I’m so excited to introduce you to today’s guest, whom I’ve known and admired for the past 25 years. I met Dr. Bonnie Pugh during residency, and we've been friends ever since. Bonnie is a pediatrician at Central Ohio Primary Care, where she also serves as president of the board of directors.

I wanted to bring Bonnie on to talk about leadership and how she transitioned from just caring for patients to leading physicians and shaping the culture at COPC. Over the past two decades, Bonnie has helped build an environment that transforms the lives of both the physicians who work there and the patients they serve. She leads with both strength and emotional intelligence, which, if you know anything about high-achieving women, isn't always an easy balance to strike.

Beyond her accomplishments, Bonnie is continually learning to integrate every part of herself into a life she loves. She's a doctor, leader, mentor, yoga teacher, wife, mom, daughter, sister, and one of my favorite humans. I can’t wait for you to hear this conversation.

Click HERE to get the full show notes.

I named this podcast Your Favorite You because I believe your favorite version of yourself already exists within you. She's not someone you have to build from scratch—she's someone you uncover one choice at a time.

For this milestone episode, I’m talking about what your favorite you actually looks like in the quiet of an ordinary life. Because after 200 episodes, here’s what I know: Being your favorite you is almost never a grand gesture. It’s not the mountaintop. It happens in small moments, on random weekdays, and sometimes without you even realizing it. It's the yes turned into a no, the bad day at work you didn’t take home with you, and speaking up when you wouldn't have before.

Today, we’re exploring the tiny, sustainable, completely unglamorous, but absolutely life-changing shifts I've watched women make over and over again. Whether this is the first episode you’re listening to or the 200th, I want to say thank you, my favorite listeners. Thank you for being brave, and for doing the quiet work that nobody claps for. You are the reason Your Favorite You exists, and I’m so glad you’re here.

Click HERE to get the full show notes.

Feeling comfortable in your body can be challenging when so much of what you’ve learned is incomplete, inaccurate, or shaped by shame. That’s why I’m welcoming back Dr. Nina Deep to help deepen our understanding of women’s bodies and tackle questions about anatomy, the existence of the G-spot, self-pleasure, and the myths many of us have carried for decades.

We explore real-life examples, but throughout the conversation, you'll hear the underlying themes of how medicine is patriarchal and the deep socialization of women to feel shame around our bodies. Change starts with education, curiosity, and learning to connect with our bodies, and it's never too late to begin.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Ep 191: It's Called The Clitoris with Nina Deep, MD
• The Disappearance of Shere Hite
• Becoming Cliterate by Dr. Laurie Mintz
• Come as You Are by Emily Nagoski
• She Comes First by Ian Kerner
• bellesa.co
• OMGYES
• ninadeep.com
• itscalledtheclitoris.com 

Click HERE to get the full show notes.

We spend an extraordinary amount of our lives preparing to live them: working toward the thing, achieving the next milestone, building toward a future version of ourselves and our circumstances that will finally feel like enough.

We’re so focused on the arrival, but grief—real, irreversible, stopping-you-in-your-tracks grief—has a brutal and clarifying way of revealing that the moment we’ve been waiting to arrive in is happening right now. There is no future version of you or your life that is more real or more valuable than this one.

This episode is a little different. I don't have a tidy takeaway, three steps, or a framework for you to try. What I have is a sentence, and I hope something in it lands for you the way it landed for me:

"But you're here now. Don't waste a minute.”

Click HERE to get the full show notes.

We spend so much time talking about how to achieve success—how to work toward it, how to stay motivated, and how to push through the tough parts—but we don't talk nearly enough about what happens when success actually arrives. And on the flip side, what happens when you've been riding high and then things get hard again?

Success can be just as destabilizing as struggle. And when you're used to succeeding, struggle can feel catastrophic in ways that are out of proportion to what's actually happening. Both of these experiences point to the same underlying issue: identity. What happens when your external circumstances stop matching the internal picture you have of yourself?

Today, we're exploring both sides of that equation because I've lived both sides of it, and chances are, you have too.

Click HERE to get the full show notes.

What if you thought about boredom not as a problem you need to fix, but fertile ground from which insight, self-knowledge, and genuine rest can grow?

Think about this: When you have an unexpected opening in your day—a canceled meeting, an hour with nothing scheduled, or a to-do list that's actually manageable for once—what does it feel like? For some of you, there is an exhale of "oh, thank goodness." For a lot of you, there was something closer to a low-grade panic: a quick mental scramble to fill the space and to find something productive to do.

​In this episode, I talk about what boredom actually is, why so many of us are uncomfortable with it, and what we lose when we never allow ourselves to experience it. Because making friends with a little more stillness can help us reconnect with ourselves, our creativity, and the version of us that's been waiting for room to breathe.

Click HERE to get the full show notes.

When was the last time you did something to take care of yourself and actually felt better after? Not just distracted or temporarily relieved, but genuinely, truly better.

We have a cultural obsession with self-care. The idea is everywhere—on t-shirts, coffee mugs, and Instagram—yet so many of the things we call self-care are actually ways of numbing. Today I’m unpacking the difference between the two and explaining why real self-care often looks different from what we expect.

And let me be clear: there is no shame in numbing. We’ve all been there. My goal is to help you recognize the difference so you can make intentional choices about how you care for yourself. Real self-care is one of the most loving, radical, important things you can do, and it is a foundational part of becoming your favorite you.

Click HERE to get the full show notes.

My nice little life—morning walks, easy Saturdays, and time with the people I love—would not be possible if I were still seeking validation and gratification from things outside of myself.

Today I’m talking about a book that helped me put that into perspective. In We Are the Luckiest, Laura McKowen writes about getting sober, but the book is not really about alcohol. It's about the ways we leave ourselves and all the things we reach for—food, wine, our phones, approval, people pleasing, pretending—when what we actually need is to come home to who we are.

The reality of being an actual person with needs and limits can feel uncomfortable and uncertain. But in the ashes of the things that don’t serve you, you find the version of yourself that you’re meant to be.

Mentioned episodes:

• Ep 3: Tell People Pleasing to Suck It
• Ep 32: My Relationship with Alcohol
• Ep 43: Freedom
• Ep 54: Accept Yourself
• Ep 61: We Are ALL Fucked Up
• Ep 70: You Can't Hide From Yourself
• Ep 97: Meeting Yourself
• Ep 123: Becoming Your Own Best Friend
• Ep 133: Stop Rejecting Yourself for Acceptance
• Ep 138: Radical Honesty
• Ep 145: Living in Integrity
• Ep 149: 7 Years Without Alcohol — A Celebration

Click HERE to get the full show notes.

Today, I’m doing something I’ve never done before on this podcast: I’m dropping you into the middle of one of our group coaching calls.

We had about three weeks left in the current group container when this was recorded, and as we wind down, I offer coaching to anyone who’s having difficulty deciding whether they want to continue or if they feel complete for now.

As I coached them through their decisions, these women shared the most beautiful things about themselves, the group, and the work we’ve done together. It was such a good conversation that I wanted to share it with all of you, and everyone on the call previewed the episode and gave me permission to do so. I am endlessly proud of the work I get to do, of these incredible women, and of their commitment to getting to know themselves better.

Click HERE to get the full show notes.

When you try to rest—genuine rest, not productive rest, strategic recovery, or resting to recharge—what do you hear in your head? Maybe your mind immediately starts firing back with thoughts like: you’re wasting time, other people are working right now, or you haven’t earned this.

Those voices are not the truth. They are parts of you shaped by systems that were never designed with your well-being in mind. In this episode, I’m unpacking why rest can feel so uncomfortable for high-achieving women and exploring how rest itself can become a powerful act of resistance through the lens of Tricia Hersey's Rest Is Resistance.

Rest is about reconnecting people to who they were before grind culture convinced them their worth was tied to how many things they could check off a list. We’ll begin unraveling those beliefs so you can rest unapologetically, luxuriously, and often—not because you’ve earned it, but because you are a human being and human beings need rest.

Click HERE to get the full show notes.