Courage and Spice

Sarah Vermunt is a longtime pal, career coach and the founder of Careergasm. She's written books about careers and columns for Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, Fortune, and Fast Company. She’s had a regular coaching spot on the tele in Canada.

Three years ago, out of the blue, Sarah started having psychic clairvoyant visions. She did not see this coming. Since then, life-long City-dweller Sarah has moved to a small town with a vibrant co...

Content note: This episode includes discussions around intentional weight loss and diet culture, and therefore contains swearing.

This episode is part of a podcast series called The Body Stories. I’m joined by my beloved friend and fellow coach, Ali Shapiro. Over the next year, Ali and I will have an occasional and ongoing conversation about the nuanced relationship with our bodies. These are tender conversations, and at times, I w...

As a highly sensitive person, Sam Dhu believes it is possible to be deeply ambitious and successful AND soft and sensitive at the same time.

Sam is a Psychotherapist, Mentor, and Facilitator of Permission. Mum to eight-year-old, Amelie and two-year-old Frankie, and passionate advocate for being radically kind and compassionate to yourself.

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We chat about how to acknowledge our individual ca...

Content note: This episode includes discussions around intentional weight loss and diet culture, and contains swearing.

This is the first in a new podcast series called The Body Stories with my beloved friend and fellow coach, Ali Shapiro. Over the next year, Ali and I will have an occasional and ongoing conversation about the nuanced relationship with our bodies.

Ali is a deeply experienced coach whose work sits at the intersection...

Tamu Thomas is a transformational somatic leadership coach, the eldest daughter of West African immigrants, a mother, a speaker, and now a published author!

Tamu’s first book, Women Who Work Too Much, helps overachieving, overfunctioning women set boundaries, find joy, and flourish.

This conversation was a balm, and I suspect fellow Gen X women in particular, will feel seen and understood. We are the generation that grew up being tol...

Have you ever daydreamed about a different potential future for yourself?

Perhaps your imagination offers you an entirely different job, country, or relationship?

It might be that your life looks the same on the inside but feels entirely different to you.

This might be a creative way to spend time on a drive or in a queue, and it could also point you towards an entirely new direction.

In this episode of Courage and Spice, we are explo...

If you love the idea of communal learning and connection, if you are looking for like-minded souls, if you have incomplete online courses on your laptop: listen in!

I’m excited for you to get to know Sally Burns. We recorded this chat before ‘The US Situation’ - I guess we need to start calling it what it is - The Coup by tech billionaires.

To know that Sally is thoughtfully building an alternative to everything they stand for, fil...

Happy (lunar) New Year!

It’s the first new moon of the year, which also marks the beginning of the Chinese and Tibetan year of the wood snake (nb: I just had a little look at this, and the wood snake symbolises the embodied wisdom of the Divine Feminine who knows her worth, lives close to the Earth and is at ease in moving within her body, which is always changing, shedding old skins for new growth. The wood snake is all about movi...

How do you feel about what you wear?

Shopping for clothes in our fast-fashion world, deciding what you like (colours, fabrics, makers), trying things on, and deciding what suits can all feel a bit like a minefield.

It can be incredibly activating for our self-doubt.

Lizzie Parsons runs The Distinctive Style Atelier and she is all about finding joy, confidence, and authenticity in your personal style - she has a really fun, human In...

I’ve spent a lot of this year thinking about the Coaching industry. It is undoubtedly going through a somewhat sticky phase of maturing - for some of us, this is a long-time-coming-reckoning.

The increasing focus on ethics and having a scope of practice, being trauma-informed, calling out the training organisations that replicate unhealthy practices is all for the good - particularly when it comes to outcomes for our beloved clients...

IMHO, the best kind of humans can access deep joy and light because they have sat in their darkness and shadows. Olivia is exactly that!

We talk about the path from anger, pain, shame and addiction to living from a quiet mind and safe body. Olivia shares how breathwork blew her heart open and invited her to follow what she calls ‘the yellow brick road home to myself’.

Breathwork is such a mysterious and deceptively simple practice...

In my former life, I was in the business of corporate goals - we called these projects - and I was responsible for some of the biggest, hairiest, riskiest projects in the UK (that life is almost unfathomable to me now). #nowonderIdrank

We often had a team of physics grads who managed an enormous Gannt chart - the project plan. We talked about The Plan endlessly. It was forever being updated, changed, added to, and reported on.

We wor...

I’m so excited for you all to meet my newest friend: Nici Wickes. Cookbook author, beloved TV star, restaurant reviewer and food editor for various publications, Nici is a national treasure here in Aotearoa.

We discuss the often undervalued experience of living alone. Nici speaks candidly about finding joy and fulfilment inside of a full midlife, living solo, and what she has learned about herself.

Our conversation moves through Nici...

It’s a delight to be back in your earholes after quite a long break since the last episode - Sas

If you are experiencing a major change in your life, you’ll know what I mean by a Life Quake. 

These experiences shake up our foundations of who we know ourselves to be; we can feel quite unmoored and at sea.  This episode is especially for you if you are going through this kind of change right now, if you know you are entering a period o...

My brilliant guest today is Karen Arthur, menopause activist, campaigner, and host of the podcast Menopause whilst Black. She is also a teacher, a fashionista, and a grandmother, and does all of this with unrelnting wholehearted joy.

Karen joins us to talk about the balance of feeling joy amidst increasingly troubling world news, embracing the aging process, and putting your energy toward meaningful change, note to mention a wh...

Welcome to a new season of Courage & Spice, and to the Age of Aquarius! For those less astrologically inclined, this means that 2024 has arrived with a big sense of newness – new ideas, new adventures, new opportunities, it’s all on the way. 

With just a few weeks before I officially move from our home in Bristol to Aotearoa, New Zealand, I’m experiencing fresh starts left and right. Tune in for some transformative life updates...

This week, we’re taking a closer look at how to approach the fear of failure so that you can let go of it for good.

 The threat of failure brings up a lot of very real worries and feelings, which are completely valid. Failure is so wrapped up in our sense of self, what we’re capable of, and our hopes for the future… no wonder we put so much effort into avoiding it.

In this episode, I share the experiences that taught me to recontextu...

Are you afraid of failure? You are definitely not alone. The fear of failure is such a big reason for self-doubt to show up. 

To complicate it even more, we define failure in so many ways, from not making the cut, to guilt around something unfulfilled, all the way to something simply not going your way.

This is a bit of a personal one for me as I’ve been diagnosed with ‘heart failure’ I’ve been playing with my relationship to failure...

Is you self-doubt tied up in your relationship with money? This week, I'm joined by the Founder of Tended Wealth, Megan DeBoer.

Megan defines wealth as a state of plenty in relationships, health, community, our environment, and of course our finances.

Tune in for a rich discussion on the familial and cultural lineage of money, how we frame our relationship with money based on this history, and what we can do to create new,...