who spent 25 years in Soviet prisons and came out talking about surrender. The result isn't a story about slowing down. It's about finally leading in a way that's actually sustainable — and, it turns out, more joyful.

What does it look like to stop chasing your life and start receiving it?

Dr. Sherri Lynch has spent decades building things — programs, degrees, careers, community — including Women Lead, a program she founded at Gonzaga University that has grown over eleven years into a gathering place for women in leadership.

But some of the most meaningful moments in her story weren't planned.

They arrived.

In this conversation, Sherri reflects on the interior life she's been quietly tending since her teens, the moments that forced her to let go of control, and what happens when you finally loosen your grip long enough to notice what's being offered.

Barry Barfield has spent his adult life following a pull he didn't choose so much as discover — through theology, law, liturgical dance, campus ministry, and decades of quiet service in places most people never think to go.

In this conversation, Barry and Mike trace a journey that has wound through Los Angeles, San Francisco, Jerusalem, and 34 years at Gonzaga Preparatory High School. Along the way, Barry reflects on the writers and thinkers who have helped to shape how he sees the world, and on a moment behind a curtain when he looked out at a standing ovation and realized something he hadn't understood before.

At the center of it all is a simple idea. Not a rule, not an aspiration. Something older and larger than that. The DNA of the universe.

Jay Ballinger came home to help his father for six months in 1982. He never left.

Forty-four years later, Jay is still with the same family-owned company — moving from sales rep to division manager to his current role as Director of Leadership Development, and earning the unofficial title of "culture cop" along the way. It's a career he never planned, in a field he never studied, that turned out to be exactly right.

But the path there wasn't straight. There were seasons of genuine lostness — moments of standing at a crossroads with no clear sign, asking the kind of question that only comes when you've run out of your own answers.

In this first conversation, Michael Carey sits down with Jay — a former student, a longtime friend, and the first guest of the Pentimento Podcast — to talk about what it looks like to build a life with intention, and what you discover when you finally stop and look beneath the surface.

An introduction to the Pentimento Podcast — what it is, what it asks, and what it hopes to find. Narrated by Michael Carey.