The Self Investment Project with Kathy Washburn | Emotional Wellness, Midlife Reinvention & Reclaiming Your Authentic Self

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• Ep. 01 - Type C Defined with Dr. Lydia Temoshok
• Ep. 04 - Radical Self-Care with Leonore Tjia
• Ep. 83 - You're Carrying Too Much with Karin Del Maestro

For ten years, Aubrey Schabowsky poured everything she had into her students, believing that being a good teacher meant showing up for everyone, no matter the personal cost. But beneath her accomplishments were unprocessed grief, burnout, and a growing disconnection from her own needs. In this conversation, Aubrey shares how stepping away from teaching, becoming a mother, and receiving an ADHD diagnosis helped her rethink the identity she'd worked so hard to maintain. Kathy and Aubrey explore Type C behavior patterns, the hidden cost of being the responsible one, and how self-investment can transform the way we serve others. Together, they consider what becomes possible when we stop confusing self-sacrifice with purpose and learn to lead from a place of authenticity rather than exhaustion.

In this episode, Kathy and Aubrey discuss:

• teacher burnout
• self abandonment
• Type C behavior patterns
• grief and emotional suppression
• ADHD and identity
• authentic leadership

View extended shownotes here

Subscribe to Sense of Peace (Kathy's Substack) today!

If this resonated, the most generous thing you can do is share it with one woman who needs to hear it. One share grows this community more than any algorithm.

Follow the show on your favorite platform, and come find me on Substack at senseofpeace.substack.com — that’s where the deeper conversation lives.

And if you’re ready to stop just listening and start doing this work — visit kathywashburn.net. I’d love to talk with you. 

Until next time — keep investing in yourself. It is always, always worth it.

#SpreadMadLove

Send us Fan Mail

You'll also love…

• Ep. 01 - Type C Defined with Dr. Lydia Temoshok
• Ep. 04 - Radical Self-Care with Leonore Tjia
• Ep. 65 - The Body Keeps Score: How People-Pleasing is Messing with Your Hormones with Dr. Seth Osgood

After years of loss, caregiving, divorce, and breast cancer, Karin Del Maestro discovered that knowing how to take care of herself wasn't the same as having the capacity to do it. In this conversation, she shares the invisible backpack metaphor, her CALM method for identifying the responsibilities and patterns weighing us down, and why trying harder can sometimes keep us stuck. Kathy and Karin also explore Type C behavior patterns, the difference between caring and carrying, and how rebuilding your life starts with recognizing that your needs matter, too.

Topics Discussed

• people pleasing
• nervous system regulation
• emotional burnout
• breast cancer recovery
• healthy boundaries
• self worth

View extended shownotes here

Subscribe to Sense of Peace (Kathy's Substack) today!

If this resonated, the most generous thing you can do is share it with one woman who needs to hear it. One share grows this community more than any algorithm.

Follow the show on your favorite platform, and come find me on Substack at senseofpeace.substack.com — that’s where the deeper conversation lives.

And if you’re ready to stop just listening and start doing this work — visit kathywashburn.net. I’d love to talk with you. 

Until next time — keep investing in yourself. It is always, always worth it.

#SpreadMadLove

Send us Fan Mail

You'll also love…

• Ep. 01 - Type C Defined with Dr. Lydia Temoshok
• Ep. 04 - Radical Self-Care with Leonore Tjia
• Ep. 05 - Tapping Into Body Intelligence

Christine G. Anastos spent seventeen years as her mother's caregiver before becoming a patient herself. She built Connect and Thrive, known as CAT, to close a gap she lived through firsthand: conventional medicine can get you to remission, but almost nothing addresses the underlying conditions, physical, emotional, and financial, that got you there in the first place.

At the center of CAT is the Kitty Fund. Friends and family contribute, and one hundred percent of the money goes directly to the patient to spend inside a vetted marketplace of coaching, energy medicine, nutrition, and other integrative practitioners. There is also a lower-lift version, a CAT e-gift card, for people who want to give without asking a patient to publicly tell her story.

Kathy and Christine talk about the split between Christine's professional and personal selves, fierce and unyielding at work, giving until there was nothing left everywhere else, and what she now recognizes as her own Type C personality. They talk about her blog post on returning to work after cancer, same badge, new scars underneath the blazer, and why the kindest response to someone in that transition is a question, not an assumption. And they talk about Christine's realization, watching both of her parents move through illness, that caregivers left unchecked can become the next patients.

Topics Discussed

• returning to work after cancer
• Type C coping patterns
• caregiving and boundaries
• integrative cancer support
• asking for and receiving help
• identity after treatment

View extended shownotes here

Subscribe to Sense of Peace (Kathy's Substack) today!

If this resonated, the most generous thing you can do is share it with one woman who needs to hear it. One share grows this community more than any algorithm.

Follow the show on your favorite platform, and come find me on Substack at senseofpeace.substack.com — that’s where the deeper conversation lives.

And if you’re ready to stop just listening and start doing this work — visit kathywashburn.net. I’d love to talk with you. 

Until next time — keep investing in yourself. It is always, always worth it.

#SpreadMadLove

Send us Fan Mail

You'll also love…

• Ep. 01 - Type C Defined with Dr. Lydia Temoshok
• Ep. 04 - Radical Self-Care with Leonore Tjia
• Ep. 05 - Tapping Into Body Intelligence

On this episode, Kathy sits down with Dr. Leslie B. Newman — psychologist, positive psychology educator, and author of A Daily Dose of Happiness — for a conversation about what happens when healing stops being a straight line.

Dr. Leslie introduces her Magic Closet practice, a way of meeting a triggered emotional reaction with curiosity instead of judgment, and unpacks the difference between mindset and what she calls mood set — the emotional baseline we return to underneath our thoughts. The two of them trace her golden spiral path framework, a Wizard of Oz–inspired map for growth that circles back around rather than marching forward in a straight line, revisiting the same lessons with more capacity each time.

The conversation lands on a single word: deserve. Dr. Leslie shares how reclaiming that word after a narcissistic relationship became the title of her book, and what it means to receive good things without having to perform for them first.

This episode speaks directly to anyone who recognizes Type C coping mechanisms in themselves — people-pleasing, conflict avoidance, emotional suppression — and is ready to find their way back to feeling.

Topics Discussed

•  emotional healing 
•  people pleasing 
•  emotional regulation 
•  self compassion 
•  positive psychology 
•  mind body connection

View extended shownotes here

Subscribe to Sense of Peace (Kathy's Substack) today!

If this resonated, the most generous thing you can do is share it with one woman who needs to hear it. One share grows this community more than any algorithm.

Follow the show on your favorite platform, and come find me on Substack at senseofpeace.substack.com — that’s where the deeper conversation lives.

And if you’re ready to stop just listening and start doing this work — visit kathywashburn.net. I’d love to talk with you. 

Until next time — keep investing in yourself. It is always, always worth it.

#SpreadMadLove

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What if the story you have never told is the very thing standing between you and your own healing?

In this episode, Kathy sits down with Cristina Simmons, an occupational therapist turned publisher, author, and founder of a company that helps everyday people write and self-publish their own books. Cristina shares how twenty years of emotional suppression, a marriage tested by grief and betrayal, and a rare femur tumor eventually became the very material that set her free.

Cristina and Kathy trace the thread from disconnection to embodiment: the difference between a "ground crew" and a "co-pilot" in your life, what it means to finally become pregnant with yourself, and why writing your story down, even if no one else ever reads it, is one of the most healing acts available to you.

This conversation touches on adoption, infertility, forgiveness, and the surprising link between self-devaluation and physical illness. It closes the loop on why reclaiming your story is not an indulgence. It is how you build your new normal.

You will hear about:

• Why Cristina describes twenty years of her life as living "underwater," disconnected from her own body
• The moment she realized her femur tumor may have been connected to decades of stuffing down her own needs
• How her husband’s infidelity became the wake-up call that turned her inward instead of destroying her marriage
• The "ground crew vs. co-pilot" distinction for understanding who really knows your backstory
• Why she believes ninety-nine percent of people who could write a book never do, and what changes when they finally start
• The ripple effect of one woman finding her courage, and how it moved through an entire community

view extended shownotes here

Subscribe to Sense of Peace (Kathy's Substack) today!

If this resonated, the most generous thing you can do is share it with one woman who needs to hear it. One share grows this community more than any algorithm.

Follow the show on your favorite platform, and come find me on Substack at senseofpeace.substack.com — that’s where the deeper conversation lives.

And if you’re ready to stop just listening and start doing this work — visit kathywashburn.net. I’d love to talk with you. 

Until next time — keep investing in yourself. It is always, always worth it.

#SpreadMadLove

Send us Fan Mail

Emily Forbes spent nine years as a CEO, winning awards and passing every performance review, while her body was quietly falling apart. In this conversation, Emily shares the equation she developed after ill-health retirement forced her to separate two things most of us have never been taught to tell apart: capability and capacity.

We talk about the moment capability stopped being enough to override what her body was saying, the crash protocol she now uses on low-capacity days, and why interoception and simple breathing techniques matter more than willpower ever did. Emily is the author of Too Hard to Swallow and founder of Wylde Wellbeing, where she coaches high-achieving women rebuilding their lives after a diagnosis, illness, or major transition.

This episode speaks directly to the Type C pattern of pushing through, staying capable on the outside while running on empty underneath, and offers a gentler, more honest way forward.

Key Topics Covered

●       The capacity equation: resource + recovery + regulation + support, minus demands and stress load

●       Why capability isn't in the equation at all, and what that reveals about how we're praised

●       Emily's crash protocol and the language of noticing versus labeling

●       Interoception, body scans, and the parasympathetic sigh breathing technique

●       Awareness before agency, and reclaiming choice after years of "capability override"

●       Too Hard to Swallow: part memoir, part self-help, and the wellness plan template inside it

View extended shownotes here

Subscribe to Sense of Peace (Kathy's Substack) today!

If this resonated, the most generous thing you can do is share it with one woman who needs to hear it. One share grows this community more than any algorithm.

Follow the show on your favorite platform, and come find me on Substack at senseofpeace.substack.com — that’s where the deeper conversation lives.

And if you’re ready to stop just listening and start doing this work — visit kathywashburn.net. I’d love to talk with you. 

Until next time — keep investing in yourself. It is always, always worth it.

#SpreadMadLove

Send us Fan Mail

This week I'm bringing back a conversation that has stayed with me since we first recorded it, and repositioning it inside our Building Your New Normal arc, because it's the piece that unlocks what this quarter is really about.

My guest is Leonore Tjia, a field guide to the inner world who helps people transform their emotional and relational patterns. Full disclosure: Leonore has also been my therapist for the last seven years.

We talk about Type C patterns, the conflict avoidance, people pleasing, and emotional suppression many high achievers live inside without naming it. And we talk about the shift Leonore and I call moving from Type C to Type D: learning to differentiate instead of merge, to hold a boundary without losing the relationship, and to let your own needs matter as much as everyone else's.

If you've ever wondered what a real transformation journey looks like from the inside, not the highlight reel version, this is it.

In This Episode

• Where empathy and high sensitivity come from, and why they can be both a gift and a liability
• The difference between merging with someone and truly meeting them
• Four ways Type C patterns show up specifically in relationships
• What it actually feels like to move from Type C to Type D

View extended shownotes here

Subscribe to Sense of Peace (Kathy's Substack) today!

If this resonated, the most generous thing you can do is share it with one woman who needs to hear it. One share grows this community more than any algorithm.

Follow the show on your favorite platform, and come find me on Substack at senseofpeace.substack.com — that’s where the deeper conversation lives.

And if you’re ready to stop just listening and start doing this work — visit kathywashburn.net. I’d love to talk with you. 

Until next time — keep investing in yourself. It is always, always worth it.

#SpreadMadLove

Send us Fan Mail

A people-pleaser's guide to saying no without guilt. Three practical scripts, one story about a boss who wouldn't take no, and why no is information, not rejection.

If you've ever said yes when every part of you wanted to say no, this episode is for you. Kathy opens Part 1 of the Building Your New Normal series with a personal story about a former boss who kept overriding her boundaries during one of the hardest seasons of her life, and what she learned about the difference between a reflexive yes and a real one.

Drawing on Kasia Urbaniak's concept of "the Smoosh" from her book Unbound, Kathy unpacks why saying no feels so loaded for high-achieving women who've spent a lifetime being agreeable enough to be liked and independent enough to be respected. She offers three practical "flavors" of no — the delay no, the clean no, and the relational no — that listeners can practice this week, plus this episode's twenty-seconds-of-insane-courage challenge.

•  How to say no without feeling guilty 
•  People-pleasing recovery 
•  Building healthy boundaries 
•  Why high-achieving women struggle to say no 
•  How small habits create lasting life change 
•  Nervous system regulation and boundaries 
•  Self-worth and self-leadership 
•  Building your new normal 
•  Emotional resilience after divorce 
•  How to trust yourself again

View extended shownotes here

If this resonated, the most generous thing you can do is share it with one woman who needs to hear it. One share grows this community more than any algorithm.

Follow the show on your favorite platform, and come find me on Substack at senseofpeace.substack.com — that’s where the deeper conversation lives.

And if you’re ready to stop just listening and start doing this work — visit kathywashburn.net. I’d love to talk with you. 

Until next time — keep investing in yourself. It is always, always worth it.

#SpreadMadLove

Send us Fan Mail

You’ll also love…

• Ep. 7 — Writing Your Way to Authenticity with Lisa Weinert
• Ep. 5 — Tapping Into Body Intelligence with Miranda Holder
• Ep. 31 — Finding Connection and Belonging by Building Self Trust with Elise Bish

What if the most honest thing you could do today involved scissors, glue, and a pile of old magazines? 

In this episode of The Self-Investment Project, Kathy sits down with artist, teacher, and self-described "walking show and tell" Molly Meng, whose collage workshops have a way of cracking people open, gently, joyfully, and sometimes unexpectedly. 

Molly's work is rooted in a simple but profound truth: we are all layered beings. And when we sit down with scissors and images that call to us, something quiet inside us begins to speak. 

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• Why collage is one of the most accessible forms of somatic self-expression
• How layering in art mirrors the layers we carry as human beings
• The healing power of making something with your hands without a plan or a grade
• What it means to work so slowly you can hear yourself living (yes, Elizabeth Gilbert makes an appearance)
• Molly's Traveling Postal Club, where strangers make collage postcards and mail them to people they love
• How procrastination might actually be a process, not a flaw

View extended shownotes here

Subscribe to Sense of Peace (Kathy's Substack) today!

If this resonated, the most generous thing you can do is share it with one woman who needs to hear it. One share grows this community more than any algorithm.

Follow the show on your favorite platform, and come find me on Substack at senseofpeace.substack.com — that’s where the deeper conversation lives.

And if you’re ready to stop just listening and start doing this work — visit kathywashburn.net. I’d love to talk with you. 

Until next time — keep investing in yourself. It is always, always worth it.

#SpreadMadLove

Send us Fan Mail

You’ll also love…

• Ep. 61 — The Currency of Your Attention: How Paying Attention Can Change Everything with Kathy Washburn 
• Ep. 69 — Investing in Your Future Self with Kathy Washburn
• Ep. 70 — Be Kind, Not Nice: The Type C Guide to Self-Advocacy with Kathy Washburn

Have you ever set a clear intention, felt genuinely aligned with it, and then found yourself three mornings later doing the exact same thing you were trying to change? You are not alone. And it has nothing to do with your willpower.

In Episode 75 of The Self-Investment Project, host Kathy Washburn draws on ancient wisdom, modern habit science, and the intelligence of your own nervous system to offer a completely different entry point into lasting change.

We start in New Zealand with the aboriginal Australians' belief that the world was sung into existence through song lines, paths across the land learned through the repetition of words. We move through James Clear's identity-based habit framework from Atomic Habits, Danielle LaPort's core desired feelings from The Desire Map, and the quiet miracle of a salmon finding its ancestral river by taste alone.

WHAT YOU WILL TAKE AWAY

• Why habits fail when the body is left out of the conversation
• The difference between outcome-based and identity-based habit change
• How to use your core desired feelings as a daily compass
• The Regulate, Reflect, Root framework as a body-first practice
• Three reflection questions to carry with you this week

View extended shownotes here

Subscribe to Sense of Peace (Kathy's Substack) today!

If this resonated, the most generous thing you can do is share it with one woman who needs to hear it. One share grows this community more than any algorithm.

Follow the show on your favorite platform, and come find me on Substack at senseofpeace.substack.com — that’s where the deeper conversation lives.

And if you’re ready to stop just listening and start doing this work — visit kathywashburn.net. I’d love to talk with you. 

Until next time — keep investing in yourself. It is always, always worth it.

#SpreadMadLove