Two days after a routine mammogram, Jaclyn Johnson was standing in a hotel room in Arizona when a room service guy walked in holding the bill at the exact moment her doctor called to tell her it was cancer. She just stared in silence and shock.

I sat down with Jaclyn this week, the founder of Create & Cultivate, and if you don’t know her story, here’s the short version: she built a media and events company from nothing in 2012, grew it into a multi-million dollar business, sold a majority stake to private equity in 2021, watched it get run into the ground by people who didn’t understand what made it work, and then did something almost no founder ever does. She bought it back.

In between all of that, her marriage ended, she moved cities alone, and she was diagnosed with stage zero breast cancer. She is now building Cherub, an angel investing platform designed to get more capital into the hands of women.

I walked away from this conversation with a handful of things I think we can all learn from:

If community is the product, you can’t monetize it out of the gate.

Create and Cultivate did not turn a profit for five years. Jaclyn said: “Communities form around a shared purpose, not a business plan” She built Create & Cultivate because she needed people who understood what she was going through as a founder, not because she saw a revenue line. The moment you try to monetize a community before it exists, you kill the thing that made people want to be in the room.

I felt this one personally. Breadwinners isn’t making a profit right now. People ask me about revenue streams constantly, and for a long time that question made me spiral. Jaclyn’s answer was the permission slip I needed. If community is the product, you cannot build it and monetize it at the same time. You have to pick one first.

Talk about it before it exists.

Jaclyn called it sales disguised as ego. You have to speak the thing into existence before you have any proof it will work, and that is not the same as faking it. Faking it implies you don’t believe it. Speaking it into existence means you believe it so completely that you’re willing to say it out loud before anyone else can see it. That belief is what gets it in motion. It’s also about accountability; once you’ve said it to a room full of people, there’s no quiet way to back out.

Your body will send the bill eventually.

Jaclyn had a tooth infection so severe her gums had to be surgically cut open, and she scheduled the emergency surgery around a company event because she didn’t have time. She ignored it for years. And unfortunately, that is what happens when you treat your body like a line item you’ll get to later. She put her physical and mental health on the back burner for over a decade, and it caught up with her the same year the company sale finally closed. Stress doesn’t wait for a convenient moment to collect.

Her advice for anyone who gets a diagnosis, or is waiting on one: push for answers. If something feels off and you’re told you’re fine, ask again. Get a second opinion. Find out if you have optionality in your treatment instead of accepting the first protocol you’re handed. “You have to become the biggest advocate for your own health, because no one else is going to do it for you.”

Selling her company was not the happy ending.

This was a harsh realization: Jaclyn closed the sale of C&C, hit her number, and thought she’d finally get to breathe. Instead, everything came crashing down. Who am I outside of work? Am I happy in my relationship? What do I actually like to do? Money solved a lot of problems, but it did not bring her internal peace. The identity she’d spent ten years building was tied entirely to a role, and when the role ended, she had to rebuild herself from nothing at the same time she was rebuilding her personal life.

You can buy back what’s yours.

When the private equity firm decided to sell just two years after acquiring the company, Jaclyn made a call most people never even consider. She asked to be treated as a buyer. She called a friend she’d known for a year and asked if they’d build something together from the wreckage. It almost didn’t happen. The deal fell apart, came back together, and she started over from zero on a company she’d already spent a decade building once.

The sobering stat: 1.9% of all venture capital goes to women.

Women get 1.9% of all venture capital funding. That number keeps going down, not up. Jaclyn’s answer to that isn’t a think piece, it’s Cherub: a platform that makes angel investing accessible at check sizes as low as a couple thousand dollars, so more women can build capital, relationships, and financial literacy without needing to write a six-figure check. She calls it treating yourself like your own mini VC. Pick an industry you understand, invest what you can, and use it as an education, not a bet.

When I asked Jaclyn how she defines a breadwinner, she said it’s the person in the household keeping it all together, financially, mentally, the glue and the silent things that get done that hold everything together. I couldn’t agree more.

Our full conversation is live now on The Breadwinners Podcast.

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.

Subscribe now

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Follow: @wearethebreadwinners

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

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.

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

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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

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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.

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

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

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

Join The Breadwinners community:

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

‘The Worst Someone Will Tell You is No.’

That’s my motto. Has been for as long as I can remember. It’s what I tell my kids when they’re nervous to try something. It’s what I come back to when I’m afraid to make an ask I’m not sure will land. It’s the simplest thing I know about building anything - a company, a career, a life that actually looks like what you want.

The worst someone will tell you is no. And if they say no, you find the person who says yes.

Pranitha Patil heard no from the medical system for a decade. And she used that experience, that rejection, and found inspiration in it to build Function Health.

The no she was handed.

Pranitha was 16 when she was diagnosed with PCOS. In her early 20s, pre-diabetes and high cholesterol entered the picture. She was working as a consultant at Accenture, traveling five days a week, eating whatever she could get on the road, managing two chronic conditions without a real roadmap.

At 25, she sat in a doctor’s office and was told her cholesterol was too high. She was also told she couldn’t go on a statin. Not because medication wasn’t the right call, but because no clinical research existed for someone like her. Young. South Asian. Female. The drug existed. The test existed. The science existed. The data on her specific body did not.

That’s a particular kind of no. The kind that isn’t even a decision, it’s an absence. A system that never accounted for you, so it has nothing to offer when you show up.

Most people accept that no. They go home, they manage what they can, they hope for the best.

Pranitha went home and started a spreadsheet.

The answer she built herself.

For years, she tracked her own biomarkers. Updated the spreadsheet through every career transition, every new city, every annual physical. Ran experiments on her own diet. Noticed patterns. Made connections between what she ate, how she moved, and what the numbers showed. She became, as she said, her own baseline, because no clinical baseline existed for her.

In 2021, she met her co-founder Jonathan, who had an idea: make biomarker data as accessible as possible. Pranitha said yes immediately. Because she knew, from years of keeping that spreadsheet alone, what access to your own health data actually does for a person.

It unlocks power.

Function Health now has nearly 500 employees. It has delivered over 50 million health results. Fifty-five percent of its members are women. That last number is not a coincidence. It’s what happens when you build something that answers a no women have been receiving from healthcare for generations.

The ‘no’ women’s health has always handed us.

We talked about perimenopause in this episode. About the fact that some OB-GYNs receive only a few hours of training on menopause, for something that can span a decade of a woman’s life. About how our mothers went through it without language for it, without options, often handed antidepressants and told that what they were experiencing was something else entirely.

The medical system’s response to women’s health has, for a very long time, been a version of no. No, we don’t have research on that. No, we don’t have a baseline for you. No, we can’t explain why every symptom you’re experiencing is apparently the same symptom.

What Pranitha is building is an infrastructure for yes. A longitudinal record of your own body, built over time, so that when things change - and they will, at every stage - you have somewhere to return to. Data that belongs to you. A picture of your health that you actually get to see.

That’s not a luxury. It’s what should have always been available.

The ‘no’ she refused about motherhood.

Pranitha had her first baby last year. Her son is almost one. She became a first-time mother while Function was scaling past 400 employees, while funding rounds were closing, while everything was in motion.

She did both things. She is still doing both things.

I asked her about it directly - what it actually looked like, not the version in the press release. And she said something I want to write down and keep: “The thing nobody tells you about being a founder and a new mother? That it can absolutely coexist. You can crush it.”

Everyone around her kept framing it as a tension. Two things pulling against each other. She refused that frame. She and her husband looked at their life, their ambitions, their timing, and designed around it. He stepped back from work this season. She sprints. They know it’s time-bound. They built accordingly. Her breadwinner story is a team story, the way most of them are when you look closely enough.

She didn’t accept the no. She designed a different answer.

The ‘no’ her father defied first.

Pranitha grew up in a traditional Indian household. Her father has a PhD; her mother, a master’s in computer science; her older sister is an OBGYN. Academic achievement was the air they breathed. And in Indian culture - she said this plainly - having daughters is still not always celebrated the way having sons is. Boys are still, in many places, still the expectation.

Her father had two daughters. And he told both of them: you have to be financially independent. You have to be able to be on your own. Find a partner, yes — but make sure you have your own money.

That was rare. That was him saying no to a cultural expectation, and yes to something different for his daughters. And Pranitha carried that yes all the way to co-founding a health company that is changing what women know about their own bodies.

The worst someone will tell you is no. And sometimes the most important yes in your life starts with someone who refused the no before you were even old enough to ask.

It will all be okay.

I asked Pranitha what she would tell her 25-year-old self. The one packing lunches in a suitcase to survive road trips at Accenture, secretly managing two chronic conditions, keeping a spreadsheet nobody else knew about because the system had nothing better to offer her.

She said: it will all be okay. And maybe one day you’ll change a bunch of lives because of this thing you’re doing on your own.

That 25-year-old got handed a lot of no. No research for you. No data on your specific body. No roadmap for what you’re managing. She took all of it and built the answer herself.

The worst someone will tell you is no. And sometimes the no is the beginning.

Listen to the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts.

— Alexis

Use the code: BREADWINNERS50 for $50 off when you sign up for ⁠Function Health

Follow on Instagram: @wearethebreadwinners

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It was 2022. I was three months postpartum with my second baby. We had just moved to a new city. I didn’t know anyone. I had a 20-month-old at my feet and a newborn in my arms. I was breastfeeding, pumping, doing all the things - and every single morning I woke up and my body just…hurt.

I joined a gym. And in walked this woman. Pregnant. Radiating something I can only describe as total authority over her own body. I didn’t know her name yet (little did I know we share the same name!). I just knew I needed her in my life.

That was Dr. Alexis Griffin. And she is, to this day, one of the most extraordinary women I know. She helped put my body back together, little by little - and I’m forever grateful.

We sat down together for the latest episode of The Breadwinners Pod and talked all things postpartum recovery, pelvic floor, motherhood, career pivots, and what it actually looks like to build through the seasons.

The myth we’ve all been sold

We started by talking about the thing that most people feel is a total black box - The Pelvic Floor.

For those who even know what it is, we are walking around believing we need a strong pelvic floor. Tight. Firm. Held together like a fist.

Wrong.

Alexis explains it like this: think of your pelvic floor as a trampoline. If the trampoline doesn’t give at all, there’s no bounce. If it gives too much, that’s also a problem. What you want is yield. Length. Movement.

She asked her husband once what the pelvic floor does. He said: “It pushes the baby out.”

Exactly wrong. The uterus pushes the baby out. The pelvic floor needs to get out of the way. If it’s short and tight and gripping, your body is literally fighting against itself.

I’ve been thinking about how often we do that. In our bodies, in our work, in our lives. Gripping so hard we forget that yielding is also a skill. And that’s for all humans - pregnant or not pregnant, men and women alike.

Stability is more important than strength

This is the other reframe I keep coming back to. Mostly because 2.5 years postpartum I’m still dealing with pelvic floor issues (hello peeing when I run) and reminded daily that stability is queen.

We chase strength. We lift heavier, push harder, add more. Dr. Griffin’s entire clinical philosophy is organized around a different principle: stability first. Always.

A strong body that isn’t stable is a body waiting to break down. For her NFL players. For her postpartum clients. For any of us who are holding a lot - professionally, physically, emotionally - and wondering why we keep getting hurt.

Strength gets the attention. Stability does the work.

The gym is not the answer (not yet)

We, unfortunately, have a serious problem with snapback culture in this country.

We think of recovery as: get cleared by the doctor, get back to the gym asap, get back to normal (what even is normal after kids?). Dr. Griffin thinks about it differently.

Before you ever walk into a gym, she wants to know how you’re bending over that crib. How you’re holding that beautiful baby. How you’re sitting in your car during your commute.

Because you do those movements hundreds of times a day. And if you’re doing them with a tucked pelvis and a disengaged posterior chain, 45 minutes of effort at the gym doesn’t undo the other 23 hours.

Here’s an amazing tip she shared: she puts her laundry on the floor so she’s forced to do a proper hip hinge every time she picked something up. A built-in RDL. Intentional movement, woven into a day that had no room for extras. And that’s how she sneaks in 30-40+ hip hinges a day….while doing chores.

What an epic hack.

On seasons…and the tech sales job at 38

There is a moment in this episode that I think every woman navigating a career pivot needs to hear.

Dr. Alexis Griffin - DPT, board-certified sports specialist, a decade of working with elite athletes - took a tech sales job at 38. Cold calling. Sitting at a desk. Quotas. Teams of 24-year-olds.

She called me when she was making the decision. I remember the conversation. She said: I’m a doctor and I’m going to go do tech sales. And I said: I think that’s exactly what you, and your family, need right now.

Because it was a season. Gwendolyn, her fourth baby, was four months old. She needed something consistent and flexible. She needed to be home without guilt. She needed the season to be what it was without forcing it to be something else.

What she took from it surprised her. The clarity of sales metrics - you hit your number or you don’t - helped her understand boundaries in a way that years of solo clinical practice hadn’t. Being fully present at work. Being fully present at home. Not bleeding everything together and calling it ‘dedication’.

But the reality is, even though that job was what she needed for that moment in her life, she also realized that nothing is wasted. It may not be your dream, or your forever - but it’s important to remember that it’s not for nothing. And that’s what she tells her kids.

Effort Matters More - High Expectations, High Support.

Those are the words written on the whiteboard in her family’s kitchen. Reminding her kids that it’s important to work hard, but also to enjoy the hard work.

Near the end of the episode I asked her what legacy she wants to leave.

She said: I want my kids to want to work hard because that’s their best self. Not because someone told them to. Because they know they have something to offer the world.

In the age of AI - where effort is increasingly optional, where the path of least resistance gets easier every day - she’s choosing to model something different. She’s building something hard. She’s showing her four kids what it looks like to do meaningful work in a season that finally has room for it.

That’s a Breadwinner. And that’s what we’re here to celebrate.

Listen to the full episode with Dr. Alexis Griffin wherever you get your podcasts.

And if it resonates, share it with someone who needs to hear that their body isn’t broken.

As always, thanks for reading - and listening.

— Alexis

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There is a moment Aileen Fitzgerald can point to exactly. Not a season, not a chapter. A specific night. Her partner hadn’t come home. It wasn’t the first time. And something shifted in her, the way a scale tips when you finally add the last weight.

She thought: no one is coming to save you.

And then, almost immediately after: but you will help your baby.

That was the door. Everything that followed - the house she found on Facebook Marketplace at midnight, the keys a week later, the nursing job she quit, the four weeks of rent money she gave herself to make it as an artist - all of it walked through that door. One sentence. One honest reckoning with the truth of her situation.

She didn’t have a plan. She had a decision.

The Waiting

Most of us are waiting for something. The right time, the right sign, the right person to tell us it’s okay to go. Waiting to feel ready. Waiting for permission we are never going to receive because no one is coming to give it.

The saving is ours to do.

Aileen would be the first to tell you it is not a clean or linear process. She burned her world down - her words - and spent a year alone in a small house with her daughter and her paint brushes, figuring out who she was without anyone else’s expectations layered on top of her. The paintings from that year were void of color. All sepia. All quiet. The colors came back slowly. First green, then red, then the full spectrum she lives in now.

One painting at a time, she was learning to listen to herself again.

The River Always Leads to the Ocean

Aileen said something in this episode that reframes the entire conversation around trusting your inner self.

“The river already knows its path. You can’t see around the bend. The path only reveals itself when you start moving. And all rivers lead to the ocean.”

She wasn’t talking about certainty. She was talking about the kind of trust that doesn’t come from having it figured out. The kind that only comes from letting go of the rock you’ve been clinging to while the current rushes past you.

She described it physically. The feeling of floating versus clinging. The way you can feel the difference in your body between moving with your life and white-knuckling against it. When she finally let go, not all at once, but slowly, painfully, one decision at a time, the river took her somewhere she never could have planned her way to.

Now Married. Expecting her second child. A world-renowned painter whose work sells out of galleries across the globe. A daughter who draws rivers at school because the river is where her family goes to feel free.

She could not have pictured any of it from that night on Facebook Marketplace. She just had to start moving.

Letting Go Is Not the Same as Giving Up

The river metaphor gets misread. People hear surrender and think passivity. Trust and think naivety.

Floating is not the same as drifting. The river has a direction. Your job is to stop fighting it.

That requires knowing yourself well enough to feel the difference between resistance and wisdom. Between fear and intuition. Between clinging to something because it is right and clinging to something because the unknown terrifies you.

Aileen spent years building that discernment. Through painting. Through acupuncture. Through morning swims at Barton Springs before the city wakes up. Through walks with no phone and no destination. Through sitting alone long enough to hear herself again.

She calls it structuring for freedom. Building your life around the conditions that make stillness possible, not as a luxury, but as the actual foundation of everything else. The business, the motherhood, the art. All of it runs downstream from that.

Will You Live for Your Kids

Aileen said something that every mother needs to sit with.

You’ll die for your kids. But will you live for them?

Our children are not watching our sacrifices. They are watching our choices. They are watching whether we live as ourselves or as a performance of who we thought we were supposed to be. Whether we go to the river. Whether we leave the phone at home. Whether we give ourselves permission to exist as full people and not just as providers and caretakers and managers of everyone else’s needs.

Aileen told her daughter that mommy had to learn how to love herself so she could show her what that looks like. Not explain it. Show it.

That is the breadwinning that doesn’t show up in a salary. That is the legacy.

The Most Liberating Sentence

No one is coming to save you is not a bleak sentence.

It is the most liberating one available.

Because if no one is coming, you are not waiting anymore. You are free to move. Free to stop performing the version of your life that was built around other people’s comfort and start building the one that is actually yours.

The river already knows where it’s going.

You just have to let go.

If this resonated with you, please leave a comment about what you feel you need to let go of, or what freedom you’ve found to allowed yourself to do so.

Thanks for reading.

The Breadwinners is a community for ambitious women redefining what it means to win - beyond the paycheck, beyond the credentials, into the life that actually matters.

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Most of us spend our entire careers trying to figure out the difference between validation and respect and nobody can ever just explain it plainly. They both look the same from the outside. Both involve caring what people think. Both require you to pay attention to how you’re landing in a room.

The difference is what’s driving it.

- organizational psychologist, author of Likeable Badass - draws a line between the two that I think most of us have never been given language for. Chasing validation is letting other people’s opinions define you. Building respect is understanding that other people’s opinions are information - and using that information strategically, in service of what you’re actually building.

One is reactive. The other is intentional.

She made a point that was a big reframe for me: we tell ourselves we don’t care what people think. We tell our kids the same thing. But nobody says that when you’re winning an award. That advice only shows up in moments of pain - when something didn’t go the way you wanted and you need a way to survive it. It’s a comfort. It’s not a strategy.

And if you actually lived by it, you’d be stuck. Because so much of what we want - the promotion, the collaboration, the room where decisions get made - depends entirely on whether the people who can give us those things respect us.

The goal isn’t indifference. The goal is knowing whose opinion matters for what you’re building, and investing there deliberately. That’s not the same as needing everyone to like you. It’s almost the opposite. It’s having enough clarity about where you’re going that you can choose which relationships to pour into - and let the rest go.

That distinction is everything. And most of us were never taught it.

What we get into in this episode:

• Why status isn’t about prestige - and the definition that actually changes how you operate (hint: Aretha Franklin wrote an entire song about it)

• The two things every person’s brain evaluates when they meet you (and how to signal both)

• Why “I don’t care what people think” is a comfort, not a strategy - and what to do instead

• The formula for figuring out whose opinion actually matters for where you’re going

• Why adapting how you show up in different rooms isn’t fake - it’s the same skill you use with your kids every day (this one was a big reframe moment for me)

• How self-deprecation quietly erodes your status without you realizing it

• How to build status with a room full of strangers in under five minutes

Put it to work:

• Identify whose opinion actually matters. Get clear on your goals, then work backwards. The people who can move you toward them are the ones worth investing in. Everyone else is optional.

• Audit the signals you’re sending. Ask someone you trust: what do people think of me before they really know me? The answer might surprise you — and it’s data you need.

• Stop self-deprecating as a warm-up. It feels humble. It reads as incapable. Find another way to be likeable that doesn’t quietly undercut your competence.

• Bring your parenting intelligence to work. You already shift your approach based on who’s in front of you at home. Name it, own it, and apply it deliberately in professional settings.

• Listen first, add value second. In any new room, resist the urge to establish yourself by talking. Ask questions, find what people care about, and look for one small way to be useful. Status builds fast from there.

• Treat your career like an experiment. Before you quit or commit, try it once more with a different approach. Alison’s framework: nothing is forever, but nothing changes if you don’t try.

Full episode with the lovely Alison Fragale is live wherever you get your podcasts - The Breadwinners Podcast.

— Alexis

________________________________________________

The Breadwinners The Breadwinners is a community-led media platform for women who are leading their families - and redefining what that means. Through our podcast, dinner series, and community, we bring together founders, executives, and mothers who have stopped choosing between ambition and presence. We're expanding the definition of breadwinning beyond the paycheck to include the legacy, opportunity, and possibility we create for the people we love.

Every guest I’ve had on this podcast has been generous. They’ve shared their origin stories, their hard moments, the systems that work and the ones that failed. They’ve been honest in the way you can be honest with a stranger, sometimes a friend - which is actually a particular kind of honesty. Contained. Curated just enough. Safe.

But there was a gap.

The person most inside my Breadwinner story has never had a public voice in it. Every time I talked about our marriage on this show - the division of labor, the mental load, what partnership actually looks like when two people are both building things and raising kids - my husband, Todd, would listen to the episode, always tells me how much he loved each episode and then, quietly, occasionally, tell me I’d gotten something wrong.

So I decided to hand him the mic. Because who better to talk about the real stuff about running a family while building our careers than the man I do it every single day with.

Buckle up folks, this is a fun one.

He was warned. He came anyway.

We read through the questions the night before and he refused to give me his answers. That’s when I knew this was going to feel less like a podcast and more like a therapy session we were accidentally making public. Todd’s words, not mine: “I’m not sure how many people do public therapy. I’m not sure this is a great idea.”

Noted. And we did it anyway.

Welcome everyone to our therapy session…

There is, apparently, only one correct way to load a dishwasher.

We are three minutes in before Todd brings up the dishwasher. Three minutes. There is, in his words, “a universal law” about how dishes should be loaded. A lot of people don’t know it. He lives with several of them. I am the original offender. Our oldest son has also revealed himself to be what Todd lovingly calls “a crazy squirrel.” The younger three are, quote, “yet to show themselves fully.”

His description of a properly loaded dishwasher: “It’s like Tetris in real life.”

My position: do the dishes get clean? Yes or no? That’s the only metric that matters. We did not reach resolution.

The invisible load debate - and why I took the bait.

I have a rule about not engaging with rage bait online. But then I broke it. There was a post from an ‘expert’ who has 337,000 followers, a ‘research study’, the whole thing -- claiming that the only household task men handle from planning to execution is taking out the garbage. I read it and I couldn’t hold back - steam coming out of my ears.

My comment got 61 likes. Todd told me to stop engaging. I read him the replies live on air, including the one that said men would be “okay sleeping surrounded by trash.” His response was measured, pointed, and worth hearing in full. The short version: “It’s called the comments section. Not conversation.”

This is one of the more useful parts of the episode - not because we solved anything, but because we actually talked about it together instead of performing our separate positions for an audience. That’s what I love about our conversations — whether they’re recorded or not.

What I didn’t anticipate about interviewing the person you actually live with.

With a guest, if the conversation goes somewhere unexpected, you can navigate it. There’s distance. With Todd, there’s no distance. When he said something true and a little hard to hear, I had to let it land on camera. When his answers were different than I expected, I had to sit with that in real time, while also running the show.

That’s a more honest kind of interview. And a harder one.

What came out wasn’t a portrait of a couple who has it figured out. It was something closer to the real thing - two people genuinely trying. To split things fairly. To parent with intention. To keep choosing each other while also building separate things and shared ones.

We talked about how we’ve never officially agreed on who does what - we just fell into patterns based on what annoyed us most. We talked about the pendulum swinging in culture and why broad generalizations about either gender are making this conversation harder to actually have. We talked about his dad, and what he carried forward from watching him show up. We talked about what we want our kids to see when they look at us.

His answer to that one: “A unit that’s interchangeable and multidisciplinary, but inseparable.”

Why this episode matters to me.

Todd isn’t a guest. He’s the co-architect of everything I talk about on this show. The person who was the first audience for everything I was building, long before any one knew to listen. Letting him speak for himself - unscripted, on the record - felt overdue.

He also wants everyone to know that he does bathe regularly. I mentioned it once in passing. He brought it up on camera. We are, above all else, a team.

Go listen. Then come back and tell me: does your division of labor have a system, or did you also just sort of fall into it?

Because I have a feeling I’m not the only one loading the dishwasher wrong.

— Alexis

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The Breadwinners is a podcast and community for ambitious women redefining breadwinning beyond the paycheck - to include emotional richness, systemic change, and legacy.

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There is a specific kind of exhaustion that high-achieving women don’t talk about.

It’s not the kind of tired that comes from working hard. It’s the tired that comes from working hard at a life that no longer fits, and pretending it does.

knows this exhaustion intimately. And in our conversation, she named it with honesty, I rarely hear from women who have reached her level.

The Pinnacle Paradox

Devon spent 17 years in venture capital, rising to General Partner at OpenView Ventures - beautiful home, successful marriage, three kids, a career most people only dream of. In March 2020, her firm's biggest portfolio company went public and returned the fund 10x. On paper, she had everything.

Yet she found herself frequently sitting alone in her car, listening to meditation audiobooks, wondering why she desperately needed to escape.

This is what I’m calling the Pinnacle Paradox - the moment when you finally reach the top and realize the view isn’t what you thought it would be. It doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. It means you grew beyond the container you built for yourself.

And that is both terrifying and completely okay.

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The Body Keeps the Score

One of the most important things Devon said - because we’ve all lived it ourselves:

Your body will tell you it’s not working long before your mind is ready to admit it.

For Devon, it was the jaw clenching. The weight gain. The skin is breaking out. The headaches. The constant low-grade tension she had normalized so completely that she didn’t even notice it anymore.

For me, it was sweating listening to her describe it - because I recognized every single symptom.

We are so good at overriding our bodies in the service of our ambitions. We treat physical signals as inconveniences rather than information. But what if the headache is a message? What if the exhaustion is data?

Devon didn’t start her healing journey with a therapist or a spiritual coach. She first started with her body. Getting back into shape. Moving. Rebuilding physical confidence. And that unlocked everything else that soon followed.

The Shame Nobody’s Talking About

Devon put language to something I hear constantly from women in our community, but rarely see said out loud:

“High-achieving women are carrying an enormous amount of shame. And we are carrying it alone.

Am I a good enough mom? Am I working too much? Am I working too little? Are my kids going to be okay? Am I hurting them by being ambitious? Am I hurting them by stepping back?”

The double bind is real, and it is relentless.

What’s unfortunate but true, the shame doesn’t go away when you get the promotion, the exit, the title. If anything, it gets louder, because now you have “everything“ and you’re still not okay. And that feels like a secret too shameful to admit.

This is exactly why we built The Breadwinners. Not to perform success at each other - but to tell the truth about what it costs, and what it actually takes to keep going by building a community of likeminded women.

The Control Trap

Devon and I had a moment in this conversation that felt like therapy.

We talked about the mental load - that invisible, exhausting weight of managing everything - and we both had to admit something uncomfortable: some of it is self-inflicted.

Not because we’re martyrs. Because we want things done our way. Because we’re probably better at doing them. Because it’s easier to just handle it than to explain how to handle it. And then we silently resent everyone around us for not handling it.

Devon’s lesson, and mine, has been learning to define the end goal and let go of the path to get there. Less about how things get done. More about how everyone feels when they do.

It sounds simple. It is genuinely one of the more challenging things to practice in my day to day life.

What “High Achieving” Actually Means

Devon co-founded Second Harvest for high-achieving leaders at midlife, and she’s the first to admit she wrestles with that term.

Because high achieving doesn’t mean you ran a Fortune 500 company. It doesn’t mean your LinkedIn is impressive. It doesn’t mean you have a certain net worth or title.

It could mean that you have raised healthy humans. That you led with agency. That you gave more than you took. That you continually helped others along the way.

This resonated deeply with how I think about who belongs in The Breadwinners community. We’ve passed on plenty of impressive-on-paper women because our real criteria is simple: does she give more than she takes?

That’s it. That’s the one criteria we hold.

The Permission to Quit

When Devon was nineteen, she was miserable at an unpaid internship she hated. One day, her twelve-year-old cousin Sarah found her crying before she had to leave for work.

Sarah looked at her and said something simple: “If you don’t like it, just quit.”

There was something about the clarity of it - coming from someone younger who could see so plainly what she could not. Why stay in something that was making her miserable?

And so she quit.

Looking back, what she really needed in that moment wasn’t advice. It was permission. Permission from someone who wasn’t tangled up in the story she had built about sticking it out.

Twenty-something years later, that small moment stayed with her. It became one of the clearest pieces of wisdom she carried into some of the hardest decisions of her life.

We spend so much energy teaching our kids resilience — push through, don’t give up, stick it out. And resilience matters.

Sometimes the bravest move isn’t pushing through. Sometimes it’s giving yourself permission to leave.

What Comes After

Devon didn’t just leave her VC career. She did the full excavation, hired a psychologist and a spiritual coach, learned about nervous system regulation, set real boundaries, ended her marriage, and rebuilt entirely from the inside out.

And out of that process, she co-founded Second Harvest - a retreat for high-achieving leaders who are ready for something more aligned to their inner truth.

What I love most about Second Harvest's philosophy: they're not promising to fix you. They're promising to give you the space to explore life’s most important questions. Their retreats help you go within to examine your stories, rewrite your narrative, and design a life that feels more aligned - all the while surrounded by a small group of other exceptional individuals who are in a similar mindset and in the midst of midlife transformation.

Sometimes the most powerful thing isn’t an answer. It’s finally feeling safe enough to sit with the question.

If any of this landed for you - the shame, the body signals, the pinnacle that felt hollow, the control you can’t put down - this episode is for you.

🌿 A Special Offer from Second Harvest

Devon & Richard are hosting the Second Harvest Spring Summit on May 21st at the deCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA — a one-day gathering for leaders at an inflection point who are ready to step back and figure out what comes next.

As a Breadwinners listener, use code BREADWINNERS for $200 off tickets.

👉 secondharvest.co

What does it actually look like to build something sustainable - in your body, your business, and your family - without burning everything down in the process?

has done it. Three world championship titles in elite whitewater paddling. A law degree. Nearly a decade in Big Law. Co-founder of San Francisco CrossFit, one of the first 25 affiliates in the world. And today, co-leader of The Ready State alongside her husband Kelly Starrett - the movement and longevity platform that has transformed how millions of people think about what their bodies are capable of. Their book, Built to Move is a New York Times bestseller.

In this episode, Alexis and Juliet go deep on the things that don't make it into the highlight reel: the real architecture of equal partnership in business and in marriage, what it means to be a breadwinner mom who is also the primary decision-maker at work, and how to raise teenagers who are watching your every move — and actually learning something worth keeping.

What we cover:

• How a 7-year-old's wilderness river trip became the origin story of a world-class athlete

• Why Juliet left a lucrative law career to build San Francisco CrossFit from a parking lot — and what she'd tell any high-achieving woman standing at that same crossroads

• The 51/49 rule: how Juliet and Kelly structure decision-making in a 20+ year business and life partnership

• The skill-based case for working with your spouse — and why complementary strengths matter more than compatibility

• Why investing in career flexibility when your kids are small is the long game for being present when it counts most

• The 10 Vital Signs from Built to Move — and how to assess yourself right now

• Why the "all or nothing" mindset is the biggest obstacle to sustainable health
  
  Pick up Built to Move at your local bookstore or visit thereadystate.com to go deeper.
  
  EXCLUSIVE OFFER FOR BREADWINNERS: Use code BREADWINNERS at thereadystate.com for 15% off the On Demand Starrett System — Kelly and Juliet's full strength and conditioning programming.
  
  Connect with Juliet: thereadystate.com | @julietstarrett | @thereadystate
  
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What does it take to walk away from 17 years of corporate security — stock options, healthcare, a VP title at Nike — and bet on yourself?

In this episode, Alexis sits down with , co-founder of , a health and wellness-focused venture fund. Mel's path has been anything but linear: first-grade teacher, journalist, marketing executive, interim CMO of Oura Ring, and now fund manager — and she's candid about every messy step it took to get there.

In this conversation:
- Why women at the same income level as men weren't investing the same way — and what Mel did about it
- The athlete mindset and using fear as a compass instead of a stop sign
- Growing up as a caregiver to a sister with disabilities — and becoming a "mom" in 4th grade
- What it was really like when her husband became unemployed and she became the Breadwinner
- Her early investment in Oura Ring and what she saw before anyone else did
- Why women are the chief medical officers of their families — and what that means for the future of health tech
- The loneliness epidemic, human connection, and why community is the truest form of technology

Mel's story is a masterclass in reinvention, resilience, and building wealth on your own terms.

🎙️ The Breadwinners Podcast — where ambitious mothers don't just earn a living, they're pioneering a new era.

🌐 Next Ventures: nextventures.com

Substack: https://nextventures.substack.com/

We’ve professionalized delegation everywhere except the home.

In corporate America, we've built entire infrastructures around executive support. Chiefs of staff coordinate cross-functional priorities. # 2s manage operations. Executive assistants run the backend so leaders can focus on strategy.

No one questions whether a CEO "should" handle their own calendar, coordinate their travel, or manage their team's logistics. We understand that leadership requires leverage.

Yet when it comes to the home - which for most working families is essentially running a second full-scale operation - we still treat delegation as controversial.

As if wanting support to manage a household, coordinate schedules, oversee contractors, and handle the thousand invisible tasks that keep a family running somehow means you're not doing enough.

House managers are finally entering the conversation. Not as a celebrity luxury, but as a practical role for households where both parents work demanding jobs, or where one parent is the primary earner carrying the financial weight.

The same mothers who built teams, managed P&Ls, and scaled companies are now asking: why wouldn't I apply that same operational thinking to my home?

It's about time we extended that same grace to the home that we've long given to the office.

This week on The Breadwinners podcast, I sit down with Kelly Hubbell, founder of Sage Haus, to talk about how she's professionalizing household management - and why Breadwinner families are finally embracing this role.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts