Advertise on podcast: Courageous Pivot with Meghan Telpner

Essential listening for anyone navigating a life transition, questioning what comes next, or needing permission to move on from something they've outgrown. What if the most courageous pivot of all is the one that brings you back to yourself? This solo episode explores what it means to truly land in alignment, how and why the midlife "menopausal window" is actually a homecoming, and how joy without hustle, metrics, or achievement is not a luxury. It is the whole point. Links + Resources Full show notes FREE + BRAND NEW: The Heart Reset Masterclass – A complimentary short program with Meghan Telpner exploring how to create alignment between your heart and mind, access inner calm, and live from your most authentic self.

Essential listening for anyone who can feel the pull toward something truer but hasn't yet been willing to look at what staying is actually costing them. We spend so much energy thinking about what we stand to lose by changing. The risk. The unknown. The people who might not come with us. But here's what we almost never ask: what is it costing you to stay? Not in some abstract, future-tense way. Right now. Today. This week. In this solo episode, Meghan gets honest about something most of us quietly sense but rarely say out loud: staying stuck is not a neutral choice. It has a price. And that price is paid in your time, your energy, your health, your creativity, your joy, and something even harder to name than all of those things. She walks through the real cost of a half-lived life, why the cost of leaving often feels enormous while the cost of staying goes almost completely unexamined, and what it actually means for the people around you when you keep yourself small. This one is a gentle shakeup. A mirror. An invitation to stop pretending the discomfort of staying is somehow safer than the discomfort of growing. Links + Resources Full show notes FREE + BRAND NEW: The Heart Reset Masterclass – A complimentary short program with Meghan Telpner exploring how to create alignment between your heart and mind, access inner calm, and live from your most authentic self.

A conversation with Director of Operations and Human Design Practitioner, Michelle Waithe. Essential listening for anyone who has ever wondered if it is okay to choose a life that simply feels good. What happens when two people follow each other from a distance for over a decade, meet briefly, and then discover their connection runs so much deeper than they ever imagined? Michelle Waithe came into my life through a series of synchronicities so specific and so unlikely that I still get chills thinking about them. She became my director of operations, then my collaborator, and somewhere in there, my soul sister. In this conversation, we go everywhere. From the moment she named her foster ducklings after my grandfathers, to her journey from holistic nutritionist to operations director to off-grid homesteader in Northeastern Ontario. We talk about living with type 1 diabetes, what it really means to acclimatize to a life that most people would find deeply uncomfortable, and why joy is not a luxury. It is the whole point. We also talk about grief, slow living, writing cursive letters, making things with your hands, and what it looks and feels like when you stop performing your life and start actually living it. Links + Resources Full show notes Shop: 30% off Rise + Shine: Guided Path to Heart-Led Living and Leadership

A conversation with keynote speaker, leadership trainer, and singer-songwriter, Rachel Druckenmiller. Essential listening for anyone ready to stop holding the best parts of themselves back. Some people find their way to a courageous pivot through careful planning. Others get there because life makes the decision for them. And then there's the kind of wisdom that only comes from having done both, and arriving somewhere you never could have mapped. Rachel Druckenmiller is the kind of guest who says things you'll be repeating to yourself for weeks. About what it means to say yes before you feel ready. About the difference between a life that looks successful and one that actually feels alive. About speaking your desires out loud, even the ones that seem too big, too unlikely, too far away. About how the things that fall apart are often quietly clearing the path to what's next. There is a particular kind of courage in letting yourself be seen doing the thing you love most. Rachel has had to find that courage more than once, in more than one arena. What she's discovered on the other side is nothing short of a blueprint for coming home to yourself. Links + Resources Full show notes Shop: 30% off Rise + Shine: Guided Path to Heart-Led Living and Leadership

A conversation with Registered Nurse turned tech founder and growth leader. Essential listening for anyone who has ever wondered what comes after the win. Abigail Keeso co-founded That Clean Life with her husband in 2014, grew it into a wildly profitable SaaS platform with a 93% profit margin and a team of four, and then sold it. What happened after the sale is the conversation nobody is having. In this episode, Abigail gets honest about the anticlimactic reality of a business acquisition, the identity earthquake that follows when the thing you built for a decade is no longer yours, and what it actually feels like to wake up on the other side with nowhere to be and nothing to prove. We talk about building a bootstrapped business from a nursing break room, naivety as a superpower, the moment she looked at her husband and said "it's time," navigating two years of earn-out inside a private equity world she hadn't quite prepared for, and the quiet life she and her family have landed in on 10 acres in the country. There are real questions about purpose, belonging, and who you are when your title disappears. If you're in a season of transition, sitting with a decision that scares you, or quietly wondering whether success might actually mean slowing all the way down, this one will feel like a deep exhale. Links + Resources Full show notes Shop: 30% off Rise + Shine: Guided Path to Heart-Led Living and Leadership

A conversation with owner of the THE TEN SPOT® International Franchise, Kristen Gale. Essential listening for anyone who has ever wondered if the same drive that built their business could actually save their life. Kristen Gale was fired on a Friday. By Sunday she had a business plan. By Wednesday, she had signed a lease. Twenty years later, she has 38 locations and a franchise system she built by doing the thing most founders never do: firing herself from her own company. But this conversation goes so much deeper than business. Kristen opens up about the marriage that dimmed her light, the moment she decided to become the CEO of her own life, and how applying the same strategic tools she used to scale The Ten Spot pulled her out of the hardest chapter she had ever lived. We talk core values, confidence, the "perfect day" exercise, and why missions are the secret weapon for getting through literally anything. Oh, and we go there on the tummy tuck too. Kristen and I have known each other for twenty years. This one felt like sitting down with a very old, very wise, very hilarious friend. Which is exactly what it was. Links + Resources Full show notes Money Mastery - A wildly practical approach to financial literacy, empowered money mindset, and wealth building for a life of joy and freedom (use code PIVOT30 at checkout to save 30% on the course).

A conversation with mindset coach and Solution Engineer, Sanjay Parmar. Essential listening for anyone who has ever wondered if true healing were possible. Sanjay Parmar was 34, a brand new father, and running on fumes in a toxic work environment when his body finally said enough. An MS attack in 2007 left him dragging himself into the hospital, clutching a stack of prescriptions he never intended to fill. What the doctors didn't account for was his refusal to let that diagnosis become his identity. What followed was nearly two decades of choosing a different path. Anti-inflammatory eating, neuro-linguistic programming, releasing friendships that were quietly draining him, and doing the deep work of healing childhood patterns that had been running the show long before any symptoms appeared. He never took the medication. Nineteen years later, he describes himself as fully optimized. Sanjay and I go way back, and this conversation has the warmth and honesty that only comes from two people who actually know each other. It is funny in places, surprising in others, and genuinely moving throughout. If you have ever wondered whether healing is really possible, this one is for you. Links + Resources Full show notes Shop: 30% off Rise + Shine: Guided Path to Heart-Led Living and Leadership

A conversation with author and founder of the Good  Food Cooking School, Heather Crosby. Essential listening for anyone who has driven themselves so hard, for so long, that they woke up one day and didn't recognize themselves anymore. Heather Crosby built YumUniverse, the Gluten Free Baking Academy, and the Good Food Cooking School almost entirely alone. She designed everything, photographed everything, wrote and tested every recipe, and handled every decision. From the outside, it looked like a thriving creative business. From the inside, it was quietly and steadily grinding her down. What followed was burnout so deep that she lost her joy for cooking entirely. An identity crisis she hadn't seen coming. And then, slowly, something else. Horticultural therapy and a job. Heather is in what she calls the fertile void right now. She has all the pieces for what comes next and a genuine resistance to rushing toward it. She is learning, maybe for the first time, to let something come to her instead of building toward it at full speed. This conversation is about what happens after the big thing. About the loneliness of doing it all yourself. About losing and slowly finding your way back to the thing you love. And about trusting that what is underground is still growing, even when you cannot see it yet. Links + Resources Full show notes Shop: 30% off Rise + Shine: Guided Path to Heart-Led Living and Leadership

Essential listening for anyone who has ever felt perpetually distracted, like they can't be without their phone, and wondered what that's actually costing them. What if the most courageous pivot you could make right now doesn't require a career change, a new city, or a dramatic life overhaul? What if it starts by putting your phone down? This episode began as an email. And then it just kept going. Because this is something that needed to be said out loud. We talk a lot on this show about nervous system regulation, heart coherence, and coming home to yourself. But there's one thing we keep dancing around, something we've collectively normalized to a degree that would have felt unthinkable a decade ago, and it is quietly dismantling all of it. The average adult picks up their phone between 50 and 100 times a day. Teens, up to 200. That's not a productivity problem. That's a nervous system crisis. And it's happening at the dinner table, in your bedroom, and in every in-between moment that used to belong to you. This isn't an anti-technology episode. It's a pro-human one. And it might be the most important pivot conversation we've had yet. Links + Resources Full show notes Shop: 30% off Rise + Shine: Guided Path to Heart-Led Living and Leadership

For anyone who knows they need to put the phone down, pick something up, and finally find out what they're made of. What if the life you're searching for is the one you keep scrolling past? In this solo episode, Meghan Telpner gets honest about one of the most quietly damaging habits of modern life: consuming more than we create. From the curated highlight reels that quietly erode our sense of self, to the synthetic hit of fast fashion and endless feeds that leave us full but starving, this episode names what so many of us feel but rarely say out loud. Drawing on three years of her own unraveling and rebuilding, Meghan shares what she found on the other side of the noise. A creative calling. Joy as a compass. And the terrifying, beautiful reality that responding to your own inner whisper is both the hardest and most important thing you will ever do. If you've been feeling restless, disconnected, or like you're watching your life from the outside, this one is for you. Links + Resources Full show notes Shop: 30% off Rise + Shine: Guided Path to Heart-Led Living and Leadership

A conversation with former newsroom producer, Melissa Om. Essential listening for anyone who has ever wondered whether the life they're living is truly theirs. What if the noise you've learned to tune out is actually the very thing shaping every decision you make? Melissa Om spent nearly 14 years as a television producer at CTV Montreal. She understood intimately how stories were made, how narratives were packaged, and how mass consent was manufactured one news cycle at a time. And then she walked away. Not just from her career, but from media entirely. News, movies, music with lyrics, Netflix, social media. All of it. That was ten years ago. In this conversation, Melissa shares what happened when she stopped consuming the world's stories and started listening for her own. We talk about burnout as a portal, the courage it takes to go to Mongolia with a backpack and no plan, and what inner sovereignty actually feels like when the noise finally clears. This one will stay with you. Links + Resources Full show notes Shop: 30% off Rise + Shine: Guided Path to Heart-Led Living and Leadership

A conversation with obé Fitness Co-Founder Ashley Mills. Essential listening for anyone romanticizing startup life, founders considering outside funding, people in major transitions, and anyone who needs to hear the whole truth about building and letting go. Everyone celebrates the start-up. The acquisition. The big payday. But nobody talks about what it actually costs to sell something you poured your soul into. Or the fact that when you take venture capital, you're signing up for an outcome you might not want. Ashley Mills co-founded obé Fitness after leaving a successful career at CAA. She created a fitness platform before digital fitness was a thing, raised millions, and then it was time to sell. Not because the business failed, or because she necessarily wanted to, but because that's the trade you make with venture funding. This conversation is honest in ways most entrepreneurship stories aren't. About the corners outside investment can back you into. About choosing purpose over profit and still ending up in a transaction. This is ultimately about the liminal space - when you're left asking who you are without the thing you built. Links + Resources Full show notes Shop: 30% off Rise + Shine: Guided Path to Heart-Led Living and Leadership

A conversation with SoYoung Founder Catherine Choi. Essential listening for anyone who has overcome the worst, achieved something worth celebrating and still feels a quiet ache that it's not it anymore. There is a particular kind of suffering in building a life that looks great from the outside while something on the inside quietly goes silent. You keep showing up. You keep pushing. You tell yourself it will feel different when you hit the next milestone. It never does. Catherine Choi knows this well. She built a successful, mission-driven product brand, got her bags into some of the most sought-after retailers in North America, and spent years wondering why none of it felt like enough. The answer had nothing to do with the business. In this conversation, we go all the way back. To a childhood marked by control and fear. To the four years of heroin addiction that started the moment she finally had freedom. To the unexplained gift of getting clean. And eventually, to the volcano that led her to dismantle her business, her marriage, and everything she thought her life was supposed to be. Links + Resources Full show notes Shop: 30% off Rise + Shine: Guided Path to Heart-Led Living and Leadership

Essential listening for anyone who has ever wondered if the hustle is worth it, or quietly suspected there might be a different, simpler, truer way. What if the entrepreneurial dream you've been sold is actually just a very well-marketed story? In this solo episode, Meghan Telpner takes an honest, unfiltered look at the mythology of entrepreneurship. Not to tear it down, but to ask a more important question: what does freedom actually mean to you? Having spent 15 years building and ultimately walking away from a successful business, Meghan reflects on the gap between the performance of success and the experience of it. From the seven goals, to the accolades that come with an actual price tag, to the moment stepping back from social media cracked something wide open, this episode peels back the highlight reel to look at what's actually underneath it. This isn't a cautionary tale. It's an invitation. To stop measuring your life against someone else's metrics. To figure out what you actually need. And to consider that sometimes the most courageous pivot isn't starting something new. It's being honest about what isn't working. Links + Resources Full show notes Shop: 30% off Rise + Shine: Guided Path to Heart-Led Living and Leadership

A conversation with Karla Treadway, Marketing Strategist for Brave Brands and Freedom Focused Entrepreneurs. Essential listening for: anyone trying to plan their way to certainty, people who feel behind because they haven't "settled," and those ready to trade the myth of safety for something more honest. Maybe you've been looking for the thing that will finally make you feel safe. The right place, the right plan, the right amount of money in the bank. This episode will make you think differently about safety, security, and what courage actually requires when nothing stays the same. Karla Treadway is here to tell you: it doesn't exist. And that's actually the good news. Because once you stop chasing the myth of safety, you can start building something real. A life that adapts. A life that pivots. A life where you're not waiting to arrive because you know the work never stops and that's okay. In this conversation, we talk about what it actually means to live sovereign in a world that keeps trying to sell you certainty. We wade into the messy middle of propaganda, the loss of nuance, and why we're all ants in a jar being shaken while we attack each other instead of looking up. Links + Resources Full show notes Shop: 30% off Rise + Shine: Guided Path to Heart-Led Living and Leadership