Correction: In this episode, Dr. Jean Pennicooke states that seven of the eight reassigned administrators were Black women. The accurate figure is six. We regret the error and have corrected it in these show notes; the audio/video remains as recorded.

"Self-honoring choices" — that's the phrase Dr. Nicole and Dr. Jean Pennicooke return to in this conversation about culturally specific self-care. Dr. Jean coined the term after watching seven Black women principals reassigned in a single afternoon, and realizing the self-care advice she'd been given her whole life was never built for what she was actually carrying. Together, they name three things most women have felt but never had language for — weathering, other mothering, and secondhand trauma — and talk through what it looks like to honor yourself before you're depleted, not after.

For fifteen years, Tiana Sanchez ran a training and development firm with Fortune 500 clients, a team of coaches and consultants, and revenue that grew 454% over four years. Then, in the space of about a week, most of it fell away. Contracts canceled. Clients stopped responding. The public version of Tiana's life stayed exactly the same — the speaking engagements, the recycled photos, the "you're doing so well." The private version didn't.

This conversation lives inside the gap between those two versions. Tiana talks about what it actually took to move her family out of necessity rather than choice, why she kept the unraveling hidden for almost a year before posting about it, and what a seven-day water fast taught her about resentment, comparison, and the difference between believing something is over and knowing, quietly, that it isn't. She and Dr. Nicole talk through what it means to separate your worth from your work when the work disappears overnight, why this wasn't Tiana's first unplanned reinvention, and the exercise — "blockers and builders" — she's used twice now to imagine a future she couldn't yet see the shape of.

This is Tiana's own Chrysalis Season, and she's still inside it. Not a comeback story told from the other side — a conversation with someone in the middle of Boldly Becoming, in real time.

In this conversation:

About Tiana Sanchez

Tiana Sanchez is the "Failure Enthusiast," CEO and founder of TSI, LLC. For over a decade, she has been the go-to corporate trainer and business consultant for organizations across the public and private sectors, including Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Music, Sempra, Mercedes-Benz Research and Development, Sherwin-Williams, Health-Ade Kombucha, and the Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles. She's a two-time #1 bestselling author, executive coach, and host of the Like a REAL Boss podcast. Her books include Undefeatable: Conquering Self-Defeat, F'D Up: The UPside of Failure, The New C-Suite: Civil Leadership in Action, and Faith, Friendships and Business: How Faith and Friendships Strengthen Your Work and Purpose.

There's a particular kind of change that doesn't announce itself. Nothing breaks. No one would know, looking at your life, that anything is different. And yet something in you has gone quiet in a way you can't quite explain, and you've never had a word for what that is.

In this opening episode, Dr. Nicole Yeldell Butts names that space: the room between who you've been and who you're becoming. She introduces the idea of a Chrysalis Season — not a waiting room, but a place where something is already stirring beneath the surface, long before it's visible from the outside. SHIFT is the framework for meeting that season with consciousness and courage, so it moves from a transition you simply endure to a transformation you intentionally choose.

This episode doesn't offer a plan. It offers something more useful first: permission to notice where you actually are.

Something is coming. The Room Between: Navigating Life's Transitions launches September 8th. A space for women navigating life's transitions — personal and professional, chosen and unchosen, planned and unplanned —  that reshape who we are. Hosted by Dr. Nicole Yeldell Butts, each episode helps you name what's actually happening in your own "room between," and take one honest step toward who you're Boldly Becoming. This is your Chrysalis Season. Subscribe now so the first full episode finds you the moment it drops.