Who are you? What makes you tick? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What are your core values, and how do they impact your everyday life? Self-discovery is an essential component of personal growth.

Discovering your potential and purpose in life is a key element to thriving, rather than surviving—especially for students transitioning from high school to college, which is a career- and life-defining stage in their lives. This is something that today’s guests, Greg and Beth Langston, discovered the hard way while preparing their kids for college application in a system that paid little attention to the crucial role of self-discovery.

Drawing on their professional and personal experiences, Greg and Beth Langston created the College Flight Plan Self-Discovery Course. According to their website, the program “gives your students everything they need to determine a career course as they confidently apply their unique strengths, values, purpose and goals to their...

Food touches every aspect of our lives, and everyone needs to eat. Because of this, your relationship to food is important, but it doesn’t need to be hard. Rather than worrying about lists of foods you can and can’t eat, today's guest on Power Up Your Performance, Claudia Wilson, encourages her clients to be mindful of why they are eating.

Claudia is a health and lifestyle coach, registered dietitian nutritionist, a board certified specialist in sports nutrition,  a Strength and Conditioning Specialist/Trainer and the author of ONE-TWO-Punch. She created ONE-TWO PUNCH after meeting with thousands of clients and creating a method that is easy, doable and sustainable.   

A few of the things we talked about:

Kim: So let's get one of the big questions out of the way at the very beginning of the show: what is the best diet?

Claudia: Everybody always wants to know. There's so many out there, all the brand name diets. What's the...

Amy Deland knows first hand that it’s not easy to tackle health issues alone, and that navigating the vast world of health and wellness can feel overwhelming. Health issues have run in her family for generations, and she has witnessed how a lack of support and resources can prolong issues to the point of devastating consequences.

Because of her personal experience and perspective, she wakes up every day passionate about creating opportunities for people to create their best life by accessing proper support and resources.

We talked about why resilience is so important, especially as we face continued challenges due to the pandemic:

Amy: On top of some of the things that we're facing globally, like environmental change, there's the need to be resilient and the need to be able to care for ourselves is paramount--not just how we show up in our own lives,  in our family's lives or our community's lives, or the people we work with, but also as a society to equip...

After taking a summer hiatus, we are back for season four of Power Up Your Performance! In this season, I'll share more content and stories that will help you change trajectory of your life, pour love into the world, conquer monumental challenges, and move more and feel better.  

In this episode, I spoke with Maureen Gibbons, MD about how to eliminate overwhelm in our hectic lives. 

Life is stressful, and tends to operate at a hectic pace. How do you remain happy, and eliminate overwhelm while keeping everything in your life running smoothly? How do you find the things that make your soul come alive and actually have time for them?

I spoke with Maureen Gibbons, an emergency physician at a level 2 trauma center, who is also a triathlon coach, sports nutritionist and the bestselling author of "Happy First: How to Win Life in the Moment - at Home, at Work, at the Gym and Even in the Kitchen."

A few snippets from our conversation:

On Sleep...

"If you're only...

Simone Knego has done some pretty remarkable things, but she says it's the small things that have impacted her life the most. She climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to raise funds and awareness for the Livestrong Foundation, and she's travelled the world on philanthropic missions with her neurosurgeon husband. She says every choice she's made is a part of her story, but it’s the small things that have impacted her life the most.

The familiar Jewish phrase she learned in her youth, Tikkun Olam—repair the world—has been the driving force of everything she does. It has changed her perspective on life and inspired her to write her book the Extraordinary UnOrdinary You to share the important message that what you do matters. We are—in essence—repairing the world with our small acts of kindness by simply being who we are.

From our interview:

"We all need to look at ourselves and say we're already doing amazing things. We can impact the...

Monica Ortega has led an interesting life. She's a professional on-camera host, speaker, and actress who has had her share of ups and downs. She created the travel show, Monica Goes, in 2014. Four years into a bad marriage, disappointed that her then-husband wouldn't travel with her, depressed, and feeling hopeless, the show helped her fulfill her desire for travel and adventure. 

Monica says she's someone who's afraid of everything, and that she'll put herself through almost anything to show that if an average everyday person like her can do these things, anyone can. (Visit the Monica Goes YouTube Channel to see how she pushes her limits!)

Monica emcees at some of the biggest music festivals in the nation, has been seen in over 20 commercials, and is the co-host on the podcast Stumblin' Forward. She recently published her first book The Power of Pivoting - How to Embrace Change and Create a Life You Love. Her goal is to inspire others to face their fears, break out of...

On her website, Becky Mollenkamp says, "Your thoughts aren't trash. Your feelings aren't toxic. Failing to get rich isn't because you don't push enough or believe enough... You can't just think yourself happy. Stress, fear, and overwhelm aren't mind trash or trolls. Your struggles aren't a personality defect. Your challenges aren't character flaws. Your problems aren't mental or moral shortcomings."

This fresh approach is what made me want to interview Becky. She's an ICF-certified life coach with hundreds of hours of experience who helps people believe in and love themselves, let go of "shoulds" and feel more confident and worthy. She's the host of the Gutsy Boss podcast and has a coaching community by the same name. 

In our interview, we covered "hitting the wall" in running and life, and she suggested a new way to look at the wall. We talked about changing jobs, self care, and about how women and girls are conditioned to believe their needs come second.

From...

Are you a woman who has been passed up for promotions? Are you sick of watching others get the advancement opportunities you deserve? Are you tired of working for bad bosses? Then you'll want to hear what Rochelle Marie has to say in this episode.  We talked about courage, confidence, how bosses should be engaging their staff if they are working virtually, the concept of "embody it until you become it," and more.

Rochelle Marie has worked her way from entry level roles to leadership positions twice (once after a 12 year career gap to raise her children) without pretending to be someone she's not or sacrificing her family.

After one too many stories from career moms who were literally vomiting on the way to work due to toxic managers, and having worked for a few herself, she decided enough was enough.

With her degree Psychology, Post Grad Dip. in Career development and education and her entrepreneurial/intrapreneurial spirit, she now empowers and inspires...

What inspires someone to spend 20 years developing a new running shoe technology? I wanted to get to know the man behind the carbon composite suspension technology in the newest running shoe, Hann Shoes.

Lenn Hann on how he got started: 

I started out running in college, not as part of a track team or anything, but recreationally. And through my early running years, I was like everybody. I was happy. I was enthused. I'm building miles. I'm running races. In 1995, I completed my very first marathon and got a pretty serious injury during the training.  And I had been since college, bread-knifing shoes apart that I thought were really nice -- just to see what's inside. How are they built? Or [shoes] that really offended me...to see what's inside and understand why isn't the shoe working. And the shoe that I got the injury from... I was so upset. It was brand new. I bread-knifed it apart and there was so much structure inside of it that there was no way it wasn't going to...

"I think our running community is made of the absolute best people in the world. They're always trying to do something good for their own health, their community, great causes. And it is a tremendous luxury for me to have the opportunity to make sure everybody feels welcome, wanted, calmed, excited," Fitz Koehler tells me at the start of our interview. "And then I  want every finisher to feel like they won the race. And while  I completely respect the speedsters up in front, I'm going to claim favorites. My favorite people in the course of the back of the packers. I think they're the grittiest, the most surprising... you know, when you look at someone and think how the heck did they get to the start line? And then all of a sudden they're at the finish line. I just, I love them so much. And I'm so blessed to do what I do."

For episode 144 of Power Up Your Performance, I spoke with race announcer, and breast cancer survivor, Fitz Koehler.

We talked about what it was like to...