Undoing with Jeanie Duncan

What happens when the identity you’ve built through achievement, ambition, and performance falls away? 

In this episode of Undoing, Jeanie Duncan talks with executive coach Pia Ault about the journey from external success to internal truth. Pia shares what’s happened since leaving a decades-long corporate career, finding herself questioning who she was on the other side of her well-established and developed corporate identity. Together, they explore who we are beneath our roles, how conditioning shapes us, and the surprising teachers who can help us slow down and return home to ourselves.

At the heart of the conversation is Pia’s mantra: presence over performance.

Guest Information

Guest Name: Pia Ault

Bio: Pia Ault is an executive coach and founder of Caballus Coaching & Consulting, where she helps high-achieving leaders bridge the gap between external success and internal truth. After a successful corporate career, including a decade leading strategy across the Middle East and Africa, Pia transitioned into coaching and equine-facilitated leadership work. Her approach draws on emotional intelligence, embodiment, leadership development, and the wisdom she’s gained through her own evolution.

• Website: Caballus Coaching & Consulting
• Connect with Pia on LinkedIn: Pia Ault and Substack: PiaLola3

Main Topics

• Shifting identity: What happens when a career, role, or definition of success suddenly falls away and you’re left with the question, “Who am I…really?”
• Letting go of achievement and performance: How conditioning teaches us to mistake performance with who we really are.
• Listening to the body: Learning to notice our body’s quiet signals that tell us we’ve drifted away from presence and back into old patterns of performing.
• Unexpected teachers: Pia’s relationship with her horse Lola and the powerful gifts of simply being with and being seen.
• Choosing congruence: Moving beyond old identities toward greater congruence, freedom, and the courage to live more fully you.

Links & Resources

• TeachingHorse (equine-guided leadership development)
• Co-Active Training Institute (CTI)

Host & Show Info

• Host Name: Jeanie P. Duncan
• About the Host: Jeanie is a transformation partner helping leaders and organizations align with their values, discover their core purpose, and create meaningful impact in the world. Bringing over 25 years of experience as a CEO, advisor, leadership coach, speaker, and author, Jeanie offers knowledgeable and passionate guidance to generate powerful, effective, and strategic change on the personal and organization level.
• Visit the Podcast Website
• Connect with Jeanie on LinkedIn

What happens when your inner knowing asks you to do something that defies all logic?

Mindy Warguez, National Board Certified Counselor and founder of Mindy Kaye Counseling & Coaching, has lived her life answering that call—even when it meant relocating her family across the globe, returning to school mid-career, and unconventionally launching a private practice. In this deeply honest conversation, Mindy and Jeanie explore what it means to bet on yourself, choose yourself without asking for permission, and listen beneath the noise of fear, doubt, and external expectations. 

If something inside you is whispering, "This way"...this episode may inspire you to follow the call.

Guest Information

Mindy Warguez is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor and National Board Certified Counselor in North Carolina. She is founder of Mindy Kaye Counseling and Coaching where she specializes in anxiety, stress management, grief, and trauma processing. Prior to launching her counseling career, Mindy was involved in entrepreneurial ventures in client relations, marketing, and visual design and serving diplomatic tours with her family in Manila, Philippines and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Main Topics

Trusting your inner knowing: What it feels like when your body knows before your mind catches up, and the courage it takes to listen anyway.

Risk-taking and embracing uncertainty: Choosing a leap that makes no logical sense, and what happens when you stop asking for permission.

Facing the inner critic and outside doubt: Navigating the voices, your own and everyone else's, that show up the moment you choose yourself.

Identity beyond the roles we play: How getting back into alignment with yourself reshapes marriage, motherhood, and what you thought success required.

Rewriting your story, one step at a time: Trading the pressure of the big leap for the freedom of just the next right step.

Links & Resources

• Mindy Kaye Counseling & Coaching – Mindy's firm
• Connect with Mindy on LinkedIn and Instagram
• Choosing Me: The Journey Home to My True Self by Jeanie Duncan – The book Mindy referenced in her interview

Call to Action

If you enjoyed this episode, please give us some love!

• Rate & Review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — your reviews help more women find the show.
• Share this episode with a friend! If it resonated, tag us on social media and share your biggest takeaway.
• Follow the show so you never miss an episode.

Host & Show Info

• Host Name: Jeanie P. Duncan
• About the Host: Jeanie is a transformation partner helping leaders and organizations align with their values, discover their core purpose, and create meaningful impact in the world. Bringing over 25 years of experience as a CEO, advisor, leadership coach, speaker, and author, Jeanie offers knowledgeable and passionate guidance to generate powerful, effective, and strategic change on the personal and organization level.
• Visit the Podcast Website
• Connect with Jeanie on LinkedIn

Description:

In this solo episode, Undoing host Jeanie Duncan explores a curiosity: “What does it take to become someone you've never been before?” As she steps into a new identity as a professional speaker, Jeanie finds an unexpected teacher—training for an endurance cycling event. What she discovers reshapes everything: big dreams don't require more discipline, they require devotion. It's a raw, in-real-time look at evolving identity…how courage, consistency, and self-trust quietly allow for emergence of who we’re becoming, long before the change is even visible.

Primary Themes:

• Leveraging lived experience, skill, and talent to fuel an emerging identity
• Devotion over discipline: How loving what you're building propels you 
• Big dreams don't require bigger effort. They require a bigger identity built in ordinary acts of becoming: deciding, practicing, learning new skills, consistency.
• The goal isn’t the destination; it’s the person you’re becoming

Links & Resources

Cycle North Carolina's Mountains to Coast Ride: Jeanie's 500-mile, 7-day cycling event (referred to in the episode as the "Mountains to Sea" ride)

Call to Action

If you enjoyed this episode, please give us some love!

• Rate & Review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Your reviews help more women find the show.
• Share this episode with a friend! If you enjoyed it, tag us on social media and let us know your favorite takeaway. LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook
• Follow the show so you never miss an episode.

Host & Show Info

• Host Name: Jeanie P. Duncan
• About the Host: Jeanie is a transformation partner helping leaders and organizations align with their values, discover their core purpose, and create meaningful impact in the world. Bringing over 25 years of experience as a CEO, advisor, leadership coach, speaker, and author, Jeanie offers knowledgeable and passionate guidance to generate powerful, effective, and strategic change on the personal and organization level.
• Visit the Podcast Website
• Connect with Jeanie on LinkedIn

This is a special Co-Lab episode: Jeanie sits down with her life and business partner, Lyn Koonce, for the kind of conversation they call a laboratory, where they test and share perspectives on something they’re each curious about. Today’s subject is hiding: the times in their lives they’ve hidden who they are, or hidden from who they are, and what that cost them. They also turn the question toward the present, asking where they might still be hiding now and how it could be holding them back, individually and as partners. An intimate look at courage and finally being seen.

Main Topics

• Lyn’s early experience of hiding her sexual identity in adolescence, and the decades-long double life she led as a music educator and church music director
• Jeanie’s own hiding from herself inside a twenty-five-year marriage, the slow unraveling that led to her coming out at 47, and the life she had to dismantle in order to live her true self
• The hidden cost of hiding: chameleon behavior, people-pleasing, and the exhausting work of constantly scanning a room for safety
• The power of being witnessed: how Jeanie and Lyn’s meeting through music became the catalyst for both of their “undoings”

Links & Resources

• Choosing Me: The Journey Home to My True Self by Jeanie Duncan 
• Brené Brown, “The Power of Vulnerability” (TED Talk): referenced regarding numbing the bad and the good
• Amy Speace, singer-songwriter and producer of Lyn Koonce's album Begin Again, mentioned in the episode
• Lyn Koonce Music website
• Connect with Lyn Koonce on social: LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook 

Call to Action

If you enjoyed this show, please give us some love!

• Rate & Review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
• Share this episode with a friend! If you enjoyed it, tag us on social media and let us know your favorite takeaway. LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook

Host & Show Info

• Host Name: Jeanie P. Duncan
• About the Host: Jeanie is a transformation partner helping leaders and organizations align with their values, discover their core purpose, and create meaningful impact in the world. Bringing over 25 years of experience as a CEO, advisor, leadership coach, speaker, and author, Jeanie offers knowledgeable and passionate guidance to generate powerful, effective, and strategic change on the personal and organization level.
• Visit the Podcast Website
• Connect with Jeanie on LinkedIn

What happens when the most honest feedback you’ve ever received comes not from a colleague or a coach, but from a horse? In this episode, leadership consultant and coach Ginny Telego shares how a stress-induced hospital stay and some unfiltered wisdom from her horse, Wager, became the wake-up call that changed everything. This is a conversation about body wisdom, the cost of silence, and what becomes possible when we finally stop negotiating with our own knowing—a story for every woman who has carried more than was ever hers to hold.

Guest Information: Ginny Telego is a leadership development consultant, coach, and founder of The Collaboration Partners, where she works with emerging leaders through the C-suite. She also serves as Senior Facilitator and Master Trainer with TeachingHorse and E3A (Equine Experiential Education Association) guiding leaders through transformative experiential work at the intersection of human behavior and horsemanship.

Main Topics

Leaving a job she loved: How a toxic work culture slowly eroded Ginny’s health—and the years of denial that preceded her decision to leave

The body’s breaking point: Ginny’s account of landing in the ER with a heart rhythm disrupted by chronic stress and what a trauma-informed doctor helped her see. This attunement became a life-changing promise she made to herself.

The wisdom of her horse: Wager delivered the feedback no coach or colleague had been able to…forcing a release of suppressed anger, unhealthy loyalty, and emotional weight that wasn’t hers to hold

People-pleasing, approval-seeking, and the need to never let anyone down: The deeply ingrained stories Ginny had to examine, and ultimately rewrite, about her identity and worth

Resilience as a forever journey: From the job loss to a house fire to ongoing undoing—how Ginny continues to navigate change with curiosity, courage, and a willingness to be with not-knowing

Links & Resources

• The Collaboration Partners – Ginny’s consulting and coaching firm
• TeachingHorse – Equine-assisted leadership development
• E3A – Equine Experiential Education Association
• Connect with Ginny on LinkedIn
• Follow The Collaboration Partners on LinkedIn

Call to Action

If you enjoyed this episode, please give us some love!

• Rate & Review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — your reviews help more women find the show.
• Share this episode with a friend! If it resonated, tag us on social media and share your biggest takeaway.
• Follow the show so you never miss an episode.

Host & Show Info

• Host Name: Jeanie P. Duncan
• About the Host: Jeanie is a transformation partner helping leaders and organizations align with their values, discover their core purpose, and create meaningful impact in the world. Bringing over 25 years of experience as a CEO, advisor, leadership coach, speaker, and author, Jeanie offers knowledgeable and passionate guidance to generate powerful, effective, and strategic change on the personal and organization level.
• Visit the Podcast Website
• Connect with Jeanie on LinkedIn

Description:

This episode features Undoing guest, Christie Soper, an extraordinary leader, entrepreneur, and recent retiree who shares her powerful journey of reimagining success, embracing an ever-unfolding identity, and redefining "enough." Christie shares how transitioning into early retirement has revealed new and deep insights about her own authenticity, purpose, and balance. Tune in for insights about how to step forward boldy and bravely, transforming your life no matter where you are on your threshold of change.

 Main Topics

• Christie’s leadership journey from Fortune 200 executive to entrepreneurship and retiree
• The importance of embracing the concept of “enough” and setting boundaries
• How big waves of change can be sleep-worthy when you relax into uncertainty
• The role of purpose over achievement and significance over material success
• The power of self-care, mindfulness, and listening to your inner voice
• Rewriting identity after career shifts and caregiving experiences

Call to Action

• Rate & Review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
• Share this episode with a friend! If you enjoyed it, tag us on social media and let us know your favorite takeaway. LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook

Links & Resources

Host & Show Info

• Host Name: Jeanie P. Duncan
• About the Host: Jeanie is a transformation partner helping leaders and organizations align with their values, discover their core purpose, and create meaningful impact in the world. Bringing over 25 years of experience as a CEO, advisor, leadership coach, speaker, and author, Jeanie offers knowledgeable and passionate guidance to generate powerful, effective, and strategic change on the personal and organization level.
• Visit the Podcast Website
• Connect with Jeanie on LinkedIn

In this episode, Undoing Podcast creator and host, Jeanie Duncan, shares the most key undoing that had to happen in her own life in order to develop and launch Undoing: Women on the threshold, in the journey, and beyond. 

It’s a story of letting go, overcoming fears, and rewriting limiting beliefs to step into her true voice—offering insights for anyone at a threshold moment. She recaps resources that were key for inspiration, accountability, and bringing it all together. 

Resource & Links:

• "Mindset" by Carol Dweck
• "Choosing Me: The Journey Home to My True Self" by Jeanie Duncan

Connect with Jeanie Duncan on LinkedIn

Reflect and Take Action:

• What might you be dreaming of, beginning, or wanting to do differently? 
• What do you need to change in order to do it? What’s the Undoing that needs to happen in your life right now? 
• What resources are available to support you? 
• What’s one step you can take to move you forward? 

Host & Show Info

• Host Name: Jeanie P. Duncan
• About the Host: Jeanie is a transformation partner helping leaders and organizations align with their values, discover their core purpose, and create meaningful impact in the world. Bringing over 25 years of experience as a CEO, advisor, leadership coach, speaker, and author, Jeanie offers knowledgeable and passionate guidance to generate powerful, effective, and strategic change on the personal and organization level.
• Visit the Podcast Website
• Connect with Jeanie on LinkedIn

Official trailer for the Undoing Podcast.

Host & Show Info

• Host Name: Jeanie P. Duncan
• About the Host: Jeanie is a transformation partner helping leaders and organizations align with their values, discover their core purpose, and create meaningful impact in the world. Bringing over 25 years of experience as a CEO, advisor, leadership coach, speaker, and author, Jeanie offers knowledgeable and passionate guidance to generate powerful, effective, and strategic change on the personal and organization level.
• Visit the Podcast Website
• Connect with Jeanie on LinkedIn