Wickedly Smart Women

"We wake up every morning as a soul in a human body. That alone should be so incredibly fascinating to us." What if the hardest things you've lived through weren't punishments, but assignments your soul chose to help you grow? In this episode of Wickedly Smart Women, host Anjel B. Hartwell welcomes Steffani LeFevour, modern-day soul strategist and author of You Are a Badass Mom and the forthcoming book Soul Assignments. Stteffani shares how childhood trauma, an alcoholic father, and the tragic loss of her sister cracked her open to a lifelong search for spiritual truth.

What You Will Learn:

The impact of childhood trauma and grief on emotional development and identity.

How growing up with an alcoholic parent shapes beliefs, coping mechanisms and adulthood patterns.

Why families often end up on "grief islands" when they lack tools, language or support to process loss.

How early exposure to death can spark a lifelong search for meaning, spirituality and healing.

The role spiritual teachers and books can play in offering language and comfort when religion wasn't present at home.

How alcohol can become an unconscious way to avoid feelings, fit in socially, or suppress unresolved pain.

What it looks like to break generational chains of addiction through awareness, boundaries and intentional behavior.

How to examine your own relationship with alcohol and shift from unconscious use to empowered choice.

The importance of creating an alcohol-free "safe house" environment for teens and modeling a different norm.

The concept of soul assignments and how reframing painful experiences can move someone out of victimhood.

Why radical acceptance of past experiences becomes the foundation for emotional freedom and conscious creation.

How thoughts, words, feelings, beliefs and stories function as "power tools" that shape every experience.

The difference between using those power tools unconsciously vs. consciously.

How to identify outdated stories and rewrite them into truer, more empowering narratives.

The process of finding gifts inside even the most difficult events and how that transforms inner resilience.

The value of viewing life from a soul-level perspective rather than only through a human-level lens.

The path from learning spiritual principles to embodying them, teaching them and serving others with them.

How a long-held dream can manifest through clarity, courage and consistent sharing of one's message.

Why owning your unique perspective allows your voice, work and mission to expand in powerful new ways.

Connect with Steffani LeFevour

"Horses don't care if you're afraid. They care if you're honest." In this episode of Wickedly Smart Women, host Anjel B. Hartwell welcomes Sue Willoughby, founder of Willoughby Coaching, certified equus coach, real estate investor, and a woman who has rewritten her life more times than most people dare to dream. Raised by a single alcoholic parent and a two-time high school dropout, Sue charted a path from instability to a six-figure career, a multidimensional portfolio of work, and a coaching practice rooted in the intuitive wisdom of horses.

If you're feeling the whisper that something in your life or career needs to change, this episode gives you permission, perspective, and possibility.

What You Will Learn:

The emotional and psychological impact of being raised by a single alcoholic parent and how early instability can shape lifelong patterns of independence and resilience.

What it feels like to reach the moment where corporate life becomes unbearable, and the emotional complexity of leaping from stability into entrepreneurship.

How passion projects and side ventures can become bridges out of corporate life without risking everything at once.

How horses instantly sense incongruence between what you say, what you feel, and what your body is actually communicating.

Why humans store emotional stories in the body while horses process, react, and release without carrying narratives, resentment, or drama.

How corporate teams can use horse-led experiences to learn authentic leadership, strengthen team dynamics, and understand each other's communication patterns.

Why it is never too late to reinvent yourself, take risks, pursue a new career, or bring long-buried creative visions into reality.

A simple daily practice for reconnecting with presence and intuition.

Connect with Sue Willoughby

"Anytime my managers are not out front, a problem happens. I want them where they can actually make the store money." In this episode of Wickedly Smart Women, host Anjel B. Hartwell welcomes Jana Franklin, serial entrepreneur, franchise expert, and CEO of CEO Concierge. Jana shares her experiences scaling brick-and-mortar franchises and how the pandemic inspired a major pivot.

If you're an executive overwhelmed by operations or a woman entrepreneur considering consultancy, this episode offers actionable advice and the inside scoop on delegation done right.

What You Will Learn:

How a corporate fashion merchandising start laid the foundation for franchise management and people skills.

The power of starting a business before getting entrenched in corporate.

What it took to open, scale, and eventually sell multiple Fantastic Sams salons.

How 80-hour weeks forced Jana to confront what she loved about her role.

Why virtual assistants can "clone" your strengths.

Creative ways brick-and-mortar businesses use virtual assistants.

Building trust and growing into delegation.

Addressing common fears: control, trust, cost, and support for first-time outsourcers.

How women can add niche roles as their business scales.

Connect with Jana Franklin

"I had my ladder on the wrong wall. I was putting all my energy into getting people to want McDonald's instead of Burger King. Who cares, really?" In this episode of Wickedly Smart Women, host Anjel B. Hartwell welcomes Kate Grant, CEO Emeritus of the Fistula Foundation and author of No Woman Left Behind. Kate explains what obstetric fistula is and how a relatively low-cost surgery can restore a woman's health. She shares the practical steps she took to move from advertising into nonprofit leadership and why investing in your own retooling can be the most powerful career move.

If you're thinking about leaving corporate for mission-driven work, this episode is full of tactical and emotional wisdom.

What You Will Learn:

How working in advertising at big agencies means using dark arts of consumer research to create psychological needs for products.

The decision process of choosing to go back to graduate school and completely retool rather than making a lateral move into nonprofit communications.

The reality that career change doesn't happen on the plane ride home from your transformative trip, it happens gradually like a pair of shoes that doesn't fit anymore, and it takes time to empower that voice that says you're done with this chapter.

What an obstetric fistula actually is.

How women with fistula are often stigmatized and how they're frequently blamed for an injury that's caused by a lack of medical access.

Why Fistula Foundation went from being one of several support organizations for a single hospital in Ethiopia to becoming the global leader doing more surgeries than the UN or US government.

The strategic decision not to take government money.

Why 90% of the fistula surgeries are successful and truly give women their lives back.

The permanent pay cut that comes with leaving the private sector for nonprofit work.

How ruthlessly thrifty operations with 19 consecutive years of four star Charity Navigator ratings prove worthiness of donor support by getting as much money as possible into the hands of doctors and hospitals in far-flung corners that do the real work.

Connect with Kate Grant

At 50, I thought my body was broken. I knew everything about nutrition, but nothing was working anymore. In this episode of Wickedly Smart Women, host Anjel B. Hartwell welcomes Heather Awad, MD, a family doctor and certified coach, helps professional women in perimenopause and menopause lose weight without counting or deprivation. Learn why kindness precedes confidence, how insulin resistance shifts at midlife, and why moving from grazing to real meals restores energy, focus, and leadership clarity.

Professional photos can be retaken. But kindness and confidence can start today.

What You Will Learn:

Why eating less and moving more, does absolutely nothing during perimenopause, revealing that something fundamentally different is happening in the body.

The moment at age 50 of wondering if the body was broken and questioning how someone with extensive nutrition knowledge could be failing at weight management.

How combining an understanding of the biology and nutrition of menopause with coaching to address emotional eating made weight loss simple and sustainable.

Why many professional women including those in corporate leadership hold themselves back from seeking promotions or starting businesses because they feel their body isn't under control.

The critical distinction that mindset work and being kind to yourself is a completely separate track from getting your body under control or losing weight.

How kindness to yourself is the precursor to confidence, and that being kind doesn't cost anything except intention and time unpacking the parts of yourself that don't want to be kind.

The fundamental difference between the weight loss world that asks us to work hard, measure, and count calories, versus nutrition that can be simple and nourishing without ever going hungry or counting anything.

How our culture has normalized overeating to the point where having a stomach ache after meals seems normal.

Why this meal-based eating pattern helps with the natural bump in insulin resistance that comes at menopause.

The biological reality that when estrogen drops during menopause, it affects the entire body including digestive hormones.

Why insulin resistance means the body suddenly needs much more insulin just to process the same food.

Why grazing becomes the default feeding pattern during intense parenting years.

Why nourishing your body becomes increasingly important at midlife.

Connect with Heather Awad, MD