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When the machines were loud and the room was cold, Holly Porter made a decision she didn’t technically get to make—she chose to come back with purpose. That return set off a chain reaction: a bestselling book with a spine of practical wisdom, a nonprofit reimagined around women leading with purpose, and the bold blueprint for an International Retreat Association the industry didn’t know it was waiting for.

We dive into Holly’s early life in a family where entrepreneurship was normal, not novel, and how real skills—not prestige—powered her career. She shares the hard-earned lessons of running multiple companies while raising eight children: the high of progress, the cost of constant stress, and the honest regret of being everywhere but not present. Her definition of success is disarmingly simple—wake up happy—and it reframes how we think about goals, growth, and what to quit.

Holly walks us through her 70-day hospitalization with COVID, the near-death experience that reshaped everything, and the SHIFT framework she built from it: surrender, hope, intuition, faith, transformation. You’ll hear how Adventure Bucket Wish pivoted from long COVID support to empowering women with purpose, and how Retreat R evolved from an ambitious tech platform into a broader ecosystem play. Most exciting, Holly unveils the International Retreat Association, designed to set professional standards, elevate safety and ethics, and unite retreat leaders, venues, travel pros, attorneys, accountants, and technologists around shared excellence.

Along the way, we explore side gigs versus “real” entrepreneurship, when to pause vs. push, and how to build enterprises that fund philanthropy without burning you out. The thread through it all is service: love people where they’re at, remove judgment, and build systems that outlast you. Subscribe, share this conversation with someone who’s on the edge of a big pivot, and leave a review with the one shift you’ll make this week—what’s your next move?

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