Who's got that end of the week feeling? The one where you did everything right, answered the messages, kept every plate spinning, and still went to bed feeling like you came up short?

Not tired in a way that sleep fixes. Tired in a way that has quietly become your baseline.

Meghan French Dunbar calls herself a business anthropologist, which is a generous way of saying she has spent years studying how work actually works and who it actually works for. Whatever your work looks like, outside the home, inside it, or some impossible combination of the two, her answer lands the same way: the rules you have been exhausting yourself to follow were never written with you in mind.

She got here the hard way. She studied journalism at a time when everyone was telling her print was dead. She went into nonprofits, then into magazines, and then one Friday night in 2014 she turned her phone off to be present at dinner with a friend. She woke up to more than sixty text messages from her boss and a one in the morning email telling her she had been fired for being unreachable. The next morning she told her husband she thought the universe wanted her to launch a print magazine about sustainable business. She crowdfunded it with a friend, and the first issue got picked up by every Whole Foods in the world.

That became Conscious Company Media, which she co-founded and led as CEO. She has since interviewed more than a thousand business leaders, consulted with companies including Coach and Kate Spade, and founded the World-Changing Women's Summit. She also resigned as CEO in early 2020, weeks before lockdown, after coming back from maternity leave with significant postpartum depression on top of being completely burned out. Her recovery took about two years. Her book came out of wanting to know whether there was a way to do ambitious work without destroying yourself, and out of noticing that of all the high achieving women she met, roughly one in ten seemed to be genuinely thriving. Those were the women she set out to study.

Together we talk candidly about:

• The one in the morning email that ended her magazine job, and the decision she made by the next morning

• Getting told print was dead, crowdfunding a magazine anyway, and landing in every Whole Foods

• Resigning as CEO after maternity leave, in the middle of postpartum depression and full burnout

• Why her burnout recovery took two years, not two weeks, and why that is the norm

• What the research actually says drives burnout, and why almost none of it is about how you show up

• Why imposter syndrome is not a confidence problem, and what happens when you stop treating it like one

• The one in ten women who seemed to be thriving, and what they were doing differently

• The joy question: if you had one day with nobody to take care of, what would you actually do with it

• Essentializing your time, your relationships, and what you let into your brain

• What she wants the woman who thinks she is just bad at balance to understand

You will walk away with language for something you have probably been carrying privately, and with three or four things you can actually start this week without quitting anything or overhauling your life. Meghan's framing is the part that sticks: the return on investing in yourself is not selfish, and your kids will not remember the cookies you stressed over. They will remember how you showed up.

LINKS AND RESOURCES

Meghan's Book: This Isn't Working

Website: https://www.meghanfrenchdunbar.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meghanfrenchdunbar/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meghanfrenchdunbar/

Meghan's TedX talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZfuHsa27yk

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Women's health self-advocacy is the heart of this episode, and Dr. Tracy Shevell, a board-certified high-risk OB-GYN with 25 years in academic medicine, is exactly the person to walk us through it. If you have ever been told your symptoms were "just anxiety" while your body kept insisting otherwise, this conversation gives you the language and the permission to be heard.

When was the last time you told a doctor the whole truth, not the version you already softened because the appointment was running late and you did not want to be the difficult one?

Dr. Tracy Shevell spent 25 years on the front lines of women's medicine. She trained at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, completed her residency at Mount Sinai and her Maternal-Fetal Medicine fellowship at Columbia, and spent 17 years as an attending and Director of Perinatal Ultrasound at Stamford Health. She has cared for the most complex, high-risk pregnancies you can imagine. Then she got sick herself, and her own doctors told her it was anxiety.

That experience reshaped everything. After watching women's symptoms get minimized for two decades and then living it firsthand, she founded Blue Moon Perinatal, a concierge practice that helps women navigate the medical, emotional, and psychological weight of their care. Her community knows her as the internet's "doctor best friend," the one who tells the truth and gives you the words for the parts that are hardest to say out loud. Her forthcoming book, Labor & Deliverance: Reclaiming the Healing in Women's Health, comes out January 26, 2027, and argues something radical: that emotional health is clinically equal to the physical symptoms we all carry.

Here is why this matters to us. About 80% of people diagnosed with an autoimmune disease are women (NIH), and research consistently shows women wait longer for diagnoses and are more likely to have physical symptoms filed under stress or anxiety. Dr. Tracy names all of it, and then she hands us something we can actually use.

Together we talk candidly about:

• Why "becoming the quarterback of your own care" is not a slogan, it is a survival skill in a system that no longer holds you

• How to tell the difference between intuition and anxiety when your body is trying to tell you something is off

• The habit so many of us have of apologizing before we even ask a question, and the one sentence to stop rewriting

• What it actually means that emotional, physical, and spiritual health are linked, not separate lanes

• Using AI as a sounding board, never a diagnosis, so you walk into a 7-minute visit already prepared

• The people-pleasing, high-achieving patterns so many women carry, and what they may be quietly costing us

• Fatigue at baseline: when "I'm just tired" is worth a second look, and the new symptoms that deserve one

• Making guilt-free time for yourself when there is genuinely none left, and why it is not optional

• What the women who walked before us can teach us, and why intergenerational friendship matters more than we think

• Finding the passion that sustains you, no matter how full the season

You will leave this one standing a little taller in the exam room, with a pen, a paper, and the belief that you deserve answers. Not because you are difficult, but because your body has been telling the truth all along.

Links & resources:

• Book: Labor & Deliverance: Reclaiming the Healing in Women's Health (preorder): https://www.tracyshevellmd.com/book-media

• Website: https://www.tracyshevellmd.com

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tracyshevellmd

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracyshevellmd/

• Substack, More than Medicine with Dr. Tracy: https://drtracyshevell.substack.com

• Blue Moon Perinatal: https://www.bluemoonperinatal.com

If this episode resonated, subscribe wherever you listen, leave us a review, and share it with a woman who needs to hear this.

The lunches are packed, the forms are signed, and the family calendar is already full through October. If the return to school has you feeling chronically behind, on time, on rest, on joy, you are in very good company.

In this episode, we sit down with Cassie Holmes, chaired professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management and bestselling author of Happier Hour, for a grounding conversation about why time feels so scarce every fall, and what actually helps.

Cassie doesn't just study happiness and time poverty. She has lived it. As a working mom moving through every season from toddlers to teenagers (her son just started middle school), she brings both data and deep empathy to the question so many of us are asking as the school year ramps back up: why does it feel like there is never enough time, and how do we stop feeling so depleted by it?

Together, we talk candidly about:

• What time poverty really is, and why mothers feel it most acutely when the school-year schedule returns
• Why saying yes to every playdate, practice, and sign-up sheet quietly leaves us more depleted, not more connected
• The surprising research behind giving time to get time
• How small mindset shifts, like "less doing, more being," can change how a hectic fall week actually feels
• Why connection, not productivity, is often the missing ingredient in our busiest seasons
• A simple way to rate your days so you can find the joy already hiding inside the time you have
• How to treat an ordinary Saturday like a vacation without adding a single thing to your to-do list
• Why happiness isn't selfish, and how caring for yours makes you a more present parent, partner, and leader

This conversation is full of permission slips: to stop racing the drop-off clock, to stop saving joy for "someday," and to notice the ordinary moments that won't always be there. The slow morning before the bus comes. The bedtime cuddle. The shared chair at the beach before summer fully closes.

Links & Resources
👉 Happier Hour by Cassie Holmes
👉 Research on time poverty, happiness, and well-being
👉 Cassie's website

For more conversations like this one, subscribe to Mighty as a Mother on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and follow along on Instagram and LinkedIn.

What would you put on a necklace? Not the piece you bought because it was pretty, but the one you reach for on the hard days, the one that sits close enough to your heart that you feel it when you breathe.

Melissa Clayton is the founder and CEO of Tiny Tags, the personalized jewelry brand made for mothers. A former CPA, she started the company hand-stamping necklaces at her kitchen counter while raising 3 boys, and grew it into a multi-million-dollar business with no outside investment, no debt, and 100% ownership still in her name.

What makes Melissa worth listening to is not just that she built something, though she did, without a war chest or a headline raise, at a time when women are starting nearly half of all new US businesses. It is that she built it around a definition of success most of us are never handed. She measured growth against presence, not just revenue, and grew Tiny Tags slowly and on purpose so she would not miss the football games and the field trips. She is refreshingly honest about money, marriage, guilt, and gratitude, and she can hold the business lesson and the human one in the same hand.

Together we talk candidly about:

• Why she believes kids do not need a perfect mother, just a present one, and how that became the whole brand

• Building the business slowly on purpose, so she would not miss the football games and the field trips

• What the necklace actually does on the hard days, and the "I have them" moment in the driveway

• Turning down investors for 15 years and still owning 100% of the company

• Saying no to brides, graduates, and every bigger market, and why that focus protected the mission

• Writing letters to her boys, and the empty-nester chapter she is walking into now

• How Target found her on Instagram, and why she almost said no

• What she wishes she had known when her kids were the age our listeners' kids are today

You will walk away rethinking what you are actually optimizing for, and a little less convinced that faster and more is the only way to build. Whether you are growing a company, a career, or a family, Melissa's story is a reminder that presence can be a strategy, not a sacrifice.

Links & resources:

• Tiny Tags: https://tinytags.com

• Instagram: @tinytags

• Melissa Clayton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-clayton-817b568/

If this episode resonated, subscribe wherever you listen, leave us a review, and share it with a mother who needs to hear this.

Check us out on Substack: mightyasamother.substack.com

Registered dietitian and nutritional therapist Kim Shapira has spent nearly three decades helping people rebuild trust with food, and in this episode she tells us why the real problem was never willpower.

Registered dietitian Kim Shapira breaks down what actually supports gut health and long-term wellness, and why fiber, not another diet, is the habit worth building.

Have you ever wondered why "eat healthier" advice never seems to stick, no matter how many times you try? It might be because most of it was never actually about your health.

Kim Shapira, MS, RD, is a celebrity dietitian and nutritional therapist whose Los Angeles practice has worked with clients across entertainment, hospitals, sports medicine, and addiction recovery for nearly three decades. She holds a B.S. in Exercise Kinesiology from Tulane University and an M.S. in Human Metabolism and Clinical Nutrition from Boston University.

Kim built her career on a simple but radical idea: food isn't the enemy, and neither is your body. Early in her practice, a client who lost significant weight told Kim she was planning to gain it back, and that moment reshaped everything about how Kim approaches her work. She realized the real work was never about what people eat, but about the emotional patterns underneath, and the daily habits that actually support long-term health. That insight became the foundation of the Kim Shapira Method, her six-rule framework for eating without shame, and her book This Is What You're Really Hungry For, which features a foreword by longtime client Kaley Cuoco.

Together we talk candidly about:

• Why health span, not just lifespan, is the more useful goal to focus on

• What actually supports gut health day to day, and what's just noise

• Simple, low-effort ways to build fiber into a busy day

• Why willpower isn't a sustainable strategy, and what actually helps people stick with change

• Kim's six rules, and how they replace restriction with trust

• How hormonal shifts through PMS, ovulation, pregnancy, and perimenopause affect hunger, mood, and body image

• What Kim reaches for when she's hungry and doesn't have time for a full meal

By the end of this one, you may not walk away with a meal plan, and that's the point. You'll walk away with a clearer sense of what actually supports your health long term.

Links & Resources:

• Book: This Is What You're Really Hungry For

• Website: kimshapiramethod.com

• Instagram: @kimshapiramethod

• LinkedIn: Kim Shapira

• Substack: kimshapiramethod.substack.com

If this episode resonated, subscribe wherever you listen, leave us a review, and share it with a mother who needs to hear this.

Personalized supplements for women's health are everywhere right now, but Suzie Welsh Devine, RN, MSN built the first one. In 2016 she founded Binto because she kept watching women get handed a generic prenatal, a one-size multivitamin, and a twelve-minute appointment, then sent home to figure out the rest on Google at midnight. In this episode we talk about what personalized actually means, how to read your own cycle, and what genuinely changes from your period years through perimenopause.

When is the last time a provider asked what you actually need? Not the protocol. Not the standard dose. Not what they recommend to every woman your age. You.

For a lot of us, the honest answer is never. That gap, between what women need and what we actually get, is the whole reason Suzie built Binto.

Suzie Welsh Devine is the founder and CEO of Binto, the first personalized women's health supplement brand, formulated and founded by licensed providers. She is a former IVF and fertility nurse who spent years at the bedside before deciding to build the thing she kept wishing existed for her patients.

What she brings to this conversation is a clinician's eye and a refusal to oversell. She reads labs before she recommends anything. She builds for prevention rather than prescription. And she will tell you plainly where supplements actually help and where they are just marketing dressed up as science.

Together we talk candidly about:

• What "personalized" actually requires clinically, and what it does not mean

• The myth that a prescription prenatal is automatically better than what you can buy over the counter

• Why your menstrual cycle is a vital sign, plus a clear walk through all four phases

• What really shifts in perimenopause, and why brain fog is not in your head

• HRT after the black box warning came off, and what to keep supplementing alongside it

• Why vitamin D and K2 belong together

• Supporting your micronutrients if you are on a GLP-1

• The standouts most women benefit from at a baseline, from a daily probiotic to omega-3s to inositol

• How to tell normal post-meal bloat from something worth taking to a doctor

You will walk away knowing more about your own body than most of us were ever taught, and with a clearer sense of what to actually ask for the next time you are in front of a provider.

Links & resources

• Binto: https://mybinto.com

• Suzie on Instagram: @nursesuziedevine

• Binto on Instagram: @mybinto

• Suzie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzie-welsh-devine-3419178/

From our cabinet to yours: We have both been on our own Binto routines, and the thing that won us over is that it starts with what your body actually needs and skips what it does not. If you want a routine built around you instead of an average, listeners get 25% off with code maam25 at https://mybinto.com/discount/maam25

Code: MAAM25

If this episode resonated, subscribe wherever you listen, leave us a review, and share it with a mother who needs to hear this. Reviews genuinely help other women find the show: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mighty-as-a-mother/id1687678053