If your life hasn’t been a neat, white picket fence…

If you’ve learned how to function, succeed, even thrive—while something inside still feels tight, unfinished, or quietly aching—this podcast is for you.

Finding Treasures in the Trash is an invitation to turn toward what you’ve avoided: the anxiety, the unease, the stories you were taught to disown. Through intimate conversations with teachers, leaders, and everyday humans, we explore what happens when pain isn’t something to fix—but something to listen to.

This isn’t a lifelong healing marathon.

It’s about courage, honesty, and curiosity.

So grab your gloves.

Let’s go dumpster diving—because in the muck lives the gold.

Finding Treasures in the Trash has always lived between what we hide and what saves us, and this moment marks its most honest turning point yet. Cari Jacobs-Crovetto shares why the show is stepping out on its own and moving to the newly formed Magic Thread Media, a network devoted to weaving conscious voices into business, creativity, and spiritual life. As she reflects on the early episodes, Cari names the deeper work that has quietly emerged: inner truth work. She explores how anxiety, shadow, and disowned parts of ourselves become survival strategies, why truth often freezes in time, and how unexamined insight can slip into self-justification and managed presence.

This episode grounds the future of the Finding Treasures in the Trash podcast in coherence and congruence, where nothing essential is pushed away and nothing is performed. This evolution invites you into a deeper relationship with yourself, where the treasure is found only by staying with what once felt unbearable.

Key Takeaways:

1. Truth Can’t Be Reached Through Performance – Learn why looking good, being right, and staying safe block real self-truth.
2. Shadow Is Adapted Truth – See how shadow reflects parts of you that learned to survive, not parts that are broken.
3. Why Truth Freezes in Time – Understand how safety, shame, and belonging force parts of us underground.
4. When Insight Turns Performative – Learn how values and spirituality lose depth when disowned parts stay hidden.
5. Coherence and Congruence – Discover the difference between looking aligned and actually being whole.
6. Why Trust Frays in Relationships – See how self-betrayal quietly erodes trust long before words do.

About Cari:

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto is a coach, secular meditation teacher, and somatic healing practitioner who blends decades of senior corporate leadership with deep therapeutic training to support meaningful personal and professional growth. After a successful career spanning global brands, media networks, consulting, and multiple Bay Area startups, she now works full-time with business leaders and individuals navigating transition, anxiety, disconnection, and the desire for deeper fulfillment. Cari offers one-on-one and relationship coaching, group work, retreats, organizational alignment, conflict resolution, and strategic future-visioning, helping clients cultivate clarity, resilience, and more conscious ways of leading and living.

https://www.bravedirections.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/carisf/

https://www.instagram.com/cari_jacobs_sf

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Are you a corporate leader, HR exec or CEO that wants to create healthy workplaces? Then this podcast is for you!

Create Magic At Work™ is on a mission to equip senior leaders with tools they need to be a true servant leader and have a deep understanding of what that means. Improve employee engagement, retain top talent, transform workplace culture to have less stress and drama! Your host: Amy Lynn Durham is the Founder of Create Magic At Work™ and a Spiritual Intelligence Coach.

Amy has spent years in the corporate world successfully managing hundreds of employees for private and publicly traded companies. Amy designed Create Magic At Work™ to bring a variety of services and strategies to aid in supporting healthy leaders & workplaces through:

1. Private Coaching - 3 month 1:1 Spiritual Intelligence Experiences
2. Speaking Internationally about Ways to Support & Create Healthy Workplace Cultures
3. Experiential Workshops & Keynotes

In her spare time, you can find her spending time with her Cavapoo Mr. Bingley, journaling, doing yoga or trying to master stand up paddle boarding with her boyfriend.

www.createmagicatwork.net

https://www.linkedin.com/in/amylynndurham/

Why high achievers keep chasing and still feel unsatisfied often has little to do with effort and everything to do with where attention is placed. In this conversation, Amy and Harper A. Bailey unpack how driven people become conditioned to equate movement with progress and achievement with worth, slowly losing connection to their internal signals along the way. They explore how performance mode, urgency, and the need to prove keep leaders stuck in a cycle of doing more while feeling less fulfilled. Rather than offering another strategy to optimize output, the discussion points inward, revealing how awareness, presence, and listening to the body restore clarity and direction. When achievement stops being the primary compass, work becomes more intentional, decisions feel steadier, and satisfaction stops living somewhere in the future.

Key Highlights

1. Why high achievers confuse constant movement with real progress - See how staying busy can mask a deeper lack of clarity and direction.
2. How performance mode quietly replaces self-trust - Understand why proving your value externally makes it harder to hear what you actually need.
3. Why achievement stops delivering satisfaction over time - Learn how success can lose its impact when worth becomes tied to outcomes.
4. How ignoring the body leads to misaligned decisions - Discover why physical signals often reveal burnout and misdirection before the mind does.
5. What keeps driven people stuck in urgency and pressure - Explore how the need to stay ahead prevents reflection and recalibration.
6. What shifts when clarity replaces chasing - Notice how slowing down creates steadier decisions, cleaner boundaries, and more grounded leadership.

About the Guest:

Harper A. Bailey is the pen name of Tiosha Bailey, a Chicago native, public health leader, and powerful storyteller who challenges the status quo. She was the first Black woman to lead a prominent national women's healthcare nonprofit, where she prioritized health equity and amplified the voices of underserved communities.

Her first book, It Was Her: A Memoir—featuring a foreword by renowned motivational speaker Lisa Nichols—invites readers into a deeply personal story shaped by loss, resilience, and transformation. Through honest and compelling storytelling, Harper explores identity, healing, and the

courage it takes to reclaim your narrative.

As a speaker, Harper brings clarity, depth, and humor to conversations about leadership, purpose, and the lived experiences of Black women. She connects with audiences through truth-telling and a passion for

creating spaces where people feel seen, heard, and empowered.

www.harperabailey.com

https://www.instagram.com/harper_abailey/

https://www.facebook.com/harperabailey

About Amy:

Amy Lynn Durham, known by her clients as the Corporate Mystic, is the founder of the Executive Coaching Firm, Create Magic At Work®, where they help leaders build workplaces rooted in creativity, collaboration, and fulfillment. A former corporate executive turned Executive Coach, Amy blends practical...

Something shifts when joy stops being a side effect of success and becomes a conscious way of living and leading. In this episode, Amy explores the idea of Exponential Joy with Kristin Joy Ekkens, founder of Exponential Joy™ movement, and how choosing joy on purpose can transform the way we work, communicate, and show up in our lives. Together, they unpack how joy is not about bypassing difficulty, but about developing the awareness, presence, and courage to meet life honestly without losing yourself in the process. Kristin shares how exponential joy grows through small, intentional choices that reconnect you to your voice, your body, and your truth, even in high-pressure environments. This conversation invites you to rethink productivity, success, and leadership through a more human lens, where joy becomes a renewable resource that deepens connection, expands impact, and creates work that feels aligned instead of draining.

Key Takeaways:

1. Why Exponential Joy Is a Practice, Not a Personality Trait – Understand how joy grows through intentional choices rather than circumstances or temperament.
2. How Joy Changes the Way You Show Up at Work – Learn how choosing joy affects presence, communication, and how others experience you.
3. The Difference Between Performing and Living in Joy – See how chasing approval or productivity blocks joy and creates quiet exhaustion.
4. How Awareness Creates Space for Joy Under Pressure – Discover why noticing your internal state is the doorway to sustainable joy, even in demanding environments.
5. Why Joy Expands Impact Instead of Diminishing It – Learn how grounded joy strengthens leadership, trust, and influence rather than making work feel less serious.
6. Returning to Your Natural State of Joy – Understand how reconnecting to your voice, body, and truth allows joy to grow exponentially over time.

About the Guest:

Kristin Joy Ekkens is the visionary founder of the Exponential Joy™ movement and creator of the Joy Operating System (JOYOS™)—a blueprint for conscious leadership, wellbeing, and human flourishing. A TEDx speaker, executive coach, and social entrepreneur, she blends emotional and connectional intelligence, well-tech, and ancient wisdom to help leaders and creators upgrade their inner operating systems. After overcoming severe burnout and autoimmune illness, Kristin developed the EPIC Joy Codes™—Energy, Purpose, Intention, and Connection—to help others transform stress into vitality and purpose into joy. Her mission: to rewire humanity for exponential joy.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinjoyekkens

https://exj.global/joyos-accelerator/

About Amy:

Amy Lynn Durham, known by her clients as the Corporate Mystic, is the founder of the Executive Coaching Firm, Create Magic At Work®, where they help leaders build workplaces rooted in creativity, collaboration, and fulfillment. A former corporate executive turned Executive Coach, Amy blends practical leadership strategies with spiritual intelligence to unlock human potential at work.

She’s a certified Executive Coach through UC Berkeley & the International Coaching Federation (ICF) In addition, Amy holds coaching certifications in Spiritual Intelligence (SQ21), the Edgewalker...

This episode is a collective pause at the edge of 2025, gathering voices from across the year to name what is quietly changing in how we lead, work, and relate to one another. Through reflections on presence, play, courage, compassion, wisdom, and humanity, the conversation invites a different way of moving forward. One that values being grounded over being rushed, connection over control, and truth over performance. As these voices come together, a deeper invitation emerges to lead with awareness, to stay human in the face of uncertainty and technology, and to step into 2026 willing to challenge old patterns while creating work that feels more alive, meaningful, and whole.

Key Takeaways:

00:55 – Paul Haas – Rediscovering presence as the doorway to meaning, aliveness, and everyday magic

03:25 – Dr. Josh Plaskoff – Healing the split between systems and soul in how organizations are built

07:09 – Tracy Clark – Using play to unlock creativity, challenge assumptions, and open new possibilities

09:53 – Doy Charnsupharindr – The quiet power of staying with someone in uncertainty instead of rushing to answers

11:36 – Marcy Moriconi – Rewriting how women relate to one another at work and what it really takes to rise

13:04 – Dr. Mark Rittenberg – Leading bravely through dialogue, storytelling, and radical kindness

17:18 – JC Carr – How simple conversations can become turning points for growth and mentorship

19:07 – Jenn Ayala – Leading as a real human being, not a role, and why trust starts there

20:19 – Brian Gorman – Moving from intelligence to wisdom in leadership and collective decision-making

23:18 – Dr. Shonna Waters – Standing at the crossroads of AI and humanity and choosing the future we’re creating

27:13 – Sandra Bargman – Ferocious compassion, self-truth, and the courage to stop betraying yourself to belong

About Amy:

Amy Lynn Durham, known by her clients as the Corporate Mystic, is the founder of the Executive Coaching Firm, Create Magic At Work®, where they help leaders build workplaces rooted in creativity, collaboration, and fulfillment. A former corporate executive turned Executive Coach, Amy blends practical leadership strategies with spiritual intelligence to unlock human potential at work.

She’s a certified Executive Coach through UC Berkeley & the International Coaching Federation (ICF) In addition, Amy holds coaching certifications in Spiritual Intelligence (SQ21), the Edgewalker Profile, and the Archetypes of Change . In addition to being the host of the Create Magic At Work® podcast, Amy is the author of Create Magic At Work®, Creating Career Magic: A Daily Prompt Journal and the founder of Magic Thread Media™. Through her work, she inspires intentional leadership for thriving workplaces and lives where “magic” becomes reality.

Connect with Amy:

https://createmagicatwork.net/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/create-magic-at-work

https://www.facebook.com/112951637095427

https://www.instagram.com/createmagicatwork

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnEm4h3fUgaq8qgvZpz6dGg

Thanks for listening!

Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the...

In a world that often rewards silence over truth, this conversation invites us into the radical possibility that courage can be compassionate and compassion can be ferocious. Sandra Bargman joins Amy to explore how choosing authenticity over approval transforms the way we lead, speak up and refuse the quiet self-betrayal that so many of us have normalized. Together they peel back the layers of social conditioning, especially for women and leaders, and show how the simple act of pausing, breathing and telling the truth becomes a liberating spiritual practice. This episode reminds us that real compassion begins with ourselves and that the courage to be disliked is sometimes the most loving choice we can make.

Key Takeaways:

• The Paradox of Ferocious Compassion - Learn how strength and tenderness can coexist and why true compassion sometimes requires uncomfortable honesty.
• Why Self-Betrayal Happens in Leadership - See how people pleasing, approval seeking and silence accumulate and undermine your integrity and confidence.
• The Courage to Be Disliked - Discover why speaking your truth is an act of self respect and how developing this muscle changes every room you walk into.
• Reclaiming Your Voice in Moments That Catch You Off Guard - Find approaches for pausing, breathing and responding instead of freezing, laughing it off or internalizing harm.
• Confrontation as Presence, Not Conflict - Understand how facing a moment directly, without attack or avoidance, becomes a deep expression of integrity.
• Practicing Boundaries With Compassion - Explore ways to assess your safety, values and intentions so you can decide when to stay, when to speak and when to walk away.

About the Guest:

Sandra Bargman helps leaders unlock truthful presence with a blend of vocal mastery, storytelling skill, and deep emotional intelligence. Drawing from decades as an actor, singer, director, and life counselor, she teaches people to express themselves with clarity, authenticity, and intention. Her holistic B.I.G. Approach brings together breath and body work, vocal strength, diction, silence, mindfulness, and story craft, giving clients the tools to communicate with confidence and purpose. Whether she’s coaching one-on-one or leading groups, Sandra guides people of all ages and professions to access their inner truth, sharpen their message, and step into bolder, more grounded communication.

https://www.sandrabargman.com

https://www.sandrabargman.com/podcast

About Amy:

Amy Lynn Durham, known by her clients as the Corporate Mystic, is the founder of the Executive Coaching Firm, Create Magic At Work®, where they help leaders build workplaces rooted in creativity, collaboration, and fulfillment. A former corporate executive turned Executive Coach, Amy blends practical leadership strategies with spiritual intelligence to unlock human potential at work.

She’s a certified Executive Coach through UC Berkeley & the International Coaching Federation (ICF) In addition, Amy holds coaching certifications in Spiritual Intelligence (SQ21), the Edgewalker Profile, and the Archetypes of Change . In addition to being the host of the Create Magic At Work® podcast, Amy is the author of Create Magic At Work®, Creating Career Magic: A Daily Prompt Journal and the founder of Magic Thread Media™. Through her work, she inspires intentional leadership for thriving workplaces and lives where “magic” becomes reality.

Connect with Amy:

Gen Z was never the problem child of the workplace as much as a mirror showing leaders how our parenting and leadership habits shaped the next wave of employees. In this conversation, Amy talks with psychologist and author Dr. Andrea Mata about why the gentle parenting movement has unintentionally fueled the youth mental health crisis and how that shows up as “the American corporate tsunami” inside our teams. You’ll hear how overfocus on feelings, avoidance of consequences, and treating kids like peers can create adults who crumble after feedback, call in sick after small mistakes, or expect promotion on day one. Dr. Mata walks leaders through a better path built on high expectations with high support, frequent coaching style check-ins instead of once a year reviews, and scaffolding that builds emotional strength instead of enabling fragility. You’ll also hear how to respond when someone calls in sick after a breakup, how to work with parents who step into workplace conversations, and how to turn your own anger and frustration into a clear sense of passion and purpose in your career.

Key Takeaways:

1. Why Gentle Parenting Backfired - See how overfocus on feelings and partnership parenting can weaken emotional strength in young adults at work.
2. Inside the Gen Z “Corporate Tsunami” - Learn why managers fire Gen Z faster, struggle with basic expectations, and feel blindsided by new workplace norms.
3. High Expectations With High Support - Explore how clear behavior standards plus real coaching create confident, capable Gen Z employees instead of collapse.
4. Feedback Without Fragility - Hear how to replace yearly reviews with short cycles, normalize discomfort, and use “exposure” to build feedback muscles.
5. Scaffolding Skills Instead of Saving People - Get simple tell show do steps for teaching presentations, ownership, and independence without throwing people to the wolves.
6. Turning Heartbreak and Hard Days Into Growth - Discover how to honor mental health days with empathy while still protecting results, planning, and team trust.

About the Guest:

Dr. Andrea Mata, PhD, is on a mission to throat-punch the youth mental health crisis and equip parents, educators, and leaders with the tools they need to raise emotionally strong kids and build resilient communities. Statistically, she shouldn’t be where she is today, growing up as the daughter of a Mexican immigrant in a gang-infested neighborhood on the Southside of Chicago. But Dr. Mata transformed her challenging upbringing into a source of strength, becoming a nationally recognized psychologist and speaker.

She is the author of The No. 2 Parenting Book: Practical Tips for the Pooped-Out Parent and a leading voice in promoting authoritative parenting: a research-backed approach that combines high expectations with emotional warmth. Her insights have been featured on CNN, The Tamron Hall Show and in The Wall Street Journal, where she offers real-world strategies for navigating parenting, behavior, and mental health with clarity and confidence.

With advanced degrees from Valparaiso University and Kent State University, Dr. Mata founded BrightSpot Families and partnered with the Anxiety Treatment Center of Greater Toledo. Known for her direct, relatable style, she delivers practical tools with just the right mix of science, humor, and real-life grit.

https://www.andreadmata.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/drdremata/

https://www.instagram.com/drdremata/

About Amy:

Amy Lynn Durham, known by her...