This is My Silver Lining
You know that feeling when you see a break in the clouds? After the storm, a ray of sun shines through, and without even thinking about it, you relax and take in the moment of gratitude. This is My Silver Lining is what we like to call a “pozcast” that brings that feeling to your ears and your hearts. That’s right, a “pozcast”! Not just a good news story, but one that celebrates the gifts of connection and community that come through periods of challenge. Each week, This is My Silver Lining (a/k/a TIMSL) shines a light on ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Our guests share their stories of resilience, courage, optimism, and gratitude. Each episode proves that, no matter how tough the journey, there is always a silver lining.
Episodes
This Mother’s Day, we celebrate a form of motherhood grounded in boldness, agency, and unwavering love, the path of the single mother by choice. In this powerful episode of This is My Silver Lining, Leslie Stone shares how one emotional moment at her niece’s Bat Mitzvah triggered a life-changing decision: to stop waiting for the traditional path and choose motherhood on her own terms.
Leslie, a former C-suite advertising executive, ...
When playwright, author, and performer Susan Lieu was just 11 years old, her mother died after undergoing what should have been a routine tummy tuck. Her family never talked about it.
The trauma, silence, and injustice was a hard-edged shadow for Susan. Her family’s silence only reinforced her determination to find answers.
Years later, Susan embarked on a courageous journey to make sense of the silence. In this episode, she shares...
Hard work alone won’t get you ahead—your success depends on how well you navigate workplace dynamics and communicate with decision-makers. That’s where Managing Up comes in.
In this episode of This Is My Silver Lining, I sit down with Melody Wilding, executive coach and bestselling author of Managing Up: How to Get What You Need from the People in Charge, to break down the essential skills for building better relationships with your...
Martha Underwood discusses the essential role of end-of-life planning and the emotional complexities it entails, sharing the inspiration behind her digital vault service, Prismm. She reflects on her family's immigrant background and how resilience, risk-taking, and a commitment to service shaped her approach to building a platform that helps families organize important documents and information to ensure access in order to fac...
Welcome to a brand-new season of This is My Silver Lining!
As we step into the new year, host Ingrid Busson-Hall reflects on the journey of creating this podcast, its mission to inspire hope and resilience, and the exciting plans ahead. This season will feature more extraordinary stories of courage, kindness, and gratitude—reminders that even in life’s toughest moments, there’s always a silver lining to embrace.
In this thought-provoking episode of This is My Silver Lining, I sit down with Dan Kowalski, founder of Plan A Thinking and author of W.I.S.E. Choices at Work: Go From Doubting to DECISIVE When the Clock is Ticking.
Dan's mission is to empower individuals and teams to make better decisions through deliberate and disciplined thinking. From his humble beginnings to navigating career transitions and founding his own consulting fir...
In this inspiring episode, we speak with Bill Burke, founder of the Optimism Institute and host of the Bluesky podcast, about the powerful link between optimism and gratitude. Bill shares his perspectives on how life’s toughest challenges ultimately shape us into better, more empathetic people, and how being grateful for these experiences opens us up to new relationships and greater possibilities in the future.
We dive into the...
In this heartfelt conversation, InsideWink co-creators and co-hosts Jean Trebek, widow of Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, and actress, Alison Martin, explore the transformative power of friendship, everyday miracles, grief, and compassion. Jean reflects on her journey of loss and resilience, sharing deeply personal experiences of losing her brother at a young age, overcoming an eating disorder, and caring for and grieving her beloved h...
When faced with a breast cancer diagnosis, treatment recommendations, and reconstruction options, Becky Johnson was unequivocal: she wanted the cancer out, and she wanted to minimize the need for additional surgeries. She opted for an aesthetic flat closure after her double mastectomy. She never expected that this decision would take her from the world of real estate to creating a whole new line of fashion for the flat community....
Amiel Handelsman opens up about his personal experience of loss and grief and how he found healing power in his discovery of positive psychology. Amiel discusses the importance of acknowledging and expressing grief, particularly for men and removing the taboos. He shares his experience of losing his first child in the hospital after a preterm live birth and the feelings of isolation that were compounded by the stress of several ro...
Nik Venios, founder of The Ideas Agency, shares his journey of resilience and creativity. When Nik lost his mother to breast cancer at age eight it made him an outlier. The transformational impact of her death wasn’t all negative, he says. It provided him the the ability to always look at problems from a range of perspectives. Nik discusses his early career, how he discovered design thinking, and how he went from foraging for ne...
Heather shares her experience of losing Jake, her four-year-old son, after a still undiagnosed illness that caused constant seizures. Heather emphasizes the importance of breaking the taboo on grief and finding the light in difficult situations.
She and her husband Brian started Jake's Help From Heaven, a nonprofit organization to provide support for individuals and families confronted with complex medical needs an...
Mike knew he wanted to be a professional golfer when he was five years old. He talks to us about how he made his big dream come true as a golf pro. We explore how he and his business partner, Andy Plummer, created the Stack & Tilt System of golf instruction through intense study and data analysis long before artificial intelligence was a thing. Mike tells us about the controversial Golf Digest article that introduced their te...
Just in time for Spring Break and with a special nod to National Optimism Month, we're thrilled to bring you this inspirational interview with Travel Expert, Lindsey Epperly, the CEO of JetSet World Travel.
Lindsey shares some of her most difficult challenges as an entrepreneur in the travel industry during a global pandemic. She also talks to us openly about how an unexpected health scare created an opportunity for her to le...
The daughter of immigrant parents, Sabrina was the consummate high achiever growing up. An Ivy Leaguer with her sights on law school, she did a summer internship at a prestigious firm that changed her plans. She took a role as a fixed income analyst on Wall Street. She was young and curious; she was great at her job. By all measures, Sabrina was a success, but she wanted more from life.
As she considered her options, the music...
Jamil Simon is a documentary filmmaker, development worker, peace activist and lifelong adventurer. Over the course of multiple capacity building projects across sub saharan Africa, the Middle East, and beyond, Jamil gained insights into the deep challenges associated with building and maintaining lasting peace in several conflict-ravaged areas. He witnessed firsthand that signing peace agreements and shaking hands in front of th...
For Meredith Tapper, boxing is as much about patience and persistence as it is about landing the perfect punch. Meredith is a 38-year-old lawyer from Winnipeg, Manitoba who works on Wall Street. She’s a big thinker driven by intellectual challenge who gets things done. She is also a risk taker who won't hesitate to take a solo trip to Southeast Asia or some other far-flung destination. In 2019, she embarked on a new advent...
When she was just seven years old Erin Dionne knew she wanted to be an author. She took all the right steps - she majored in English at Boston College, she earned a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston, and set her sights on writing the great American novel. But a chance opportunity to take a class in children’s literature ignited a new creative spark. Today, Erin is a successful author who has wr...
Just off the coast of Portland, Maine, in the Casco Bay lies Great Diamond Island, the home of Crown Jewel, a unique dining hotspot where you are sure to make new friends and memories while you delight in the chef’s creative twists on seafood standards and truly smashing cocktails. A 20-minute ferry or water taxi ride will get you there, but you’ll definitely need a reservation. This gem is open Memorial Day to Columbus Day and o...
For Bram Zeigler, an economist and unapologetic capitalist, changing the narrative on poverty starts with dignity and self-determination. In 2021, Bram founded Capitalists for Shared Income (C4si). Inspired by the work of Milton Friedman, who advocated for a negative income tax in the late 1960s, C4si offers an innovative approach to address poverty and income inequality. Through one-time debit card cash payments of $58, C4si pa...
Popular Podcasts
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Burden is a documentary series that takes listeners into the hidden places where justice is done (and undone). It dives deep into the lives of heroes and villains. And it focuses a spotlight on those who triumph even when the odds are against them. Season 5 - The Burden: Death & Deceit in Alliance On April Fools Day 1999, 26-year-old Yvonne Layne was found murdered in her Alliance, Ohio home. David Thorne, her ex-boyfriend and father of one of her children, was instantly a suspect. Another young man admitted to the murder, and David breathed a sigh of relief, until the confessed murderer fingered David; “He paid me to do it.” David was sentenced to life without parole. Two decades later, Pulitzer winner and podcast host, Maggie Freleng (Bone Valley Season 3: Graves County, Wrongful Conviction, Suave) launched a “live” investigation into David's conviction alongside Jason Baldwin (himself wrongfully convicted as a member of the West Memphis Three). Maggie had come to believe that the entire investigation of David was botched by the tiny local police department, or worse, covered up the real killer. Was Maggie correct? Was David’s claim of innocence credible? In Death and Deceit in Alliance, Maggie recounts the case that launched her career, and ultimately, “broke” her.” The results will shock the listener and reduce Maggie to tears and self-doubt. This is not your typical wrongful conviction story. In fact, it turns the genre on its head. It asks the question: What if our champions are foolish? Season 4 - The Burden: Get the Money and Run “Trying to murder my father, this was the thing that put me on the path.” That’s Joe Loya and that path was bank robbery. Bank, bank, bank, bank, bank. In season 4 of The Burden: Get the Money and Run, we hear from Joe who was once the most prolific bank robber in Southern California, and beyond. He used disguises, body doubles, proxies. He leaped over counters, grabbed the money and ran. Even as the FBI was closing in. It was a showdown between a daring bank robber, and a patient FBI agent. Joe was no ordinary bank robber. He was bright, articulate, charismatic, and driven by a dark rage that he summoned up at will. In seven episodes, Joe tells all: the what, the how… and the why. Including why he tried to murder his father. Season 3 - The Burden: Avenger Miriam Lewin is one of Argentina’s leading journalists today. At 19 years old, she was kidnapped off the streets of Buenos Aires for her political activism and thrown into a concentration camp. Thousands of her fellow inmates were executed, tossed alive from a cargo plane into the ocean. Miriam, along with a handful of others, will survive the camp. Then as a journalist, she will wage a decades long campaign to bring her tormentors to justice. Avenger is about one woman’s triumphant battle against unbelievable odds to survive torture, claim justice for the crimes done against her and others like her, and change the future of her country. Season 2 - The Burden: Empire on Blood Empire on Blood is set in the Bronx, NY, in the early 90s, when two young drug dealers ruled an intersection known as “The Corner on Blood.” The boss, Calvin Buari, lived large. He and a protege swore they would build an empire on blood. Then the relationship frayed and the protege accused Calvin of a double homicide which he claimed he didn’t do. But did he? Award-winning journalist Steve Fishman spent seven years to answer that question. This is the story of one man’s last chance to overturn his life sentence. He may prevail, but someone’s gotta pay. The Burden: Empire on Blood is the director’s cut of the true crime classic which reached #1 on the charts when it was first released half a dozen years ago. Season 1 - The Burden In the 1990s, Detective Louis N. Scarcella was legendary. In a city overrun by violent crime, he cracked the toughest cases and put away the worst criminals. “The Hulk” was his nickname. Then the story changed. Scarcella ran into a group of convicted murderers who all say they are innocent. They turned themselves into jailhouse-lawyers and in prison founded a lway firm. When they realized Scarcella helped put many of them away, they set their sights on taking him down. And with the help of a NY Times reporter they have a chance. For years, Scarcella insisted he did nothing wrong. But that’s all he’d say. Until we tracked Scarcella to a sauna in a Russian bathhouse, where he started to talk..and talk and talk. “The guilty have gone free,” he whispered. And then agreed to take us into the belly of the beast. Welcome to The Burden.
"SmartLess" with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, & Will Arnett is a podcast that connects and unites people from all walks of life to learn about shared experiences through thoughtful dialogue and organic hilarity. A nice surprise: in each episode of SmartLess, one of the hosts reveals his mystery guest to the other two. What ensues is a genuinely improvised and authentic conversation filled with laughter and newfound knowledge to feed the SmartLess mind. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of SmartLess ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!