Shameless Leadership

Dr. Sasha Heinz, Ph.D., MAPP, is an academic who went mainstream, using her background as a developmental psychologist to become a mindset coach who teaches people the science of getting unstuck. An expert in positive psychology and adult development, Dr. Heinz has based her entire career on helping clients make real transformations, giving them the tools to develop their mental fitness by facing challenges and breaking our mind’s default modes for stress, self-criticism, and anxiety.

Dr. Heinz received her BA from Harvard, her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Columbia, and her Master’s in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she also served as a faculty member. She was one of the first 33 people in history to receive a degree in Positive Psychology.

Listen in to hear Sasha share:

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Viki Zarkin was diagnosed with cancer in 2011, has been living with Stage 4 metastatic cancer for over 10 years, and is the only person in the world alive with this aggressive illness. She was diagnosed in her 40s when her doctor first told her to go home and get her affairs in order and at the time, she had 2 small children at home. Viki spent the next several years fighting for her life, advocating for herself, navigating through the healthcare world, and following her gut. Today, Viki is a beacon of hope for others, she’s a motivational speaker and coach on a national level and a successful author.

Viki inspires women to change the way they have been programmed to think and emphasizes the importance of starting with young women on how to believe in themselves, challenge the status quo, find their voices and listen to their hearts. 

Listen in to hear Viki share:

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Ruchika Tulshyan is the author of Inclusion on Purpose: An Intersectional Approach to Creating a Culture of Belonging at Work (MIT Press). She’s also the founder of Candour, an inclusion strategy practice. A former international business journalist, Ruchika is a regular contributor to The New York Times and Harvard Business Review.

I first heard Ruchika speak on Brene Brown’s podcast, Unlocking Us. I became immediately obsessed with her work. I had the honor of hearing her speak at her book launch party here in Seattle and I’ve been fangirling over her ever since. The work she’s doing is so critically important and the way she does the work is so thoughtful and deeply impactful. I was so excited and so honored when she said YES to coming on the show. 

Listen in to hear Ruchika share:

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As you come to the close of another year, I am inviting you to pause for a moment to own and honor 2022. I know pausing and taking a moment to yourself in this busy season might sound like a ridiculous suggestion. WHO HAS TIME TO PAUSE?!  

Perhaps you pause as you sip your coffee today. Perhaps you pause while taking a shower. Perhaps you pause as you walk the dog. Perhaps you pause for a few minutes before you go to bed.  

Whenever & however you choose to pause, I want you to think through the following questions:

In this episode, I walk you through these questions and how you can frame them in order to get the most out of them. I share my personal answers with you so you can see the value in looking back before you move forward.  

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Sarah Stevens is a former healthcare executive turned writer, speaker, and entrepreneur. After leaving her career in corporate healthcare in 2016, she founded The Beautifull Project - a storytelling collective that has reached tens of thousands of women across the globe with its powerful message about learning to take up space. Today, Sarah helps other people tell their stories through Branded, by Sarah Stevens, a small business offering a full suite of marketing services. She also serves as the Community Impact Officer at The Project of The Quad Cities, a nonprofit that serves people living with HIV and the LGBTQ+ community. Sarah is a gifted storyteller with a skill for using her own story as a woman navigating the world in a fat body to invite her audience to encounter the parts of themselves they hide away from the world, the parts they believe to be “too much.” Addressing everything from “too-big” bodies to a fear of failure that cripples confidence, Sarah amplifies a message that moves beyond a body-positive sentiment and creates a movement that makes room for everybody to tell their truth and take up space. She draws out confidence and courage. She believes in being free and full. And she will make a believer out of you, too.

This is Sarah’s third time on the show. I invited her back after finding myself in a parenting conversation around body image that I was worried I totally screwed up. I reached out to Sarah and asked if she would be interested in hashing this topic out on the show and she immediately said yes. This is a really important conversation, as the pervasiveness of diet culture continues to be so insidious, oppressive, and ultimately deadly, in our culture. 

Listen in to hear Sarah and I discuss:

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Vulnerable episode alert.  

2022 was a year of a messy mindset for me. I made the choice to go after a lot of big things this year and many of them did not pan out for me. I think it’s great to reach for the stars. But sometimes when you only aim really high, you have a lot of misses. This is 100% OK! But, it can be tricky to internalize.  

In this episode, I talk about how my mindset got messy this year and how I clawed my way through my own headspace over and over again. I dig into my history of PTSD and how my mindset can be prone to messiness as a result. I share with you the tools that have worked for me this year - because I’m guessing you might have had some messy mindset moments this year too. Or maybe you're stuck in a messy mindset moment right now?? If that’s the case, I got you.  

Listen in to hear 5 ways I worked on managing my mindset when I felt like crawling under my desk and crying (which I sometimes did!)  

It’s ok to be messy, friend. You are not alone. 

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Yoky Matsuoka is the Founder & CEO of Yohana, an independently-led subsidiary of Panasonic, focused on building consumer technology products and services to help people live healthier and happier lives. As an accomplished executive and technologist, Yoky brings more than two decades of leadership experience to her role where she also leads global innovation and serves as the Managing Executive Officer of Panasonic Corporation.

Prior to Yohana, Yoky was a VP at Google, a CTO at Nest, a senior executive at Apple, and CEO of Quanttus, a health tech startup. She has also spent time as an endowed professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award for her work in robotics and neuroscience and the founder of YokyWorks Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping children with physical and learning challenges, focused on removing reading barriers to unlock the potential of every child.

She is also a Shameless Mom of four children, a dog, and a pet pig.

Listen in to hear Yoky share:

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As moms, we naturally center our children (and often our partners and extended families) repeatedly over the course of the holiday season. As caretakers and givers (mayyyybe over givers?) we love to make all the magic happen for everyone. But what about making magic for yourself?? 

Over the course of the holidays, it’s easy to completely neglect yourself and sometimes even compromise your core values in the process. 

Every year around this time, I record a holiday episode as an invitation to center YOU over the holidays. 

An invitation to:

Prioritize your joy over other people’s expectations

Do things differently

Do less and breathe more

Reconsider what brings you joy

In addition to this invitation, I’m offering you 4 strategies to get what you want out of the holidays. My hope for you is that you get to the end of this month (and the end of 2022) feeling like you created all the joy you wanted for your family and yourself without overgiving, overdoing, over proving yourself in every moment of this season. 

Listen in to get ideas on how to make all the magic without all the hustle this holiday season.

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Vanessa Quigley is a renowned memory expert and mother of seven. In 2014, she co-founded Chatbooks to help families organize and enjoy their family stories. Vanessa's aha moment came when she found her youngest son clutching his most prized possession: a photo album his preschool teacher made for him. 

Once an avid scrapbooker, Vanessa knew there needed to be a better solution for her photos stuck on her phone. Now millions of parents have printed their family memories with the Chatbooks app.

Vanessa was named Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017, authored DIY advice book Real Moms, Real Hacks, and hosts The MomForce Podcast. In 2021, Chatbooks was named the #1 place to work for women in the United States, by Fortune magazine.

And… fun fact: Vanessa is Miss Utah 1994 and a professionally trained opera singer. In her downtime, you can find her in the mountains with her family, seeing the everyday magic.

Listen in to hear Vanessa share:

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Last Monday, on my 47th birthday, I sat down at my desk and decided it would be a good day to integrate some new software into my business.  

Look, it’s never a good day to integrate new software, but it’s an especially rotten decision on your birthday.  

Shortly after that awful life choice (and 13,000 messages on chat support with said software company), I accidentally deleted 84,628 emails. That is not an exaggerated number I made up. That is the literal amount of emails that I watched disappear from my inbox.  

84,628.  

Most of them were from the last 18 months. Many of them were filled with things like contracts and critical client information. 

Needless to say, I spent a decent chunk of my birthday having VERY BIG feelings. The kind your 3-year-old has when you give them the orange cup instead of the green cup.  

VERY BIG.  

I yelled. I cried. I definitely dropped a few (like, 347) F-bombs.  

I tried to remind myself of what my therapist recently shared with me. Based on research from brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, she told me that feelings are waves that rise and recede all day long. These waves last only 90 seconds. After that, we're simply re-stimulating our internal circuitry. In other words, if we stay stuck in horrible feelings for longer than 90 seconds it’s because we have created our own feedback loop keeping us there. This is great news because it tells us we have the power to move through feelings very quickly if we have the right skills in place.  

This just made me madder, if I’m being honest. I knew that I was gonna need more than 90 freaking seconds. And how dare these doctors and therapists try to put limits on my ability to hold rage!

I had to dig deep into my coaching toolbox to coach myself on my birthday. While I definitely felt the universe was conspiring against me, I was determined to move through my big feelings in order to still find a way to find joy in my day.

In this episode, I talk you through how to use unconventional gratitude practices to get over yourself and get through sticky emotions - whether you deleted 84,628 emails or someone gave you the orange cup instead of the green one. 

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• Get the SMA Newsletter to learn about our January 2023 events: shamelessmom.com/newsletter

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