Author Elizabeth Gilbert says the universe buries strange jewels deep within us.  This helps to explain in part why broadcast journalist Sheree Franklin left a successful marketing career as an entrepreneur to become an intuitive coach and meditation teacher.  She’s traveled the world, gone Down Under with Oprah Winfrey, and been featured on news outlets discussing the powerful wisdom of her book, Intuition: The Hidden Asset Everyone Should Learn To Use. Sheree has lived an incredible life of leadership and discovery, mining and sharing these hidden jewels.  This is her story.

Today’s changemaker is an award-winning interior designer who left a career in the financial services industry to build the life she wanted.  Armed with courage, tenacity, a paint brush and a few good ideas, Felicia Gimza built a new life and the interior design company, The Expert Touch Interiors.

Sip on some designer secrets and the story of how Felicia created a new life around design and new opportunities.  With some great advice on how to avoid decorating disasters and bringing light into your home for the holidays, this is her story.

Micheal Lewis popularized the idea of blind spots in his bestselling book, The Blind Side. Blind spots can be anthing from a football quarterback not seeing the tackle spot, a hidden view in your rear view mirror or decisions made regardless of things unknown. Typically, we see blind spots as a deficiency, a gap in judgment where mistakes can happen. But what if we saw them as opportunities for nudging us to take chances with the possibility of silver linings?

As we celebrate Thanksgiving and our many blessings, Sipping on Stories host Rose McInerney shares three blind spots in the most painful experiences of her life. Each is connected to the number 13 and every one eventually stirred her soul to happiness and transformation. To all those who have lost someone and something special, remain steadfast in hope, courage and the promise of new life.

Cristina Mittermeier is a world-class Fine Arts Photographer whose global influence extends well beyond her Mexico City roots. More than 1.5 million people recognize this award-winning Sony Artisan, National Geographic Woman of Impact and She’s Mercedes Empowered Woman. Cristina founded the International League of Photographers and co-founded of Sea Legacy to tell photographic stories that protect our oceans, Indigenous Peoples and women and girls everywhere. This love-affair and dedication to our ecosystems is inspired by her travels to over 120 countries. This is her story.

Lise Poulsen Floris is a Danish freelance writer currently based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her articles have been published internationally, most notably by ABC Australia, Global Times, Beijing KIds and Womanscape. She is a former EU worker turned writer, whose global travels have helped her to find the big story in every little story she discovers.   Lise shares some of the highlights of her new lifestyle and the challenges of globetrotting and the writer’s life.  This is her story.

Ching Tien grew up in Beijing in the 1960s with dreams of becoming a journalist until the Cultural Revolution changed everything. Ching’s father was jailed and her mother, a doctor, was forced to work in Gansu, one of the poorest provinces in China. For eight years, Ching labored in a factory and witnessed dire poverty alongside her mother - people living in caves with no running water or electricity. This stayed with Ching, who moved to Canada in 1983. After raising a family, Ching created Educating Girls in Rural China (EGRC), a nonprofit to help educate impoverished young women hold up half the sky. This is her amazing story.

Adriana Bertini is a brilliant fashion designer whose innovative creation of condom art hangs in over 35 museums around the world. Her collections belong to some of the greatest celebrities and designers, even though Bertini left the haute couture fashion industry three decades ago to work with impoverished youth living in the streets of San Paulo, Brazil.  Many of them are LGBTQ kids that suffer violence and also the scourages of sex trafficking.  Bertini educates them about sexual health and rebuilding their self-esteem through art.  Her selfless and dangerous work in a COVID-ravaged city models leadership built on kindness, sacrifice and radical generosity. This is her story.

This entrepreneur helps women to feel beautiful from the inside out. Words like confident, graceful and free are favorite expressions of Aradhana, a jewelry designer from India. She has lived in Indonesia and Shanghai, where she discovered the healing power of gemstones. If we are all the sum of our experiences and the nature that lives within our hearts, ARRA by Aradhana Designs reveals the potential that lives within us if we dare to be open to building freedom, joy and a life of passion. This is Aradhana’s story.

She escaped a revolution only to build a new one.  But this time, Shermin

Kruse is reimagining political and structural systems of leadership that actually work. As a corporate lawyer turned strategist, Kruse is a Northwestern Law Professor, entrepreneur, writer, and TEDTalk speaker and producer. Kruse understands twenty-first century challenges like COVID and America’s civil rights protests are a call for change and empowering transformational leadership. This is her story.  

Today’s changemaker is Arica Hilton, a poet, a visual artist, and a Chicago gallerist for Hilton Asmus Contemporary.  She has traveled the world chasing creativity, from the peaks of the Himilayan mountains to the deep diving waters of Raja Ampat, Indonesia. Working to protect our waters from plastic pollution with art exhibits from North America to Europe, and the Middle East to Asia, Arica embodies the cosmic energy of nature with the greatest passion and universality.  This is her story.