These aren’t just words for a vision board.
They’re your barometer.
That measures your offers, platforms, or opportunities.
Values aren’t something you give off.
They’re something you build with.
Your North Star creates a path for who you can become.
This is the layer that changes everything.
Together, they hold you accountable to YOU.

What is a North Star?

Your North Star isn’t a mission statement, and it isn’t a fixed identity you adopt. It’s a reference point — a person, or pieces of different people, real or not yet met, someone you already know or someone entirely made up, or a piece of the future version of you.

You have to see it to be it.

The question isn’t “who do you want to be like.” It’s: who is the person or organization you’d most want to notice you — to have follow you, recognize you, know that you exist? And why? Then reverse engineer it so it comes back to you.

That “why” is the real answer. It’s rarely about the person. It’s about the qualities they represent that you admire. That you would want to see how they fit for you.

This isn’t a one-time exercise. Spoiler alert… most of my work is not. As we change and grow, so do the things we want. The process doesn’t resolve into a tidy sentence and a checked box. It keeps going — you keep refining your reference point as you grow, until eventually the reference point is you. You become your own North Star. That’s the actual destination, not a single moment.

This is my North Star — the core group. There are layers beyond this too.

You may be familiar with Martha Beck’s book and methodology “Finding Your North Star.” This is different.

It’s Not About Copying Someone

When I bring this, I’m often met with resistance. In this exercise, the word “Emulate” does not mean to try and be someone else. It’s about noticing why it works — the structure underneath it, not the surface of it. The intention is to understand the part of them that you admire so you can try it on like clothing and see if it fits the rest of your parts.

The three-step framework itself comes from an unlikely place: USC’s Thornton School of Music, by way of a Mel Robbins podcast episode I have listened to and shared a lot.

Then you start again. That’s not a flaw in the process — the process is the work. Your North Star gets clearer each time you run it, not fixed once and filed away.

Listen to Mel Robbins podcast-episode 71. Actually listen to it, don’t skim the summary. This one’s better heard than read, and doing the work makes everything else easier. The time is an investment.

Values Are What Hold You Up When Things Get Hard

Brené Brown says…

“your values are what give you strength when you’re in the arena. Not when things are easy. When they’re not”

Most people can rattle off a value or two if you ask them. Fewer can tell you what that value actually looks like in a bad week — when you live your values, they come right up and support you, help you make hard decisions, or guide you through a difficult conversation.

Mine are curiosity and making a difference. The fun parts are easy, I’m curious I like to learn and find new things and ways of working. The Real 50 over 50 is my making a difference in action. It’s a lot of work, but it’s work I cannot not do.

On the flip-side, when things are hard, my curiosity goes MacGyver level and has saved my ass more than once. And the making a difference, that I approach two different ways. If it’s a situation I can change, I challenge myself to find a way. If I cannot change the situation, I do a random act of kindness to balance the universe. It will come back to someone in some way, maybe even me.

Here’s the thing about narrowing to your core values: it’s another process, not a checklist you fill out in ten minutes. Brené’s own exercise starts with a long list and asks you to keep cutting until you’re down to two. That cutting is the exercise. Listen to the podcast episode in the Dare to Lead Hub on her website. She explains it beautifully. If you’re at five… keep going.

I’m certified in Dare to Lead, which includes this values work directly. The full exercise is available on Brené’s site: Living Into Our Values.

This is not easy breezy work. But I can say with 100% certainty that doing the work is worthwhile. You will learn things about yourself you do not know now. And having your values in your hip pocket when you need them is invaluable. Sit with the full list, cut it down for real, and get to the two that are left when you stop protecting yourself. For each one, get specific is it a value or something you do? What does living it actually look like? What does drifting from it look like, when you’re tired or scared or rushed? And when has it been fully, visibly true — a real moment, not a mission statement?

That specificity is what makes a value more than an adjective.

Putting the Barometer to Work

Once you’ve named your reference point and your two values, the test is simple. Look at what you’re already doing — your offers, your content, your platforms, your pace — and ask where it’s actually pointed toward that North Star, and where it’s quietly drifting toward someone or somewhere else.

You don’t need to fix everything you find. Pick one adjustment. That’s enough for now, get accustomed to the process so you can use it again and again. .

Barometers in play: North Star & Values.

Your Next Step

Open the Sustainable Rhythm Workbook to Article 3. Carving out some time to name your North Star and do the real values work is what moves this from an idea to something you can actually use.

That’s it. You’re not building the whole structure today.

I’d love to see what you find. Bring it to the roundtable. First one is this Thursday, July 23rd, at 1pm ET. It’ll be intimate—which means you’ll have space to breathe, ask questions, and actually think aloud. If you’re in the thick of the values work (and maybe cutting it down to two) or working through who belongs in your North Star roster, bring it with you. I’ll help you sort it out live.

Register Here

Next Tuesday, we start exploring Tried & New and what happens when you look at your collective content with a discerning eye.

Don’t burn down the ships… call in the fleet.

— Donna

I hope you are well and enjoying the summer.

I’ve been building in public and BTS — watching closely for what actually helps us grow intentionally. Not louder. More aligned.

I’d love for you to join me on the:

Read more

The Real 50 over 50 is a weekly livestream series I’ve been hosting for 3½ years. It started when I realized the Forbes ‘over’ lists exclude most of the women I know, so I created my own.

To date, there are roughly 165 interviews and 18 Wisdom Panels, and we’re consistently booked 4–5 months in advance. The 185 women + 1 man in this community are exactly the people you’re out there looking to meet.

I started livestreaming the interviews here on Substack in April. As my audience here has grown, it feels like the right time to re‑introduce these incredible women — and bring more of their stories onto the page.

They are livestreamed every Wednesday at noon ET here on my Substack, The Intentional Visibility Project, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

On the Last Wednesday of the month at noon ET, we gather together for a Meet & Mingle. Join us…

Keep reading below to learn more about our July interviews, more about the Meet & Mingle event, and what these amazing women are up to.

The July Interviews

July Replays

— leadership default patterns and life by design

Lenore is a transformational coach, inspirational speaker, and author for conscious leaders, founders, and soulpreneurs. We talked about the patterns — inner, relational, and outer codes — that quietly run the show until a “talent moment” forces a wake‑up call. She reframes midlife pivots as a design feature, not a failure, and asks the question that changes everything: Is it what you really want, or just what you think you should want?

Watch Lenore’s interview

Bonnie Schutz — delegation muscles and the admin-to-ecosystem path

Bonnie is the founder and CEO of Tandem Resource Solutions, co-founder of Preferred Service Pros, and host of the Delegate to Elevate podcast. Her story will feel familiar to a lot of us: decades as a high-level admin, then an “accidental” step into entrepreneurship that became a three-business ecosystem. We talked about delegation muscles, creative ways to get support, and why admins and executive assistants are true force multipliers whose skills can quietly power entire companies.

Watch Bonnie’s interview

Kathleen Lawson — CEO Hour and business architecture

Kathleen is a small business strategist and founder of Kathleen Lawson Consulting, where she helps service-based solopreneurs move from decision fatigue into clear, intentional structure. In our conversation, we dug into her CEO Hour® framework: one protected hour a week to stop reacting, make decisions in advance, and reconnect your calendar to your real priorities and goals. It’s deceptively simple and quietly powerful.

Watch Kathleen’s interview

Coming up this week: Dr. Charleanea Arellano

Wednesday, July 22nd — noon ET

Dr. Charleanea Arellano | Psychologist, Founder of Embodied Narrative™ Leadership, Author & Podcast Host

Some women spend decades achieving at a level that looks like confidence from the outside while carrying narratives underneath that were never true to begin with. has spent more than thirty years working at exactly that intersection — and built her entire practice on what she learned living it herself.

Her forthcoming book, Terrible Gifts: Finding the Light in the Darkest of Places, explores how pain, when metabolized rather than bypassed, becomes a portal to wisdom and legacy-level impact. We’ll talk about the gap between how accomplished women are living and who they actually are, and what becomes possible when you finally stop waiting for permission to take up space.

Join us LIVE

July’s Meet & Mingle

The next Meet & Mingle is Wednesday, July 29th, at noon ET — a casual gathering where we connect and cheer one another on. These gatherings keep getting better every month, and they’re becoming one of my favorite spaces to see what’s possible when women show up for one another on purpose.

Register for the Meet & Mingle

If you hit reply or leave a comment and tell me which interview you watched first — Kathleen, Lenore, or Bonnie — and what landed for you, I’d love to hear it.

Each individual article also has soundbites and video clips - share away - a rising tide lifts all ships.

Real 50 over 50 Women in the Wild

I love to celebrate the accomplishments of these extraordinary women as they move through the world. This week, there are three.

Susanne Mueller -

Susanne is a Women in Cloud nominee in the EMPOWher ACCESS Global Prestige Awards. She’s a TEDx Speaker, Global Executive Coach, Author, Podcast Host, Mountaineer, and Ironwoman. Her podcast has well over 500 episodes, including many conversations with Real 50 over 50 women.
You can learn more about Susanne on her Spotlight Page.

The audio version of ’s book Truths & Contradictions: Life-Changing Experiences in Afghanistan dropped last week. And… her Substack is new. Head over and subscribe.

Truths & Contradictions offers a unique blend of personal growth, cultural insight, and leadership wisdom. Through real-life examples of what it’s like to live and work in conflict zones, you’ll gain the inspiration and strategies to face your own crossroads with strength and clarity.

Pamela Thompson, a leadership and transition coach and consultant who has lived and worked on five continents, shares her life-changing experiences in Afghanistan. As a consultant to the Ministry of Public Health, she witnessed the resilience and courage of the Afghan people while helping them develop their first strategic plan. Pamela provides you with tools to navigate challenges, gain clarity, and lead with confidence—even in the most uncertain times.

Trish Tonaj - Artist, Author, Podcast Host, and Founder of ShareYourStories.online

“When I started my first company over 25 years ago there was no support for entrepreneurs. A mentor wore a blue suit and red tie, business consulting was in the incubator stage and no-one had ever heard of a coach unless it was through a sports team. Thankfully times are changing.” —Trish Tonaj

After 25 years in business, Trish became an author and created a passion project. There have been many lightbulb moments, including one life‑changing event while attending an executive education program at Harvard Law School’s Negotiation Institute. The individuals at the program sparked a great idea… to share stories that inspire others to pursue their dreams.

That was Trish’s lightbulb moment. She decided to celebrate entrepreneurs by giving them a platform to tell their stories in their own voice. It all started with writing a book, which then led to creating a guest blog series through a new brand, ShareYourStories.online. Recognized as a global award-winning community of vibrant leaders, creators, and innovators who are redefining success on their own terms.

The platform has grown to over 500 stories and close to 300 podcast interviews. A quarterly magazine, and an annual entrepreneurial grant program funded by entrepreneurs.

Together, they are making a difference, one story at a time.

Have a story to tell?

Connect with Trish

As I grow my platform here on Substack, I’ll be sharing more of the women in this community. If you would like to be interviewed, send me a DM on LinkedIn or here on Substack.

Thanks,
Donna

Watch the Replay above. Here is a small clip

Overview

Bonnie is the founder and CEO of Tandem Resource Solutions, co-founder of Preferred Service Pros, and host of the Delegate to Elevate podcast, and she’s stitched those pieces together into what she calls an ecosystem: recruiting, remote support pros, and a vetted directory that all feed each other. This conversation is about how she built that ecosystem from a side hustle and a “happening” at her last job, and what it really takes to move from being the force multiplier in someone else’s company to leading your own.

We spent time on the emotional and practical side of delegation—especially for former executive assistants and admins who find it easier to manage other people’s calendars and inboxes than to let anyone touch their own. Bonnie talks about delegation as a spectrum, with “delegation muscles” that need time to strengthen, and she’s honest about her own challenges: she can teach others how to delegate beautifully but still resists handing off her inbox. I loved her examples of creative delegation and cross-delegation: leaning on her spouse for books and tech, bringing in interns for research and social media, and helping owners see that they don’t have to do everything themselves to earn the right to delegate.

What runs under all of this is respect for the often invisible expertise of admins and support pros—what Bonnie now calls remote support pros. She talks about sitting at merger-and-acquisition tables, soaking up acronyms and strategies, only realizing years later how much return on experience she’d accumulated. That same experience is now what she uses to match business owners with vetted service providers through Preferred Service Pros, so people don’t dismantle the foundations they’ve already built by hiring the wrong help in their first years out of corporate.

We also got into the bigger arc of work and life at 50+: the shift from being behind the scenes in a corporate setting to being fully visible as the face of three businesses and a podcast. Bonnie is clear that she’s an “accidental entrepreneur” who discovered her entrepreneurial mindset in motion, and now she’s thinking about sustainability, legacy, and what retirement could look like when you own the business instead of just working in it. For her, delegation isn’t just tactical—it’s how she creates space in her life to enjoy these later decades, help others, and make sure the businesses she’s built can keep going, with or without her at the center.

Her Wisdom Bomb at the close said it all:

“Delegate your mind—start opening your mind to new ways you can learn from your past experiences, transfer those skills into a new idea, and tap into your network so you’re not doing it alone.” — Bonnie Schutz

Highlights

Building a three-business ecosystem from admin roots
Bonnie explains how a recruiting firm, a remote support agency, and a vetted B2B directory grew out of her admin background and side hustle, and how each business feeds the others instead of competing for her attention.

Delegation muscles and the spectrum of letting go
She talks about delegation as something you build gradually—like lifting 10 pounds before 100—and shares real stories of people discovering free time for the first time, learning to sit in that space instead of immediately filling it back up.

Admins as force multipliers and return on experience
Bonnie names the often unseen value of admins and executive assistants, from sitting in Taco Bell franchise offices to M&A tables, and shows how those “just doing the work” years become the foundation for leading and teaching in later life.

Bonnie Says…

“I call them remote support pros because ‘VA’ just didn’t fit the level of skill—these are the people who’ve been force multipliers in businesses for years.”
— Bonnie Schutz

“Delegation is a spectrum. You don’t start by lifting the 100‑pound weight; you dip your toes in, delegate a little, and build those muscles over time.”
— Bonnie Schutz

About Bonnie

After nearly three decades as a high-level Executive Assistant in corporate America, I made the leap into entrepreneurship and founded Tandem Resource Solutions, an administrative recruiting firm and US-based remote support company helping business owners delegate better, lead stronger, and grow with the right support beside them.

Based in the Denver area and powered by a fully remote team, Tandem Resource Solutions connects entrepreneurs and small business owners with experienced Remote Support Pros who can plug into the real work of a growing business, from executive assistance and administrative support to light operations and behind-the-scenes business support.

In my second act, I’ve been stepping more fully into my founder and CEO shoes, with all the humbling, hilarious, and holy-cow-is-this-really-happening moments that come with it. I lead with empathy, humor, lived experience, and a no-BS approach, which feels especially fitting since those are also my initials.

I also host Delegate2Elevate: Get Sh!t Done, a podcast where I talk with service-based entrepreneurs, leaders, and business owners about delegation, leadership, growth, and the very real work behind building something meaningful.

Most recently, I launched Preferred Service Pros, a vetted B2B directory created to help business owners find trusted service providers without relying on guesswork, endless scrolling, or “someone I found in a Facebook group” energy. It was born from my belief that good people should be easier to find, easier to trust, and easier to refer.

I’m especially passionate about helping women in business rise together, and I’m proud to support communities that advocate for Executive Assistants, women in their second act, military spouses, entrepreneurs, and the people who often do their best work behind the scenes.

Connect with Bonnie

• Tandem Resource Solutions + Delegate2Elevate: Get Sh!t Done podcast + Preferred Service Pros

• Bonnie’s Real 50 over 50 Spotlight Page

Have a question for Bonnie? Drop it in the comments — I’ll make sure she sees it. And come back next Wednesday at noon ET, we have interviews booked months in advance. Or catch the replays.

The Intentional Visibility Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

In our Real 50 over 50 conversation, business strategist and consultant @Kathleen Lawson shared the story of how she started her business and how her CEO Hour® framework is deeply rooted in the realities of women running small businesses inside full, complicated lives. We weren’t talking theory. We were talking about real-life decision fatigue, the “what am I doing today?” loop, and the exhaustion that comes from living in a reactive mode where everything feels urgent and nothing feels grounded. Kathleen has built her business around helping women shift out of that state and into clear, intentional architecture—so their businesses actually support the lives they want, not the other way around.

Watch the Replay above. Here is a small clip

Overview

We got into the nitty-gritty of what structure really means when you’re a service-based solopreneur: not just back-end systems, but offers that are clear, pricing that works, weekly rhythms, and the kind of planning that makes Monday calm.

Kathleen’s CEO Hour® started as a simple weekly planning practice and evolved into a protected space where you make decisions in advance, reconnect your calendar to your real goals, and give yourself permission to stop “doing” long enough to think. Over time, it became the underlying framework of her business and all levels of her client work, giving women the rails to run on so they can move from feeling overwhelmed to owning the decisions of their own business.

We also side-barred into the fast-moving world of digital tools and AI, from email and project management to the pressure to automate everything before you even know what you truly need.

Kathleen and I share discernment about automating too fast. She sees people jumping to tactics and automation ten miles down the road without ever mapping their client journey or getting clear on what their business needs right now. The running thread of our conversation was simple but not easy: figure out your architecture first, then decide where tools and AI actually help—and make those decisions intentionally, not because the latest webinar told you to.

Underneath all of this was the story that runs through Kathleen’s life: corporate marketing and facilitation, a food-focused direct-sales business built around her family's needs, and now a consulting business for women midlife and beyond who want businesses that fit their lives. She’s mentoring women who are brilliant at what they do but tired of living inside decision fatigue, helping them recognize that they don’t need “all the things”—they need the right things, sequenced in a way that actually works.

Her Wisdom Bomb at the close said it all:

“Carve out one hour a week to plan your next week and make decisions in advance, so your priorities actually move and your business starts to feel like something you’re leading, not just surviving.”

Highlights

The power of protected CEO time
Kathleen talks about how carving out one hour on Fridays shifted her from daily “what am I doing now?” panic into a calm, intentional weekly flow where priorities, goals, and client work all fit inside a structure that makes sense.

Architecture vs. bright, shiny tactics
We dig into why so many women come out of corporate and jump straight into tools, programs, and marketing tactics without ever mapping their actual process—and how clear business architecture becomes the safety net that keeps everything from collapsing.

Sequencing instead of doing everything at once
Kathleen shares real stories of women trying to move eight initiatives forward at the same time, and how focusing on “what does my business need right now?” can turn overwhelm into momentum.

Kathleen Says…

About Kathleen

Kathleen Lawson is a business strategist and founder of Kathleen Lawson Consulting, where she works with service-based solopreneurs – primarily women – to bring structure, strategy, and consistency to their businesses.

With more than 20 years of entrepreneurial experience, Kathleen is known for her practical, no-nonsense approach to helping business owners move out of overwhelm and into clear, focused execution. Through her consulting work and her CEO Hour® Framework, she helps clients think like CEOs, make better decisions, and build sustainable businesses that actually work.

As a longtime entrepreneur and mother of five, Kathleen understands firsthand the realities of building a business alongside real life – and is passionate about helping women create businesses that support both.

Connect with Kathleen

• Visit Kathleen’s website

• Visit Kathleen’s Real 50 over 50 Spotlight Page

Have a question for Kathleen? Drop it in the comments — I’ll make sure she sees it. And come back next Wednesday at noon ET, we have interviews booked months in advance. Or catch the replays.

The Intentional Visibility Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Watch the Replay above. Here is a small clip

Overview

Lenore and I talked about the spiral nature of change—how women move through a first pivot (the “I can’t do this anymore” crisis), then the harder stage of actually embodying their new role, and then the ongoing evolution as their goals and desires keep shifting. Lenore is very clear that change is not a bug; it’s a design feature, and the friction comes from trying to hold onto identities, titles, and shoulds that no longer fit. She sees clients who think they want the promotion, the visibility, the big PR push, only to realize midstream that they don’t actually want what comes with it, and she helps them get honest about the gap between “what I think I should want” and “what lights up my heart.”

From there, we dug into her leadership default patterns: inner capabilities, interpersonal tendencies, and outer-facing qualities that are often driven by core needs like love, validation, attention, or safety. When those needs stay unconscious, they leak into work decisions—over-giving, over-achieving, perfectionism, seeking love through a job—and eventually trigger what she calls talent moments: layoffs, missed promotions, betrayals, or credibility hits that act as wake-up calls. That’s often when people find her, carrying an invisible weight from the past like an albatross, and she helps them see it, name it, and put it down so they can build something new without dragging all that heaviness along.

We chatted about the transition from corporate safety nets to entrepreneurial uncertainty: the loss of built-in structure, benefits, and other people making the decisions, and the reality that now you’re holding that bag, claiming your voice, and deciding how you spend your days.

Lenore and I share the view that there is no easy button—AI included—for doing the deeper work of self-awareness, healing, and owning your voice as a founder. And yet, she’s optimistic about what emerges when leaders stop following defaults and start choosing consciously: more specific roles, more aligned work, and businesses that reflect who they truly are rather than who they were told to be.

Her Wisdom Bomb at the close said it all:

“So we need to become more consciously aware. And then we can choose to build our life and work by design… you don’t have to keep doing whatever you’ve been doing, but you need to know that something else is possible and then you need to decide you’re ready to step into that.” — Lenore Kantor

Highlights

Default patterns running the show
Lenore breaks down the leadership default codes—inner, interpersonal, and outer—and shows how unexamined needs like love, safety, or validation silently drive behavior at work and at home until a “talent moment” forces a reckoning.

Change as a design feature, not a bug
She reframes midlife pivots, reinventions, and goal changes as part of a natural spiral rather than something to feel guilty about, and walks through how women move from crisis to embodiment to ongoing evolution.

The difference between shoulds and true desire
Lenore keeps asking, “Is it what you really want or just what you think you want?” and illustrates how chasing shoulds—titles, salaries, structures—can lead to roles and businesses you don’t actually want, versus designing work that fits who you are now.

Lenore Says…

“What got you to where you are isn’t going to get you to where you need to be… once we understand what’s going on, then we can shift it.”
— Lenore Kantor

“Is this a should or does it light up your heart?”
— Lenore Kantor

About Lenore

Lenore Kantor is President and Chief Growth Officer of Growth Warrior Ltd. Also known as The Work-Life Alchemist™, a life path guide, energetic alignment strategist, and business thought partner for high-achieving leaders seeking more authenticity and impact. She founded Growth Warrior to guide conscious leaders to more fulfillment and impact. Lenore is an inspirational speaker and author of So, What Do You Do? The Authentic Alchemy Path to Find Who You Are, a heart-centered user manual and companion workbook for seekers to create meaningful life and work. She has conducted extensive research on how high performers can redefine their relationship with work, worth, and identity to break free of unhelpful patterns and find more freedom, fulfillment, and flow, which will be explored in her next book (to be released in 2027).

Lenore’s five-step framework guides clients to claim their calling, self-author their story, measure success on their own terms, take aligned actions, and live by design. She integrates business positioning and leadership with embodied and energetic practices for soulful realignment. Her intuitive insights and grounded strategic perspective empower conscious leaders, soulpreneurs, and founders to create more balance, fulfillment, and purpose. For over thirty years, Lenore has acted as a strategic advisor, entrepreneur, and financial technology corporate executive, providing career guidance to students as a member of Columbia’s Coaching Collective and mentoring many founders across multiple startup accelerators. Lenore has an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania. She is available for private coaching, professional development programming, workshops, book talks, and more.

Connect with Lenore

• Visit Lenore’s website

• Lenore’s Real 50 over 50 Spotlight Page

Have a question for Lenore? Drop it in the comments — I’ll make sure she sees it. And come back next Wednesday at noon ET, we have interviews booked months in advance. Or catch the replays.

The Intentional Visibility Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Now we go one layer deeper. To the thing that sits underneath all of it.

The architecture.

What Most Women Over 50 Are Actually Missing

If you’ve been in business for years, you probably have more than you think. Content, relationships, offers, platforms — all real, all earned. What’s usually missing is the structure that ties the pieces together.

Without architecture, everything lives in fragments. And the thought of pulling it all together feels overwhelming, so most people don’t. They keep creating on top of a shaky foundation and wonder why it feels like starting over every time.

Architecture is what turns those fragments into a system that can hold your next act.

Lead First. The Marketing Falls Into Place.

I said it in Article 1, and it belongs here too:

marketing is the side hustle to leadership

When visibility is treated as marketing, the focus shifts to tactics — launches, campaigns, content calendars, funnels. Those things have their place. But they’re scaffolding. And scaffolding built before you have a foundation gives you random acts of marketing. It’s hard to connect with and build upon.

Architecture asks different questions:

• What am I actually building?

• What do I already have?

• Who is it for?

• How do I want people to move through it now and over time?

• How does what’s Tried and what’s New connect to each other? The ecosystem? Will it hold what comes next?

Until those questions are answered, every launch feels like starting over. When answered, a launch becomes one moment in a longer, intentional arc.

Brené Brown’s new book, Strong Ground, has a chapter called “Grounded Confidence” that lines up almost exactly with this:

The Methodology, Simply Put

Here’s the whole thing in plain language:

• Tried & New is the inner work. It starts with an audit. Going back through everything you’ve already built, remembering and reclaiming what’s there, and making deliberate decisions about what stays, what goes, and what gets upcycled/recycled, what can be given away or sold. Then you build what stays into living libraries you can return to again and again. AI is a powerful tool here — it surfaces patterns you can’t see yourself because you’re too close to the work.

• Found is the layer that makes your work findable — content strategy, SEO, AEO, GEO. Most people resist this part because it feels technical and hard. But when you’ve done the inner work first, it changes completely. You’re not gaming a system. You see that this is the part that opens the door to possibility. The value of being found by the people you want to meet and want to help becomes more important than learning new skills. That is leadership.

• Known is how people remember you over time — PR, media, speaking, events, relationships. This is often where clients want to start. And what happens when this is done before the foundation is built? The increased visibility is not connected to the work. There is a gap.

Most people treat these as separate projects. Architecture is what happens when you intentionally decide how these four parts fit together — and in order.

The Invisible Cost of Building on Shaky Ground

Visibility has a shadow side. The moment you’re about to share something and that voice in your head asks: Is this actually good enough? Who am I to think I can say this out loud?

That’s fear. That’s imposter syndrome doing its job, if you let it.

But here’s what I’ve watched happen on the other side of a Zoom screen, countless times: there is no version of imposter syndrome that can withstand the self-lovebomb of a Tried & New process. When you sit down and actually look at what you’ve built — what you’ve solved, taught, survived, created — the evidence becomes undeniable. You remember what you forgot. You reclaim what you abandoned. And suddenly you’re not asking am I enough — you’re asking what else can this be?

That’s the shift. And when that foundation gets woven into your content and your story, it builds more than confidence. It builds what holds whatever comes next.

Why I’m Building on Substack

When I wrote the original version of this methodology, I wasn’t yet active on Substack. That’s changed, and as I am updating the work I’ve done for so long, it’s now part of the foundation.

Substack is where I’m building this. For three years, I kept coming back to Substack, but it did not feel right. Now it does, and let me explain why you should consider it too.

You own your content. You own your list. Since I launched in March, Substack has shipped at least 60 upgrades — they are actively building a platform for creators to grow. I feel welcome here. It feels like 2009 Twitter, when you could actually find and connect with the people who want to find you. The algorithms are working in your favor. It’s not social media. It’s a media platform that you can build the way you want.

I wrote an article in 2010 saying everyone should have their own media company. Now it’s possible, and the platform is entirely free to use.

I’ve built my own publication to be a significant part of my business. I’m helping clients do the same. We’re still early adopters here. Plenty of people haven’t heard of Substack yet. That’s an unexpected advantage, not a gap.

How This Series Is Built on Architecture

This summer series is itself an example of what I’m describing.

These ten articles aren’t stand-alone posts. They’re an updated sequence — inner work first, outer work second, connecting the dots last. They sit inside a publication that also holds all of my gathered parts, including live Real 50 over 50 interviews, soundbites from past interviews and wisdom panels, my thought leadership on visibility, and the personal essays I started with.

Taking myself through the process also led me to take a discerning look at my services. I did not burn them to the ground and start over. I redesigned my $5000/year small group program into The Founding Member tier of this Substack. It’s a growing community of women using this methodology to build their foundations with my guidance. The 1:1 services are more connected than ever. The work is the same. We build the architecture for your specific business together.

You don’t need the entire ecosystem to start. But I want you to see that it exists — because many of you already have more than you realize. It’s waiting to be named and connected.

Your Next Step

This work is not one and done. Start small.

Open the Sustainable Rhythm Workbook to Article 2. Give yourself ten minutes with the one prompt: sketch your own layers — Tried & New + Found & Known. Note what already exists in each. Circle one gap.

That’s it. You’re not building the whole structure today. You’re seeing what it feels like to look at it as one thing instead of scattered pieces. To remember and reclaim something you lost along the way and see where it may fit now.

I’d love to see what you find. Bring it to the roundtable on July 23rd.

Register Here

Next Tuesday, we go looking for your North Star.

Don’t burn down the ships… call in the fleet.

— Donna

This roadmap is the map for all of it — one place to see how the pieces fit, so you’re never wondering what’s coming or where something lives.

One thing I’d like to name up front: I’m not a coach, and this isn’t coaching. I’m a strategist, and the lens I bring is different. I listen first — in four directions, before anything gets built — and then turn what surfaces into content that supports your thought leadership and speaks directly to the specific audience you’re trying to reach, so they can find you when they are seeking the solution you provide.

Many of the women I work with are coaches themselves, and some of this territory overlaps with tools you already use with your own clients. But this is an invitation to look through a different lens and to look at your own work. Pointed at intentionally growing your visibility and audience. Letting go of random acts of marketing forever. It’s different. Give it a try.

What’s in the Summer Series

Each Tuesday, through September 8th, you’ll get three things that work together:

• A new article exploring one part of the Tried & New + Found & Known framework and the Sustainable Rhythm barometers.

• A livestream where we walk through the week’s topic, tease out patterns, and make space for questions.

• A guided exercise in the workbook that turns the idea into something you can apply directly to your own business — one focused prompt, not a homework assignment.

Underneath all of it is one practice you can start right now, before you read anything else: four-way listening — to yourself, your audience, your ecosystem, and your tools. It’s not an article of its own. It sits below every part of the work, the same instinct that produced the barometers below, and the actual mechanism behind the strategist lens I described above — the order matters, and listening in all four directions is the first thing I do… before anything gets built or said.

Over 10 weeks, we move from rhythm and architecture (Inner Work) into North Star and values, content curation, and audience narrative — then into search and AI, relationship-based visibility, and finally the flywheel that connects everything (Outer Work).

Where to Find Everything

Summer Series Landing Page (Substack) — home base.

• Links to all 10 articles — the livestreams on Substack are scheduled, you can add them to your calendar, and after the event, I will add the article to the same page and update the link on the landing page.

• The Sustainable Rhythm Workbook

• Roundtable registration — replays will be added here too.

• This article will also reside there.

Workbook — a working companion, not a handout. The workbook is a downloadable Google Doc you can print or work online. Each article gets one focused exercise and a “Barometers in Play” note.

Roundtables — three 90-minute live working sessions, not webinars. Do the work each week, then come prepared with your exercises, friction points, and questions.

You can move at your own pace. Following the weekly cadence gives you the clearest experience of Sustainable Rhythm actually in practice, rather than in theory.

Visit the Landing Page for Links

The Methodology: Tried & New + Found & Known

Tried & New is where Sustainable Rhythm starts, every time.

Tried is the audit. You look at what you already have — content, assets, offers, relationships — and make deliberate decisions about what stays, what’s redesigned, what’s released. It’s remembering and reclaiming what you’ve already built, instead of creating on top of an unexamined foundation.

New is what you build after the audit. You turn what stays into a living library you can return to, and you fill the specific gaps you find. New isn’t always content — sometimes it’s a tool, a relationship, a reframe.

Together, Tried & New becomes the living library of your earned wisdom, so you stop starting from scratch and work from something that already sounds like you — because it is you.

Found is how people actually discover you — content strategy, search, answer engines, the technical layer that makes you easy or hard to find. When Tried & New comes first, Found stops being about gaming an algorithm and becomes about making sure the right people can find work that’s already worth finding.

Known is how people remember you over time — PR, podcasts, speaking, relationship-based media. It’s visibility built on a real foundation, so it holds instead of needing to be rebuilt every time a platform changes.

The order — Tried & New + Found & Known, Inner Work before Outer Work — is what holds everything together. It’s not a suggestion. It’s the architecture underneath Sustainable Rhythm, and it’s the same order leadership actually happens in: you first, then what you build, then how it reaches people.

The Sustainable Rhythm Barometers

I didn’t design these six barometers ahead of time. I’d been using versions of them for years without naming them — they surfaced while I was building the workbook, remembered and reclaimed rather than invented. That’s proof of the method, not a footnote to it.

The Six Barometers

• Rhythm — Can your body, life, and business actually hold this, and is it sustainable in this season?

• Architecture — Does this have a clear place in Tried & New + Found & Known, or is scaffolding being added without a foundation?

• North Star & Values — Does this move you toward the future you’ve named, and honor the values you’ve committed to in practice?

• Opportunity — Stop and go all in, stay with the plan, or find a hybrid that protects both rhythm and potential?

• Audience — Is this where your people already are? Does your content speak to them? In language they can actually hear and trust?

• Listening — Has listening happened first — conversations, analytics, search, quiet observation — before deciding on direction, content, or offers?

What to Expect as You Work Through It

This isn’t about starting over or reinventing yourself. It’s about gathering the wisdom and assets you already have, clarifying the story at the center of your work, and building visibility systems that feel like you and can actually be held by your body, life, and business.

The early weeks help you see everything on your plate, understand the Tried & New + Found & Known architecture, and name the North Star and the values that will guide your decisions from here. Mid-series, we turn to content as a mixtape, the “LLM of YOU,” and audience narrative. Later weeks move outward into search and AI, relationship-based visibility, and a flywheel that keeps turning and evolving long after the summer ends.

Ways to Work Together

The Summer Series offers plenty for free. But for those who want more, here are four ways to go deeper — the Visibility Matrix and Strategic Partnership are also built as a ladder, where your investment credits forward if you go deeper within 6 months.

1. Founding Member tier on Substack (The Intentional Visibility Project) — evolving training materials, deeper breakdowns of the methodology, templates and examples, and ongoing support as you build your own system. This is also where the Substack Glow-up lives, if your publication itself needs its foundation rebuilt.

2. Visibility Hour — a focused, one-off strategy session if you’ve got one specific question you want real clarity on.

3. The Visibility Matrix Fast-Trak — this is the strategy. A new way to do the work of the Visibility Matrix: a concentrated, one-day version for building your complete positioning and story architecture, at special summer-only pricing. Best if you already know you want the full strategy done and you’d rather move through it in one focused day.

4. Strategic Partnership — for women who want ongoing support implementing the strategy, not just building it. Monthly sessions, implementation support between them, and access to my network of podcast, media, and partnership introductions.

If you’re not sure which path is right, start with the series and the workbook, and join a roundtable. Notice where you get stuck, or where you want more nuance — that’s usually the signal for which kind of support will actually serve you. You can learn more on my services page.

Still have questions? Let’s chat.

You’re not starting over. You’re standing on everything you’ve already built. This roadmap is just here to keep you on the road.

Visit the Landing Page for Links

I look forward to spending the summer together.

-Donna

She has decades of work behind her. A body of knowledge that is genuinely rare. A track record that speaks for itself — if you know where to look. She has built things, led things, survived things. She has shown up for everyone else for a very long time.

And she is not as known as she should be.

Not because the work isn’t there. It’s because the way visibility gets sold to her — hustle harder, chase the algorithm, post more, “be seen” — was never built for someone like her. She is not at the beginning. She is holding a hard-earned library of wisdom: her stories, her wins, her relationships, and what she once thought were her failures.

The demand to create more was never the requirement. What she needed was someone to help her see that she already has what she needs. A name for it. A system sustainable enough to let the right people find her — without burning down the ships to do it.

That woman is who I built all of this for.

She is also me.

My Chaotic Heart and the Barometer it Gave Me

I didn’t set out to build a framework. I set out to survive.

I launched the first version of my virtual business in 2006 with no blueprint to follow, leaving a secure job to be a more present solo parent. For years, I built based on what clients needed, not what I wanted — I was the fixer, holding together clients, campaigns, and a household the same way I’d been holding things together since I was five.

That system worked. It built a successful agency. It also cost me.

Seven years ago, I was diagnosed with AFib. Four ablations. Multiple medications. Lifestyle changes. Nothing held.

Three and a half years ago, I finally listened to my body that was screaming at me to stop pushing. It was no longer a choice. I had to start asking different questions:

• What pace can my body actually hold?

• What can my clients sustainably implement?

• What would it look like to build systems that honor wisdom and wellbeing, instead of one at the expense of the other?

That’s when sustainable rhythm stopped being a phrase and became my barometer.

Before I say yes to a new offer, platform, collaboration, or way of working, I ask two things: Is this in rhythm with everything else? Is this sustainable with everything else?

If the answer is no, I redesign it or let it go.

Intentionality isn’t a marketing concept. It’s load-bearing. When the system finally fit the life carrying it, everything began to move together.

My Body Found Sustainable Rhythm

Seven weeks ago I started Zepbound, a medication that helped me stabilize my weight and metabolic health. Three weeks in, my electrophysiologist sent me a report from my internal heart monitor. It showed three months of AFib episodes almost daily. After May 22nd — almost none. This was confirmed again with another graph for the month of June. Very little AFib.

I started this Substack three and a half years ago to share my personal essays, and called it Cadence: One Woman’s Story of Sustainable Rhythm. I wrote a few essays and stopped. I wasn’t ready. The publication sat dormant until last March, when I rebranded and relaunched as The Intentional Visibility Project, where I’m sharing content about my intentional visibility work, livestreaming the Real 50 over 50 interviews, and will be adding more personal essays.

Now I understand why that original title was right, but it was not the entire story. They all now live side by side, sustainably, in this publication.

What Sustainable Rhythm Actually Is

Sustainable Rhythm is both a barometer and an operating system, personally and professionally.

As a barometer: it’s the question you ask before you say yes — to a strategy, a platform, an offer, a collaboration. Not “is this a good idea?” but “is this in rhythm with everything else I’m carrying, and can I sustain it?”

As an operating system: it’s the framework that sits underneath everything in this series. It has four interconnected parts — Tried & New + Found & Known — and they only work when they’re built in that order.

This isn’t a productivity system. It’s not about doing more. It’s about building something that holds its shape without you holding it together — so the work you’ve spent years earning can finally reach the people it’s meant for.

From Marketing to Leadership and Legacy

Most of the women I work with don’t want to market. They want to lead.

When visibility is reframed as leadership rather than marketing, it makes sense to them. The work becomes clarity of thought, standards made visible, your work in the world actively connecting with the people you want to know.

Marketing is the side hustle to leadership. It’s always been the smaller, noisier cousin of the real work — knowing what you stand for and building something that lets people find you without shouting, building complicated funnels, or throwing money at ads.

By the time you’re over 50, you’ve earned the right to be discerning. To say no. To build on what’s true for you specifically, and no one else. This is when you choose the work that matters, who it’s for, what you’re leaving behind, and the legacy you want your work to carry.

Sustainable Rhythm is the barometer we’ll use to make those decisions.

Why This Methodology is Complete Now — and Why the Order Matters

Six months ago, I fed 15 years of my own content into AI tools and worked with my AI thought partner, Miranda, to look at what was really there: LinkedIn articles, Real 50 Over 50 interviews, wisdom panels, client projects. The methodology I’d been building for years finally snapped together.

But I only named part of it.

I was deep in the inner work — figuring out how AI and Substack fit, moving through my own evolution — and I included them in the 8-article series covering the arc of my methodology. Yet, I didn’t name them or build them into the version of the business I was actively creating. They’d been part of my work for 15 years. Reflecting back, I see now that they were still brewing.

The pattern I’ve guided clients away from for a long time is skipping the inner work and the technical work to rush into building content before they understand what they have. Then jumping into PR before they had a solid foundation that speaks for itself. Reaching for visibility before they were ready to be found — and then stopping, quietly, when they realized something wasn’t holding. It usually shows up as fear or some flavor of imposter syndrome.

Completing this methodology stops the cycle of random and creates a flywheel.

This is not new or a rebrand… The work was always whole. I needed to live the proof of why the order matters before I could build it and teach it in this new iteration of my business.

The System: Tried & New + Found & Known

The four parts of Sustainable Rhythm work in sequence. And it’s not optional or negotiable.

Tried & New is where we start — always. And it’s actually two distinct moves.

Tried is the audit. You go through what you already have — content, assets, offers, relationships — and make deliberate decisions: what stays, what goes, what gets upcycled or recycled, what gets given away or sold. Most women have never done this. They’ve forgotten what they’ve achieved and keep creating on top of an unexamined foundation. This is an almost ritualistic process of remembering and reclaiming. This is the most rewarding work I do.

New is what comes after. You take what stays and build it into private libraries — in NotebookLM or similar tools — that you can return to again and again. And you fill the gaps you find. New doesn’t always mean content. It might mean a tool, a relationship, a service, a reframe. It’s always different, because the gaps are always yours specifically.

Together, Tried & New becomes the living library of your earned wisdom. You stop starting from scratch. You have a space that is entirely yours to create from, so it always sounds like you, because it is.

Found is how people actually discover you — content strategy, SEO, AEO, and the technical layer that quietly makes your work easy or impossible to find. Most people resist this part. It feels technical, unglamorous, and unsexy. But when you’ve done the inner work first — when you’re showing up with your purpose clear — it changes the dynamic entirely. You’re not gaming a system. You’re making sure the right people can find you when they are seeking what you have to offer. That is an entirely different way to start a relationship.

Known is how people remember you over time — PR, podcasts, speaking, interviews, panels, relationship-based media. This is what most women want to rush to. And it’s where most people quietly stop, because they arrive here without a foundation and don’t understand why it isn’t working.

The order isn’t a suggestion. It’s what holds it all together.

These four layers form the architecture that sits underneath Sustainable Rhythm. It’s so much more than a content calendar or funnel. This foundation is built on what you chose to bring with you into your next act. They are often things that don’t change.

Your content becomes an introduction to who you actually are, what you’ve already accomplished, and speaks directly to the audience you’re meant to serve — that holds the weight of the business as it grows, regardless of the rapid pace of change.

Start Here: Four-Way Listening

Before we get into values, north star, content, and tech, here’s one way to get going. This work is a practice. Let’s get you started right away.

1. Listen to yourself. What do you already know, already believe, already keep coming back to? Most of us have never stopped long enough to ask.

2. Listen to your audience. Not demographics — a heartbeat. What they actually value, what touches them, what they’re already saying in their own words and in their actions.

3. Listen to the people and companies in your ecosystem. Hosts, media, collaborators, rooms you want to be in. What they care about, need, and talk about.

4. Listen to your tools. AI included. Not to replace your thinking — to sharpen it, surface patterns in it, and hand it back to you clearer.

This is the operating system underneath everything we’ll do this summer. The more you listen in these four directions, the more each piece of this series will land where it needs to.

What’s Coming this Summer

Starting today, I’m going live on Substack and publishing an accompanying article at 10am ET every Tuesday through September 8. Each article goes deep into a different part of the methodology, in order, because the order matters. The entire series is on Substack. It’s free, permanent, and built to be used.

Phase 1 — Inner Work

• Article 2: The Architecture of Visibility: Building a Foundation That Lasts (July 14)

• Article 3: Finding Your North Star & Core Values (July 21)

• Article 4: Discerning Content Curation & What’s Tried & New (July 28)

• Article 5: Your Content Is the Mixtape of Your Wisdom (August 4)

• Article 6: The Paradox of Wisdom, AI, and the “LLM of YOU” (August 11)

Phase 2 — Outer Work

• Article 7: You Are NOT the Hero… It’s All About Your Audience (August 18)

• Article 8: Found – AI/SEO/AEO Content, Search & Tech (August 25)

• Article 9: Known – The Human Connection (September 1)

• Article 10: Connecting the Dots (September 8)

Alongside the series, three live 90-minute roundtables where we have actual conversations, not webinars. You’ll learn how you can apply this to your own content, offers, and platforms.

• Roundtable 1 — July 23 at 1pm ET

• Roundtable 2 — August 20 at 1pm ET

• Roundtable 3 — September 10 at 1pm ET

For women who want more, there are different doors into the same system: a focused Visibility Hour, a one-day Fast-Trak Visibility Matrix, longer-term strategic partnerships, and the Founding Member tier where the ongoing learning and community live.

You’ve spent a lifetime building your fleet — stories, skills, relationships, wisdom. Sustainable Rhythm is the barometer that will help you decide where those ships are headed next and make sure the journey is one your heart can hold.

Visit the Series Home Pagw

If you want a place to work through this week by week, there’s a simple Sustainable Rhythm workbook and a series home page on Substack with links to the livestreams, roundtables, chat, and a way to explore working together beyond the series.

Next Tuesday, we start with the architecture.

For now, start listening.

-Donna

This Summer Series is your guided tour through Sustainable Rhythm—the framework I use to keep visibility aligned, consistent, and human. Across ten weeks, we’ll explore the inner work that shapes your stories and the outer work that helps the right people find them. Use this page as your home base for dates, replays, and resources.

With Substack, there i…

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She has decades of work behind her. A body of knowledge that is genuinely rare. She has built things, led things, survived things. She has shown up for everyone else for a very long time.

And she is not as known as she should be.

She knows something is missing, but she can't quite name it. She's tried the visibility tactics…

Read more

A few months ago, I took the transcripts of 145 interviews and 18 wisdom panels with women from The Real 50 over 50, the livestream show I’ve hosted for over three years. I uploaded them as sources in Google NotebookLM and st…

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Watch the Replay above. Here is a small clip

Overview

That’s how Kathy works. She listens for what wants to happen, then she holds space for it to unfold. Her pre-writing process — she calls it “capturing those pivotal moments” — is intentionally messy. A loose outline that gets rearranged, moved, questioned, surrendered to. Because she believes most books arrive as a job from the universe, and your only real task once you say yes is to ask: what really wants to be said here?

One of the things she does with every new client is ask them to share what got edited out. Not what an editor cut — what they cut themselves, out of fear of how it would land. That moment always brings a little wistfulness. And that, Kathy says, is exactly where the juice is. The self-edited parts are almost always where the real connection lives. She laughs with her clients, cries with them, polishes with them — and then they present. She calls it reverence. She calls it surrender. It’s a sacred process, and she means that without a trace of performance.

Her clients range from Olympic athletes to thought leaders in private equity and healthcare to a children’s book author now coaching girls into golf through First Tee. One client, John DeGregory, rode the Transamerica bike trail — and in his story of resilience and epiphanies on the road, Kathy already sees a screenplay. Another is Jake Sloan, an 80-year-old who was part of the original 21ers at Mare Island, a group that spearheaded a civil rights action around labor injustices. Kathy is working with screenwriting mentors to get that story to the screen because, as she put it: it’s a story that should not be forgotten. Then there’s the project she’s ghostwriting now — a book where nature itself is a character. The author is learning what he needs from allowing the land to tell him things. Surrendering to what the land wants to teach. It’s the same philosophy Kathy brings to everything.

And in her own work. The Whispered Teachings of Grandmother Trout — touted as the feminine version of A River Runs Through It — is being retitled Laguna Madre and reimagined for the screen. She started writing it when she owned a fly fishing lodge in the lower Laguna Madre. The bones of the story were always there. But when she pulled it out to begin adapting it as a screenplay, she realized something had been left on the table — material she wasn’t ready to go into the first time around. One evening, glass of wine on the balcony, she was thinking about Taylor Sheridan’s The Madison and suddenly saw it: the title was too long, too literary, too much of who she was then. The new title landed after weeks of sitting with it, and with it came a fuller version of the story — and a clearer picture of who she’s become. The woman who spent decades helping others be visible was finally ready to be seen herself.

Her Wisdom Bomb at the close said it all:

"If you hear a story that wants to be given voice to, honor that. Trust it. You don't need to know where it's going. Maybe it's just something you need to put down for yourself. But I think we need to trust that more and bring our stories out — whether it's for a big audience or our kids."

Highlights

How the literary midwife was born
Kathy began her career in magazine and book publishing, identifying as a writer. But every time she introduced herself, people responded the same way: “I’ve always wanted to be a writer.” After hearing it enough times, she recognized the pattern for what it was — a direction. She started coaching writers, pre-internet, when it was purely about the story. Over 30 years, that evolved into the full journey: from idea to manuscript to marketing to the life a book takes on once it’s in the world.

The projects that have her completely lit up right now
Kathy is working on three projects she describes as everything she’s worked toward. A man who rode the Transamerica bike trail — resilience and epiphanies on the road, a story she sees heading to screen. An 80-year-old civil rights figure whose story of labor justice at Mare Island she believes should not be forgotten. And a collaboration where nature is a character — a book about surrendering to what the land wants to teach you. Each one is a different expression of the same thing she’s always believed: that stories arrive as assignments, and our job is to be ready.

Kathy Says…

About Kathy

In my early childhood, I knew I wanted to be a writer.

I read voraciously and penned stories but never shared them with others. When I was entering high school, I was told by my guidance counselor that I’d never be a writer.

Luckily, my soul’s voice was much louder than his, and I began to write. Initially, I wrote personal essays, and one submission led me to a long-term gig, writing personality profiles for a community newspaper. Since I lived in Upstate New York, not too far from New York City or the Berkshires in Massachusetts, I was able to capture the stories of many artists, writers, and musicians.

One rainy Sunday afternoon, I sipped tea with Kermit Love, the creator of Sesame Street’s Snuffleupagus and Oscar the Grouch. Another time, I sat in the storeroom of one of The Body Shop stores, interviewing the Founder Anita Roddick. Soon after, I met New Age music pioneer, Stephen Halpern and later penned a story about his music journey.

Over time and with many other publications, my responsibilities grew from freelance writer, to contributing editor, to managing editor. Then the world of book publishing opened up to me, and I began working with a number of publishing houses, including the For Dummies publisher and Masters Press in Indianapolis.

My work has been celebrated by my colleagues, and I’ve received several awards for my non-fiction writing and my poetry, including:

• Gallery ‘05 Student Literary Arts Journal, Second place for my poem, “So This is the Arroyo.”

• Valley Byliner’s Contest, First place, nonfiction, “Black Drum Speaks.”

• Society of Professional Journalists Best in Indiana Journalism, Second place for profile on Margot Adler.

• Combined Health Appeal Award, Coverage of health topics, The Bristol Press.

As my portfolio grew, so did the number of people who knew about my work. I often heard the remark, “I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but never knew how to begin.”

That’s when I began coaching private clients in crafting their stories.

I’ve been blessed to work with a number of aspiring authors, guiding them through the writing process to bring their vision alive. After I completed my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from the University of Texas Pan American (now Rio Grande Valley), I was hired to teach in UTPA’s First-Year Writing Program.

I’m currently teaching at National University, Pikes Peak Community College, and Southern New Hampshire University, teaching first-year composition classes and also marketing for aspiring writers.

Connect with Kathy

• kathysparrow.com + stankyandcece.com + Kathy’s Substack

• Kathy’s Real 50 over 50 Spotlight Page

Have a question for Kathy? Drop it in the comments — I’ll make sure she sees it. And come back next Wednesday at noon ET, we have interviews booked months in advance. Or catch the replays.

The Intentional Visibility Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

A woman with 20, 30, or 40 years of work behind her. Interviews, talks, articles, client work, projects, books, programs. A lifetime of substance that isn’t fully showing up in her thought leadership.

Because it lives in pieces.

Some of it is in her head. Some of it is scattered across platforms. Some of it…

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Enter Brad Walsh. Podcast Producer, Photographer, Author, Speaker, Host of the EMPOWEROGRAPHY Podcast Featuring the Stories of Over 800 Women.

Watch the Replay above. Here is a small clip

Overview

Raised by a single mom and his grandmother, Brad grew up surrounded by strong women, and that early world shaped everything that came after. He built a career as a women’s empowerment photographer, creating spaces where his clients could feel safe enough to be truly seen. When the pandemic paused those in-person sessions, those conversations found a new home: a podcast called Empowerography, now closing in on 800 episodes and ranked in the top 1.5% of shows globally. Brad is also an international bestselling author, speaker, and soul empowerment guide, and he’s currently building a platform, book, and TEDx talk around allyship.

Brad shared that he has been transformed by the work itself. He talks about being invited into the passenger seat of someone’s story — trusted to witness it, never to drive it — and about how interviewing hundreds of women has changed how he shows up as a husband, a father, and a man. We talk about the weight hosts carry after a hard conversation, what it really takes to build trust before the mic even turns on, and why “fixing women” has never been the answer.

This conversation is about allyship in practice, not as a destination you arrive at, but as something you choose every day. Brad brings a perspective that’s rare: a man who has spent years listening, actively listening, to women tell their stories, and the impact this has had on his life and his work. I think you’re going to love this one.

Brad’s Wisdom Bomb at the close said it all:

"We have to be in and of a service mindset to people in business and in life... it's the three C's, connection, collaboration, and community... that being in and of service mindset is part of the key to that. I wholeheartedly believe that. That's part of why we're all here."

Highlights

The discovery call before the interview
Brad explains that trust and connection are built before the mic ever turns on — through the discovery call, the rapport-building, knowing the guest came through someone in his community — so that by the time of recording, "there's really no armor that's up.”

The passenger seat
Brad describes what it’s like to be trusted with someone’s story, not as the driver, but as someone invited along for the ride. It’s a beautiful reframe of what it means to be a good listener, and a good guest in someone else’s life.

Why allyship can’t just be women talking to women
Brad makes the case that conversations about allyship need men in the room — not as an afterthought, but as essential participants — and shares the HERE method he’s developed for heart-led listening: hold space, empathize without ego, ask questions, respond with presence.

Brad Says…

About Brad

Brad Walsh is a podcast host/producer, photographer, story doula, and a published #1 International Best-Selling Author and an International Speaker who found himself wanting to inspire others during the pandemic. He birthed the idea of EMPOWEROGRAPHY, a Top 1.5% Globally Rated Podcast, a platform that highlights 800+ strong, inspirational, dynamic women who share their stories of success, triumph, resiliency, and transformation.

Brad is building a platform, a book, and a TEDx talk around allyship — what he learned from those 800+ conversations with women and how he thought allyship was a destination when it's actually a practice. Not one-and-done, but something you do every damn day. It's a lifelong commitment

Brad is building this platform to teach other men how to show up for the women in their personal and professional lives, not because he has figured it all out. Because he is committed to continuing to listen and learn.

Connect with Brad

• EMPOWEROGRAPHY Podcast

• Brad’s Substack

• Brad’s Real 50 over 50 Spotlight Page

Have a question for Brad? Drop it in the comments — I’ll make sure he sees it. And come back next Wednesday at noon ET, we have interviews booked months in advance. Or catch the replays.

The Intentional Visibility Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Watch the Replay above. Here is a small clip

Overview

Janine is an award‑winning, 3x entrepreneur and nationally recognized expert on ageism and age inclusion who has spent decades helping organizations rethink how they see older workers and intergenerational teams. In this Real 50 over 50 conversation, she shares why her new project, Build Your Own Boat, is all about telling the stories of women who start entrepreneurial ventures in midlife and beyond.

The origin story is both simple and revealing: Janine asked five AI image tools for “an entrepreneur in a coffee shop,” and every result was a young guy in a hoodie with a laptop. When she told that story at a women’s conference and said out loud that she was going to tell the stories of women building their own ventures later in life, she spent the next two days hearing stories shared by women saying, “that’s me.” From there, she asked who wanted to share their story in a LinkedIn post and quickly had a list of 40 women to interview whose careers range from nonprofits to tech and AI, and they put aside the fear and the naysayers and build their own boat anyway.

Janine is candid about money and value: why so many women underprice, say yes to “exposure,” and believe they need one more credential before they begin. She shares the story of a small business she started years ago around recycled cashmere wall hangings and blankets—she loved the craft of creating, and they sold out, but it was clear that it was ’t paying the mortgage and couldn’t realistically support her financially. That experience became a barometer of sorts about how to think about the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, and what the market will actually pay for.

We also talk about time and boundaries. Janine references Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and the idea that if you live to about 80, you only get roughly 4,000 weeks in your lifetime. She describes sitting down, calculating how many weeks she might have left, and using that number to get much clearer about what she will and won’t do. That clarity also shows up in the stories shared by guests in Build Your Own Boat. It’s a big part of the message she wants women to hear: you have less time than you think, and more agency than you’ve been told.

At the end, we touch on how closely our work mirrors each other—her “build your own boat” and my “don’t burn down the ships, call in the fleet,” as well as the StrengthsFinder themes we share, including futuristic and activator. It’s a conversation about the importance of sharing our stories. There is someone out there waiting and wondering if they can build their own boat. I say YES!

Her Wisdom Bomb at the close said it all:

“To be truly radical is to make hope possible instead of despair convincing.” — Raymond Williams, a line Janine tries to live by every day.

Highlights

How we stop “starting over” at 50+
Janine names the quiet panic so many women feel after a layoff, merger, or career pivot—and how often they don’t see the wide range of skills and relationships they already have. She talks about what changes when you stop treating midlife as starting from zero and instead build from everything you’ve done.

The anti‑bucket list and saying “no” on purpose
We get into the practical side of boundaries: making a list of what you never want to do again and refusing to design a business that requires those things. Janine shares how that practice, combined with her “weeks left” math, changed how she chooses projects and clients.

Stories from the fleet
Beyond the “AI entrepreneur in a hoodie” moment, Janine shares stories of women across industries—nonprofit leaders, tech and AI founders, consultants—who decided to build their own boats. Listen for how they pull past experience forward, find their pricing courage, and model what’s possible for the woman sitting at her kitchen table wondering “could I do this?”

Janine Says…

About Janine

A 3x entrepreneur, Janine Vanderburg is a nationally recognized expert on ageism and age inclusion. She is the CEO of Encore Roadmap, which helps professionals turn their experience, insights, and connections into consulting practices and helps companies leverage the benefits of older workers and intergenerational teams. She is the host of Build Your Own Boat, a podcast series featuring the stories and advice of women who have started new entrepreneurial ventures in midlife and beyond.

Janine’s work has earned numerous awards, including the Colorado Women’s Chamber of Commerce’s Top 25 Powerful Women in Business and the American Society on Aging’s 2024 Award for Success in Diminishing Ageism.

Connect with Janine

• Janine’s Website: Encore Roadmap

• Build Your Own Boat Podcast

• Build Your Own Boat on Substack

• Connect with Janine on LinkedIn

• Janine’s Real 50 over 50 Spotlight Page

Have a question for Janine? Drop it in the comments — I’ll make sure she sees it. And come back next Wednesday at noon ET, we have interviews booked months in advance. Or catch the replays.

The lineup for June is here, and I’m really excited about each one.

Here are a few re…

Read more

Watch the Replay above. Here is a small clip

Overview

Wanda came up through over two decades in corporate — Verizon, the full plan-your-whole-life-there path — and when that chapter unexpectedly ended, she tripped into something she didn’t know she was built for. She became a health coach, and as she was trying to build a business, the skills she acquired in her “real job” started creeping in. She realized that she was spending an increasing amount of time helping her new friends and colleagues sort out the back-end chaos of their businesses. Turns out, operations and data aren’t just skills she has — it’s what she does, and it’s needed.

But that does not mean that health coaching certification went to waste… Wanda builds well-being into her strategy. What she’s actually doing when she works with a client. She’s listening to what you really want and need. She’s not coming in to tell you that you did something wrong. Instead, she’s coming in to show you what you already built, and what comes next. The distinction matters. So does the way she holds the evidence, all the while, Wanda tracks the little wins her clients don’t always notice, and makes space for things to evolve with kindness, humanity, and a bit of snark to keep you laughing.

We talked about AI, about tool overload, about the trap of thinking you need everything IBM is using, and about that moment when your nervous system finally catches up to the progress you’ve made. There’s a lot in this one. If you’re a service-based founder running on full throttle and wondering why it still doesn’t feel like enough, this conversation was made for you.

Her Wisdom Bomb at the close said it all:

“It’s okay to change your mind. Some people are so committed to the decision that they made that they just keep making a bad decision over and over again. Don’t wait for me to come and say, are you ready yet? It’s time.”

— Wanda Cox

Highlights

1. “Growth that costs you your health isn’t growth — it’s just a slower version of breaking down”

   This is not a tagline for Wanda — it shapes everything she does with clients. She’s not interested in building businesses that technically work but quietly hollow out the people running them. The goal she sets with every new client isn’t just operational — it’s about what kind of life they actually want. And when the click finally happens, when the systems are working and the business can support rather than consume you, she’s there with notes to prove it happened.

2. Why your success metric might be the thing holding you back

   When I asked Wanda what she sees most often when she starts working with a new client, her answer was direct: the number of hours you worked last week is not a measure of success. The outcome is. So many established founders are working incredibly hard — just on the wrong things. Wanda walks through how she starts that conversation without making it feel like criticism, and why she genuinely admires the hustle that got her clients where they are.

3. The “skunk at the picnic” — and why Wanda wouldn’t have it any other way Wanda has a name for the role she plays when she walks into a client’s business: the skunk at the picnic. Everyone’s dressed up, lunch is ready, the mood is good — and she’s the one who has to ask whether the turkey sandwich is really what they meant to order when they said they wanted pizza. It’s not a comfortable moment, but it’s the whole job. She’s not there to validate what’s already happening — she’s there to make sure what’s happening actually matches what the client said they wanted.

Wanda Says…

About Wanda

I’m Wanda Cox, a Fractional Director of Operations and Data Advisor. I help service-based founders turn chaos into calm through clean systems, clear metrics, and sustainable growth that doesn’t require sacrificing health, energy, or humanity. I’m known for practical clarity, a warm pep talk when you need it, and just enough sarcasm to keep it real.

I build operational and data foundations that make growth sustainable with workflows, decision dashboards, and team responsibilities that match real capacity. I do it because I believe success shouldn’t come at the expense of your well-being. I’m especially passionate about helping women build healthy businesses and healthy bodies. By “healthy,” I mean overall well-being and self-trust, not any particular size or aesthetic.

Five Little-Known Facts About Me

1. The year I was born, I was the first baby of the year in my city. Care to guess my birthday?

2. My top three values are Service, Peace, and Humor.

3. I have visited eleven of the Major League Baseball parks. It is my intention to visit all of them.

4. My cat Rosie is the boss of my household. And she knows it!

5. Much to the surprise of this city girl, I have fallen in love with camping. Well, some people might call it glamping! This cabin is my friend Maurice.

Connect with Wanda

• Wanda’s website

• Wanda’s Real 50 over 50 Spotlight Page

Have a question for Wanda? Drop it in the comments — I’ll make sure she sees it. And come back next Wednesday at noon ET, we have interviews booked months in advance. Or catch the replays.

The Intentional Visibility Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Watch the Replay above. Here is a small clip

Overview

Erin left corporate in the middle of leading a massive bank acquisition — migrating clients and people over a single weekend — crossed over to a new company, and very quickly realized: what matters to me more than anything is people and culture. She woke up one morning and decided to certify as a coach. She did it during what she describes as the shittiest year of her life. Her daughter was diagnosed with cancer in 2024, her world was falling apart, and she built ERA Collective anyway. Not in spite of all that, but in some ways, because of it. Building the business gave her a glimmer forward when she couldn’t bear to look too far ahead. And her daughter? Healthy, gorgeous, amazing, heading to university. We’re all good.

What Erin has built in ERA Collective is grounded in something deceptively simple: culture is just actions and words being the same. She spent 25 years inside major financial institutions watching what happens when they’re not — and what becomes possible when they are. She works with mid to senior leaders, particularly women, on becoming more visible, more influential, and more themselves. She also coaches women returning from parental leave, which is a gap in how organizations treat people that she’s been quietly working to close for years. Her take: if you want to get that high-potential woman back up and running, give her a coach. The ROI is not complicated.

We also went deep on AI, specifically, what happens when wisdom meets AI. Erin is a Claude devotee and makes no apologies for it. Her argument is clear and worth sitting with: put me up against a 35-year-old and let’s see whose prompt does more. My prompt is bringing 25 years into this tool. That’s not competition. That’s a different league. She’s also started coaching her own 20-year-old daughter on this, telling her that if she’s not over-caffeinated from networking by the end of the week and getting sticky with people who’ll remember her, the analyst work she’s doing now will be gone in 18 months. The work that won’t go away? Storytelling. Human connection. The things companies are paying up to $400,000 a year for because they don’t have enough people who can do it.

Her Wisdom Bomb at the close said it all:

“Learn to advocate for yourself… and be brave sooner.”

Erin Rogers

Highlights

1. Building a business in the hardest year of her life Erin didn’t build ERA Collective from a place of ease. She built it while her daughter was in cancer treatment, while her world was coming apart. She talks about why she did it anyway — not as inspiration, but as survival. The business gave her somewhere to look forward when the present was too scary to stay in. This is one of the most honest things I’ve heard anyone say on this platform about why they started.

2. Culture is not complicated — until it is Erin’s definition of culture cuts through a lot of noise: actions and words are the same. When they’re not, trust dissolves. Full stop. She walked through what that actually looks like in practice — building champion programs that deliberately recruit the naysayers, not the hand-raisers; creating safe environments for conflict; the difference between engagement and communication. If you’ve ever sat in a company where the strategy changes every six months and nobody believes anything leadership says, this conversation will feel very familiar.

3. Why women over 50 have an AI advantage — and most don’t know it yet Erin came into the AI conversation with a brilliant point of view: our experience doesn’t make us slower, it makes our prompts better. Twenty-five years of knowing what questions to ask, what matters, what doesn’t. That is what you bring into the tool. She talked about what it means to stop hiding your prime, stop apologizing for experience, and show up as someone who uses AI and knows how to make it work. This is where wisdom and technology meet, and for women at this stage, it is a genuine advantage.

Erin Says…

About Erin

Hi, I’m Erin Rogers—founder of Era Collective.

I’ve sat in the rooms my clients are trying to get into. Over 20 years, I’ve led high-performing teams, built marketing and sales strategies that drive real results, and served on executive teams at organizations like EY and HSBC. That experience changes how I coach — I know what it takes to get to the table, and what it takes to stay there.

The constant through every role has been people — helping them find clarity, confidence, and momentum. My most transformative era began when I became a mom. Motherhood reshaped how I lead — it deepened my emotional intelligence, taught me to fiercely prioritize what matters, and showed me what a truly balanced life looks like. That season of growth inspired how I now help others define their own best eras.

Whether I’m coaching a leader through a career pivot or helping a business align strategy and culture, my approach is thoughtful, collaborative, and rooted in real-world experience. And when the work calls for it, I bring in trusted partners from the Era Collective network — assembling the right team for each client and project.

If you’re ready for your next era, I’d love to help you get there.[add bio]

Connect with Erin

• Era Collective

• Erin’s Real 50 over 50 Spotlight Page

Have a question for Erin? Drop it in the comments — I’ll make sure she sees it. And come back next Wednesday at noon ET, we have interviews booked months in advance. Or catch the replays.

The Intentional Visibility Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

None of what I’m sharing below involves handing my voice to a machine. I co-write. I co-think. I stay in the driver’s seat. The tools I co-create with are Claude, Perplexity, and Google NotebookLM. Collectively, I call them Miranda. Each one does something different, and together they’ve become a real part of how I operate.

Here’s what I’ve been using them for lately.

The Find of the Week:
Real 50 Over 50 Post-Production

I LOVE hosting The Real 50 Over 50 interviews. I do NOT love post-production. It has always been where I drop the ball. I was inconsistent, and I knew I was leaving value on the table every time I didn’t follow through.

In April, I moved the live interviews from Facebook over to Substack, and something shifted. (Still livestreaming on LinkedIn and YouTube.) Substack makes the whole post-production side so clean that I was able to create a process that was manageable, one I would actually do.

I figured out what Substack provided after a livestream, and it’s seriously amazing. When you schedule the livestream, Substack creates a placeholder article page. You cannot edit or add anything to it until after the livestream is over. Then it asks, “Would you like video clips?” It creates the clips. It also creates images you can download and the opportunity to send a Note.

After I knew what I had to play with, I mapped out exactly what I wanted to happen after every interview: what to capture, what to write, how to structure it for the guest, for the archive, for anyone who finds it later. Then I brought that process to Claude.

We worked through it together. I brought the context, and Claude helped me shape it into something repeatable. Then we turned it into what’s called a “skill.” Essentially, a saved workflow that gets applied the same way every single time. Now I upload the transcript, which is available right on the livestream page, run the skill, and in a few minutes I have a full Substack post: a narrative summary in my voice, three highlights for readers to skim, two pull quotes from the guest, and a ready-to-publish draft.

To make this even better, Substack recently launched templates, and I created a template for these pages so they have the same look and feel every time.

The content is evergreen. I can use it. The guest can use it. Anyone who finds that interview six months from now gets the full story. Nothing is left on the table. We’re building an archive that actually works, not just a feed that disappears. From start to finish, this takes me about 30 minutes.

This is the foundation of something I have in the works… a campaign to amplify the voices of women we actually know, not just the women everyone already knows. More on that soon.

Here is a recent post-production page I created for my interview with Amy W. Vogel. And another with Beverley Glazer.

Other Ways I’ve Been Using AI

A few more things I reached out to Claude or Perplexity about. Each one took a fraction of the time it would have otherwise:

Researching new doctors — I’m transitioning between medical groups and need to understand my options and which group would work best with my insurance and specific medical needs. Claude helped me research groups, physicians, and think through the right questions to ask.

Finding grants for a client — Rather than hours of searching, I described the client’s work and got a focused list of relevant funding sources to investigate. I’m going to set this up as a skill and have them delivered to me monthly.

LinkedIn relationship mapping — I built a process for researching contacts and identifying where to actually focus relationship-building energy, instead of just scrolling and hoping.

The same thing on Substack — Who to follow, who to engage with, where the real conversations are happening in my space.

eBay selling strategy — Yes, really. Turns out AI is excellent at figuring out how to price, list, and move things you’ve been meaning to deal with for two years. I sold two wireless extenders that have been sitting in my closet for $180. I still have two watches listed that have not sold. I’m going to go back to Perplexity and see what I can do to increase interest.

Refining my messaging — I’m close. We’ve been going back and forth, and I can feel it coming together. This is what we co-wrote to describe the Founding Member tier of The Intentional Visibility Project on Substack — what do you think?

The Intentional Visibility Project is where three things converge:

• Decades of building systems, processes, and content that create real visibility and growth

• Three+ years of stories gathered through the Real 50 Over 50, a weekly livestream now approaching 200 interviews with women who have done extraordinary things; and

• The emerging potential of AI tools to help you work with what you already have instead of starting from scratch.

This is not a passive membership. The women who get the most from The Living Lab are the ones who show up, do the work, and are willing to rethink how they’ve been doing things. It will take time. Some of it will be harder than you expect. But it is significantly less work than everything you’ve been doing that isn’t working, on platforms that don’t really want you there. It will change how you operate for the next decade or more.

What you’re joining is still being built, intentionally, in public, with you. The guides, the workshops, the interviews, the connections, and the opportunities on this platform are growing. Founding Members are here at the beginning, which means you have a seat at the table as it takes shape.

If you’re ready to put your hands on the keyboard and build something that can carry you for the next 10 to 30 years, this is for you. If you’re looking for someone to do it for you, I can help with that too, but that’s a different conversation.

One More Thing: Claude Just Launched Something Worth Knowing About

Anthropic released Claude for Small Business this week. I haven’t dug into it fully yet — that’s on my list — but here’s the short version: it’s a set of ready-to-run workflows and connectors that plug Claude directly into tools like QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, and Google Workspace. No extra cost beyond what you’re already paying. It runs through Claude Cowork, their task-automation platform.

I'm super excited about this. Most AI tools go right for the enterprise crowd. We get overlooked, again. This feels like another reason to be a Claude fan.

I’ll report back once I’ve actually used it. In the meantime: anthropic.com/news/claude-for-small-business

A word of caution: don’t start automating your business without a clear process first. Build the process, then let the tool serve it.

Wrapping Up

That’s what’s been on my desk recently. Nothing here is fully automated, and nothing here replaced my thinking. AI made room for more of it.

There is also a lot happening in the world of AI + Google, I will be checking that out as well. Stay tuned.

If this sparks something for you, leave a comment or hit reply. I read and respond to everything.

More next week.

— Donna

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