Mariah Sheridan grew up wanting one thing above everything else — normal. A stable home, a loving partner, kids, a life that looked nothing like the one she came from. She built exactly that. A successful real estate career, a marriage people admired, three daughters, a home nestled in the Rockies. From the outside, it looked like arrival.

And then, after nearly two decades, she walked away from it.

Not because of a crisis. Not because of a dramatic turning point. But because of a quiet knowing she'd been carrying for years — a distance between the life people could see and the one she was actually living inside of. And because she realized she would never want any of her three daughters to stay in a marriage the way she had been staying in hers.

Mariah is a real estate agent, a mother of three, and a writer working on a memoir built from journals she's kept since she was ten years old. Her story begins in a complicated childhood and ends, for now, in the messy, honest, hopeful middle of becoming someone new.

This is a conversation about perfectionism, the weight of the highlight reel, what it really means to choose yourself, and why keeping going is sometimes the only thing you can do.

In this episode, we explore:

• What it means to grow up carrying a secret — and how that shapes the life you spend decades trying to build
• Why the white picket fence dream was deeply personal, not just cultural, for Mariah
• What she knew long before she said it out loud — and what finally made her say it
• The experience of telling her daughters the same day she told her husband, and why she couldn't imagine doing it any other way
• What the four months after her announcement revealed about the relationship she was actually in
• Why the people closest to us often can't see the gap between our highlight reel and our real life — and what that isolation costs
• The purgatory of divorce proceedings — the holding pattern nobody warns you about
• What codependency work taught her about how she showed up in her marriage
• The moment her 15-year-old daughter read her memoir pages and forgot, for a few minutes, that the story was about her mom
• The belief she's had to release most — and why "perfect" was always a two-dimensional image
• What she wishes her friends had known to do when everything on the outside still looked fine
• What it means to keep going when you can't yet see what's coming next

Resources & Links:

• Connect with Mariah and follow her journey at mariahrealestatefernie.ca
• Follow Mariah on Instagram → @mariah_in_fernie
• Ready to step off autopilot? Visit thinkoutsidethelines.com to access free worksheets designed to help you cut through the noise, ask the right questions, and finally hear yourself clearly
• Explore 1:1 coaching and other resources at thinkoutsidethelines.com
• Follow along on all platforms → @thinkoutsidethelines

Enjoyed the episode? Please share it with someone who might need to hear it, and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.

Picture this. You're at dinner with friends. Someone asks how things are going. And you say, "Good. Really good, actually." And you smile. And you mostly mean it.

Because things are good. The job is solid. The relationship looks healthy. The routine works. From the outside, your life is something people would look at and say, they've got it together.

And that's exactly what makes this so confusing.

Because underneath the "really good, actually" — there's something else. A quiet hum you can't quite name. It's not crisis. It's not depression. It's not even unhappiness, exactly. It's more like a distance. Between the life people see and the one you're actually living inside of.

That's the gap.

And if you've never had a name for it before, this might be the first time someone has given you one. But if you've been carrying it — you already know exactly what I'm talking about. And you know how exhausting it is. Because maintaining the gap takes real energy. The energy of saying yes to things that don't excite you because they're supposed to. Of performing competence and confidence while quietly wondering whether any of this is actually what you want.

Here's what I want you to hear: the gap doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It means something is right with you. It means you're aware enough to notice.

And closing it doesn't require blowing up your life.

It starts with one quiet, honest question — not the kind you post about, not the kind that requires a dramatic conversation. Just the private kind. The kind where you sit with yourself and ask: what am I holding onto because I'm afraid of what it would mean to let it go?

Resources & Links:

• Ready to step off autopilot? Visit thinkoutsidethelines.com to access free worksheets designed to help you cut through the noise, ask the right questions, and finally hear yourself clearly
• Explore 1:1 coaching and other resources at thinkoutsidethelines.com
• Follow along on all platforms → @thinkoutsidethelines

Enjoyed this episode? Please share it with someone who might need to hear it, and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.

Colleen Budde holds two mechanical engineering degrees, spent nearly a decade navigating the automotive and defense industries, and walked away from a combined household income of $300,000 — not because of a crisis, not because of a disaster, but because the system she was operating inside of was never going to bend.

She and her husband purchased an Office Evolution franchise in January 2020, survived a pandemic with a newborn, found a building that would take a chance on them, and built something real. Today Colleen runs her coworking space alongside Budde Consulting Group, where she works with small business owners navigating the messy, honest, unglamorous middle of building something on their own terms. She also writes and builds community through her Mompreneur Facebook page and Substack — creating space for people at every stage of the journey to find each other and realize they're not doing it alone.

This is a conversation about discomfort as information, time as wealth, and what it actually looks like to build a life the system never offered you.

Connect with Colleen: 

🌐 buddeconsultinggroup.com 

📸 Instagram: @colleen_the_ 

💼 LinkedIn: Colleen Budde

In this episode, we explore:

• How growing up with a father who got fired repeatedly — and kept moving — shaped Colleen's relationship with change and risk
• Why changing jobs early in her career wasn't instability, it was strategy — and what the numbers proved
• What it's actually like to be a woman in mechanical engineering, and what the defense industry added to that
• The moment Colleen stopped waiting for the system to change and started building an exit
• Why she and her husband bought a franchise in January 2020 — and how they survived what came next
• The childcare situation that crystallized everything — and the meeting that pushed her over the edge
• What "rage quitting" actually looked like, and how her husband's response said everything
• The difference between the golden handcuffs keeping most people stuck and the financial clarity that made leaving possible
• Why discomfort isn't a personal flaw — it's information
• What entrepreneurship is actually harder than she expected — and what she didn't anticipate getting back
• The medical emergency that reminded her exactly why she built this life
• What wealth actually looks like when time is the currency

Resources & Links:

• Connect with Colleen, explore her consulting work, and find her community at buddeconsultinggroup.com
• Follow Colleen on Instagram → @colleen_the_
• Connect on LinkedIn → Colleen Budde
• Ready to step off autopilot? Visit thinkoutsidethelines.com to access free worksheets designed to help you cut through the noise, ask the right questions, and finally hear yourself clearly
• Explore 1:1 coaching and other resources at thinkoutsidethelines.com
• Follow along on all platforms → @thinkoutsidethelines

Enjoyed the episode? Please share it with someone who might need to hear it, and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.

Here's a question worth sitting with: why isn't kindness the default?

Not the performative kind. Not the kindness that gets posted about. The quiet, unglamorous kind that asks something real of you — the kind that requires you to stay open when the easier thing would be to shut down.

Because somewhere along the way, we started confusing hardness with strength. And they are not the same thing.

This episode starts with a simple question that completely reframed the way I think about how we show up for each other: Do you want notes or do you want compliments? That's it. Just ask. Because not everyone who shares something with you is asking you to evaluate it. Sometimes people just want to be seen.

But it goes deeper than that. Most of us were raised inside systems that trained us to manage, evaluate, optimize, find the gap, and fix it. And that conditioning doesn't stay at work. It bleeds into our friendships, our partnerships, our parenting — every moment where someone shows up and says, here's what I've got.

And then there's social media. Over a decade of training ourselves to react instead of respond. To form opinions about strangers in seconds. To comment without context. That conditioning doesn't stay online either. It changes the texture of real life — makes us quicker to judge, slower to listen, more comfortable being dismissive, less comfortable being sincere.

The world feels heavy right now. And a lot of people are responding to that heaviness by getting sharper, more guarded, more defended. But what if more armor isn't the answer?

What if it's just more kindness?

Resources & Links:

• Ready to step off autopilot? Visit thinkoutsidethelines.com to access free worksheets designed to help you cut through the noise, ask the right questions, and finally hear yourself clearly
• Explore 1:1 coaching and other resources at thinkoutsidethelines.com
• Follow along on all platforms → @thinkoutsidethelines

Enjoyed this episode? Please share it with someone who might need to hear it, and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.

Peter Moore spent thirty years catching a wave. As a top editor at Playboy and Men's Health, he interviewed presidents, shaped some of the most widely read magazines in the country, and ghostwrote three New York Times bestsellers — none of them under his name. He was very good at speaking in other people's voices. Then the wave carried him to shore, the tide went out, and the silence arrived.

What followed wasn't a crisis. It was, eventually, a calling. Today Peter is a writer, cartoonist, NPR commentator, and Substack creator with 16,000 subscribers — blending humor, illustration, and sharp cultural observation into a body of work that is entirely, unmistakably his. He got there by taking an art class in Pennsylvania, putting rabbits and foxes on a landscape painting, and following the laugh.

This is a conversation about the seeds you plant before you know what you're cultivating — and what becomes possible when you finally stop asking for permission.

Connect with Peter: 🌐 petermoore.substack.com

In this episode, we explore:

• How Peter rode a wave of magazine publishing for thirty years — and what the silence felt like when it finally ended
• Why being laid off from Men's Health turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to him
• The painting class in Pennsylvania where rabbits and foxes changed everything
• What it means to spend decades writing in other people's voices — and the moment you realize you're ready to write in your own
• How the old version of your career can quietly fund the new one
• Why imposter syndrome hits hardest right before the breakthrough
• The Substack post about Vincent Van Gogh that went from 400 subscribers to 10,000 readers in three days
• What the disappearance of editorial gatekeepers has cost us — and what it's made possible
• How collaboration on Substack works, and why the rising tide really does lift all boats
• What to do with the time you're spending on things that aren't moving you forward
• Why you lose a hundred percent of the life initiatives you never start
• The difference between comfort and alignment — and why now is exactly the right time to find out which one you've been choosing

Resources & Links:

• Connect with Peter and explore his work at petermoore.substack.com
• Ready to step off autopilot? Visit thinkoutsidethelines.com to access free worksheets designed to help you cut through the noise, ask the right questions, and finally hear yourself clearly
• Explore 1:1 coaching and other resources at thinkoutsidethelines.com
• Follow along on all platforms → @thinkoutsidethelines

Enjoyed the episode? Please share it with someone who might need to hear it, and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.

Have you ever driven somewhere and arrived without remembering a single moment of the drive? You weren't asleep. You just weren't there. Your body was going through the motions while your mind was somewhere else entirely.

That's autopilot. And the uncomfortable truth is — you can live your whole life that way.

Same routine. Same conversations. Same goals you set three years ago that you haven't stopped to revisit. Not because they're wrong, necessarily. But because you stopped asking whether they still fit.

Most people call that feeling stuck. But stuck implies something's broken — that there's a wall in front of you and you're not strong enough, disciplined enough, or clear enough to push through. What if that's not what's happening at all?

Because there's a real difference. Stuck means you can't move. Autopilot means you're moving — just not intentionally. You're checking the boxes, going through the motions, doing what's expected. But you're not really choosing any of it.

And autopilot is comfortable. Efficient. That's exactly why your brain defaults to it. But comfort and alignment are not the same thing.

The good news? Autopilot has an off switch. It's not dramatic. It doesn't require a reinvention. It just requires one honest question — even once a day:

Am I choosing this? Or is this just what I've always done?

Resources & Links:

• Ready to step off autopilot? Visit thinkoutsidethelines.com to access free worksheets designed to help you cut through the noise, ask the right questions, and finally hear yourself clearly
• Explore 1:1 coaching and other resources at thinkoutsidethelines.com
• Follow along on all platforms → @thinkoutsidethelines

Enjoyed this episode? Please share it with someone who might need to hear it, and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.

Cheryl Whitelaw built a life around planning. Bright, capable, and deeply achievement-oriented, she moved through academia and a career in intercultural education the way most of us do — by mapping the path ahead and executing it. Then one day, sitting in a windowless office she believed in, something shifted. Not a thought. A feeling. A knowing she couldn't explain and couldn't ignore.

What followed was a years-long journey into somatic intelligence — the Aikido dojo, the Feldenkrais method, the study of how the body holds wisdom the mind can't always access. Today, Cheryl is a Feldenkrais practitioner, martial artist, certified integral coach, and the founder of Kind Power Studio in Canada, where she helps individuals and organizations develop the embodied presence needed to navigate conflict, uncertainty, and change.

This is a conversation about what it means to stop living five seconds ahead of yourself — and what opens up when you finally come home to your body.

Connect with Cheryl: 

🌐 kindpower.ca 

📺 YouTube: Peace and Power

In this episode, we explore:

• What it means to live entirely from the mind — and the moment Cheryl's body finally said enough
• How she left a career she believed in without a clear next step, guided only by a feeling she couldn't rationalize
• What somatic intelligence actually is, and why Western culture consistently undervalues it
• The practice of grounding and centering — and how it creates a physiological calm you can retrieve under pressure
• Why by the time we realize we're afraid, the body has already been doing fear for at least a minute
• What it looks like to enter a conflict situation from a place of presence rather than adrenaline
• How Cheryl navigated one of the most charged DEI conversations of the past decade — with 16 activists ready for battle — and what actually shifted the room
• The difference between authentic and true — and why that distinction matters in coaching, conflict, and self-understanding
• What "softly evolving ambition" means, and why Cheryl is reconditioning her entire relationship with productivity and success
• Kronos versus Kairos — clock time versus right timing — and what it looks like to actually live by the latter
• Why the body is not something you have. It's something you are.

Resources & Links:

• Connect with Cheryl and explore her work at kindpower.ca
• Find Cheryl on YouTube → Peace and Power
• Ready to step off autopilot? Visit thinkoutsidethelines.com to access free worksheets designed to help you cut through the noise, ask the right questions, and finally hear yourself clearly
• Explore 1:1 coaching and other resources at thinkoutsidethelines.com
• Follow along on all platforms → @thinkoutsidethelines

Enjoyed the episode? Please share it with someone who might need to hear it, and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.

You get the promotion. The title. The salary you told yourself would finally make things feel settled. And you get it — and everyone around you is thrilled. Your parents are proud. Your friends are impressed. Your LinkedIn looks incredible.

But somewhere underneath all of that, there's a quiet voice asking: is this it?

That voice is easy to ignore. Because on paper, everything looks right.

Here's what no one tells you though — achievement and alignment are not the same thing. Achievement is external. It's measurable. It's the box you check, the milestone you hit, the thing other people can see and validate. Alignment is something different. It's internal. It's that feeling of being genuinely connected to what you're doing — not because someone told you it mattered, but because you feel it. In your body. In your days. In how you show up when no one's keeping score.

Most of us were never taught to pay attention to alignment. We were taught to achieve. So we build entire lives around it — and then one day look around and realize we're really good at something we're not sure we care about.

That's not failure. That's awareness. And awareness is where everything shifts.

Because once you notice the gap between what looks successful and what actually feels true, you can't unnotice it. It doesn't go away. In fact, it gets louder.

The good news? You don't have to blow up your entire life to close the gap.

Resources & Links:

• Ready to step off autopilot? Visit thinkoutsidethelines.com to access free worksheets designed to help you cut through the noise, ask the right questions, and finally hear yourself clearly
• Explore 1:1 coaching and other resources at thinkoutsidethelines.com
• Follow along on all platforms → @thinkoutsidethelines

Enjoyed this episode? Please share it with someone who might need to hear it, and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.

Kimberly Lee spent ten years as a trial attorney — four as a public defender in downtown Los Angeles, six running her own practice. She had the pedigree, the credentials, and a career that looked like everything was figured out. She also had a throat that hurt every time she left the courtroom, a Sunday dread that never went away, and a quiet inner voice that kept growing louder.

Today, Kimberly is a writer, workshop facilitator, and retreat leader who works with creatives and emerging writers. She's the author of Have You Seen Him? — a thriller available now — and the creator of a body of work that exists because she finally stopped outsourcing her sense of self to a title.

This is a conversation about what it means to trust yourself when the path isn't clear, let go of an identity that no longer fits, and build something new without a roadmap.

Connect with Kimberly:  kimberlylee.me 

In this episode, we explore:

• What it felt like to follow the "right" path into law — and when Kimberly first started to sense it wasn't hers
• The physical signals her body sent before her mind was ready to listen — and what she did with them
• What it costs to perform a version of yourself for years, and how that performance eventually runs out of steam
• Why identity gets so tangled up in impressive-sounding titles — and the quiet act of resistance it takes to let that go
• The moment at a birthday party that became an unexpected test of who she was becoming
• What actually transfers from a high-stakes legal career into creative work — and what she was more than happy to leave behind
• Imposter syndrome, the non-linear path, and why forging your own way requires a tolerance for uncertainty
• The difference between people who thrive in hard environments and those who carry that environment home with them
• People pleasing, saying yes to the wrong things, and how Kimberly learned to pause before committing
• Fear as fuel — and the Nelson Mandela quote she adopted to replace the win/lose binary she left behind
• What "I either win or learn" looks like in practice when you're building something from scratch

Resources & Links:

• Ready to step off autopilot? Visit thinkoutsidethelines.com to access free worksheets designed to help you cut through the noise, ask the right questions, and finally hear yourself clearly
• Explore 1:1 coaching and other resources at thinkoutsidethelines.com
• Follow along on all platforms → @thinkoutsidethelines

Enjoyed the episode? Please share it with someone who might need to hear it, and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.

Most of us never chose the rules we live by. We didn't have to — they were already everywhere. In what our parents valued, what our teachers rewarded, what our culture quietly insisted a good life was supposed to look like.

Go to school. Get the degree. Find the stable career. Hit the milestones in the right order.

And most of us followed those lines without ever questioning them. Not because we agreed — but because we didn't realize there was another option.

That's the thing about inherited expectations. They don't announce themselves. They just become the water you swim in. You end up building a life that looks right but doesn't quite feel like yours. And that low-grade friction — that constant, quiet misalignment — takes more energy than most people realize.

This episode isn't about burning it all down. It's about something quieter and more honest than that — learning to tell the difference between the lines that genuinely fit you and the ones that were drawn by someone else's anxiety, someone else's definition of enough.

Because there's a version of your life where you get to choose. Maybe for the first time.

Resources & Links:

• Ready to step off autopilot? Visit thinkoutsidethelines.com to access free worksheets designed to help you cut through the noise, ask the right questions, and finally hear yourself clearly
• Explore 1:1 coaching and other resources at thinkoutsidethelines.com
• Follow along on all platforms → @thinkoutsidethelines

Enjoyed this episode? Please share it with someone who might need to hear it, and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.