The TrailBLAZER Pod

Chanie Wilschanski had everything she'd worked for; the family, the home in Florida, the thriving company, the dream calendar. And she was quietly unraveling.

This episode traces how she got there and what pulled her through. Chanie is the founder of Schools of Excellence and the author of This Can't Be Normal , a book she took four and a half years to write because she needed to live every chapter. She's the oldest girl of eight in a Russian-immigrant Chabad family. She started teaching preschool at 20. She founded her company in 2015 because her family couldn't afford groceries. She moved to Florida in 2020, hit every pinnacle, and admitted to herself somewhere in that stretch that building the life you want and inhabiting it are two very different things.

Then came 2024: her father-in-law passed away five weeks after getting sick. She had two miscarriages that year. By November she got on a call with her business mentor asking for a biohacking script to protect her energy through grief. He told her she didn't need to protect it. She needed to create it.

This episode goes deep on being needed vs. being chosen, the parent-teacher conference at 20 where a school psychologist taught her leadership through a mirror, the grief that cracked her biohacking frame open, and the question she's left me sitting with: is fine all you want to experience from your life? A conversation about building, unraveling, grieving, repairing, and the uncomfortable grey where real adulthood actually lives.

Connect with Chanie: 📷 Instagram: @chaniewilschanski 💼 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chanie-wilschanski 🌐 Schools of Excellence: https://schoolsofexcellence.com 📚 Book-This Can't Be Normal: https://thiscantbenormal.com/ 🎙️ Schools of Excellence podcast: [podcast-link-placeholder]

Connect with Faye: 🌐 ⁠https://thetrailblazerpod.com/⁠ 📷 @thetrailblazerpod 📬 ⁠https://trailblazerpod.substack.com/⁠

🔔 New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one.

Nine days postpartum, Chaya walked into a photo studio in a wig and full makeup. She told everyone she was doing great. On the inside, she was drowning.

That photo shoot cracked something open. Over the next months she moved through undiagnosed postpartum depression and anxiety. She was convinced she was the only one struggling.

A year later she realized how far from normal it had been. Three months after that she was pregnant again. She spent the second pregnancy researching postpartum care obsessively and designing specific support systems. The second postpartum was unrecognizable from the first.

That became the Gentle Postpartum course and the nonprofit she's building, a vision of a physical space where every practitioner a new mother needs lives under one roof, and preventative care replaces reactive crisis response.

This episode: the photo shoot, the lie that she was the only one drowning, the practical system that rewrote her second postpartum, and the postpartum village she's quietly building toward.

New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one.

Connect with Chaya:

📷 @inmymotheraura

📧 [email protected]

Connect with Faye:

🌐 https://thetrailblazerpod.com

📷 @thetrailblazerpod

📬 https://trailblazerpod.substack.com

Yehudis Kornfeld stopped being afraid of aging.

That's not where she started. She watched her grandmother suffer frp, Alzheimer's for years. Both her parents have heart disease. Her father has prostate cancer. Her father-in-law fell at 70 and was never the same. By the time Yehudis had her fifth baby at 39 and turned 40 the next month, the fear she'd carried for decades was finally sitting in her own body.

She went looking for a way out and found electrical muscle stimulation (EMS); a workout in a full-body suit that fires every major muscle at once. She tried it before buying a suit. First session, her muscles "woke up from the dead."

Power 20 Studios opened six months later in Tom's River, New Jersey. Priced deliberately below the $250-per-session industry standard so regular women could actually afford it.

Her thesis is the one her clients rarely walk in believing: modern medicine extends your lifespan. Muscle extends your healthspan. Those are two different things.

This episode goes into the fear, the body at 40, the suit, the bulky-weights myth, and the mitzvah of muscle that most people gloss over.

Connect with Yehudis: 📷 Instagram: @power20studios 📧 Email: [email protected] 📞 917-588-7617

Connect with Faye: 🌐 https://thetrailblazerpod.com/ 📷 @thetrailblazerpod 📬 https://trailblazerpod.substack.com/

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#JewishWomen #BoldJewishWomen #TrailBLAZERPod #WomenFounders #Longevity #StrengthTraining #EMSTraining

She doesn't want to inspire change. She wants to create it. And she learned the difference at 17.

Mussie shares the Shabbaton at 17 that redirected her whole career, why she thinks the reason people avoid therapy is that we've called it "for broken people" too long, why the therapeutic relationship is a mirror of every other relationship in your life, and the line that stopped me mid-interview: "It's not pathological. It's just weird."

A conversation about therapy, advocacy, mental health, identity, self-worth, and why humble isn't the strategy for women who want to make change.

Connect with Mussie:

📷 Instagram: ⁠itsnotmuss⁠

📧 Email: [email protected]

Connect with Faye:

🌐 https://thetrailblazerpod.com/

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/faye-r-b70408b8/

📷 @thetrailblazerpod

Effort without structure is just chaos. That's the thesis Blimi Adler has spent six years proving.

She's a business structurist. She helps founders trade the busy-14-hour-day feeling for a business that actually moves. Plus two newer offerings, CEO Mode and Launch Mode, that meet earlier-stage founders and first-time business owners where they are.

Blimi shares how she got here. From a childhood spent trying to fit into a box that didn't have her shape, to an accounting career , to the coaching course she bought that reset her whole trajectory. Plus the business plan she wrote in a journal at twenty-two that turned up in her garage a decade later.

Plus: her "know the rules, then break them" framework, why every employee at every level deserves to know what success looks like for them, the reason she think we need to stop avoiding business conversations at girls' nights, and what it actually means to call yourself self-made.

A conversation about entrepreneurship, structure, clarity, self-made narratives, and how confidence is the output, not the input.

Connect with Blimi: ✉️ [email protected] 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blimiadler/

Just getting started? Launch Mode gives you a clear, step-by-step guide to building your business, from education to community, with support and resources along the way. https://www.blimiadler.com/launchmode

Ready to hire your first few employees and strengthen your leadership, systems, and operations? Check out CEO Mode. https://www.blimiadler.com/ceomode

Special offer for Trailblazer listeners: use code TRAILBLAZER10 for 10% off Launch Mode or CEO Mode.

Connect with Faye: 🌐 https://thetrailblazerpod.com/ 📷 @thetrailblazerpod 📬 https://trailblazerpod.substack.com/

🔔 New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one.

#JewishWomen #BoldJewishWomen #TrailBLAZERPod #WomenFounders #BusinessConsulting #JewishEntrepreneurs #BlazingInBusiness

One in three women describe their birth as traumatic. Toby Deutsch was one of them. Then she had a miscarriage, discovered neuroplasticity, and rewired herself into a completely different person for her second birth, which was redemptive, and the foundation of the company she now runs.

Toby shares how years of searching for her calling all pointed to the thing her own body finally taught her, and how she built Gentle Beginnings around helping other women prepare for birth the way she wishes someone had prepared her.

Plus: the neuroplasticity fact that reframes everything (pregnant brains rewire six times faster than regular ones), why she calls postpartum the whole thing, the Ayurvedic saying that says forty days influence forty years, and the founder truth that passion and execution live in different parts of the brain.

A conversation about birth, motherhood, neuroscience, founding, confidence, and doing it scared until the doing turns into the confidence.

New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one.

Connect with Toby:

📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gentlebeginningsofficial/

🌐 https://www.gentlebeginnings.life

🎙️https://www.gentlebeginnings.life/podcasts/gentle-beginnings-2

📧https://www.gentlebeginnings.life/newsletter

📱https://chat.whatsapp.com/DAcXJqhMM0aCCBniRr6VPj

Connect with Faye:

🌐 https://thetrailblazerpod.com/

📷 @thetrailblazerpod

At twelve, she was running a nanny agency from the middle school bathroom. At fifteen, she'd hired her first CEO. At twenty-six, she's building the first digital infrastructure for post-intensive-care recovery, because modern medicine got so good at saving lives it created a whole new syndrome, and nobody built a system to catch it.

Noa played business the way other kids played house. She never really stopped.

Noa shares how her curiosity about people and problem-solving followed her from childhood into studying cognitive neuroscience at Brown University, working in healthcare technology, and eventually founding a company focused on helping people recover after intensive care.

Plus: her advice for women starting something of their own, why judgment might be the most important skill to develop, how to separate signal from noise, and why your failures may teach you more than your successes.

A conversation about entrepreneurship, identity, healthcare, AI, judgment, and staying true to yourself while building something that matters.

New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one.

Connect with Noa:

📷 https://www.instagram.com/noamintzz/

🌐 https://libyhealth.com/

🌐 https://nanniesbynoa.com/

💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/noamintz

Connect with Faye:

📷@thetrailblazerpod

🌐 https://thetrailblazerpod.com/

💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/faye-r-b70408b8/

What if the imposter syndrome you can't shake was actually a shared secret across every room you've ever walked into?

When Miriam Sheril was a Federal Reserve intern in January 2009, her job was to read the meeting agenda out loud. She spent three days a week nauseous leading up to it. Instead of asking am I in the wrong career?, she found herself asking who else in this room is faking it? a question that would carry her through fifteen years at the Fed, the launch of FedNow, and the leap to running US strategy at a UK-based fintech called Form3.

In this episode Miriam shares what fifteen years inside the Federal Reserve taught her about power, politics, and the imposter syndrome nobody escapes, and how being openly Orthodox in fintech turned out to be the strategy, not the risk. Deep on the five-item checklist she used to pivot in her career, the colleague who told her to stop saying "this might be a stupid question," and the American Bankers piece she calls her proudest work.

New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one.

What if every zig and zag in your career was actually the path, not the detour?

When Heidi Oshin was twenty years into a law career she didn't love, she didn't ask did I waste the time? She asked what's next? and pivoted to build a program for twice-exceptional children, then Menemsha Films, then during pandemic week one, Chaiflicks, the largest streaming service dedicated to Jewish-themed stories anywhere in the world.

In this episode Heidi shares how three completely different careers stacked into one life — and what that life taught her about pivoting, about being the only woman at the table, and about believing in a dream long enough to build it. Deep on rehearsing her way through misogynistic 1980s law rooms, the line every young woman needs about imposter syndrome, why twice-exceptional kids get missed, launching a streaming service in COVID week one, and the advice she'd give the woman sitting on her next pivot but too scared to move.

Use code TRAILBLAZERS36 for you Chaiflicks discount code

Connect with Heidi: https://www.chaiflicks.com/ Instagram: @ChaiFlicks Connect with Faye: https://thetrailblazerpod.com/ @thetrailblazerpod https://trailblazerpod.substack.com/

New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one.

What if the worst thing that ever happened to you turned out to be the thing that saved you?

When Amanda Spiro was 21, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. Instead of asking "why me," she found herself asking something most people never get to ask: what is this trying to teach me?

In this episode, Amanda shares how cancer became the catalyst for the most precious chapter of her life, meeting her husband during chemo, deepening her Jewish identity, and finding a clarity she'd been searching for since childhood.

Connect with Amanda:

📷 Instagram: @amandadawnspiro

📷 Instagram: @amandaspiroshares

🌐Chabad of Trois-Rivières: https://www.chabad3r.com/

Connect with Faye:

📷 @thetrailblazerpod

🌐 https://thetrailblazerpod.com/