Warrior Forward: The Podcast

You Don't Have To White-Knuckle It To New Year's

November 1st, my feed was flooded with the same post: "congrats mom, you made it through Halloween and a full moon just in time for Christmas decorations, classroom parties, spirit weeks and holiday breaks."

It's funny because it's true. It's also a terrible plan for the next two months.

This week I'm taking the joke everyone's sharing and turning it over. I talk about the spirit week list that came home on a Friday (it started Monday), and why the stretch from Halloween to New Year's was never meant to be a run of finish lines.

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You raise them to leave, and that's the whole job. Then your daughter says she's moving out, and your body acts like somebody pulled the fire alarm.

In this solo episode, Kim takes the guest chair to talk about what parenting looks like once your kid is legally an adult and still very much yours. She was born in 1979 and grew up in the fuck around and find out generation, where nobody was coming to get you and the coping skills were…… not great. Now she's raising a twenty-year-old from a generation that hit COVID in the middle of high school and missed out on a lot of the low-stakes practice adulthood used to come with. Neither generation got it right, and Kim is honest about both.

She also gets into the part of this that catches most mothers off guard: launching an adult while there's still a younger kid at home who's sad, watching, and taking notes.

In this episode:

• What happens in your body when your adult kid makes a call you don't agree with, and why Kim regulates before she opens her mouth
• Why letting a natural consequence land feels like negligence, and isn't
• Kim's two non-negotiables with her daughter, consistent communication and safety, and the fuck it bucket for everything else
• What it's like to raise a teenager with a curfew in the same kitchen where the oldest is moving out
• The statistic that stopped her cold: 71% of parents say their kids' successes and failures reflect on their parenting

The numbers Kim references:

• 57% of 18-to-24-year-olds live in a parent's home, up from 53% in 1993 (Pew Research Center, 2024)
• 59% of parents helped their 18-to-34-year-olds financially in the past year, and 45% of young adults say they're completely financially independent (Pew Research Center, 2024)
• In 1983, 80% of eighteen-year-olds had a driver's license, and by 2010 it was about 61% (University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute)
• In 2021, 44% of high schoolers reported persistent sadness or hopelessness (CDC Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey)
• Twenge and Park's study of 8.3 million teens, 1976 to 2016, Child Development

You Don't Have To Love The Options

Election Day is tomorrow, and if your ballot is still sitting somewhere between the permission slip and the grocery list, I ge it. This isn't an episode about who to vote for or why. Kim won't tell you, and she doesn't want to know. It's about what it means that you get to choose at all, why a working mother's vote carries more weight than she's been told, and how to make the choice from a settled place and not a braced one if you choose to make it at all.

In this episode:

• Why voting belongs in a different category than everything else on your to-do list
• What the numbers say about women showing up, and have said for over forty years

Referenced: Center for American Women and Politics, Rutgers University (women's voter turnout since 1980; 590 women running for the U.S. House, as of August 2026).

Subscribe free: https://substack.com/@warriorforward

In December 2025, Lean In and McKinsey reported that, for the first time, women were less likely than men to say they want a promotion. They called it an "ambition gap." That same report found the gap disappears when women get the same career support as men.

Kaleana Quibell left her VP role to consult part-time and stay home with her kids. She thinks we've been asking the wrong question. Kim and Kaleana dig into what the report left out, why so much of a family's security is tied to one full-time job, and what ambition looks like when it stops meaning a promotion.

In this episode

• What the 2025 Women in the Workplace report actually found, and what it left out
• Why the "ambition gap" closes when women get equal sponsorship and support
• The case against waiting for women at the top to fix the workplace for everyone else
• Who is responsible for change when the men and dads are already in the room
• Consulting, fractional work and 4-day weeks as a different kind of ambition
• What it costs to step off the ladder, and what it gives back

About Kaleana

Kaleana Quibell is a former corporate VP turned part-time consultant and stay-at-home mom. She's the founder of Both&, where she helps parents rethink work after kids through stories, tools and real-life career paths.

Find Kaleana

• Instagram: @bothand.co
• Links: linktr.ee/bothand.co

Referenced

• Women in the Workplace 2025, Lean In + McKinsey

Your ambition isn't fading. You might just be done with the ladder. Maybe the next promotion used to light you up, and now the thought of it just makes you tired. Maybe you've quietly told your own goals to "wait until the kids get older." This week on Monday Mindset, I'm separating two things we were sold as one: ambition, and the ladder it came attached to. I share what it looked like to start a three-year Somatic Experiencing training at 46, with a teen and a newborn in tow. Then I leave you with one question to carry into your week, small enough to ask somewhere between pickup and dinner. If you've been wondering where your drive went, this one's for you.

Jalena is a somatic experiencing practitioner, a fellow military spouse and a mentor. In this episode we get into what SE really is, beyond the Instagram version, where its limits are and why it's so damn powerful.

In this episode:

• The biggest misconceptions about somatic experiencing, and why "going slow" is the point
• Whether some of what gets called "dysregulation" is just an accurate read of military life
• What hypervigilance costs the spouse who plans for everything
• Who regulates the regulator, when your own training goes out the window
• The difference between regulation and healing
• Who is qualified to do Somatic Experiencing Trauma Recovery

Let me be clear: this conversation is education, not treatment. If you're carrying something heavy, work with a qualified practitioner.

To connect with Jalena: IG: https://www.instagram.com/jalenat/ Free Weekly Experience: https://stan.store/JalenaT/p/join-body-regulated-free

Website: Janena T

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Make sure you mention your favorite part of the episode! Follow Warrior Forward: The Podcast on IG: https://www.instagram.com/warriorforwardpodcast/

Somewhere around 8 o'clock every Sunday night, you start auditioning a woman who doesn't exist. Monday-you is up at 5 with her water bottle already full, and she answers every email like she's had a full night's sleep and a massage. And every single Monday, by about 10:15, you fire her.

This week I'm questioning the "Sunday reset." The issue isn't the groceries (I'm pro-groceries). It's the idea underneath them: that the woman who lived your weekend isn't good enough to run your week, so you'd better build a new one by morning. You don't need a reset. You need a re-entry.

In this episode:

• What a spacecraft coming home has to do with your Monday morning, and why the whole job is the angle
• Coming in steep and coming in too shallow, and what each one costs you by Wednesday
• Why the woman who laughed at dinner on Saturday belongs in the 9am meeting
• The one-minute thing to try every morning this week, before you touch anything that belongs to somebody else

Monday doesn't need a new you. It needs you, coming in at the right angle.

If this one landed, send it to the woman who's already answering emails from bed (yes, she might be you). Subscribe wherever you're listening, and come read with me on Substack every Monday and the private podcast: More Than Your Story.

Substack: https://substack.com/@warriorforward

GOT A MINUTE? I'D LOVE A REVIEW!! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Make sure you mention your favorite part of the episode! Follow Warrior Forward: The Podcast on IG: https://www.instagram.com/warriorforwardpodcast/

The holidays hit your body weeks before they hit your calendar.

The decorations are still in the garage and somebody's already asking where Christmas is this year.

For the default parent, the holiday season doesn't start on a date. It starts with the first question. In this episode Kim talks about why the season shows up in your body weeks early, and shares the ten-second somatic reset she uses when the next holiday question lands.

When a journalist asked the internet to help him find out who Jane Doe was, women answered by all becoming her. Then they started telling their own stories.

Every time a case like the Cornell 7 breaks, the first question is "why didn't she say something?" I think it's the wrong question. This week I'm asking a different one: what's actually happening in the body of a woman who can't tell, and what happens to the ones who do?

Harassment is a blatant act of entitlement. And so is rape. The reasons don't matter, but the fact it's still happening does.

In this episode:

• Why I think the ketamine and frat house conversation lets everybody off the hook
• What #IAmJaneDoe actually built, and why women are suddenly telling stories they've held for decades
• Unwanted is unwanted: why extreme assault starts long before it happens
• The great American excuse machine, and the adults who keep it running
• Fight, flight, freeze and fawn, and why fawn is the one that gets women called liars
• Why the body stores trauma in pieces, and what shame does to a woman who wants to speak up
• The ranking system that files harassment under "not that bad"
• What it leaves behind, from the school hallway to the corner office
• Two sentences worth borrowing, one for the kid in your house and one for yourself

Content note: This episode discusses sexual harassment and sexual assault.

Referenced in this episode:

• Cornell 7 lawsuit and reopened investigation (PBS News)
• Cornell agrees to an independent probe (NPR)
• The #IAmJaneDoe movement (Katie Couric Media)
• Tonic immobility during sexual assault, Möller et al. 2017 (ScienceDaily)
• Reporting statistics (RAINN)

Warrior Forward Substack IG: https://www.instagram.com/warriorforward/?hl=en

You can be furious and still take the night off.

You scanned the news in the car line and then walked into the 9am like nothing happened. And on the nights you didn't check, you felt guilty for it.

According to Gallup's 2026 research, women are more burned out than men and more engaged at work at the same time. In this episode Kim calls out the exhaustion for what it is and makes the case for stepping back from the news without stepping away from what you care about. Gallup: Women Show Stronger Employee Engagement Amid Higher Burnout (Mar 2026) https://substack.com/@warriorforward https://www.instagram.com/warriorforward/