Welcome back to The Found Podcast with Molly Knuth! In this episode, we kick off Women's History Month with a deep dive into the state of women in 2025, the third year in a row of this particular episode format.

This week I reflect on the challenges women face in the workforce, access to childcare, pay disparity, and political representation. Drawing from research, statistics, and personal experiences, we discuss how much progress has been made and how far we still have to go. I also explore the importance of finding personal success and working together as women to overcome obstacles and move mountains....because none of us can do this work alone, we were never meant to.

Key topics include:

• The impact of childcare costs and accessibility on women in 2025
• The current state of gender pay disparity
• Representation of women in government and politics
• The overwhelming nature of social media and how to manage information overload about what women "should" be pursuing
• The power of women uniting and finding their unique paths to success

Resources:

• Blog post with detailed citations and sources now available at mollyknuthmedia.com/blog.

Listen in to explore these critical issues and how we can all contribute to positive change for women’s futures!

This week, I’m joined by my friend and creative powerhouse, Ana Dellamuth! Anna and I first connected through Empower Her, a community for female entrepreneurs in Eastern Iowa, and I’ve been inspired by her joyful outlook ever since.

Anna’s journey from teacher to creator is a beautiful example of how creativity isn’t just about art—it’s about community, courage, and joy. She specializes in hand lettering, calligraphy, and brand design, but she also brings people together through her Creators Club, a monthly gathering where women explore new creative projects (and step out of their comfort zones!).

In this episode, we dive into: ✨ The importance of creativity in everyday life (even if you don’t think you’re "artistic") ✨ How creativity can be a tool for connection, confidence, and self-discovery ✨ The joy of trying new things without the pressure of perfection ✨ Why creativity is more about the process than the final product ✨ My (hilarious) experience with finger knitting and how it pushed me past my fears

Ana’s message is one we all need to hear: creativity is joy. It’s not about being perfect—it’s about making space to explore, grow, and have fun.

Hit play and get ready to be inspired to bring a little more creativity into your life! 🎧

📲 Free Resource for Business Owners: 10 Questions to Ask Prior to a Rebrand

📲 Free Resource for Creative Enthusiasts: Creativity Challenge

📲 Learn more about Lovely Little Light: https://www.lovelylittlelight.com/home

📲 Follow Ana on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lovelylittlelight/

Are you creating or just consuming? In today’s episode, we’re diving into the power of creativity and how shifting into a creative mindset can make your life more fulfilling and productive in unconventional ways.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why 75% of people feel they’re not living up to their creative potential
• How creativity is a learned behavior, not just a natural talent
• The importance of creativity beyond traditional artistic expression
• What you need to foster creativity: time, space, and inspiration
• How I’m prioritizing creativity in 2025
• The science behind right-brain vs. left-brain thinking and achieving flow
• The CAT Model (Calm Down, Make Art, Transcend) from Dr. Martha Beck

Let’s break free from the idea that creativity is a luxury—it’s a necessity for problem-solving, innovation, and living a more joyful life. Tune in to find out how you can tap into your creative potential in 2025!

💡 Let’s connect! Share your thoughts on Instagram @mollyknuth_mkm and tag me in your creative projects!

Helpful Links:

• Lovely Little Light Creator's Club
• Dr. Martha Beck episode of We Can Do Hard Things

In this episode of The Found Podcast, I’m sitting down with a guest whose words have been inspiring me for years—poet and author Jennae Cecelia. If you’ve ever found yourself drawn to poetry as a way to process emotions, reconnect with your values, or simply feel seen, this conversation is for you.

Jennae shares her journey of discovering poetry as her calling, the role of creativity in personal growth, and how writing has helped her (and so many others) return to themselves. We also dive into the process of writing — how she’s structured her days and her life to make room for writing and celebrating life.

If you’re a woman navigating change, seeking creative expression, or dreaming of publishing your own words, Jennae’s story will remind you that your voice matters.

In This Episode, We Cover: ✨ Jennae’s journey to finding herself through writing ✨ Practical insights into her writing and creative process ✨ How the publishing world has evolved—and what it’s like to self-publish a book AND an exciting announcement about something new in 2025! ✨ Why creativity is a necessary part of reconnecting with who you are

More About Jennae Cecelia: Jennae is a poet and best-selling author who has been sharing her words with the world since 2017. With multiple self-published collections under her belt, she is now preparing to release her first traditionally published book later this year—a major milestone in her career. Through her work, Jennae encourages women to embrace creativity as a way to process emotions and rediscover themselves.

📖 Check out Jennae’s books and upcoming releases: jennaececelia.com 📲 Follow Jennae on Instagram: @jennaececelia

It’s 2025, and I’m kicking off the year (okay, I know, it is February already, but I'm just getting warmed up over here) with some thoughts on what women—especially ambitious moms, business owners, and entrepreneurs—don’t need more of this year.

Spoiler alert: it’s not another free download that's only two pages long, another social media platform, or another "life-changing" productivity hack.

In this episode, I’m sharing how I eased into the new year (hello, sauna time and slow workouts) and a download of information that hit me on a random Saturday. We’re talking about stripping away the excess and focusing on what really matters: creating instead of consuming, making space for what we love, and redefining success on our terms.

Tune in to hear:

• How I intentionally eased into 2025

• Why women don’t need more shoulds this year

• What it really looks like to align with your own values

• The power of connection, third spaces, and nerding out over what you love

• Why you were never meant to do life alone as an ambitious woman

It’s time to stop chasing more and start making space for what truly fuels us. Let’s get find ourselves in episode 188 of The Found Podcast with Molly Knuth.

Connect with Molly: 

Find me and all my business life/personal life shenanigans at @mollyknuth_mkm on Instagram and Facebook. Subscribe to Founder's Field Notes, my weekly email series, where I talk about what I'm observing in life and in business in real time at https://mkm.myflodesk.com/email.

What are you wondering about in 2025?

“Wonder” is my word of the year, and over here I’ve been wondering:

• What don’t I know yet? What do I want/need to learn this year?
• What does work look like in the months ahead?
• Where do I need to slow down?
• What do I need to stop doing?
• What does my audience need to hear? Want to hear?
• What moments in my life made me know “wonder?”

So I took a little pause on recording and producing new episodes to make space and get perspective, and this episode is the product of all that wondering.

The Found Podcast with Molly Knuth will be back weekly in February with more stories and strategies for finding ourselves while founding businesses as ambitious women.

Links from the episode:

• The Daily Stoic
• Onyx Storm

How did your year go?

Honestly.

How do you measure the "success" or "failure" of a year?

I propose looking at 3 areas of your business and/or life to unpack the past 12 months and make room for how you'd like 2025 to be:

1. Numbers
2. Value
3. Time

Listen in to this week's episode for all the details and questions to help you reflect on 2024 and make space for the new year ahead.

You can be transformed by this episode if you let it. I’m 100% serious.   Today I’m sitting down with Money’s Mom herself, Gina Knox.   Guys, I’m seriously tingly at the opportunity to share her message with you this week on the pod!    Gina Knox is a financial coach for entrepreneurs with variable income. She teaches entrepreneurs and small business owners how to save $100k with her program Small Business Money School, then she helps her clients create a 7-figure wealth portfolio with her mastermind 7 Figure Wealth. Over her career as a coach Gina has helped her clients save $8,257,123.75 (as of 10-28-24)! Gina’s podcast, Small Business, Big Money, is an amazing resource for those who want more financial understanding AND key skills and strategies that will help them get there.   Personally, I worked with Gina since March 2024 to help me build savings at MKM and help identify. And I can personally attest to the fact that her systems work. I have more money on hand than I have in the history of my business’ 7-year history, and I know how to put my money to work for me.   In this episode we talk about money systems you can implement (aka: the Cash Flow Waterfall), debt, money mindset, planning for the future, and building wealth. But most of all, I want you to hear the energy and excitement of our conversation and that money can feel this level of freeing for you too.    Trust me, if I can do these things, you can to.   You can be transformed by this episode if you let it.   Key Takeaways

• “Your financial data in your business is the biggest gold mine of data that your business has. It is such a wasted opportunity when folks ignore it or avoid it.”
• “What’s important about money is that you have some kind of mental model for how to visualize it in your brain.”
• “Businesses spend money to make money.”
• “I’ve worked with over 700 companies, and I’ve never seen a business that hasn’t used debt at one point or another.”
• “Debt is a business tool.”
• “Stop waiting for a windfall, solve your actual money problems.”

  Key Links

• Molly’s episode on Gina’s Podcast
• Small Business Money School
• Small Business, Big Money podcast

In this episode...you might get uncomfortable. I know it's only recently that I'm not getting itchy when talking about MONEY with others.

But that's exactly why today's conversation is so important, especially for female entrepreneurs and small business owners.

You see, the less we talk about money, the bigger it looms over us.

The less we talk about money, the more shame and guilt is allowed to grow.

The less we talk about money, the more stories we make up in the absence of facts and data.

So today, I'm diving in to my personal money story over the course of my life and business at Molly Knuth Media.

We'll unpack the money misbeliefs I held for decades and the people and tools that have helped me dismantle those misbeliefs in recent years to build healthy money systems and practices.

Links:

• Managing Your Money Mindset with Sheila Hansen
• Perspectives from a Failing Business Owner
• Pricing and Packaging
• Sheila Hansen CPA
• Sheila Hansen Profitable Women Podcast
• Gina Knox Small Business Money School
• Gina Knox Small Business Big Money Podcast

Today I welcome a past guest, dear friend, and resilience expert to the podcast to share skills and strategies that we can practice to stay resilient in our lives, work, and engagements.   Whitney Sullivan is a speaker, educator, team trainer, and coach with a background in health, wellness, higher education, communications, entrepreneurship and the Enneagram. All these life experiences have allowed her to test and build up her resilience over time and use it to help her current clients and students build what she refers to as their “resilience batteries.” The Resilience Battery   In today’s episode, Whitney shares that resilience is like a battery - the more charge you have going into challenges, setbacks and failures, the more capacity you have to thrive in the face of them.   In the interview, Whitney shares that resilience is less about willpower and more about wellness. Tending to your resilience battery will help you stay energized, manage stress, prevent overwhelm and avoid burnout in work, life and leadership.   By practicing self awareness and knowing when our own resilience batteries are in the various color zones, we can be proactive about our wellness and enact interventions to keep us healthy and resilient.   Green Zone: your most energized self. We still experience stressors in this zone, it’s just that our challenges are balanced evenly with our comforts. We have capacity to face whatever comes our way.   Yellow Zone: your most stressed self. This is when challenges start to outpace comforts and things feel like they’re moving faster than we can keep up with. The signs for needed self-care intensify a little bit, so we want to intervene and address them here.   Orange Zone: your exhausted self. Your mind and body’s final call before depletion, and we start to get “emergency alerts” from our body. These alerts might appear as outbursts, reacting to triggers, or feeling the desire to quit or engage in numbing behaviors. We may still be in a good mood and have decent morale, but our highs are higher and our lows are lower.   Red Zone: your depleted self. Your nervous system is overwhelmed and you experience a hard time making decisions, problem solving, and seeing the big picture.    In the interview, Whitney shares stories, strategies and skills to help you identify and move through the zones in your own life to keep yourself resilient and healthy. For additional support, you can grab her Resilience Battery Tracker or her To-Do List Audit at the links below.   Key Takeaways

• “Owning a business is a masterclass of resilience.”
• “[Resilience is] not this innate ability, it’s a nurtured capacity.” 
• “[Resilience is] not a matter of willpower, it’s a matter of wellness.”
• “I like to think of resilience as a battery and the more charge you have going into each day, the more capacity you have to thrive, no matter what challenges come your way.”
• “We have to go on offense with our wellness, not defense.”
• “I want everyone to not underestimate the power of 10-20 minutes.”
• “I’m always evaluating what I need to grit and what I need to quit.”
• “One thing that lead me into burnout was this ‘I never quit’ mentality…and it’s sneaky because that looks like resilience, doesn’t it? …but that actually just exposed me to a lot of harm in my health.”
• “To grit is staying the course and working hard when the easy, but wrong thing, would be to quit. To quit is letting go of what’s not working and moving on when the easy, but wrong thing, would be to grit.”

More about Whitney:   Whitney Hinshaw Sullivan is a resilience speaker, Enneagram practitioner, team-builder and coach. Her professional training and coaching business is designed to:

• Help leaders and teams use the Enneagram to positively influence their relationships, responsibilities and results
• Support emerging leaders in the development of skills in communication, stress management and self-mastery
• Deliver keynotes and company webinars on resilience, connection and purpose

  With a background in leading health/wellness and student leadership programs in higher education, she has been a professional educator since 2012. Whitney's favorite moments in higher education were always when others stopped by her office and asked, "Hey, Whitney. Do you got a minute?" She loved the coaching conversations and mentorship moments that followed so much, that she opened her own business in 2021 in order to do it even more.   In 2024, Whitney created The Enneagram Studio: a virtual learning platform designed to deliver professional Enneagram trainings, masterminds, coaching and more. Her goal is to demystify the Enneagram and make it an accessible and mainstream professional development tool in leadership, business and higher education settings. She currently lives in Bozeman, Montana with her husband Tim, where she is also an avid reader, outdoor adventurer, and communication professor at Montana State University.   Connect with Whitney at https://www.whitneysullivan.com/ Resilience Battery Tracker: https://whitneysullivan.myflodesk.com/tracker To-Do List Audit: https://whitneysullivan.myflodesk.com/audit