Rock Your Brain. Rock Your Life

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring was a director at a pharmaceutical company making close to $700,000 with a clear path to seven figures. He quit.

He had trained at Baylor, done a drug development fellowship at Janssen, and reviewed psychiatric drug safety data at the FDA. In 2020, he and his wife Marissa started TaperClinic.

Then he tells the story he rarely tells. Three coffees a day. Eight nicotine pouches. Eighty-hour weeks. He collapsed mid-shift and left the ER with hepatitis and fatty liver disease at 210 pounds. He was also taking Xanax to sleep. Today he runs the largest practice in the world, helping people come off psychiatric medication.

In this episode you'll learn:

• The three domains that decide your mental health, and the one almost everyone skips
• What to fix before you ever consider a prescription
• How these drugs were studied, and what your doctor is not telling you
• Why coming off too fast is what causes the damage
• What Dr. Josef changed instead of having his gallbladder removed
• Why he walked away from $700,000 and started over
• The motto he would put on a billboard in Times Square

Not medical advice. No one should change or stop a psychiatric medication without their prescriber.

You're at the top of your game and you still feel behind. Stacey Lindsay knows why.

She's interviewed hundreds of people. Gillian Anderson. Erin Brockovich. Reese Witherspoon. Jay Shetty. She's a journalist for Maria Shriver's Sunday Paper and Gwyneth Paltrow's goop, and she's usually the one getting people to tell the truth. In this episode, she turns it on herself.

Her new book BEING 40 makes the case that there comes a point where you put down the pressure of living by other people's opinions and expectations, and start living as who you actually are and always were. For her it was 40. For you it's whenever you notice the weight.

Because there is a weight, and you never chose to pick it up.

Stacey calls the source of it the invisible battle: the rules you absorbed before you were old enough to choose them. Be nice. Say yes. Don't take up space. Hit the milestones on time. Nobody hands it to you in one piece. It arrives one obligation at a time, starting around age six.

The reason you can't feel how heavy it's gotten is your threshold. Stacey says we just keep doing more, and more, and more, until it climbs so high we don't know where it ends. And it doesn't stop on its own. There's no point where your body tells you that's enough.

Here's the part that matters. None of this is a personal failure. You're not disorganized, undisciplined, or bad at boundaries. The system was built, and you were handed it. This isn't men versus women; it's a structure we all live inside. Stacey says once you see it, the rage comes first and the clarity comes right after. And what was built can be dismantled.

Put it down and your interior finally matches your exterior. You stop second-guessing. And you get the four things Stacey says every person she's ever interviewed is searching for.

She names all four. Then she gives us the four moves that get you out, starting today. One of them is to say no to something you've said yes to a million times. She's got three more.

And when I asked what her motto would say on the NASDAQ billboard in Times Square, she said: Your Life Belongs To You.

Not your boss's. Not your parents'. Not some random timeline. Yours.

Stacey spent twenty years getting other people to tell the truth and didn't think her own story was worth telling. Then she wrote it down, and it changed her. She's calmer, stronger, and, by her own account, finally letting herself soar. She'll also tell you she still worries about what people think, just much, much less.

Press play.

Connect with Stacey Lindsay 

• Website: https://www.staceylindsay.com/
• Substack: https://staceylindsay.substack.com/ — insights from real women on work, love, sex, and identity.
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacey-lindsay-ab1b3330/
• The Sunday Paper: https://www.mariashriversundaypaper.com/author/staceylindsay/
• Book, BEING 40:  https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/747056/being-40-by-stacey-lindsay/ 

Monica Nassif grew up in a town of 600 people in Iowa, one of nine kids, raised to cook, clean, sew, and garden. She turned every one of those skills into Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day and Caldrea.

She started at age 43 out of a spare bedroom with maxed out credit cards, two daughters, and a backup plan to drive a UPS truck. She grew to 20,000 stores and sold both brands to the multi- billion dollar household cleaning empire, SC Johnson.

And Mrs. Meyer is real. She's Monica's mom, Thelma, who is 93 and still out in her garden tending to her geraniums.

In this episode, Monica takes us inside the messy business of building. The moment in a store in Atlanta that turned into a business plan on the plane home. Why she decided cleaning products should be personal care for the home. The decision to knock off her own successful brand before someone else could. And the investor who told her he hated consumer deals but liked her anyway, and became her greatest champion.

She also gets honest about her daughter's cancer diagnosis while she was building, and what her mother said that got her back to work. The two companies out of four that flopped, and what each one taught her. Why she kicked her own brand out of Target before Target could. And what it feels like eighteen years later to have sold her own mother.

Monica now sits on the board of Barkeeper's Friend, coaches early stage consumer brand founders, and just published her memoir, “I Bottled My Mother.”

Her motto: Bet on Yourself.

Connect With Monica

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monica-nassif-686876335/
• Website: monicanassif.com
• Book, “I Bottled My Mother”: available at Amazon, Walmart, and Target
• Recommended in this episode: The Experience Economy by Joseph Pine, and his new book, The Transformation Economy

AI can generate a thousand flawless options in seconds. John Trotter will tell you exactly what that flawlessness costs you.

John is the founder and chief creative officer of 4040, the design-led brand consultancy he started at the age of 40. With roots at Nike and Landor, he has spent three decades building brands across sport, tech, financial services, and consumer, and he built 4040 on a conviction that lands at the heart of this show: the most enduring brands are built at the intersection of culture, design, and belief.

In this episode, John gets into what still matters as everything automates. What is taste and judgment, and why they become your real competitive advantage. Why a brand built by AI can be beautiful and still have no life in it. And the line every founder needs to hear about knowing when you are ready to build.

He also opens up about the partnership with his wife, Michelle Bowler, that put 4040 into the best growth of its history.

Connect With John Trotter

• Website: 4040agency.com
• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johntrotterbrand
• Michelle Bowler, co-founder and CEO of 4040, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-bowler-brand-growth

Wandia Chiuri is in the business of turning a leader's authority into measurable business results. She is the CEO and founder of Reactionpower, where she works with executives at the highest levels of corporate America. She has spent more than two decades at the intersection of AI, leadership, and strategy, taking her from Medtronic to Eli Lilly to Google, Samsung, and Johnson & Johnson, with a company she built and sold along the way.

What she discovered at those companies drove why she built her business. Audiences had become blind to ads. Great products were going undiscovered. And she noticed that when a leader spoke, something measurable happened: products would sell, customers would get inspired, leads converted into sales. A leader's authority was outperforming advertising by 10x. So she focused her new company Reactionpower on executives. 

In this conversation, Wandia and Sarah get into the failure that taught her the power of a brand, and what stays irreplaceably human as AI reshapes leadership. Wandia shares the story of selling her first company with $1.39 in her bank account, watching the buyer resell it within three months for close to 40 times what she was paid, and spending the next 10 years learning exactly why. She talks about her mother, who came of age during the state of emergency in Kenya and still built a life of adventure, optimism, and service at scale.

Two friends and fellow Entrepreneurs Organization members, talk about what it takes to build authority, trust, and a life that is authentically yours. Recorded live on LinkedIn.


Connect With Wandia

• Reactionpower: reactionpower.com
• Personal site and all social channels: wandia.info

Elizabeth Garvish is the founder of Garvish Immigration Law Group, an all-female firm named one of the fastest-growing in the country five consecutive years, with a specialty in medical immigration and a place among the nation's leading immigration lawyers. She is on a mission to run the happiest law firm in America. 

She is the granddaughter of Hungarian immigrants who fell in love with the language and culture of America. She turned that love into a calling, helping people and companies build their lives and futures in the United States. 

Along the way, she trademarked a way of working she calls “Practicing Law with Love”, built on one conviction she has tested over and over: your energy and what you believe creates your reality, in the courtroom and in your life. In this conversation, she shares the formula her firm now runs on: Know the law, recite the facts, expect miracles, and the cases where it looked like the client would lose,  to them holding their green card. She opens up about the day she walked away from the big law partner track after a review that tried to stereotype her as too flashy, too loud, doesn’t fit in, even though she’d brought in huge books of business. Why happiness comes down to two things. How she built a life she loves while raising four kids and moving her family to Spain. And the time a doctor told her that her last two embryos were damaged and gave them just a thirty percent chance, despite that, she calmly decided that she was not going to believe him. Her twin girls just turned three.

If you know you are meant for more, this one is for you.


Connect With Elizabeth

• Website: goimmigrationlaw.com(Garvish Immigration Law Group)
• Elizabeth on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/elizabethlagarvish
• Firm on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/garvishimmigration
• Love Letters to Immigrants podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/love-letters-to-immigrants/id1876388675
  
  

What happens when an entrepreneur who helped build the e-commerce internet, bets his entire next company on the one thing everyone else is racing to automate away?

Brent Peterson, founder, host of the Talk Commerce podcast, and the endurance athlete behind 34 marathons and an Ironman, taught himself software, went all in on building his company Magento in 2009, and grew it with his wife Susan, into a globally recognized agency before selling in 2021. Then, instead of coasting on a beach in Hawaii, he made a contrarian bet: that humans belong at the center of content creation, right as the rest of the world handed it all to AI. 

In this episode, Brent gets refreshingly honest about the chapter few entrepreneurs want to talk about, what it feels like to sell your company and then work for someone else. He shares how he once ran a lifestyle business for four hours a day, and why he is convinced that AI will not replace you. He now builds human-led content with a simple rule: a human reads it; before a human reads it. Plus the daily streak he has kept alive for more than 1,500 days, and what it taught him about building anything for the long term. 

Connect With Brent

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brentwpeterson/
• Talk Commerce podcast: https://talk-commerce.com
• EO Visionary Voices podcast: https://eovoices.com
• Content Basis: https://www.contentbasis.io
• Content Cucumber: https://contentcucumber.com

Justin Nassiri has lived more reinventions than most. Naval Academy engineer, nuclear submarine officer, Stanford MBA, three-time founder. In this episode, he sits down with Sarah to talk about the conviction at the heart of everything he's built: leading publicly isn't vanity; it's leadership, and the leaders worth hearing from are often the ones who'd rather just do the work.

They get into the counterintuitive truth: Almost none of the 400+ executives Justin coaches wanted the spotlight. Why bringing your full self is what draws people in. Justin shares a hundred-million-dollar decision that you can learn from, the belief he carried for years and had to unlearn. What success feels like from the inside now. Also, the daily mantra that moves him from stuck to "I'll figure it out." If you've ever told yourself you'd share your voice once you were ready, this is the one for you. 

If you've ever told yourself you'd share your voice once you were ready, this is the one for you.

Connect with Justin:
LinkedIn: Justin Nassiri
Email: [email protected]
Personal Website: =www.justinnassiri.com
Company Website: executivepresence.io

Listen and connect:
Apple: Rock Your Brain. Rock Your Life.
Spotify: Rock Your Brain. Rock Your Life.
Website: www.sarahmoody.com/mainpodcast

What if the difference between the life you have and the life you want comes down to a single word? 

In this episode of Rock Your Brain, Rock Your Life, we sat down with Case Kenny, host of the podcast New Mindset, Who Dis?, keynote speaker, and best-selling author. With two degrees in languages, which is where the obsession with words traces back to, he has grown into one of the most listened to self-improvement shows out there, including an Apple Podcasts top 30 show.

You'll hear Case redefine optimism in a way that has nothing to do with butterflies and rainbows.

 Real optimism, he argues, is the belief that things can change. People can change, emotions can change, industries can change, and so can you. 

He shares how he rebranded patience as faith because patience felt too passive for his ambition, and how that single reframe became a quiet anchor through years of building his company.

Case opens up about the moment he quit his cozy senior sales job after eight years to become an e- commerce entrepreneur. How he experienced hockey stick growth selling guided journals using paid ads, and then watched the Apple iOS privacy changes nearly take his e-commerce business down while he was cutting $300K inventory checks. He talks honestly about rejection (which he says is 80% of the work of being an entrepreneur, even with close to 2 million followers), about the "end of history illusion" that tricks us into thinking we're done evolving, and why the least permanent thing about yourself is yourself. 

If you've ever felt the tension between ambition and peace, between grinding and trusting, this conversation will give you the words and the reframes to hold both. 

Press play.  Grab a red felt pen and a piece of paper. You'll be taking notes within minutes.

Check out Case Kenny:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/case.kenny/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@casekenny

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CaseKenny

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/casekenny/

Website: https://www.casekenny.com

Podcast - New Mindset, Who Dis?:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-mindset-who-dis/id1383599078

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2BpUjzy5FMqos6H9ILK103

iHeart: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1319-new-mindset-who-dis-30674891/

In this deeply human episode, my client Founder and CEO Denise Gosnell shares how she went from zero revenue and feeling the constant pressure to prove herself, to building a multiple 6-figure business, and finally feeling calm in her own skin,  all in just 90 days!

You’ll hear what it looks like when a high-achieving executive stops leading from fear and starts creating from deep conviction in herself. For Denise, that meant forgiving and releasing the patterns from society and family that kept her chasing more success, and learning to trust herself again.

This is not another “success story.” It’s a blueprint for the new paradigm of leadership: where your results expand as you come into deeper alignment with who you truly are.

Because when you stop second-guessing every move, pushing through exhaustion, and trying to prove your worth, you start leading from trust instead of anxiety. And that’s when your results come with ease. The big revenue goals, the deeper love, the grounded calm you’ve craved to feel every day….they all start to unfold.

Follow Denise Gosnell:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denisekgosnell

Website: https://denisegosnell.ai

Substack: https://substack.com/@denisegosnell