SpeakUP! International Inc.

A bad day can wreck your plans, but it should not get to make your decisions. We sit down with Phoebe Trotman, multi Hall of Fame soccer player, entrepreneur, author of the Never Quit On A Bad Day book series, and a coach who brings athlete-level clarity to real life. We dig into what a “champion mindset” actually means. Phoebe explains why obstacles are not a stop sign, how growth happens at the edge of your comfort zone, and why “control the controllables” can save your mental...

Money can buy comfort, but it cannot buy a life that feels like yours. We sit down with Kenneth G Alexander, award-winning entrepreneur, author of The Successful Man: A New Vision of Masculinity, and a former US Marine, to pull apart the story many boys inherit early: make money, achieve status, suppress emotion, and you will be “successful”. Kenneth explains how that doctrine of patriarchy and cultural programming trains men to chase external validation, then wonder why their relationships f...

Money can look like a numbers problem while it acts like an identity problem. We’re talking with Jacqueline Blair, a money mindset coach who works closely with Black women entrepreneurs, about why so many of us can earn, hustle, and grind, yet still feel stuck in paycheque-to-paycheque cycles, guilt, overgiving, or “mysterious” overspending. Her lens is clear: when generations have lived with lack, our nervous systems learn to push money away because abundance feels unsafe or unfamiliar. ...

Silence can be a muzzle, but it can also be a strategy. We sit down with Majella Mark, cultural strategist, filmmaker, and author of Cats Are Trash, right after she reads a powerful passage on Women in Black and the way quiet protest can cut through a sea of violence. From there, we follow the thread that runs through everything she does: storytelling is not decoration, it is infrastructure. We dig into what cultural preservation looks like in real life for the Black diaspora and the wider A...

A lawyer walks out of a plush Beverly Hills office and into a government agency tasked with everything between war and diplomacy. That pivot sets up a gripping journey through foreign aid’s hidden front lines: a month in Eritrea trying to give away 20 million and getting told no, audits that can overturn streetlights after floods, and market experiments that turn onions in Honduras into livelihoods for thousands. Rita and I sit down with Clifford Brown to unpack what USAID actually did—and...