I posted the above graphic last week. Fifteen lines of permission, one line of instruction. It did well. People shared it, saved it, sent it to friends.

Then I realized I had to sit with it and really think about how, not if, I was taking my own medicine.

When you have nothing, failure is free

I built The Breadwinners from nothing. No institutional backing, no media company behind me, no playbook. The first dinner could have been six people and awkward silence. The first podcast episode could have landed with the sound of one hand clapping. That would have been fine. When you’re starting from zero, the downside of failure is that you end up where you already are. Failure is free.

That freedom is the most underrated asset a beginner has. Every risk I took in year one, the nomination-only dinners, the refusal to define breadwinning as a salary figure, the decision to build community before product, I took because I had nothing to protect.

Then it worked.

The trap of having something to lose

Now there’s a brand. A community of thousands of women (and men!). A podcast heading into its second season. Sponsors, a Substack, a reputation. And I’ve noticed something ugly in myself: I hesitate more now than I did when I had no audience at all.

Behavioral economists have a name for part of this. Loss aversion, documented by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, shows that losses hurt roughly twice as much as equivalent gains feel good. Its cousin, the endowment effect, means we overvalue what we already hold simply because we hold it. The moment you build something, your brain quietly reclassifies every experiment as a potential loss. Same risk, same odds, completely different fear.

So the founder who launched with nothing to lose becomes the founder who’s afraid one public misstep will unravel the brand, the business, and her name. I know because that founder is me. And I know I’m not alone, because the women at our tables tell me the same thing in different words. The more you achieve, the more you have to lose, and the more you’re tempted to protect instead of play.

The Whips

Kelly Starrett posted something recently that was actually the inspiration for this piece. His wife Juliet sat at our Breadwinners dinner table, and their work at The Ready State is ostensibly about movement, but this post was about something bigger. Watching youth athletes compete, he noticed they’re afraid to make mistakes, and he pushed back: learning has to embrace mistakes. We should go after them. His example was an acrobat taking huge whips, falling hard, over and over, to land one skill.

Then he turned the lens on adults: most of us, he said, pretty much inoculate ourselves from failure. We don’t want to fail in our work. We don’t pick up new skills. We don’t try. And we definitely don’t fail publicly. His closing question: when’s the last time you were vulnerable enough to try something a hundred times, two hundred times, to make the one?

I read that and did the math on my own life. In year one of The Breadwinners, I was constantly taking whips. Cold outreach that went unanswered. Formats that flopped. Now? I catch myself editing a post four times before publishing, not to make it better, but to make it safer. I’ve been calling that high standards but it’s really fear masked as a good workflow.

Failure is the mechanism, not the obstacle

Here’s the reframe: failure shouldn’t just tolerable in human development. It’s the engine for growth.

Karen Adolph’s lab at NYU studied infants learning to walk and found that toddlers fall on the order of seventeen times per hour, and they keep going. No shame spiral, no brand audit, no post-mortem. Falling is the stepping stone (pun intended) to walking.

Carol Dweck’s decades of growth mindset research show that people who believe ability is developed, not fixed, treat mistakes as information. Neuroscientist Jason Moser took it further, finding that growth-minded brains show a larger neural response to errors, meaning they literally pay more attention to mistakes, which is exactly why they improve faster. Manu Kapur calls this “productive failure”: students who struggle and fail at problems before instruction end up with deeper, more durable understanding than students who are protected from the struggle.

And Amy Edmondson, who spent her career at Harvard studying failure in organizations, draws the line I needed to hear. There are intelligent failures, the ones that happen in new territory, in pursuit of a goal, at a survivable scale.

Our kids are watching

I was chatting with my dear friend Rita this week, and she said something I knew immediately belonged in this piece: “It’s so important to show our kids the importance of failure.” Show. Not tell. It’s about watching us miss, not telling them the story of it.

There’s research on exactly this. Kyla Haimovitz and Carol Dweck found that what shapes a kid’s mindset isn’t what their parents believe about intelligence. It’s how their parents react to failure. Kids can’t see your beliefs. They can see your face when something goes wrong. A parent who treats failure as damage, something to hide, something to fix fast and never mention, raises kids who conclude that ability is fixed and mistakes are verdicts. The lesson transfers through the reaction, not the lecture.

And a huge piece of this is what we do when the mistake is with them. When we get it wrong, when it comes to how we communicate with or treat our kids, we say I’m sorry. Out loud. And we make sure they can hear that the apology is real.

Fall, fail

Something kept happening with the graphic above I posted on social: people kept misreading it. More than a few told me they saw “it’s ok to fall in public” and got several lines deep before their brain corrected it.

The two words aren’t even related on paper, but our language gave up on keeping them separate a long time ago. We fall short. We fall flat. A business that fails, collapses. When someone fails big we say she took a fall, and when she recovers we say she picked herself up. Somewhere deep in how we talk, we already know these are the same event: you were upright, then you weren’t, and gravity was involved.

Which is exactly why the toddler research is so apropos. A toddler falling seventeen times an hour and a founder failing in public are doing the same thing. The only difference is the story attached. The toddler hasn’t learned there’s supposed to be one, and I’m no longer sure who has it right. So read the graphic however you want. It’s ok to fall in public. Same meaning.

So here is my whip

The Breadwinners exists because I believed high-achieving women deserved a place to tell the truth about what winning actually costs and what it actually means. Emotional richness. Legacy. Systemic change. Not just the number.

A platform built on that premise cannot be run by a founder who’s performing flawlessness. If I sand every edge off this brand to protect it, I will have protected it into irrelevance. The women at our tables didn’t come for polish. They came because someone finally said the unpolished thing out loud.

So this piece is me taking the whip in public. I’m afraid of failing now in a way I wasn’t when I started, and the fear itself is the signal that I’ve drifted from the thing that built this. The toddlers fall seventeen times an hour. The athletes take two hundred attempts to make one. The research is unambiguous: the people still learning are the people still failing, and falling.

It’s ok to fail in public. It’s ok to fail in public. It’s ok to fail in public. It’s important to fail in public.

As always, thanks for being here,

Alexis

We go deep on all of it, the emotional complexity of building a life worth living, in The Breadwinners community.

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Zanotti described her new product to me in a single breath. “Waay, a sparkling protein drink, ten grams of protein, 45 calories, zero grams of sugar”. When I pointed out she hadn’t inhaled, she said, “You got to get it out fast.”

That pace tells you a lot about her and I will tell you that my cheeks hurt from laughing so hard during our interview. Morgan was employee number two at Primal Kitchen. She and Mark Sisson grew it to $50 million in revenue, sold it to Kraft Heinz for $200 million three and a half years after launch, and she stayed on to run it for five more years. She was 32 weeks pregnant with her first son during the management presentations to sell the company. She had the baby on November 6th and signed on November 28th.

Now she’s doing it again at 41, with three boys under seven at home. This conversation covered a lot of ground, and a few things she said have changed how I’m thinking about my own work.

Here’s what I took from it.

Knowing too much is its own kind of risk

Morgan said something I keep coming back to: “Launching a business at 28 when you’re blissfully ignorant, you have no idea what you’re doing, is beautiful. Launching a business at 41 when you’re the sole provider for your family and you know way too much.”

The second time around is not easier. She knows the margins, the distribution math, the ways a beverage company dies. She raised money this time, which introduced a fear she never had at Primal: what if I lose someone else’s money? Experience gave her pattern recognition and a longer list of things to be afraid of.

Her counterweight came from a president at Kraft Heinz, after the acquisition, when she confessed she felt lost. He told her no one knows what they’re doing. Her version of it now: “Nobody knows what they’re doing. This is the secret of life.”

She still hasn’t thrown herself a launch party because part of her wonders if people would come. This is a woman who built a nine-figure brand. If she carries that doubt and builds anyway, the doubt was never the disqualifier we treat it as.

Count up, not down

Morgan’s case for Waay is really a case about how women have been taught to eat. “We just have generations of women who have walked around all day for decades thinking, how little can I eat?” First it was calories, then fat, then carbs, then fasting. Every message for forty years pointed the same direction: less.

Protein reverses the math. “Actually, ladies, we need you to get 100 grams of something. We actually need to count up.”

I’d never heard the protein trend framed that way, as the first mainstream nutrition message that asks women to add instead of subtract. She built a company on that reframe. I think it applies well beyond food. Most of us are still running a subtraction mindset somewhere in our lives, and it’s worth asking where.

Two out of three, on any given week

I asked Morgan about her system with her husband Adam. Her answer: “Show me someone whose system isn’t breaking down. They’re lying.”

She thinks of it as a rotation. Some weeks she’s crushing the mom thing and hasn’t seen her husband in four days. Some weeks work is firing, and school drop-off is late every single day. Her oldest son’s friend thinks they must live far from school, because why else would Ryker be late every morning? She told me the goal is not to fix that. “You just have to be okay with doing two well.”

Her tactical moves follow the same logic. She sleeps in the guest bedroom when she needs real sleep, because one kid comes into their bed every night and her husband can sleep through what she can’t. She quit self-help books for romance novels, 450 of them in three and a half years, because at 41 she doesn’t need another improvement plan. And she’s made peace with missing meetings. “I’m not saying purposely be late, but I’m saying allow yourself that, or you’ll lose your mind.”

Fun is a strategy, not a reward

At a recent Primal Kitchen company event, someone asked Morgan what she wished for the brand. The Kraft Heinz president on the panel wished it would become the number one salad dressing brand. Morgan wished the team would have as much fun as she did. Her reasoning: “If you’re going to work this much, I’m not doing it unless it’s fun.”

Then in the rapid fire, I asked what she’d tell herself before starting Waay. “Don’t take yourself too seriously. We’re not curing cancer here. It either works or it doesn’t. You’re the same person in the end of the day.”

Coming from someone whose first company sold for $200 million, that lands differently than it would on a motivational poster. She’s proof that loosening your grip on the outcome doesn’t shrink it. Fun kept her team at Primal for a decade. It’s why her first hire, her best friend Anna, still runs marketing there ten years later. She treats fun as infrastructure, and the results back her up.

This episode is live now wherever you listen. Morgan’s drink is Waay, two A’s, at Whole Foods nationwide, drinkwaay.com, and Amazon.

As always, thanks for being here,

Alexis

We go deep on all of it, the emotional complexity of building a life worth living, in The Breadwinners community.

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I spent twenty years in marketing before I started The Breadwinners. I've run nine-figure media plans, pulled all-nighters in launch war rooms, and rebranded companies from the logo down. I know what a great campaign looks like, and I know how rare they are.

The best one I’ve seen in years has no media buy, no agency, and no CMO. It’s a 92-year-old woman sitting in her living room. And inviting others to join her.

If you follow enough influential women across socials, you’ve seen it. The same brownstone. The same yellow walls. And Gloria Steinem in her red chair, holding court. Several times a month, a new group of women visits the Upper East Side apartment she’s lived in since 1968, sits in a circle, and talks. Fortune’s Most Powerful Women community came for a circle on AI. Emily Tisch Sussman convened a Women in Sports Talking Circle. Leaders from eight independent reproductive health clinics gathered to strategize about care after Roe. Lupita Nyong’o, Jenna Lyons, and Lauren Bush Lauren showed up for a circle on women’s health that the New York Times covered. Kimberlé Crenshaw and Dolores Huerta came for a “State of Feminism” salon. You get my point…

Gloria can’t easily travel the country anymore. So her marketing team flipped the script: bring the country to her. And as a marketer, I am on my feet applauding. 👏🏼👏🏼

Here’s Why It Works

The venue is the brand. Every marketer preaches consistency. Gloria’s team has achieved something most brands would kill for: instant visual recognition without a logo. When Dr Becky or a founder you follow posts from that living room, you know exactly where they are before you read the caption. Same room, same seat, same light. Fifty-plus years in one apartment turned her home into the most recognizable set in the women’s movement, and every photo taken there compounds the asset.

The guests are the media plan. Gloria doesn’t need a distribution strategy because every woman who walks through that door brings her own. Actresses, athletes, executives, activists, editors. Each one posts, and each post reaches an audience Gloria could never buy her way into. The earned media follows the social: the Times, Fortune, Forbes, and a wave of Substack essays from writers who got a seat in the circle. And the best press of all: word of mouth. She is leveraging hundreds of other women’s channels, and I’m fairly certain every one of them considers it an honor to be leveraged.

Scarcity does the selling. There’s no ticket link. You get invited, or you don’t. As one participant told Forbes, “not everyone has access to Gloria’s living room.” That single fact makes an afternoon on a couch more coveted than any gala in Manhattan. In an era when every event is livestreamed, and every panel is content, the thing you can only experience by being physically in the room has become the ultimate luxury good.

She listens more than she speaks. At the AI circle, Gloria admitted the topic wasn’t her expertise, then spent the session absorbing what the women in the room knew. At the circle on beauty, she offered, “Each person is a world,” and let everyone else fill it. A legacy campaign where the icon does the listening. Try getting a celebrity founder to sign off on that.

Living Your Legacy

The detail that elevates this from a great campaign to a masterclass: the salons aren’t new.

Gloria has been hosting circles in that apartment since 1968. She borrowed the format from her years in India, and her friend Wilma Mankiller, the former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, connected it to ancient traditions of democratic decision-making. Those gatherings became the consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement. Ms. Magazine was partly organized in that room. So was the National Women’s Political Caucus.

So the product has existed for 58 years. What’s new is the infrastructure around it. Gloria’s Foundation now works to preserve her home as a historic hub of connection. There’s a fellows program training a next generation of women to run circles themselves. There’s a residency program. The whole operation is designed so the format outlives the founder.

That’s the real strategy, and it’s the one most brands never figure out. You can’t manufacture authenticity at the end. The reason this “campaign” lands is that it isn’t a pivot or a farewell tour. It’s the same thing she’s always done, finally meeting a distribution era built to amplify it.

Her team didn’t invent a legacy. They built a stage around one that already existed and let the world’s most influential women do the broadcasting.

Most public figures have their legacies written for them, after the fact, by people who weren’t in the room. Gloria is producing hers in real time, in her own voice, on her own furniture, surrounded by the women who will carry it. When she said at one circle, “A movement is only people moving,” she was describing her method as much as her mission.

Why I’m Inspired

I think about rooms constantly. The Breadwinners started at a dinner table, and everything we’ve built since has grown from the conviction that when the right women sit down together, something happens that no feed can replicate. Curation is key. Gloria has been proving that thesis since before I was born. She even jokes that her brain “has not converted to A.I.,” and points to the science: we produce oxytocin when we connect in person. Empathy requires proximity.

This is exactly how I think about convening the Breadwinners table. Every dinner starts with intention. Who is in the room matters more than what’s on the menu, and I spend far more time on the guest list than on anything else. But the intention only carries you to the moment the first course lands. After that, my job is to step back and watch the magic happen.

The best moments at our dinners have never been ones I scripted. They’re the ones that emerge when a founder, a surgeon, and an artist realize they’re carrying the same questions, and the table takes over. Gloria’s circles run on the same physics at a scale I can only admire: curate with care, create the conditions, then trust the women in the room.

Gloria built a movement on the belief that women gathering in a room can change the world, and now she’s spending her tenth decade making sure the next generation knows how to set the chairs. That’s what she’s choosing to leave behind: a practice, passed hand to hand, from her generation to ours to our daughters’. Most legacies are monuments. Hers is an invitation.

To the founders and marketers reading this, the lessons are sitting right there on her couch:

• Own a format, and repeat it until it’s unmistakable.

• Make your community your distribution.

• Protect scarcity like the asset it is.

• And build the product for decades before you need the campaign, because the campaign only works if the product was always real.

Gloria Steinem earned this moment across sixty years of doing the unglamorous work of convening. Her team’s brilliance is recognizing that the most valuable thing she owns isn’t her archive or her image. It’s a living room, and the chairs are still full.

May we all build something worth gathering around.

As always, thanks for being here,

Alexis
Founder, The Breadwinners

We go deep on all of it, the emotional complexity of building a life worth living, in The Breadwinners community.

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Lizzie and Alexis will be hosting a Substack Live this Thursday, July 9 at 12:30p ET/9:30a PT - please join us as we discuss all things boredom and the importance of giving your children space to be their own, independent self.

“If your kid is coming to you in 2026 and complaining that they’re bored, pat yourself on the back. Not every kid gets that luxury.”

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That’s what Lizzie Assa said to me on this week’s podcast, and it was such a refreshing reminder for me, and I’m sure most parents. Lizzie is the founder of , a former teacher, and the author of But I’m Bored. We talked about play, family dynamics, and modern parenthood, and somewhere in the middle of it I realized I’d been getting a few things backwards with my own kids.

Here’s what I took from our conversation:

We co-regulate our kids. When we’re calm, they can be calm too.

Lizzie’s statement really made me reflect on this one: kids don’t want to be in a separate room entertaining themselves, they want to be near us. Not because they need us to play with them, but because our nervous system anchors theirs. When we’re a calm presence in the room, they can be a calm presence in the room too, and that’s when they can actually focus on what they need to do. It’s not about giving them more of our time. It’s about giving them a steadier version of us.

The permission slip to do less.

Lizzie’s whole philosophy comes back to this: when we step back and do less, say less, kids get the lead back. And when kids have the lead, they get to be their most authentic selves, which is when behavior actually gets better. Doing less isn’t neglect. It’s the thing that works.

Look at how your kid is most successful in play, then give them more of that.

Instead of trying to fix how a kid plays, Lizzie’s advice is to notice how they’re already succeeding, are they a kid who needs to move their whole body, or a kid who sits quietly and builds, and then match what you provide to that. You’re not reshaping the kid. You’re reading them correctly for the first time.

When kids are bored, they’re looking for connection, not something to do.

This one reframed boredom completely for me. Lizzie’s take is that a bored kid usually isn’t asking for an activity, they’re asking to be seen. They want us to say, yeah, you’re bored and you don’t know what to do next, and just sit in that with them for a second. The fix is an acknowledgment - of the space, of them, and of your engagement with them.

Look at behavior through the lens of curiosity, not discipline.

Lizzie told me about parents who come to her convinced their kid’s behavior means something’s wrong: the running, the falling out of chairs, the yelling, the inability to stay ‘focused’. Once the parent understands what’s actually happening developmentally, the story changes. They’re not bad. No kid is bad. Behavior that looks bad is usually a kid working something out the only way they know how. Once you see it that way, you stop managing behavior and start understanding it. Curiosity over discipline changes everything about how you respond in that moment.

Screen time and imaginative play are not opposites.

My son is borderline obsessed with Spidey right now, and I’ll admit I’ve felt some low grade guilt about how much he watches. Lizzie asked me a question that reframed the whole thing: what does he do after the show ends? He plays Spidey. He’s not just consuming the show, he’s processing it, then turning it into a game where his imagination brings it to life. And that’s exactly how kids are supposed to interpret what they watch. The move isn’t to cut the show, it’s to put a couple of Spidey figures in the block bin so his character obsession can become part of his play.

The messy middle is where the real stuff gets built.

Lizzie’s oldest son quit team sports around age eight. That’s a hard thing to sit with as a parent, especially at the cocktail party or the pediatrician’s office when everyone’s asking what your kid plays. He spent that time in the backyard instead, flying planes, building things, doing his own thing while his friends were on teams. He’s a licensed private pilot now. Lizzie was careful to say she’s not claiming a direct line from backyard boredom to flight school, but she is claiming this: the resilience that gets kids through a hard year of college, the ability to sit with a mistake and come back from it, that’s not built in a schedule packed with activities. It’s built in the unstructured hours nobody’s tracking.

I keep coming back to something Lizzie said near the end, that she built her whole community around one permission slip: it’s okay to do less, intentionally. Not less because you’re failing to keep up. Less because you decided that’s actually the better version of the choices you make.

That’s the same instinct behind everything we’re building here. Slow, deliberate, and not particularly interested in doing what everyone else is doing just because it’s what everyone else is doing.

Full episode is up now if you want the whole conversation, including her thoughts on the “hot toy” trap and what she actually keeps on hand for her teenagers.

As always, thanks for being here,

Alexis

Lizzie and I will be hosting a Substack Live this Thursday, July 9 at 12:30p ET/9:30a PT - please join us as we discuss all things boredom and the importance of giving your children space to be their own, independent self.

Join Lizzie’s community:

https://www.workspaceforchildren.com/

Substack:

Purchase Lizzie’s book ‘But I’m Bored’:

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• Rate & review wherever you listen - it helps more women find this show

‘Does anyone understand the feeling of knowing you’re in the happiest time of your life - which makes you paradoxically sad?’

Yes. A thousand times yes.

I feel this every day. Every single day. And I’ve been sitting with it long enough that I finally want to go deep into what the science and research actually say about it - because this is not typically me. I’m a go-getter, half-glass-full, always looking towards the future type gal. But this feels like a tiny tinge of anxiety, of sadness, always swirling around the happiest moments when I’m with my kids. Blink, and you’ll miss it - they say.

It is one of the most documented, least discussed phenomena in the psychology of human happiness.

And I think it hits Breadwinner women especially hard.

What Is This Feeling?

Psychologists call it anticipatory loss - the grief that arrives not when something ends, but while it’s still happening. You are standing inside a moment so full that some part of your brain has already started mourning it.

There’s also a related concept: peak-end happiness distortion. Our minds are wired to remember experiences by how they ended, not by how they felt while they were occurring. Which means that even in the middle of joy, your nervous system is doing a kind of accounting - bracing for the ending that hasn’t come yet.

And then there’s what researchers call happiness anxiety - the documented tendency for people who are experiencing high levels of positive emotion to simultaneously experience heightened vigilance, scanning for the thing that will take it away.

In other words: the happier you are, the more you have to lose. And your brain knows it.

Why It Hits Different When You’ve Built Something

Here’s what I notice specifically about the women in this community. Most of us have done hard things. We have navigated the scarce years, the uncertain years, the years where we were building in the dark and weren’t sure anything would come of it. We know what it feels like when things fall apart.

So when things are good - like ‘pinch yourself’ good - the body doesn’t fully trust it. It’s pattern recognition. It’s the part of you that remembers 2009 or 2020 or the year you thought everything was fine and then it wasn’t. The part that understands: seasons change, nothing is forever.

The research backs this up. Studies on high-achievers show a consistent correlation between past adversity and what’s called positive affect dampening: a kind of emotional ceiling that activates precisely when life is going well. The greater the prior hardship, the harder it can be to fully inhabit moments of ease.

And it is evidence that you have lived something real.

Why Time Speeds Up As You Age

There is a reason this feeling intensifies the older you get, and it’s mathematical.

Psychologists call it the proportional theory of time perception, and the logic is brutally simple. When you are five years old, one year is twenty percent of your entire life. When you are forty, that same year is two and a half percent. Your brain isn’t measuring time in absolute units. It’s measuring it in proportion to everything you’ve already lived. Which means every year, by definition, registers as a smaller fraction of the whole - and feels correspondingly faster.

But there’s a second mechanism at work, and this one is even stranger: it has to do with how the brain encodes memory, not how it tracks the clock.

Neuroscientists studying time perception have found that the brain doesn’t actually measure duration directly. It estimates it after the fact, based on how much new information it had to process. A week of novelty, a new city, a new job, a child’s first steps, gets encoded densely, with thousands of distinct memory markers. Your brain, looking back, reads that density as length. A week of routine, by contrast, barely gets encoded at all. Days blur into each other because the brain filed almost nothing new. When you look back, there’s nothing there to measure, so it reads as short.

This is why childhood summers felt endless and your thirties can vanish in a blur you can’t fully account for. It isn’t that time moved faster. It’s that you stopped collecting markers.

There’s a researcher at Duke, David Eagleman, who has spent much of his career studying this exact distortion. His findings suggest something almost paradoxical: the way to slow down your perception of time is not to relax into routine, but to do the opposite: seek out novelty, even small amounts of it, on a regular basis. New environments. New conversations. New physical sensations. Anything that forces the brain to lay down fresh memory rather than coast on autopilot.

Which means the ache so many of us feel, the sense that the years with young children, or the early years of building something, are moving at an unbearable speed, isn’t a flaw in how we’re living. It’s a side effect of how full the living is. The density of it is exactly what’s compressing it in our memory, even as it’s expanding in meaning.

So the sadness underneath the happiness isn’t really about loss. It’s about velocity. We are watching the most information-rich, memory-dense years of our lives compress in real time, and some part of us understands that we will spend years afterward trying to recover the resolution of what we’re living through right now.

That isn’t a reason to mourn the moment. It’s a reason to pay closer attention to it.

So What Do We Do About It?

Here’s what actually helps us acknowledge these feelings, and incorporate them into our daily lives, according to researchers.

Gratitude as interruption, not performance. Most gratitude practices miss the point. Listing what you’re thankful for doesn’t work nearly as well as pausing in the moment you’re in and letting yourself register it. Psychologists call this savoring, and the evidence for it is substantial. The goal is not to appreciate the moment after the fact. It is to slow down enough to actually be in it while it’s happening. That means, yes, putting down your phone to be present, not to snap a pic on your phone so you can remember it forever (I’m so guilty of this).

Name it to tame it. The neuroscience on this is clear: labeling an emotional state reduces its intensity. Not because naming makes it go away, but because it moves the experience from the amygdala (reactive) to the prefrontal cortex (reflective). When I can say “this is anticipatory grief” instead of just feeling it as a vague weight, something shifts.

Let the sadness be part of it. This one is harder to accept, but the research is consistent: trying to eliminate the sad note from a joyful experience tends to flatten both. The grief is not the enemy of the happiness. In some strange way, it is proof of it. The things we most fear losing are the things most worth having.

Talk about it. Which is, in part, why I’m writing this. The women who report the highest levels of sustained well-being are not the ones who feel the most uncomplicated joy. They are the ones with the highest tolerance for emotional complexity, who can hold multiple true things at once without needing to resolve the contradiction.

This community is full of women who know how to do that.

The Question Under the Question

My friend Ali, who originally posted that question – she wasn’t asking for reassurance, she was asking something harder: does anyone else know what it is to love your life so much that it makes you grieve?

The answer is yes. We do.

And I think the work, the real work, is learning to stay inside that feeling instead of trying to manage it away. To let happiness and loss exist in the same breath. To understand that the ache is not a signal that something is wrong.

It is a signal that something is very, very right.

As always, thanks for being here,

Alexis

We go deep on all of it, the emotional complexity of building a life worth living, in The Breadwinners community.

Subscribe: wearethebreadwinners.substack.com

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I discovered Ali Tate Cutler through a viral Instagram post. She had done the research. Less than 1% of guests on major business podcasts are mothers.

When I saw that, I left a comment and then slid into her DMs immediately - because that single statistic is the entire reason The Breadwinners exists. We need different frameworks, different voices, different conversations about how work actually works when you are also responsible for keeping a small human alive.

Ali is a former plus-size model turned entrepreneur who built a business helping women grow on social media. She has two kids under two, a farm outside of Austin that her whole family moved to after a literal dream from God told her to go, and a perspective on motherhood, grief, visibility, and business-building that I have not heard anywhere else.

This episode went many places I did not expect (including talking about having high birth weight babies) - below are the notable takeaways:

The ‘Morning Routine’ advice that we can’t relate to.

Ali was deep in Diary of a CEO, Alex Hormozi, all the usual hits. And she realized she was doing real-time translation on 65% of what she heard. She couldn’t wake up at 4am to ground, workout, and take ice baths - instead, she went to bed at midnight and breastfed four times. She wasn’t cold plunging. She was surviving.

The business playbooks, she says, aren’t malicious. They’re just not written for women with children. The models were built by people without that particular constraint, and when you apply them wholesale, they don’t fit.

Her reframe: Mothers don’t grind, we create. We don’t hustle, we flow.

And the way she describes how women actually build is spot on. Women work better in collaboration. Men, she observes, can lone-wolf it for hours and hit their numbers. Women - and she sees this with her own team, which is almost entirely mothers - do better when they’re trusted to steer, not just execute. When their intuition is treated as a signal rather than a deviation.

She lets her team figure out what works for them. The results follow.

The paradox of freedom is real…and counterintuitive.

Before kids, Ali had unlimited optionality. She could have done anything on a given Tuesday. And she describes something most people won’t admit: that kind of freedom is quietly exhausting. When you have infinite options, your brain never stops generating them. What if I pivoted? What if I moved? What if I got my real estate license? Your background operating system just runs and runs.

When kids arrived, the field collapsed. There’s one thing. The kids need her. She goes to the office. The decision is already made.

And something paradoxical happened: her focus sharpened. Her output got bigger, not smaller. Because simplicity, she says, is what scales. Complexity fails.

She is clearly pointing out that when you stop generating an infinite horizon of choices, you can actually go deep on the one right in front of you.

Grieving your pre-mother self is not a problem to solve. It’s part of becoming.

Ali did not want to be a mother. She had a genuine fear of childbirth that she traces back, with some seriousness, to a past life. She had a dream where God told her to have a child – so, she overcame it. Then her second birth nearly killed her. She was on the table, a doctor yelling for help, the room going bright at the edges.

She made it through.

But she also grieves the version of herself that existed before. The maiden, as she puts it. The one who was magnetic and spontaneous, and whose husband touched her butt every time he walked past. The one who could wear whatever she wanted on a Friday night and go out and be seen for that, specifically.

She does not pretend that woman is still here. But, she misses her. And she has also discovered that the version of herself she is becoming - more steady, more present, able to hold her friends and family in a way she couldn’t before - has a different kind of power.

I think a lot of us need permission to hold both. To say: I miss who I was. And I am genuinely becoming someone new. Those two things do not cancel each other out.

Social media is a hall of mirrors. Whatever is unresolved in you will show up there.

Ali has been canceled. When she was 25, she said something in the modeling world that landed badly. It was everywhere - Teen Vogue, Refinery29. There were moments, she told me, when she wanted to exit entirely. Leave the world.

She came out the other side. And the thing that carried her through was not a thick skin. It was a settled internal premise: there is nothing you can say or do that would make you unloved by something larger than you. When you really land on that, social exile loses most of its power. Not all of it. But most.

Her framework for getting visible: speak truth, let whatever isn’t yours fall away, and trust that anything that leaves in the presence of your honesty was not actually yours to keep.

She also told me something specific about how I’m building The Breadwinners: If you are not marketing something you genuinely believe in because you are worried about what people will think, you are not being humble. You are letting your ego win. The ego shows up as fear of being salesy, fear of looking desperate, fear of getting it wrong. And meanwhile, the people who needed what you had to offer never found it.

She asked me, “How many women are you robbing of this by not getting over yourself?”

That was a huge reframe for me, which I think about often.

What your 80-year-old self already knows.

At the end of our conversation, I asked Ali what she would tell her pre-mother self.

She said: try to see these moments - the 1am breastfeeding, the five hours of sleep, the too-much-noise in the house, the fight with your husband - through the eyes of the version of you who is 80 and would give anything to have one more day of it.

These are the golden days. Life doesn’t get better than this. We’ve arrived.

It makes me cry every time I think about it. It’s so hard to see in the day-to-day. And it’s also completely true.

I’d like to leave you with an incredibly important reminder from Ali:

Ali’s episode is live now wherever you listen to The Breadwinners.

Fair warning: She is the kind of person who says the thing that activates you before you have processed it.

As always, thanks for being here,

Alexis

Follow on Instagram: @wearethebreadwinners

Rate and review wherever you listen - it helps more women find this show.

My 4 year old son was playing with a beat-up pool toy this weekend - hair falling off, arms missing. He looked at her and said, “Momma, what’s wrong with her?”

Without thinking: “Oh, that’s just Perimenopause Mermaid.”

My friend next to me lost it. Hysterically crying laughing.

But then I actually started thinking about it. Why doesn’t Mattel make Perimenopause Barbie? Hair thinning. Joint pain. Mysteriously missing her patience and half her sleep. Comes with a CGM, a magnesium supplement, and a glass of wine she’s been told to stop drinking.

I genuinely think it would sell.

Because there is an entire generation of women - high-functioning, still running everything - quietly navigating a phase of life that has almost no cultural representation. No doll. No mascot. No mainstream conversation.

So if we can normalize it in culture, for our kids, for ourselves, maybe it’ll make it feel a bit more acceptable — this massive shift we’re going through, involuntarily?

We have a toddler Barbie. A pregnant Barbie. A CEO Barbie. Even an equestrian Barbie.

Where is the woman in her 40s who is somehow doing the most important work of her life while her body is doing something completely unrecognizable?

Because if we can’t laugh about it, we’ll lose our minds. And Perimenopause Barbie has already lost her arms.

Happy Monday. Lighter content this week - hope you enjoy.

As always, thanks for being here,

Alexis

How many of you have been here?

You’re on the couch. Maybe ten minutes, tops. The kids are occupied, the house isn’t on fire, and for one small moment, you have let yourself just sit. And then…footsteps. Someone walks in. And before you even recognize who, you are up. You are moving. You are suddenly very busy with something, anything, because god forbid it looks like you were taking a minute to yourself.

“How luxurious that she gets to relax?“ you imagine them thinking. So you beat them to it. Nothing to see here. Just a woman on her feet, doing important things, absolutely not resting.

Sadly, I have done this. More times than I’d like to admit.

And when told me she does it too - that she catches herself jumping up from the couch the second someone might walk in, that the scrubbing begins almost involuntarily, that the whole performance kicks in before a single word has been said. Then I realized that if Neha, who has spent a decade building a body of work on how women spend their time, is still jumping off the couch, then this is not a personal failure. It’s a cultural one.

We laughed about it, but we also both knew it wasn’t funny. Or perhaps, it’s funny because it’s true, and hits really close to home.

When Luxury Became a Fighting Word

The conversation started with Neha and her husband.

A few years back, when Neha had stepped back from her corporate career and was home with their kids, he said something that landed the wrong way. That it was a luxury for her to be at home.

She pushed back immediately.

“There’s nothing about my day that’s luxurious”, she told him. “And actually, the luxury is yours. You get on a plane to the Bay Area to fundraise without ever once thinking about who’s picking who up from school, who’s taking who to the doctor. Your attention is singular. Your days are uninterrupted. You don’t have to hold the entire operating system of this family in your head while you’re working.”

They decided to table the word. Too loaded, too much charge on both sides.

I get it. When luxury is used as a weapon, when it’s shorthand for “you have it easy” or “you’re not really working”, of course, it lands the wrong way. Of course, you reject it. The word had been weaponized, and she defended herself against it.

But here comes the reframe (you know how much I love a good reframe…)

What If Luxury Isn’t the Wrong Word?

I brought it back toward the end of our conversation. I said, “What if there’s a luxury of emotion in being able to slow down and actually ask what you want? What if sitting in that space, having the headspace to be intentional about your time, is a luxury worth claiming instead of one worth defending against?”

Neha paused – “Wow. That’s a big deal.”

So, we decided to dig into this: We’ve made luxury = worthless. Indulgent. Unserious. When we label something a luxury, we signal that it’s optional - and optional things don’t get protected. Optional things get cut first when the calendar fills up and the demands pile on.

But what if we flipped it? What if a luxury of emotion, the capacity to feel deeply, to sit with something, to ask what you actually want before the next obligation arrives, is something worth naming as valuable, not something worth dismissing as disposable?

That reframe changes everything. Because you protect what you value, right now most women aren’t protecting this because they don’t value it, or they don’t feel they have the agency to find that value.

The Punishment We Didn’t Know We’d Internalized

Neha then went a level deeper: “When we deem something a luxury, we deem it less valuable. We punish people for it. And we punish people for privilege.”

And because we’ve done that long enough, we’ve scared women away from claiming either one. We are so wary of being judged as frivolous, so practiced at preemptive self-erasure, that we don’t even wait for the accusation. We make it ourselves first.

So we jump off the couch.

We don’t just feel guilty about resting; we manage the perception of resting. The scrubbing begins. The to-do list comes out. The calendar gets opened. Nothing to see here. Certainly no luxury.

“How many women,” Neha asked, “would do different work, more meaningful work, more aligned work, if we stopped punishing them for taking time to think about how they’re spending their lives? How much healthier would we be? How many decisions would finally get made if slowing down didn’t carry a social cost?”

It’s a genuinely sad question. That we have built a culture where intentionality is coded as indulgence. Where asking what you actually want - not what your resume suggests, not what your salary history has trained you toward - reads as something you have to earn before you’re allowed to do it.

On Privilege, and Learning to Hold It

Bringing it back to my present day, I think the work I’m doing is a luxury. The Breadwinners, this podcast, these conversations - they fill my cup in a way that very little else does. Every day, I get to sit across from women who are doing remarkable things and ask them how they actually live. That’s a privilege. I know it.

But it took me a long time to hold that without immediately qualifying it. To say it without the defensive parenthetical. Without preemptively apologizing for loving what I do, for having built something that matters to me, for carving out a life that feels like mine.

Neha is still working on her relationship to privilege, too. She said she’s made a lot of headway rewriting the rules - but that one, she walks carefully. In the context of her work on women, time, and ambition, naming privilege is a tightrope. You’re always checking: am I seeing where someone else is coming from? Am I accounting for the difference in where we started?

Those are healthy checks. They should exist.

But there’s a line between accountability and self-erasure. Between staying honest about where you came from and deciding that your capacity for intention is something to apologize for. Whatever capacity a woman has - whatever time, whatever resources, whatever room she’s managed to make - she should be allowed to be intentional with it.

That should not be a radical statement. And yet….here we are.

The Culture That Made This Hard

“How sad that we’ve created a culture where women don’t want to slow down to think about how they’re spending their time?”

Since my conversation with Neha, I’ve thought about that statement often. Because it’s not provocative, it’s just…accurate. And somehow that makes it worse.

We have built a culture that punishes women in every direction:

Earn too much, and you’re not present enough.

Step back, and you’re not serious enough.

Ask for rest, and you’re indulgent.

Push through, and you’re neglecting yourself.

Every configuration comes with a critique pre-loaded. Neha said it takes a certain headspace to embrace what you’ve built rather than feel guilty about it.

The only exit is deciding to stop requiring everyone else’s approval before you inhabit your own life. Building enough self-trust that other people’s discomfort with your choices stops being your problem to manage. Neha calls this making decisions that no one else has to understand. She said it’s the muscle she’s most proud of, the one that took the longest, the one that cost the most, and the one she’d least like to give back.

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Twenty years ago, Neha Ruch and I worked together at an ad agency in Boston. We were in our twenties, single, no kids, and we would stay late working on PowerPoint decks. The agency let us expense our taxi rides home after a certain hour. We thought that was a perk. It wasn’t - it was an incentive to stay. We just didn’t know it yet.

Between the two of us now: six kids, two platforms, and almost two decades of completely rewriting what we thought we knew about ambition.

Neha is the founder of The Power Pause and the author of the book by the same name. She spent ten years building language for a question most high-achieving women won’t say out loud: if I’m not working for pay, what is success?

This wasn't just an interview. It was a reminder that life is the long game, and the right relationships carry you across decades, if you let them.

Here are my key takeaways:

The train stop she didn’t expect

Neha went to Stanford Business School because she wanted out of advertising and didn’t know where to go next. Someone told her to think of it as a train stop: surround yourself with smart people and figure out what comes next.

Stanford was fine. But that’s not where she figured it out.

“The real train stop to surround myself with smart people and figure out what comes next came in motherhood.”

When her son was born, she stopped performing. The armor that had carried her through boardrooms, pitch meetings, and rooms where she was always the youngest person - she put it down. Her son didn’t want the version of her that was trying to please others. He just wanted her. And in that space, something cracked open that business school never touched.

That was also the moment she checked her ego. Not in a meeting. Not in a performance review. On a blanket in Madison Square Park in a gray V-neck just…happy. She looked at the photo from that day and thought: ‘I look free’. She wanted more of that. So she started making room for it - even when the people she loved most didn’t understand why.

Dream without an audience

Neha’s most practical piece of advice sounds something like this: write your ideal day in detail. What you’re wearing. How your body feels. What you’re actually doing with your time, paid or unpaid. The version of the day you’d design if no one was grading it.

She spent two weeks on hers the first time. And she still has it.

“Give yourself permission to dream without people looking over your shoulder.”

Writing it down makes it a contract with yourself. Science shows that the brain holds written commitments differently than thought ones. And once you have it, it becomes your filter - every decision either moves you toward that day or away from it. You get to decide what’s important. Not the numbers. Not the title. Not whatever your LinkedIn profile is currently suggesting you should want next.

Muscle memory around noticing

Every morning, Neha spends under five minutes meditating and pulls up her iPhone. Three emojis for her gratitude, and emojis for her intentions. That’s it.

But the practice underneath is bigger than the ritual. She’s built what she calls muscle memory around noticing - catching the small things before they compound. The backpack that derails every morning. The tone in your partner’s voice. The moment your kid says something you actually want to slow down for.

“The emotional work and joy of parenthood does become invisible. Unless you talk about it, unless you notice it.”

The noticing is how you see it before it disappears. It’s also how you stop letting it build until you’re at the ceiling - which is where she was the afternoon she yelled at her three-year-old while trying to put the baby down, and realized she had a choice about what kind of mother she was going to be in this season. That moment of overwhelm is what made her ask for help. Which led to getting help. Which changed everything.

The decisions no one else has to understand

When Neha stepped back from her corporate career, the questions were polite and relentless. Her husband worried she wouldn’t be fulfilled. Dinner parties got awkward. Are you sure? Won’t you be bored? What are you going to do all day?

She had to rewrite every rule she’d internalized about what made a woman valuable. And she couldn’t do it for anyone else until she did it for herself first.

“The reason I had to rewrite the rules was because I first had to rewrite them for myself.”

What she came out with - after the messy middle, after reading The Four Agreements, after enough conversations, she didn’t know how to finish - was this:

“Letting myself make decisions that no one else had to understand. That is a muscle. And of all the superpowers I left that stage of my life with, that was it.”

Your determination to live a good life does not require a consensus. The unexplainable decision is often the most important one. Learning to make it and stay in it without flinching takes years. It’s also, she said, the thing that keeps showing up in her work. The self-trust to know this is right, even when no one else can see it yet.

Growing up alongside your children

Neha’s son is ten and a half. He’s slowly pulling away, as a tweens do. The doors are closing - less chatter, more privacy, his own interior world forming. She talked about what that shift actually creates room for.

“How can we grow up alongside each other? How do I make room for the next version of me - by nature of making room for him?”

When you’re shifting your energy away from one thing to make room for something else, you reserve room for yourself to grow, too. That’s the part nobody tells you. You’re not just releasing a phase of parenting. You’re stepping into new spaces, meeting people you’d never have met, having conversations that don’t exist in your old life. Just by nature of operating somewhere new, you expand.

The threads you want to carry into that next version, you carry. The ones that no longer fit, you let go. The point is that you’re choosing - not just surviving one season until the next one arrives.

What happens when family life takes up less space? A new version of yourself walks in. The question is whether you’ve kept enough room for her.

Ambition, redefined

One afternoon, Neha was on the couch with a three-year-old and a one-year-old, completely at capacity. She felt the familiar guilt of not doing enough. She was ambitious. She should be doing more. Why was she just sitting here?

She googled “ambition.” Merriam-Webster: the determination to do. It doesn’t specify what.

She opened her laptop and wrote it down. She was determined to get her house steady after having two kids. To be mentally healthy again. To get her son adjusted. To be a generally calm human. That’s ambition. And as soon as she realized it, that became the filter for everything else - including the decision not to scale her company in ways that would cost her the headspace she’d worked to protect.

“Ambition is aligning your time with what you really value — and the trust to come back to it. That’s intention.”

As soon as you realize something else needs you, it challenges you to become a better version of yourself. That’s what your kids see. Not whether you worked from home or the office. Not whether you hit your revenue number. Was she happy and joyful to be around? That’s the legacy question she’s actually building toward.

Where we landed

We could have talked for another three hours. We started as two twenty-somethings expensing cab rides home from late nights at a Boston ad agency, and somewhere along the way, we both stopped measuring our lives by how late we stayed, how much we earned, and how busy we looked doing it.

Neha’s work gave me language I didn’t have before. The contract with yourself. The muscle memory around noticing. The decisions no one else has to understand. These are the critical life lessons that you can only carry with you once you’ve been through them – as they say, hindsight is 20/20.

If you take one thing from this episode, let it be the reframe on ambition. Not the determination to do more, faster, louder. The determination to align your time with what you actually value, and the self-trust to keep coming back to it when you drift. By that definition, the most ambitious thing some of us will do this year is slow down long enough to ask what we want.

As always, thanks for being here,

Alexis

Follow Neha on Instagram

Visit The Power Pause

Join The Breadwinners community:

Follow on Instagram: @wearethebreadwinners

Rate & review wherever you listen - it helps more women find this show

I get a version of the same message after every dinner we host.

The wording is always a little different, but the heart of it never changes. “Something happened in that room that I didn’t expect, and I’m not sure I have the words for it. I walked in not knowing what I was walking into, or why I deserved to be there - and I walked out…different.”

After hosting dinners in Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, I’ve stopped being surprised by it. In multiple cities, dozens of women who had never met before sit down together, and the message I get afterward is almost always the same. What I can’t get over is how reliably it happens, regardless of the city or who’s in the room that night.

Let me try to explain what I think is going on.

A new kind of leaning in.

There’s a moment at almost every dinner, usually about an hour in, after the introductions, the first drink, and the initial pleasantries have settled. Guests start answering my prompt - and one by one, everyone says something true. Not something impressive, not a well-crafted answer to a question, just something true about who they are as a person, a human being. And the room shifts in a way you can feel physically.

The women around the table lean in - to one another. Someone nods in a way that means I thought it was just me. And then someone else goes somewhere real, and then someone else does, and the whole tone of the night changes.

One guest described it as the hairs on her arms standing up. She wrote: ‘I began to feel the magic and the electricity of so many incredibly inspiring women coming together to share, connect, and support in such an immediate and beautiful way. I left with a full heart, new friends, and I can’t wait for the next dinner.’

That feeling she’s describing, the one that raised the hairs on her arms, I have watched it happen at every single dinner. And that is exactly what our room is designed to do.

What makes this room different.

Most rooms that bring together ambitious professional women are organized around performance. There is something to prove, someone to impress, a photo to get, a pitch to land. The social contract underneath those events is transactional even when nobody says so out loud. You show up with something to offer, and you leave having traded it for something in return. And if you’ve spent any time on that circuit, you know the feeling of driving home afterward and realizing that despite all the talking, nothing actually happened between you and another human being.

Our dinners are not organized that way.

There’s no keynote, no panel, no person standing at the front of the room positioned as the expert. The format is a table; the guests are the experience; and it matters that everyone faces each other, because everyone’s voice carries the same weight. The prompts we use aren’t designed to draw out the professional update or the rehearsed story of how you got here. They’re designed to get past all of that and reach the person sitting underneath the title.

One guest described it perfectly: ‘It isn’t about networking, it isn’t about the photo opp for the ‘gram. It is about being in a safe space to share your truth, to be vulnerable, to feel held.’

The word that shows up more than any other in the messages I receive after dinners is “held.” Not inspired, not energized, not motivated, though those things happen too. Held. I’ve thought a lot about why that word keeps surfacing, and I think it’s because most of these women spend a significant portion of their lives holding things up for other people, and a room where someone else is holding something for them is genuinely freeing, and exactly what they need.

Breadwinner women are exceptional at networking, yet starving for real connection.

Here is the irony: The women who come to our dinners are genuinely good at networking. Getting to this level in your career requires knowing how to work a room, how to identify the right people, how to follow up, how to stay visible and relevant over time. These women have built entire careers on those skills, and they deploy them effortlessly.

Yet the majority of them are starving for real connection.

Networking and connection are not the same thing, and conflating them leaves many women feeling as though something is wrong with them, when the real problem is that they’ve been trying to meet a deep human need with a tool never designed for it.

Networking is a professional skill. It generates contacts, introductions, opportunities, and referrals, and it is genuinely valuable. But if you’ve ever left a networking event feeling somehow emptier than when you walked in, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You worked the room. You said the right things to the right people. You collected cards or LinkedIn connections or whatever the currency was that night. And somewhere on the drive home, you realized that despite all the conversation, you hadn’t actually said anything. And neither had anyone else.

That hollowness is the correct emotional response to a transaction that was dressed up as something more meaningful than it was.

What the women at our table are actually hungry for is something networking was never built to provide. It’s the experience of saying something honest, something that costs you a little to say out loud, and having the person across from you receive it without flinching or pivoting to their own story. It’s the relief of being known rather than impressive. It’s the feeling of being around people who understand your situation so completely that you don’t have to earn their understanding before you can get to the actual conversation.

That doesn’t happen on a schedule of five minutes per person with a drink in hand and a room full of noise. It requires the right conditions, and we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what those conditions are and how to deliberately build them.

The company we keep.

The women who come to our dinners are not women who lack connection in their lives. They have partners, friends, colleagues, and teams. They are surrounded by people. So what is it about this particular room that keeps producing something they describe as unlike anything they’ve experienced before?

It comes down to who is sitting across from you.

There is something that becomes available when you are surrounded by women who understand your exact situation without needing you to explain it first. Women who know the weight of being the primary financial provider while also carrying most of the domestic and emotional management at home. Who understands what it costs to be deeply ambitious and deeply present at the same time, and the guilt that lives permanently at that intersection without ever quite having a name. Those who have built something significant and know the specific loneliness of not having many people in their lives who understand what that actually took.

You don’t have to earn the context at our table. You walk in, and it’s already there, already shared, and if you’ve ever spent years being the only one or the exception in the room, that particular relief is bigger than you expect.

These are women who are not performing for each other. They’re not there to be impressive or to collect something useful. They came because someone who knows them nominated them, which means everyone in the room already has a reason to trust the people around them before the night even starts. That changes what people are willing to say. Which changes everything else.

One guest put it this way: Being in a room with ambitious, thoughtful women openly sharing not just who we are as leaders but what we are seeking as humans. It created space for honest conversation and meaningful connections.

What we are seeking as humans. That is the thing that almost always gets skipped. Our dinner is specifically designed not to be skipped.

What it actually feels like to be seen.

I’ve come to think of the Breadwinners dinner as a corrective for something most of the women in the room have been carrying, unknowingly, for a long time.

For many of these women, the majority of their professional lives have been spent as exceptions or anomalies in the room. The only woman at the table, or one of the very few. The one who had to be twice as prepared, twice as confident, twice as polished to be taken seriously. The one who learned, somewhere along the way, that certain parts of who she actually is were better left at home.

That accumulates in ways that are hard to measure and easy to minimize, and its weight is real even when it’s invisible.

When you walk into a room where none of that is true, where your ambition is completely unremarkable because everyone in the room is equally ambitious, where your complexity as a person is the point rather than a liability, something in you relaxes that you didn’t even know was tensed up.

One guest described leaving with the same feeling as spending an evening with her closest girlfriends: ‘Over candlelight, women who have never met share vulnerabilities and dreams, and before you know it you have made friendships that you know will open doors in ways you can’t even imagine. The conversation is deep, and the connection is even deeper.’

And then there’s this line, which is maybe my favorite thing anyone has ever written about a Breadwinners dinner: ‘Some rooms drain your energy. This one multiplies it.’

That’s the truth of it. We’re not asking anything from the women who come. We’re giving something back. Time that belongs to them, permission to show up fully, company that can actually hold the full weight of who they are. The experience of being surrounded by people who are also a lot, so for once, you don’t have to make yourself smaller to fit.

The seat that’s waiting.

I started these dinners because I kept having the same conversation in private. A woman I admired, someone who had built something real, who was holding a lot together, would pull me aside and say something she clearly hadn’t said to many people. About the loneliness of it. About how hard it was to find other women who understood the specific version of her life without needing a long explanation first.

I kept thinking: what if we just put those women in a room together?

That’s what the Breadwinners Dinner is. It is not a networking event with better conversation. It is not a conference with smaller panels. It’s not a support group for working moms. It is a room full of women who are carrying versions of the same thing, finally in the same place at the same time, with enough trust built into the format that something real can actually happen between them.

We are expanding to new cities because the need is real and it is everywhere. We deliberately keep the rooms small and curate carefully because that is what makes them work.

And if a dinner hasn’t come to your city yet, it’s coming. We are building this community one table at a time.

As always, thanks for being here.
Alexis

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My parents never had a prenup, neither did my grandparents. Nobody in my family ever talked about it. The only reference point I had going into my marriage was Charlotte York negotiating with Bunny MacDougal in a 2005 episode of Sex and the City. “I’m worth a million dollars” - that was my association.

Cut to twenty years later, and nearly half of millennials getting married now get a prenup. About half of those conversations are initiated by women.

Libby Leffler is the founder and CEO of First, a platform making prenuptial agreements accessible to modern couples, and she sat down with me to talk about what’s actually changing.

But what I really want to talk about is the conversation we had about careers and motherhood and the pressure we put on ourselves that, as Libby points out, came from nobody but us.

Before we get there, one thing she said that shocked me: everyone has a prenup. It’s either the one you made, or the one the government made for you. The default laws of your state have already determined how your finances will be treated in a marriage. Most people just never asked whether they agreed with that.

And for the women in the Breadwinners community who skipped this conversation because they didn’t feel like they had enough to protect, Libby’s reframe is worth listening to: a prenup isn’t about the you of today. It’s about the future you. Your IP, your equity, your 401k, the apartment you bought before you met anyone, the social handles you’re building an audience on. Some of those assets don’t exist yet. That’s why its so important to think about the future you. Women are set to inherit the majority of $110 trillion in the great wealth transfer over the next decade. That money is coming. The question is whether we’ll be positioned to receive it fully.

Below are the highlights from our conversation…

Money is harder to talk about than sex.

Libby made this point and it’s incredibly accurate. We’ve had decades of cultural evolution around talking openly about sex. Money is still treated taboo. Because for most people it’s tied to identity in a way sex simply isn’t. It’s your family’s history. The stories you were told about who’s good with money and who isn’t. Your own failures and the shame attached to them.

That’s why the prenup conversation feels so charged. It’s not really about the assets. It’s about whether you believe you’re worth advocating for. Whether asking for transparency makes you strategic or suspicious. Whether you can sit across from someone you love and talk about what happens if this stops working, without treating that as a prediction.

My husband and I got married in the Greek Orthodox Church. Before the priest would marry us, we went through a counseling process. Questionnaires. Then a joint session to compare answers. Kids. Religion. Finances. We agreed on most things. We knew where we didn’t. I didn’t think of that process as a prenup at the time. Libby told me it was the inspiration for building First. Based on a structured invitation to talk about the hard stuff before the hard stuff arrives.

Get fluent in the F word.

Her biggest financial regret: not getting in the weeds on her own finances sooner. Not knowing what her portfolio looked like. Not tracking where money was going and what it was doing. She’s very hands on with it now. But she wishes she’d started earlier, when the stakes felt lower and the habits would have been easier to build.

Also, for the record: the ‘latte factor’ (small cost vs big impact) is a scam. Nobody has ever built generational wealth by skipping the matcha. Know where your money is going, know what your goals are, figure out if you can get there and then reconfigure if not. But please, for the love of God, drink the coffee.

The pressure came from you. It always did.

Libby described her twenties as defined almost entirely by impatience. No patience for herself, for her timeline, for the distance between where she was and where she thought she should already be. And she realized she projected that pressure onto other people - managers, peers, circumstances - when in reality it was all her own doing.

Nobody was telling her to move faster. She was telling herself.

This is the thing nobody prepares you for about ambition: it doesn’t come with an off switch. The same drive that gets you somewhere is the thing that makes it impossible to enjoy being there. At some point the work has to stop being the whole identity, and for most of us that shift takes longer than it should and costs more than we expected.

Libby had to remind herself: if she’s going to do this at the pace and execution she wants, it has to be fun. It has to be fulfilling. Without that, it all falls apart.

Read the room before you make your ask.

She spent years in tech in San Francisco before building First. Chief of Staff to Sheryl Sandberg in the early days of Facebook. One of the things she carried out of that chapter: know how to manage up. Know your audience. Understand timing.

She used to walk into meetings loaded with data. The best analysis, the freshest numbers, the most airtight case. And she could feel the room go flat. Because she was leading with data instead of a story. Trying to win a debate instead of paint a picture.

She learned to lead with the story first. Use data to support it, not open with it.

This applies to asking for raises, for promotions, for anything that requires someone else to say yes. The ask itself is only part of it. The quarter just ended short. Your boss got difficult news. The company missed its number. Those are not your moments, even if your case is airtight. As they say, timing is everything.

The best thing I took from corporate life was the same thing: read the room. It’s the difference between being heard and being dismissed.

The relief barometer.

Libby has a test for whether she should have committed to something: if it gets canceled and her first feeling is relief, she shouldn’t have said yes.

She spent years saying yes to everything and eventually realized she was showing up for everyone else’s agenda at the expense of her own. It started showing up in her health before it showed up anywhere else. She pulled back. Started asking what actually pulled her attention rather than what simply demanded it. Those are not the same question.

For the women in this community running companies and households and creative practices and managing invisible labor on top of all of it, the yes problem is real. Every yes is a no to something else. The relief barometer doesn’t lie.

Seasons, not balance.

Libby plays golf, has since she was eleven. Some years she plays over a hundred rounds. This year, the clubs have barely moved.

She’s not in a golf season. She’s in another kind entirely. And she’s made peace with that.

Her version of ‘having it all’ shifts with the year, the quarter, the stage her kids are in, what the company needs. Some seasons the friendships get the time. Some seasons health is the priority. Some seasons work takes everything and the rest of life finds its own rhythm.

The goal isn’t balance. It’s knowing which season you’re in and making sure what matters most inside that season is actually getting what it needs.

Balance is bullshit (I think we should make this into a bumpersticker!). But seasons are real, and naming the one you’re in is more useful than chasing the one you think you should be in.

Feel most like yourself with people who really see you.

I asked Libby when she feels most like herself. She paused longer than she had on anything else in our conversation.

The answer: when she’s doing things she loves with people she loves. A big win at work with a team she respects. Quiet moments with family where there’s nothing to perform. Time with the women in her life who’ve known her long enough to show up without judgment when it matters most.

She talked about friends who are currently caregiving for aging parents. Friends whose careers are peaking while their personal lives feel uncertain. The range of what one generation of women holds at the same time. What she values in those friendships isn’t advice or strategy. It’s being seen.

That’s what we’re all looking for. In our partnerships, in our friendships, in this community. Someone who sees the whole picture and doesn’t flinch, who fully understands.

Listen to the full episode with Libby Leffler wherever you get your podcasts. Find First at ThisFirst.com and Libby on Instagram @ll

As always, thanks for being here…
Alexis

💸 First Promo for The Breadwinners community:

$100 off your prenup with First by using code BREAD100 at checkout.

Discount codes must be applied at checkout. No retroactive coupon codes or refunds applied.

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“I had to pretend I wasn’t ambitious. I had to play the game of small because that’s what other people needed from me.”

Britton said this to me when we sat down together in New York. She built Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream from a $30,000 SBA loan into a $175 million national brand with more than 80 scoop shops and 12,500 retail placements. She is doing it again with Floura, the next-generation fiber company she launched last year that is already doubling its projections.

We did not spend much of our conversation on how she built her companies.

Instead, we spent the hour on the interior life of a woman who has been operating from a place of certainty since she was seven years old. In it, we discussed:

• Her childhood most people have never heard her describe publicly.

• A near-death experience that made her feel invincible.

• The decade she spent figuring out how to mother a daughter whose nervous system worked differently.

• The cost of being ambitious in rooms where women were ‘not supposed to be’.

I left our conversation with pages of notes from her life lessons: prolific pieces of advice that we can all take with us in our day to day.

Below are some of my favorites:

1. She has been certain since she was seven.

Jeni had three emergency surgeries before age eight. During one of them, she crossed over. Whatever happened in that moment, whether neurological, spiritual, or both, gave her a lifelong sense of certainty.

“I felt weirdly invincible. I was a different me after that. It made me feel special for the rest of my life. And I still have it today.”

She described what she saw on the other side as “so beautiful, indescribably gorgeous, sublime.” Whatever you call that moment, it is the engine that has powered every decision she has made since.

The lesson for the rest of us: one early experience of certainty is enough to fuel an entire lifetime.

2. You are who you are becoming.

Jeni does not measure herself against who she is today. She talks to her 98-year-old self most days. That woman is who she is building toward. That woman is whose voice she listens for when she has to make a hard call.

Most of us are trying to make our current selves comfortable. Jeni is trying to make her 98-year-old self proud.

“When I’m 98 years old, I want to be wrecked. I want to be so happy and wrecked. I want to be exhausted. I want to get the most out of whatever this experience is before going on to the next one.“

Wrecked is not a word I have associated with legacy before, but I think it should be.

3. Live in the future. Take it like a vigilante.

Jeni said it from experience: “I think entrepreneurs, we live in the future.“

She is not interested in what is happening this quarter. She is interested in what she can see five years out that no one else can see yet. Floura is not a fiber bar company to her. It is her answer to two intersecting crises: 95% of Americans are fiber-deficient, and the United States wastes 80 million tons of food a year. She built the company on watermelon rinds and apple cores that other companies were throwing away.

But seeing the future is not enough. You also have to claim it.

“You have to think of yourself as a vigilante. You gotta make your plan. And like, also be kind. Because my whole life has been how do I build the world that I want to live in?”

The vision gets you to the door. The vigilante gets you through it.

4. Your essential character is what you are really building.

Jeni told me she once looked up the word “flavor“ in a dictionary at one of her early scoop shops. The definition: the essential character of something.

“So I started thinking, well, what’s my essential character? What’s the essential character of our customers? What’s the essential character of our company? What are we building?“

The companies, the ice cream, and the fiber bars are all outputs. What she has been building for fifty-two years is her own essential character. And as she put it:

“First, it starts out like you’re building it, but in the end, now I’m 52. It becomes your essence, and you’re no longer building it. You are it.“

5. Tell people what you are building.

Most founders hold their ideas tightly: afraid of being copied, afraid of being wrong, afraid of failing in public.

Jeni does the opposite. She tells her idea to others, out loud.

“When you tell people, you’ve got to do it. There’s a magic to that.”

What that creates is accountability. The version of you who has already told the world what she is building cannot quietly back out. I know this from the early days of The Breadwinners, the moment Mally Burton from UBS took a chance on what I was building and backed my first dinner as a sponsor. There was no turning back from that point on.

If you have been waiting to feel ready before you say it out loud, you have it backward. Say it. Then become the person who has to make it true.

6. The harder it is, the cooler you are.

When most of us encounter hard things, we feel inadequate. Jeni feels the opposite. She uses difficulty as a competence signal.

“Understanding that you’re a warrior, the harder it is, you’re just cooler than everybody because you can do it. I always think whenever I’m doing something really hard, I just think I’m so much cooler than all those other people who can’t do it.”

The reframe she taught me: hard is not a sign you are doing something wrong. Hard is the entry fee for the room that everyone else couldn’t get into. Wear that as a badge.

7. Reframing financial freedom.

Jeni does not say this the way you have heard it before. She is not talking about generational wealth or private jets. She is talking about the specific kind of freedom that lets you make decisions from a place free of fear.

“As long as you are tied to your next paycheck, you are not free.”

She lived on $30,000 a year for 20 years while building Jeni’s. She still says she can lose everything and build it back with a tube of lipstick in her pocket. The money has never been the point for her; the optionality is, and that brings freedom with it.

For breadwinners, this hits harder than it does for anyone else. We are the ones holding the household paycheck. We are the ones whose family’s stability is tied to whether the next deposit hits. The takeaway I am holding on to: build the resilience to survive without the paycheck. That is the freedom you are actually working for.

8. Let people change you.

This was the closing note of our conversation. Jeni no longer believes in free will. She believes the people you let into your life shape who you become, and that the most important act of an adult life is letting yourself be transformed by the people you love.

Most of us guard our identity. We hold it tight. We resist being shaped because we have spent so long being shaped against our will, by parents, partners, bosses, and culture. Guarding ourselves can feel like the only freedom we have left.

Jeni’s invitation is the opposite. Let your partner change you. Let your kids change you. Let your friends change you. Let the next 20 years rewrite who you thought you were.

The version of you on the other side will be more interesting than the one you are guarding right now.

Jeni told me she does not want a legacy the way most people talk about it. She wants to be wrecked at 98. Exhausted. Empty-handed because she gave it all away.

So here’s to being exhausted, in a way that we can be proud of.

As always, thanks for being here.

— Alexis

Follow on Instagram: @wearethebreadwinners

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Society tells us: “If you’re a good mom, you can just productivity your way out of this.”

She said it as a critique. As the lie. As the message we are being fed every time we open an app, scroll a feed, or buy another planner that promises to give us our lives back. And the second she said it out loud, I felt it click into place. Because I have absorbed that message. You probably have too.

Pooja is a board-certified psychiatrist, a New York Times contributor, the author of the national bestseller Real Self-Care, and a mother of three including ten-month-old twins. She came to the very first Breadwinners dinner seven months pregnant, and she has been one of the sharpest voices in my orbit ever since. This episode is dense with reframes, and I want to give you the ones that really struck a chord with me….

Real self-care is infrastructure, not a reward.

This is the line that landed hardest for me, and I think it’s the thesis of everything Pooja teaches. We have been sold self-care as a thing you earn after the work is done. A bubble bath at the end of the week. A massage you “deserve.” A retreat you book to recover from the life you built.

That is not self-care. That is recovery from a system that is grinding you down.

Real self-care is the infrastructure underneath every decision you make. It is how you build the life you want, not what you do to survive it. If the infrastructure is shoddy, the house falls down. You cannot productivity your way out of a foundation problem.

Faux self-care is the yoga class you leave feeling worse than when you walked in.

Pooja’s example is one we’ve all experienced, one too many times. You are a working mom. You decide to go to yoga on a Wednesday night. You put your mat down. Within ten minutes you are comparing your leggings to the woman next to you, you cannot do crow pose, your kid has a math test tomorrow, and you are pretty sure you are a bad mom for being there.

You leave the class more stressed than when you came in.

That is faux self-care. The activity is not the problem. The internal work you did or did not do before you walked in the door is the problem.

The four principles of real self-care are boundaries, compassion, values, and power.

These are not affirmations. They are operating principles. Boundaries with your partner so you can actually get to the yoga class. Compassion with yourself in the room. Values you have named for why this activity matters to you in the first place. Power, which Pooja defines as the agency to be present and actually take in what the practice has to offer.

If those four are in place, the yoga works. If they are not, the yoga is just another thing on your list.

Your to-do list is delusional.

This one made me giggle, because its so honest and so true. Pooja says this to nearly every patient. She says it to her friends. She says it to herself. The to-do list most of us carry is not grounded in reality. It is grounded in what we think a good mother, a good partner, a good founder, a good employee should be doing.

The first principle of real self-care is boundaries, and the first place to apply them is your own schedule. Audit it block by block. Get honest about what is actually optional. The kindergartner does not need basketball multiple nights a week. You do not need to be on every call. You can skip that dinner that you don’t really want to go to.

To what end?

This is the question almost no one is asking. We bring in the meal kits and the delivery apps and the support so we can have an extra hour. And then we sit on the couch and doom scroll because we have spent so many years serving everyone else that we no longer know what we want to do with our own time.

Lighter is not the goal. Lighter for what is the goal.

Find the thing that is uniquely yours.

Pooja’s prescription for the doom-scroll inertia is to find something hyper-specific that is just yours. Not yoga because yoga is good for you. Not working out because you should. Something that is a little weird. A little frivolous. A little embarrassing to admit.

Intricate puzzles. Japanese bikes. Singing in a choir. Tennis.

The qualifier matters: it cannot be productive, it cannot be performative, it cannot be posted on social media. There is a Substack note that I read that I have thought about daily since I read it: What would you do to truly enjoy something that no one else needs to see?

If you do not have an answer, that is the work.

The Real Self-Care Thermometer.

Pooja built a quiz in her book, and the framework is the easiest gut check I have heard for whether your internal infrastructure is holding.

Green: You feel spontaneously generous. Someone asks you for something and you are genuinely happy to help. You reach out to a friend for coffee because you want to. You have extra.

Red: Everything is a chore. You say yes but resent every yes. You are a zombie on the couch. Everyone around you can feel it, but you will not admit it.

You can be in the red and still be functioning. You can be in the red and still be winning. That is the trap.

The boundary is the pause, not the no.

This was the most useful reframe of the entire conversation for me, and I have been applying it all week.

A boundary is not saying no. A boundary is the pause before you answer. And after the pause, you have three options: yes, no, or negotiate. Every no has a cost, and sometimes you cannot absorb that cost today. So the real question becomes: what do I need to do over the next six months so that six months from now I am closer to being able to say no?

That is not a boundary problem. That is a strategy problem. And it is something you take to your coach or your therapist or your book club, not something you carry as guilt.

Guilt is a faulty check engine light.

When you start setting boundaries, guilt shows up immediately. Most of us read the guilt as a signal we are doing something wrong. Pooja says no. The guilt is a broken indicator on the dashboard. It is flashing, but it is not giving you valid information. It is the external message we have internalized so deeply we cannot tell the difference between the world’s voice and our own.

Acknowledge the light. Keep driving.

Compassion is not soft talk. It is real talk.

This was the reframe that hit me second-hardest. Compassion is not telling yourself everything is fine when it is not. Compassion is saying Pooja, your to-do list is delusional. You cannot be in five places at once. You cannot say yes to that dinner and that call. That does not work.

Compassion has to be truthful or it is not compassion. It is appeasement.

You cannot rush a quantum shift.

Pooja’s next book, scheduled to launch in 2027, is called Quantum Shifts. It is about the in-between space after a major life change. Divorce, a launch, a diagnosis, a birth, a death. There is a very clear before. There is a very clear after. And there is a space in the middle where the old you no longer exists and the new you does not exist yet.

High-achieving women try to sprint through that space. We want to fast-forward to the next version of ourselves. But the in-between is the work. Following the breadcrumbs. Holding space for the uncertainty. Resisting the urge to rush.

Building The Breadwinners has been my own quantum shift. I sat in the unknown at that first dinner. It was uncomfortable. And that is exactly when this business fell into my lap.

Burnout is what will stop you, not the work.

Pooja landed in the hospital for four nights after her bestseller came out. Gallbladder surgery. A kidney stone. The whole thing. She had said yes to everything because she had never been an author before and did not know what the cost of a no would be.

Her executive coach told her something I have written down: The thing that will stop you from reaching the heights you want is not your skill as a founder. Not your ability to write a bestseller. It is burnout. If you keep going through these cycles, that is what will stop you.

I am writing this as someone who knows that I run hot. If you are reading this and you know you run hot, I want you to take that sentence seriously. I know I am after my conversation with Pooja, because I’m close to my boiling point.

Your slow is most people’s fast.

This is what Pooja tells her patients, and what I needed to hear. If you are an entrepreneur, if you are a founder, if you have ADHD tendencies, the issue is almost never that you are going too slow. The issue is that you are going too fast. There are lessons that only arrive if you give them the developmental time and space to land.

The slow-down advice I rejected for thirty years is starting to look like the most important skill I am developing in my forties.

The one thing I want you to take from this episode

If you read nothing else, read this:

You cannot app your way out. You cannot meal-kit your way out. You cannot planner your way out. The mental load is not solved by a better system. It is solved by a different question.

To what end.

To what end is the 6am call.
To what end is the kindergarten basketball league.
To what end is the dinner you said yes to before you checked your week.
To what end is the meal kit subscription that was supposed to save you.

That question is the infrastructure in which you are able to feel a bit of reprieve, an exhale of relief, a comfort in feeling good that your day-to-day structure works for you, not against you.

Thanks for being here, as always.

— Alexis

The Breadwinners

Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Pooja Lakshmin wherever you get your podcasts. And if this resonated, share it with a woman who needs to read it.

Find Pooja’s writing at poojalakshmin.substack.com.

Nobody told me my nipples would hurt.

And nobody told me that when they did - when the night sweats started, when the sleep disappeared, when the rage showed up uninvited - that I would somehow feel obligated to just... keep going. Exactly as before. Same pace, same output, same everything, except now with a body that was clearly staging a revolution.

That’s the reality of perimenopause that no one actually considers.

It’s not that your body is betraying you. It’s that for the first time, you might actually notice the pace you’ve been keeping. And your body, going through one of its most significant transitions, is finally saying: No. We’re changing the terms of the deal.

This Is a Season. A Real One.

Remember how we talk about seasons in motherhood? How some seasons ask us to lean hard into career, and other seasons ask us to be present at home, and some seasons are just about survival until we get to the other side?

Perimenopause is a season too. Except nobody gave us a name for it that made us feel like it was something we could actually navigate instead of just endure.

This is the threshold between one form of womanhood and another. Your body is literally reorganizing itself - your hormones are shifting, your metabolism is changing (gee, thanks), your nervous system is recalibrating. This isn’t a bug in the system. This is a major life transition, the same way menstruation was when you were 12, the same way pregnancy was if you’ve had children.

It deserves that same level of reverence. And care.

The Battle Is Real. So Is the Permission to Stop Fighting It.

Let’s call a spade a spade: perimenopause feels like a battle. Because your body is sending you signals that the old rules don’t apply anymore, and everything around you is designed as if they still do.

You can’t sleep, but your calendar is still packed. Your joints hurt, but nobody’s rescheduling the meetings. You have brain fog so thick you can’t remember basic words (what was I saying?), but somehow you’re still expected to show up with the same clarity and energy as before. The rage comes out of nowhere (like, legitimate rage), but you’re supposed to be “professional” about it.

Of course it feels like you’re fighting. Because you are - not against your body, but against a system that says the only way to matter is to never, ever slow down.

And here’s what I’m here to tell you: You don’t have to win that battle the way you’ve been winning all the others.

You don’t have to white-knuckle through perimenopause like you white-knuckled through sleep deprivation with a newborn, like you pushed through the exhaustion of building your career, like you somehow managed to show up for everything all the time.

Your body doesn’t want that. And honestly? Nobody else needs you to do that either.

What Your Body Is Actually Asking For

Your body isn’t being difficult. It’s being honest. It’s finally loud enough that you can’t ignore it.

Night sweats at 2 AM? That’s your body asking you to slow down, to examine what’s stealing your rest, to take your sleep as seriously as you take your quarterly earnings.

Joint pain that won’t quit? That’s your body asking you to move differently, to adjust, to stop pretending that the intensity level from your 30s is still the right calibration.

Brain fog? That’s your body asking you to stop trying to hold everything in your mind at once. To write things down. To ask for help. To admit that you’re human, not a machine.

Rage that appears from nowhere? That’s your body asking you to examine what you’re tolerating, what boundaries you’re not keeping, what you’re swallowing instead of speaking.

This isn’t punishment (although it sure feels like it!). This is information. And information is how you actually change things.

The Kindness Intervention

Here’s the part that I need to remind myself of: You get to be kind to yourself during this season. Not kind in the “treat yourself to a bath” way. Kind in the “I’m going to actually listen to what my body needs and reorganize my life accordingly” way.

That might look like:

• Saying no to things that deplete you (not because you’re weak, but because you’re in a transition and you deserve to protect your energy)

• Adjusting your workout because your joints need different support (not because you’re less fit, but because you’re literally changing)

• Sleeping when you can instead of forcing a schedule (not because you’re lazy, but because sleep is how your body heals during transition)

• Talking to people instead of suffering alone (not because you’re burdening them, but because we all deserve to be witnessed in our transitions)

• Asking for help from your partner, your doctor, your community (not because you’re failing, but because you’re doing something significant and you deserve support)

This isn’t about “managing” perimenopause. It’s about honoring what’s actually happening to you.

The Celebration Part (Because Your Body Is Incredible)

Yes, perimenopause is a battle. Yes, some days you’ll want to ask Mother Nature what the hell she was thinking.

But also: your body is doing something extraordinary.

It’s reorganizing. It’s shifting. It’s moving from one chapter of your life to the next with intelligence and intention, even when it feels chaotic. Even when the sore nipples and night sweats and rage spirals make you want to tear your hair out.

Your body carried you through your 20s and 30s and 40s. It made you a mother, if you chose that. It built the strength that created your career, your impact, your presence in the world. It learned how to manage cycles and pregnancies and lactation and emotional labor and professional demands all at once.

And now it’s doing one more impossible thing: it’s preparing you for the next era of your life. The one where you might finally have clarity. Where you might finally know exactly what you want and refuse to apologize for it. Where you might finally understand that your worth isn’t measured in how much you can endure.

So take a moment to soak that in, because this is a very important reframe.

The Real Transition

Perimenopause isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a season to move through - with information, with care, with actual support.

Get a doctor who takes you seriously. Track what’s happening so you can see the patterns. Talk to other women going through this. Adjust your life - not drastically, but intentionally. Listen to what your body is asking for and actually give it.

And most importantly: stop treating yourself like you have to earn the right to slow down. You don’t. Your body is literally changing. Your comfort matters. Your rest matters.

This is a new form of womanhood knocking on the door. It’s not better or worse than what came before. It’s just different. And different deserves reverence.

So be kind to yourself. Take a beat when you need it. Celebrate how incredible your body is, even in the moments when you’re questioning everything.

Mother Nature might have some explaining to do. But your body? Your body deserves your gratitude.

Thanks for being here, and reading til the end

With gratitude,

Alexis

How are you experiencing this season? What has perimenopause asked of you that surprised you? What’s actually helping? Reply here or send me a note at alexis@thebreadwinners.co. Because we’re all moving through this threshold, and we deserve to do it with honesty, support, and actual kindness—not just the performative kind.

This is a new season. And you’re going to make it through it. Not by running yourself through a wall. But by finally, finally listening to what you actually need.

Molly Morse is a marketplace builder by training and a working mother by lived experience, and the combination makes her one of the most clear-eyed people I’ve talked to about what it actually takes to change something systemic for working parents.

A few things from our conversation I keep coming back to, and I want to share them here because they go well beyond childcare. They’re about how we make arguments, how we build partnerships at home, and how we stop exhausting ourselves trying to fix things at the wrong moment.

You cannot make an ethical appeal to a for-profit business and expect anything to happen.

This sounds obvious. It isn’t, because most of us are still doing it.

Molly has been posting data about the childcare crisis for a while now. The numbers are staggering: 1.3 million people miss work every month because of childcare breakdowns, 90% of them women. School is closed 46% of the year. After you subtract PTO and federal holidays, parents are left covering 99 days with no formal childcare solution. There is no amount of workplace flexibility that closes that gap.

When I asked her what she thinks corporations are supposed to do with that information, her answer was blunt: the framing has to be ROI, or it goes nowhere.

Childcare stipends, she said, have a massive return on investment in terms of employee retention and productivity. The cost of losing and replacing a high-performing employee is significant. But the argument has to be made on those terms, not on the terms of fairness, because companies are profit-motivated. Appealing to their goodness doesn’t work. It’s never worked.

Molly studied competitive speech and debate. Her framework for shifting behavior: establish shared premises first, layer in credible data, and walk people to a conclusion that feels inevitable. You cannot skip straight to the conclusion and expect agreement. Most advocates do exactly that, and wonder why nothing moves.

I think about how often we as women make emotional or moral cases for things at work that could land so much harder with a financial argument attached. It’s important to let this sink in, and consider this the next time you’re making a case for something you believe strongly in.

Systems are temporary. Knowing when not to fix one is a skill.

Molly runs an early-stage startup. She told me that one of the most important things she counsels her team on is learning to distinguish between a system that isn’t working and a system that isn’t working and needs to be fixed right now. Those are two different things. And in early-stage companie, and in households with young kids, most of us default to: broken = fix immediately.

She’s pushed herself to sit with the inefficiency. To name that something is unraveling without catastrophizing it. To say “this is not the season to address this” and schedule a time when it will be.

She brought this directly into her home. Her floors were covered in glitter for an entire week during a stretch of back-to-back conferences. And she made a deliberate decision: this is not the week. What it was, it turns out, was her glitter week.

That capacity to consciously let something go because the timing is wrong is something I think a lot of us struggle with. The impulse to solve every broken thing immediately is strong. It is also, often, not strategic.

The reframe I’m taking from Molly: let the system unravel a little, name it calmly, schedule the fix, and keep moving. It makes the hard more bearable because you’re not also fighting the feeling that everything is falling apart.

The household conversation nobody wants to have but everyone needs to.

When Molly decided to go all-in on building her company, she had a real conversation with her husband about what that would mean. Not an implied understanding. An actual conversation.

She told him she believed the business could contribute meaningfully to their future financial security. He heard that and decided his investment toward that future was to take on more of the household. He now does more at home than she does, in addition to his own work. He does her laundry. He gets her the Red Bull. He is a partner in the truest sense of the word.

What struck me is that she didn’t let this redistribution just happen. She addressed it, explained the reasoning, and made the ask explicitly. That’s how you build a system that both people understand and have bought into. Implied agreements fall apart under pressure. Explicit ones have a fighting chance.

This is breadwinning in its fullest definition, as a family unit. Her husband not generating the main income right now, but he is absolutely investing in their future. That’s a form of contribution that doesn’t show up in a paycheck and doesn’t make it into the cultural conversation nearly enough.

On the girlboss pendulum; and what’s actually in the middle.

We talked about the whiplash between the “you can do it all” era and the backlash that followed - the years of content telling women that the ‘girlboss’ myth was going to destroy them. Molly said she lives in the interstitial space between those two poles. There are moments where she’s doing it all, and moments where she can’t, and she’s releasing the need to declare which one is the preferred reality.

She clearly said: maybe we just don’t need to label any of it.

I believe that. The Breadwinners has always been about integration over performance. What Molly articulated is that the freedom is in refusing to plant your flag in either camp. You’re not the girlboss who never struggles. You’re not the cautionary tale either. You’re a person moving through seasons, making decisions, adjusting systems, and building something real in the meantime.

The Letter To Your Future Self.

At one of our early dinners, I gave guests the option to write a letter to their future self or to their child, to read in 20 or 30 years time. Molly wrote hers to her four-year-old daughter, Isla. She brought it to the podcast and read it on air.

Part of it went like this: I also feel deeply motivated and moved to build my own dream and actualize this solution I have in my mind. I hate every time I have to leave you or work at night or skip swim class. But I also know I must feed this passion. My dream is that we’ll both be better for it.

That’s the Breadwinner reality, held in full - the tension, the love, the conviction, all at once.

The full conversation is on the pod. I think you’ll enjoy this one.

As always, thanks for being here.

— Alexis

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It’s a simple idea. It’s also one most of us spend enormous energy trying to avoid.

This episode wasn’t a biography. It was an hour of someone thinking out loud about how she actually lives - as a founder, a mother, a partner, a breadwinner. Iskra Lawrence built one of the fastest-growing body care brands in America, Saltair. She has never paid herself a salary, clocks off at 2:30 to pick up her kids, and still doesn’t think she has it figured out. That combination is exactly why I wanted her at the table.

Here’s some lessons learned from our conversation:

Remove “should” from your vocabulary.

Any time you construct a thought around the word “should,” it means the idea hasn’t come from you. It’s downloaded - from your parents, your industry, your feed, whoever told you what success is supposed to look like. Iskra’s done dismantling it. Sleep training, nursing schedules, nannies, salary structures - her answer to all of it is the same: figure out what works for you, and stop letting someone else’s version of right make you feel wrong.

That’s not a parenting philosophy. That’s a life philosophy.

One habit is enough.

The origin of Saltair is a postpartum story most women don’t tell publicly. Postpartum with her first, Iskra wasn’t showering. She was malnourished, exhausted, barely holding on. Her husband asked her what she needed. She said: A shower. I just need five minutes in the shower.

That was it. Not a wellness routine. Not a comeback plan. One habit. The shower led to getting dressed, getting dressed led to feeling human, feeling human led to a company that has now sold over a million bottles of body oil.

When you’re at the bottom, the goal isn’t to climb all the way back at once. It’s to find the one thing that makes you feel like yourself for five minutes. It’s the little things.

Your children will teach you about yourself if you let them.

Her son’s tooth brushing story sounds small. It isn’t. Iskra’s son hated brushing his teeth - constant battle, every night. She started paying attention to what motivated him, and realized it was speed and accomplishment, not rewards. So she turned it into a race. Problem solved.

But then she turned the mirror on herself. Why does she do things at a high level? Why does she hate to leave things unfinished? She traced it back to her parents’ discipline style: disappointment as currency. One tooth brushing standoff became a window into her own self reflection.

Our kids are constantly showing us who we are. The moments that trigger us the most are usually the moments worth paying the closest attention to.

Empathy is the real Breadwinner superpower.

I asked Iskra what her superpower is as a Breadwinner. I expected something about execution or resilience. She said empathy - specifically, empathy for her husband.

She talked about how her husband, Philip, grew up with the cultural message that men carry financial responsibility. Now she does. And she watches him navigate that, quietly, without making it smaller or brushing past it. She holds space for his feelings about their financial dynamic without letting it destabilize what they’ve built together. She watches his tone cues. She thinks about timing when she asks for things. She lets him feel valuable.

This is the marriage conversation we don’t have often enough. Breadwinner partnerships require active, ongoing maintenance of each other’s dignity. That’s the recipe to a healthy relationship.

Apply timelines to your children the way you do your career.

Iskra said something that hit: we set timelines for our careers, our businesses, our goals. We rarely do it for our children. And then the years move faster than the days, and we’re caught off guard.

We talked about the math of it. You get one summer with your baby. Three with your toddler. Nine with your child. Four with your teenager. That’s seventeen summers, total, before the shape of your relationship changes permanently.

I’m not saying this to add guilt. I’m saying it because it reframes the 2:30 school pickup. The activity you build your afternoon around. The phone you put down at dinner. These aren’t sacrifices - they’re investments in a window that closes.

Let your kids see the fight and the resolution.

Iskra and I both openly discussed the importance of this. It’s not about having a conflict-free household. It’s about modeling what happens after the conflict. Kids who watch their parents fight but never see them repair walk away thinking rupture is permanent. Kids who see the repair learn that it isn’t.

Have the hard conversation. Let them see you disagree. And then let them see you come back together. That’s the lesson worth teaching.

You can’t wait for the phone to ring.

At 22, Iskra walked into a New York modeling agency with a laptop and gave a veteran agent - someone who had been in the industry for over 20 years - a full presentation. Where she wanted to work. Which brands. What she could bring. He cried. He said no model had ever done that before.

She had already been booking jobs by cold-calling brands directly, cutting the gatekeepers out entirely. She wasn’t waiting for permission. She was building leverage.

Whatever you’re building - a company, a career, a platform - no one is coming to discover you. Make your own door.

This is a season.

The last thing I want to leave you with is this. Iskra clocks off at 2:30. She’s the default parent. She’s also building one of the fastest-growing body care brands in American retail - without a salary. These things coexist right now because she’s decided this is the season for both.

Not forever. Not for everyone. For her, right now, in this season.

We spend so much energy trying to find the permanent answer. The right structure, the right schedule, the right split. But the structure changes. The kids get older. The business matures. Your partner’s career shifts. The season turns.

The question isn’t what does this look like forever. But rather: what does this season call for - and are you building something that can flex when it changes?

Iskra is. This is her Breadwinner story.

Listen to the full episode here.

Thanks for being here
— Alexis

Follow on Instagram: @wearethebreadwinners

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Our LA Breadwinners Dinner was held on a warm October evening in Los Angeles. Thirty women. Seated on the grass. And a simple premise: that the women who are financially, emotionally, operationally, and systematically leading their families deserve a room where they don’t have to explain themselves.

We asked each woman we interviewed the same essential question, in different forms: What does breadwinning actually mean to you? What are you carrying? And what are you bringing home?

The answers were not what I expected. They were deeper.

And it came with a through-line that ran through every single answer: this word: Breadwinner - is ready to be reclaimed. Not as a burden. Not as a badge of sacrifice. As something richer, more complex, and more honest than the definition we inherited.

What You’re About to See

Today, we’re releasing a documentary series called In Confidence - filmed entirely at our LA Breadwinner Dinner, built from our unscripted conversations, and shaped around the questions that kept coming up around the dinner table.

• What does the word Breadwinner actually mean?

• What are we carrying that nobody sees?

• What are we bringing home that we forget to count?

• What are we building - for ourselves, for our children, for the women who come after us?

Each episode follows a different theme. Each one draws from multiple voices at the table.

Who You’ll Hear From

You’re going to hear from the author, , who is raising three kids alongside her husband while building a body of work she hopes will change history. Morgan Zanotti, who co-founded Primal Kitchen, sold it to Kraft Heinz, and is now doing it all over again building a protein water company called Waay - with three boys under seven and a stay-at-home husband who she keeps calling “the poor guy.“ She’s working on that.

You’ll hear from Shilpa Shah, who started her company, Cuyana, in 2011 with a toddler and an infant at home, before Instagram existed, before anyone was putting female founders on panels. She got three to four hours of sleep a night for years. Her eldest’s college essay is about how his mother chased risk and fulfillment over the safe path.

You’ll hear from , co-founder of Norms, who hasn’t yet had her first child but is about to - and who showed up to this dinner to understand what she was walking into. Her answer about what breadwinning meant in her own childhood was one of the most expansive of the night. You’ll hear from , a founder who pitched investors ten days postpartum. who talks about the showing her children the importance of presence, more than anything.

And you’re going to hear one of the most honest answers - from , who admitted, out loud, that she sometimes doesn’t know what her unique contribution is at home. That she knows she’s needed at work - nothing moves without her. But at home, with the village in place, she’s wondered: do they actually need me here? What is my job description?

And then she talked herself right back into her own worth. Just as it should be.

Why We’re Calling It ‘In Confidence’

Because that’s what our Breadwinners dinners are built on.

The women who come to these dinners do not show up to network, to posture, or to perform. That is not what these evenings are. There are no name badges, no pitches, no carefully curated personal brands on display. What happens at the table is something purer: women who are used to being the most capable person in the room, finally in a room where that’s assumed, and talking honestly about what it costs and what it gives.

Not everything said at the table makes it out of the room. That’s by design. But some things deserve to travel further - not because they’re polished or packaged, but because the woman sitting next to you at your own dinner table needs to hear them. Because you need to hear them.

In Confidence is our attempt to bring the dinner to you. The real version. The one without the filters.

Where to Watch

You can watch each episode here on Substack, as well as on Instagram & YouTube. All 5 episode are posted on our Breadwinners website.

And I will be posting an episode of The Breadwinner Podcast where we play all 5 episodes consecutively.

If someone in your life needs to listen to these messages, as a reminder of how incredible she is — please send her this. That’s how The Breadwinners grows. Not through ads. Through women who recognize each other.

A Special Thank You

This series would not exist without the people who showed up - not just to attend, but to give something of themselves.

To our partners at the team at Hearth - thank you for believing in what we’re building and for supporting the kind of community that makes evenings like this one possible.

And to Elaine Welteroth and the team - thank you. What you shared in that interview required real courage. You sat down and told the truth about something most women carry alone and never say out loud. The fact that you’re willing to tell your story of motherhood - fully, honestly, without the edited version - is exactly what this community is for. We are so grateful you’re in this room.

This is The Breadwinners. This is In Confidence.

The courage to confide. The confidence to lead.

And most importantly, Happy Mother’s Day to all who celebrate.

Thanks for being here,
Alexis

Watch the full series here.

Subscribe on Substack: wearethebreadwinners.substack.com

Follow on Instagram: @wearethebreadwinners @hearthdisplay @birthfund

Use code BREADWINNERS at checkout for an extra 10% off, stackable on top of Hearth’s sitewide 20% off sale. Up to 30% total savings for our community.

Not 1 in 20. Not some niche arrangement confined to coastal cities and progressive zip codes.

Nearly 1 in 5.

A full restructuring of the American family is happening quietly, without much fanfare, while the culture around it largely lives within an outdated narrative.

Researchers at Pew point to women’s rising earning potential and educational attainment as the primary drivers. Which means this isn’t an accident or an anomaly. It’s the direct result of what happens when women build serious careers - partner restructure around them.

These are the partnerships that make us possible. And we’re barely talking about them.

The Arrangement the Culture Hasn’t Caught Up To

A significant number of the Breadwinner women in this community are doing so because someone at home made a decision. Their partner looked at their earning potential, their ambition, their career trajectory - and chose to step back in this season of life so that they could step forward.

And yet the culture is still fumbling with it - on both sides of the arrangement.

Stay-at-home dads show up at the playground and get treated like an anomaly at best, a threat at worst. Research from the University of Michigan found that being shunned by mom groups at parks and playgrounds is one of the issues these fathers discuss most often. Some have been turned away from joining local parent groups outright - told the space needs to be “comfortable for moms.” Others report being treated with suspicion simply for being a man in a caregiving context during the day. Some still call it “dad’s day with the kids.” The pediatrician still looks at mom first.

Meanwhile, the stay-at-home dad is quietly navigating a masculinity script that was never written for him. Research on how these men construct identity consistently finds the same tension: they chose this, they believe in it, and they still have to fight the internal and external noise that says providing financially is what makes a man a man. Many find their way through - discovering, as researchers put it, a version of masculinity rooted in emotional connection rather than a paycheck. But they’re doing it largely without a roadmap, without peer community, and without much cultural acknowledgment that what they’re doing is, in fact, extraordinary.

Which means the breadwinner partnerships we’re building aren’t just personal. They’re making an argument. Every one of these arrangements that works - visibly, sustainably, joyfully - is evidence that a different model is possible.

Hollywood Still Thinks The Old Narrative Is Funny

There’s a movie coming out May 29th called The Breadwinner.

At first I was ecstatic about the movie title, how could I not be? But then I noticed the premise of the movie was hitting on all the wrong, outdates tropes about dads.

Nate Bargatze, genuinely one of the funniest humans alive, and someone I have a lot of affection for, stars as a car salesman whose wife (played by Mandy Moore) lands a Shark Tank deal and leaves him in charge of the house. The trailer shows him struggling to cook eggs, locking his family out, getting into a car accident, and somehow ending up with a horse in his living room. His daughter’s first reaction to the arrangement: “We’re all going to die.”

I love Nate Bargatze. I do not love this character.

Because the bumbling dad who can’t figure out a frying pan is not a new idea. It’s Homer Simpson. It’s every beer commercial from 1987. It’s the premise that has kept American sitcoms running for decades - the joke being that men are inherently incompetent at domestic life, and the women who run households are martyrs performing miracles. At the same time, their husbands wander through the kitchen like confused golden retrievers.

It gets a laugh. And it has done real damage.

Here’s what that trope actually says, underneath the comedy: that caregiving is women’s work, that men are constitutionally incapable of it, and that any man who ends up doing it has fallen into a situation he can’t handle rather than made a choice he’s proud of. It frames the household as a foreign country that men visit, but women inhabit. And it lets everyone off the hook - men from developing competence, culture from expecting it.

The 2.1 million stay-at-home dads in America right now are not Homer Simpson. They are not bumbling through their days in a state of domestic bewilderment, waiting for mom to come home and restore order. They are men who made a deliberate decision about what their family needed and who was best positioned to provide it. But that only works when the breadwinner mother treats them as a full partner in the information flow - not just in execution.

Kim Chappell, a mom of 3 and corporate executive, put it plainly: “Whenever a school or classroom group chat or sports WhatsApp group starts, the first thing I do is add my husband. The constant mental load of replying, remembering who needs to be where and when, changes, rainouts, snacks - that should not fall on mom alone.”

The bumbling dad isn’t bumbling because he’s incapable - he’s bumbling because nobody handed him the information. The joke only works if Mom stays the default. Kim opted out of being the default. That’s what a real partnership looks like, and it has nothing to do with a horse in the living room.

The real breadwinner story - the one happening in 1 in 5 American households right now - is a lot less funny and a lot more interesting. It’s two people looking at their actual lives and making an actual choice. Together. With intention.

We can hold space for a good Nate Bargatze movie and still say, “We’ve earned a better narrative than this.”

What Makes It Work

The breadwinner partnerships that function well share a few things in common, and none of them are what the articles usually focus on.

Not the chore chart. Not whoever makes the money has final say. Not even gratitude, though gratitude matters.

Both people have a clear identity outside the transaction. The stay-at-home parent has a sense of self that isn’t entirely defined by what they gave up. And the Breadwinner has a genuine understanding of what her partner is actually doing, which is not nothing.

Pranitha Patil, co-founder of Function Health, who became a first-time mother while her company was scaling, put it plainly when we talked on our podcast: “It’s so cool to be the breadwinner. It’s so cool to have a husband that’s just the coolest champion of me - just like, ‘let her take the spotlight, I will feed that spotlight.’ He does everything at home that makes us run as a household. He chose to step away and not work so that we could have what we have today and still be good parents.”

He chose it. She didn’t ask him to shift, or shrink. He decided this was the best use of what they had between them. That distinction matters more than most people realize - because a man who chose this, who owns it, who sees it as an expression of his values rather than an absence of options, is a man with a stable identity inside the arrangement. That stability is what makes everything else possible.

The women who have figured this out aren’t the ones who perfected the logistics. They’re the ones who stopped treating their partner’s contribution as something that needs to be justified against a paycheck.

The Conversation Most Couples Are Avoiding

These arrangements only work when both partners have genuinely chosen them - not drifted into them because one career took off and the other stalled. Intention is everything, and intention requires a conversation that most couples are still too uncomfortable to have directly.

What does this mean for ‘our’ money vs ‘your’ money? What does he need to feel whole - not just as a parent, but as a person? What does each parent need to feel supported without carrying the weight of each part of their arrangement alone? What happens if it stops working?

Pranitha and her husband answer this by thinking in seasons. “We really do define it as a season. I know he has ambitions that are so cool, and I cannot wait for him to have the space and time to focus on those. Because we know it’s time-bound - we don’t know what the time bound is, but we know it’s time-bound. And because we know this is the season for us right now, it’s worked really well.”

Time-bound. That framing releases the pressure from the arrangement without undermining the commitment to it. It says: we chose this, we’re not trapped in it, and we’ll choose again when the season changes.

The families navigating this well are talking about it regularly. They treat the arrangement like what it is: an agreement that gets renegotiated as life changes.

Why This Matters Beyond Your Own House

When Breadwinner women build partnerships that actually work at the foundation level, we become proof of something. Not that you found a better morning routine, but that you built a structure designed around the life you’re actually living - and that structure includes a partner who chose it with you.

18% of stay-at-home parents are dads, and that number is moving. The American family is restructuring in real time. Our culture is catching up slowly, and most importantly, we can help guide where it goes, to show future generations what’s possible.

We can steer this ship in the right cultural direction. Together.

Thanks for reading and being a part of our community.

- Alexis

@wearethebreadwinners

The Breadwinners is a community-led media platform for ambitious high-achieving mothers who are the earners for their families, beyond the paycheck.

Our podcast features candid conversations with founders and executives navigating the reality of building careers while raising families - challenging the narrative that ambition and motherhood are at odds.

We’re redefining breadwinning beyond the paycheck to celebrate the legacy, opportunity, and possibility we create for our families.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

How many of you have googled “botox near me” at 11 p.m. and immediately closed the tab? Not out of lack of interest - but out of not knowing who to trust.

That’s not a personal failing. That’s a feature of an industry that runs almost entirely on marketing.

The education available to practitioners in aesthetics comes largely from the companies selling the products. Which means the information filtering down to us as consumers - through social media, med spas, and beautifully lit before-and-after photos - is built on a foundation with serious conflicts of interest. Most of us walking into an appointment have no idea how to vet the person holding the syringe. And most practices have no incentive to tell us what we don’t need.

This week’s episode exists to change that.

Meet Adriana Culling

Adriana is the founder of Maeva Aesthetics in Austin. She’s a nurse with a near-complete second degree in chemistry who spent years training under physicians, reading clinical studies, and building an approach grounded in anatomy rather than trends. She built her own practice for one specific reason: so she would never feel pressure to upsell a patient or inject something that wasn’t genuinely in their best interest.

I found her on TikTok years ago, watching her break down celebrity faces - not to gossip, but to explain what had gone wrong and why. I eventually realized she was in Austin, booked an appointment, and sat across from someone who looked at my face and told me what I didn’t need. That was the first time I’d heard that from anyone in this industry.

This conversation is everything I wished I’d had access to years ago.

The Topics We Discussed

How to find someone you can trust. Adriana’s framework isn’t complicated, but it’s specific. Look at the staff. If they don’t look the way you hope to look, walk out — they’re practicing on each other. Be skeptical of heavy discounting and high-volume practices. And find someone who asks you questions before they pick up a syringe.

The difference between what you think you need and what you actually need, or don’t need. Most of us walk in with a list we’ve assembled from social media. Most of that list is wrong for our specific face. A great injector reads your bone structure, your tissue quality, your muscle movement — and builds a plan from there. What works beautifully on one face can look completely wrong on another.

What’s worth spending money on and what’s overhyped. Adriana’s honest answer: true innovation in aesthetics is rare. Most “new” treatments are existing science repackaged with a new name and a marketing budget. She’s a strong believer in the fundamentals — SPF, Vitamin C, a retinol or tretinoin, micro needling, and consistent Botox for those with expression lines. Red light masks. The boring stuff that actually works over time.

The treatments she won’t offer. CoolSculpting. Morpheus8. There are things Adriana has looked at, assessed, and decided are not worth what they put a patient through. She says so directly. That alone tells you everything about how she operates.

What this does to your relationship with your own face. Adriana is her own billboard. She posts photos of herself. She’s surrounded by the work every day. And she was honest that it messes with her — that she can find herself fixating on things no one else is seeing. Her solution is the same one she offers her patients: back up. Get a second opinion from someone who knows you. Don’t chase perfection in bad lighting.

Running a practice while raising kids. She started Magnet Esthetics when her children were babies. She doesn’t cook. Her house is, by her own description, a mess. She is lit up by her work and intentional with the time she has with her family. Something’s always going to give — the point is to decide what it is, not let it be decided for you.

The Long Game

Late in the conversation, I said something that’s important for everyone to realize: this is a long game. Three years with Adriana. A slow, considered build. No single appointment transformed anything. The results compound over time, and they only work if the person guiding them is someone who’s genuinely thinking about your face, not their revenue.

That’s true of most things worth doing.

Find the right person. Build the relationship. Trust the process. And stop letting marketing make decisions your actual face should be making.

The episode is live now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

— Alexis

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