Pentimento Podcast

What happens when it falls apart slowly?

Janet Clancy-Feliciano didn't set out to find her path. A phone call from a family member in the middle of the night led her to grad school almost by accident — and from there into a career she never would have guessed for herself, one that has stayed genuinely curious about her studies all the way through her current doctoral work at Gonzaga's School of Leadership Studies.

But the deepe...

What happens when you know you want to take a next step, but you have no idea where to place your foot?

In this episode, Mike talks with Carrie Donker, a learning experience designer and executive coaching consultant, about a pattern that keeps showing up across her life: stepping into the unknown, from moving to a foreign country alone to volunteer, to leaving a leadership firm she loved at thirty, often before she felt ready. Carr...

What do you do when the path you're insisting on working just isn’t working... because life has something else in mind?

In this episode, Mike sits down with Jeff Rosick — composer, actor, graphic artist, and the producer behind this very podcast — to talk about the years that took him from a Gonzaga stage to Friday Night Lights to a decade of quietly resisting what life was trying to tell him. Jeff shares the story...

Linda Latto has spent her career asking one question: what is being asked of me right now?

She has answered it from Alaska to Georgia to Seattle to Portland to Southern California, across roles in real estate, healthcare, government, and now coaching and consulting. But the through-line was never the job title.

In this conversation, Linda traces a world-cracking moment in her mid-twenties, the slow healing that followed, and how a Ca...

What if the greatest obstacle to your growth was never your circumstances — but your certainty?

Laura Miner spent much of her life in a world where questioning wasn't allowed. She learned early that you defend what you see — or else. It wasn't until her mid-40s, with no bachelor's degree and a funny argument with her husband, that everything began to shift.

In this conversation, Michael Carey sits down with Laura Miner &m...

Joel Junker was always told that leaders get results, and that leaders are measured based on the results that they get. But, after decades of building an identity around results — Army officer, Notre Dame grad, and a 27-year career helping military leaders transition into business, he realized it all came with a cost that he didn't fully see until life stopped cooperating with his plan.

In this conversation, Joel traces the sl...

What does it look like to stop chasing your life and start receiving it?

Dr. Sherri Lynch has spent decades building things — programs, degrees, careers, community — including Women Lead, a program she founded at Gonzaga University that has grown over eleven years into a gathering place for women in leadership.

But some of the most meaningful moments in her story weren't planned.

They arrived.

In this conversation, Sherri r...

Barry Barfield has spent his adult life following a pull he didn't choose so much as discover — through theology, law, liturgical dance, campus ministry, and decades of quiet service in places most people never think to go.

In this conversation, Barry and Mike trace a journey that has wound through Los Angeles, San Francisco, Jerusalem, and 34 years at Gonzaga Preparatory High School. Along the way, Barry reflects on the write...

Jay Ballinger came home to help his father for six months in 1982. He never left.

Forty-four years later, Jay is still with the same family-owned company — moving from sales rep to division manager to his current role as Director of Leadership Development, and earning the unofficial title of "culture cop" along the way. It's a career he never planned, in a field he never studied, that turned out to be exactly right.

But the pat...