0:00 – Intro: Angie welcomes Veronica Seaver, a woman she's known and admired for over a decade, back for Episode 9.

3:21 – Career Journey: Veronica traces her path from the restaurant industry at Hyatt to HR, to running her own nurseries, to becoming Elgin Chamber president. Every stop taught her the same skill: how to create buy-in.

8:55 – Choosing Honesty Over the Mask: Veronica gets real about faking her life for years and the moment she decided to just be honest with everyone, about everything. She talks about how dropping the mask disarms people and how much energy it gives back.

12:04 – 📚 Book Mentioned: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. This is the book that taught Veronica to love reading and showed her, as a kid, that she was creative. She's already planning a Narnia-themed event because of it.

16:16 – 📚 Book Mentioned: Hey Doll by Veronica Seaver (unpublished). Veronica wrote this after losing her mom and grandma to cancer within one week of each other, both diagnosed at the same time. She checked into a hotel the day her mom died and started writing. It sat untouched for eight years before she finally finished it, locked away in a hotel room by herself. Heartbreaking and funny in the same breath.

25:09 – Empowering Women Without Undermining Men: Veronica pushes back on the assumption that empowering women means being anti-men. Her mentors, her general manager, her ex-husband, have all been men who called things out of her. She wants to do for other women what men have done for her.

28:15 – Adjusting Her Business for a Tough Economy: Veronica talks candidly about how expensive everything's gotten and why she had to rethink her business model to stay sustainable.

32:21 – Introducing The Business Social: Veronica unveils her new event space in downtown Elgin, seats 70, walk-in ready, and open to the public for everything from business classes to baby showers. She's also planning a monthly community night with concepts like Pitch a Friend Singles Night and Hot Take Night.

37:11 – Where to Find Veronica: She shares where to follow her, mainly Facebook, with LinkedIn and her website sheisallthethings.com as backup.

Ep. 8 | Anne Grady: Evolvability, the Inner Critic, and Why Your Brain Would Rather Be Predictably Unhappy

What happens when the life you planned falls completely apart — and you end up more yourself than you ever would have been otherwise?

Anne Grady is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, and resilience expert who has spent two decades learning — the hard way — how to not just survive tough circumstances but actually grow through them. Her son Evan was born with autism, mental illness, and developmental delays, and navigating his world as a single mom became the unlikely foundation for everything she now teaches.

In this conversation, Anne and Angie cover a lot of ground: why uncertainty is neurologically threatening, the 15-second trick that rewires your brain, what it means to use your values as a decision filter when the choice feels impossible, and why your resume and your eulogy really shouldn't be the same thing.

Anne also unpacks her brand new book Evolvability — and the difference between resilience (surviving) and evolvability (actually growing forward).

This episode is packed with neuroscience that doesn't feel like neuroscience, real talk about mental health stigma, and more than a few lines you'll want to write down.

Books mentioned: 📚 Evolvability by Anne Grady 📚 Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff 📚 Anchored, Aligned, Accountable by Ayo Bethia 📚 Joyful Prayerful Thankful by Kevin Karschnik

Connect with Anne: Website: AnneGradyGroup.com Free adaptability assessment: evolvability.com Social: @AnneGradyGroup

Kathy Wetzel is a tech executive, long-time SIM leader, and one of those people who has quietly shaped rooms full of leaders for decades. Armed with both an accounting and computer science degree, her career took her from Honeywell to Great Clips to TASB, the Texas Association of School Board Services, with a few wild pivots in between.

This conversation is packed with real leadership wisdom. Kathy breaks down why change management is a people problem first and a technology problem second, why you need to stop chasing the naysayers and win the people in the middle, and why your HR person should be on your speed dial before you ever have a crisis.

She also talks about building a personal board of directors, succession planning as a leadership essential, and the books that kept showing up for her at every stage of life and career.

Books cited are Don't Sweat the Small Stuff to Crucial Conversations to Who Moved My Cheese,

She closes with a perspective on AI that is grounded and hopeful. She has watched every major tech cycle arrive and create more than it displaced. Her take on the jobs that do not exist yet is worth the listen alone.

This one is for every leader navigating change they did not sign up for.