Episode Title: From the Marines to the Courtroom to the Boardroom | Michael Ciccolone, Blackline GC

Description:

What happens when an attorney decides the billable hour model is broken and builds something completely different? You get Michael Ciccolone.

Michael is a Marine veteran, former Chief Legal Officer, and the founder of Blackline GC — a fractional general counsel firm offering flat-fee, subscription-based legal services to growth-stage companies. He built a model designed around relationship and trust, not billing anxiety, and nine months in, every client has renewed.

In this conversation, Michael takes us from his childhood in New York and a love of the library, to deployments in Anbar Province with a bomb-detecting German Shepherd named Cindy, to building a law firm that puts small business owners in the same room as the legal expertise that used to be reserved for companies ten times their size.

We talk books — from Stephen King to Aristotle to Dan Martell's Buy Back Your Time. We talk Sicily, self-care, and what his sister taught him about living now instead of waiting for retirement. And we talk about what it means to be an underdog advocate in a profession not exactly known for that.

This one is full of wisdom, warmth, and a few stories you won't see coming.

📚 Books mentioned: Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell, Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Last of the Mohicans, Dracula by Bram Stoker, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Rhetoric by Aristotle

Connect with Michael: [email protected] | LinkedIn: Michael Ciccolone

Connect with Angie: AngieSmithSummitConsulting.com

The Books That Shaped Me is proudly sponsored by WinStar Insurance Group — Cedar Park, Texas. Faith, trust, and authenticity in everything they do.

This episode is proudly sponsored by WinStar Insurance Group, owned and operated by Stephanie Dew out of Cedar Park, Texas. Real coverage, real integrity, and a heart for the people they serve.

I'm joined by PJ Diamond, a leadership voice with Leadership Austin and a genuine global citizen. PJ walks me through the books that built her, starting with a poem her sisters passed down before she could read it herself and ending with the one that gave her permission to define motherhood on her own terms. In between, we talk about growing up the oldest of three, a Rotary exchange year in Argentina, teaching kindergarten in Japan, therapy that saved her life, and what it means to belong to yourself before you belong anywhere else.

📚 Book Mentioned: Life Doesn't Frighten Me by Maya Angelou (illustrated by Jean-Michel Basquiat) 📚 Book Mentioned: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho 📚 Book Mentioned: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn 📚 Book Mentioned: The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C. Maxwell 📚 Book Mentioned: Others Like Me by Nicole Louie

Connect with PJ Diamond on LinkedIn, and find me at angiesmithsummitconsulting.com if you want to keep the conversation going.

Finding Your Voice, Your Tribe, and Yourself with Kat Rector

In this episode of The Books That Shaped Me, I sit down with Kat Rector, a tech leader and mom of two boys who I've admired from afar since we first connected on LinkedIn. Kat opens up about her divorce, years of burnout she didn't recognize until she named it, and the slow work of reconnecting with herself.

We talk through the books that carried her: Attention Management by Maura Thomas, I'm So Effing Tired by Amy Shah, MD, You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero, and Atomic Habits by James Clear. Kat also shares how Wolf Pack by Abby Wambach, Iron John by Robert Bly, and Wild at Heart by John Eldredge shaped the mentoring bootcamp she built to surround her sons with strong men.

This one covers hustle culture, building your tribe on purpose, raising boys with intention, and learning to sit still long enough to hear your own thoughts.

Connect with Kat on LinkedIn or Instagram, search Kat Rector and her blog DearFellowMoms.com.

Want to talk through your own season of change? Book a call with me at angiesmithsummitconsulting.com.

Dave Leon, an executive, business, and life coach based in Austin who spent 34 years in corporate America first, seven years on Wall Street, then 27 years in enterprise tech and SaaS sales, including over a decade selling cloud and AI services for a major hyperscaler.

Dave was laid off twice. The second time, at 56, he sat with himself for three months until he ran out of excuses. In the years that followed he was also diagnosed with cancer and went through a divorce, all inside about 18 months. Out of that he rebuilt his own definition of success (peace plus joy, no variable for wealth) and built his coaching practice around five pillars he mapped out on his own whiteboard.

We talk about stoicism, neuroplasticity, why saying your own name can interrupt a bad pattern, and the book that reframed rigid goal setting for both of us.

Books that shaped this episode:

• A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William Irvine
• Limitless by Jim Kwik
• Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

My guest is Carrie Davis, VP of Patient and Employee Experience at Hanger, Inc., born without her left arm and wearing a prosthesis since she was nine months old.

We talk about growing up as an empath, the difference between performative confidence and the real thing, and why she's letting go of the five-year plan at 55. Carrie also opens up about the day she traded a plain prosthetic hook for one covered in Swarovski crystals, and what that taught her about being seen.

If her story has you thinking about your own next chapter, book a call with me: angiesmithsummitconsulting.com

o Lead by Brené Brown Wolfpack by Abby Wambach The Gift of Change by Marianne Williamson The Human Margin by Dr. Catherine Meese The Thin Book of Trust by Charles Feltman The Speed of Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey The Empath Leader by Claudia Katarucci Strong Ground by Brené Brown

CONNECT WITH CARRIE linkedin.com/in/carrie-davis-05805b12

#TheBooksThatShapedMe #UnBreakableLifeCoaching #FaithForwardLeadership #EmpathLeadership #ServantLeadership #LimbDifference #DisabilityAdvocate #TrustAtWork #CampNoLimits #PersonalDevelopmentPodcast

Nichola Cotto — Founder & CEO of Women Who Govern, the first career navigation platform for women pursuing leadership in municipal government. Also serves on the CAPCOG Economic Development Advisory Board. Based in Austin, TX. Background spans real estate, nonprofit leadership (Director & CEO of We Are Not Broken), and grant writing before founding Women Who Govern in 2026. Currently an MPA candidate. Recently marked 5 years cancer-free.

Diana Sawyers has spent almost 30 years leading enterprise transformation for the State of Texas. She's also a saxophone player, a guitar student who's played Stubb's and Antone's, a political junkie, and a mom launching two sons into the world. In this episode we talk about all of it, and the books that helped her hold it together along the way.

Diana shares the moment she froze on stage with sticky notes taped to her guitar (and found out later Bob Dylan did the same thing). We talk about teaching inside a maximum security juvenile facility, why she believes music is one of the last truly human things we have left, and what it means to finally be comfortable in your own skin.

Books mentioned in this episode:

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
• The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
• 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think by Brianna Wiest
• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

If this conversation resonates, that's kind of the point. The books that shape us usually show up right when we need them. If you're in a season where you're asking what your own next chapter looks like, I'd love to talk with you. Head to angiesmithsummitconsulting.com to book a call.

Loree Tamayo built a life running hospitals and long-term care facilities, one that looked polished from the outside. Underneath it was a lifetime of psychological abuse she didn't even have language for, generational patterns passed down from her great-grandmother to her grandmother to her mother, and finally to her.

In this episode, Loree walks through the moment she surrendered her life to God with a blank check prayer, and how that same surrender carried her through a devastating marriage, eight years of counseling, and the slow work of learning what a boundary even is. She talks about the anger she didn't know she was carrying, why "no" felt like a foreign language, and how she came out the other side to found Yesterday's Gone, a women's shelter now supported by an army of men who show up to serve the very population abuse once tried to break.

This is a conversation about denial, boundaries, forgiveness, and the belief that God writes the best endings, if you let Him.

Find Loree at yesterdaysgone.org and hiddentreasureteams.org. She was also recently on Michelle Savage's Her Best Chapter podcast, check it out!

Today I'm sitting down with Jennifer Buaas. We first connected at work conferences over the years, and I knew there was a story here worth telling. Jennifer's path took her from driving a beverage cart at a golf course to the Texas Workers Compensation Commission, then to the Texas Department of Information Resources, and now to KPMG. Every door that opened came through a person who saw something in her first.

We talk about mentors who invest their time for no reason other than wanting someone else to succeed, why relationships and connection matter more than we give them credit for, and how public sector workers rarely get the credit they deserve. Jennifer shares the books and voices that shaped her along the way: children's books like Curious George during her early parenting years, Brené Brown's work and her podcast The Curiosity Shop with Adam Grant, the devotional Devotions from the Horse Farm by Kara and Dan Whitney, and Kristin Neff's book on self-compassion, which met her in one of the darkest seasons of her life.

We close on listening as the most underrated leadership skill, why AI will never replace human connection, and Jennifer's own book that's been taking shape in her mind for years.

If this episode encourages you, share it with someone who needs it today. Want to be a guest or explore a sponsorship? Connect with me at AngieSmithSummitConsulting.com.

Valentina MacGregor has lived on four continents, survived a body brace that reshaped her whole life, and turned heartbreak into one of the most meaningful projects of her career.

Born in Buenos Aires, raised in Venezuela, and shaped by stints in Italy, London, Glasgow, and Madrid, Valentina joins Angie to talk about what happens when you stop asking permission to be different. At 10 years old, a scoliosis diagnosis put her in a back brace for two years. She couldn't do PE, so she read instead. That's the moment she became a lifelong reader.

She opens up about losing her brother after two heart transplants, the book that taught her to trust her own heart over everyone else's opinion (The Alchemist), and why she now photographs women over 40 for her Legends Project, an annual exhibit celebrating the women who dared to pivot.

This one will remind you that the hard seasons are usually the ones doing the shaping.