I went into this thinking Elizabeth Holmes and Martha Stewart had been punished more harshly because they were women. The sentencing research complicated that idea. It also made me separate what happens in a courtroom from what happens afterward: who gets hired, who gets funded, and who gets another chance.

In this episode, I look at the difference between selling a vision and saying something already works when it doesn't. I follow that question through Theranos, investors' responsibility to check, Martha Stewart's comeback, and the chances people get after a mistake. These cases involve different conduct. I'm not arguing that fraud should be excused.

The question I bring back to everyday life is whether I'd give somebody the same chance if they were a person I didn't like.

Join me at https://MichelleVaughn.co to subscribe, join the community, and choose the newsletters you're interested in. We talk about finance, business, life, and everything in between.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Theranos and the patient in the opening story

01:37 What I wanted to understand

03:09 When does a promise become a lie?

12:18 Who lost money, and who got hurt?

17:20 What the sentencing research says

19:19 Martha Stewart and the criminal case

25:28 Who gets hired and funded again?

29:32 Martha Stewart's comeback

31:03 Pardons and second chances

33:19 Applying the same standard at work

35:50 Who benefits from the story?

37:21 Questions to take with you

CASE-HISTORY CLARIFICATIONS AND SOURCES

Elizabeth Holmes was convicted on four investor-related counts, acquitted on four patient-related counts, and the jury did not reach verdicts on three other investor-related counts. The acquittals do not establish that patients were unharmed.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/us-v-elizabeth-holmes-et-al

The 2023 Elon Musk/Tesla verdict discussed here was in a civil shareholder case, not a criminal trial. The jury found Musk and Tesla not liable for investor losses.

https://www.quinnemanuel.com/the-firm/publications/defense-verdict-secured-in-multibillion-dollar-securities-trial-on-behalf-of-elon-musk-and-tesla/

Martha Stewart's ImClone stock sale was in December 2001. The FDA news concerned its refusal to accept a drug application for filing, not an approval. Her criminal convictions concerned conspiracy, obstruction and false statements. Separately, the SEC did bring civil insider-trading charges, which she settled in 2006.

https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releases/lr-19794

https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2003-69-sec-charges-martha-stewart-broker-peter-bacanovic-illegal-insider-trading

The sentencing and employment studies describe patterns in their own datasets, not a rule explaining every individual case:

Sonja Starr, Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases

https://repository.law.umich.edu/law_econ_current/57/

Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos and Amit Seru, When Harry Fired Sally: The Double Standard in Punishing Misconduct

https://www.nber.org/papers/w23242

The Observation Room with Michelle Vaughn | Episode 17

Imagine me in the passenger seat and my son driving. We're in the same car, on the same road, and we're living two different realities. Then there's the space where those two lives meet.

In this episode of The Observation Room, I look at the stories we tell about each other and what those stories create between us. I follow that question through Adidas and Puma, the McDonald brothers and Ray Kroc, relationships, negotiation, and my own work leading a team.

I also talk about the difference between seeing someone's perspective and carrying their pain, why seeing several sides doesn't have to stop you from making a decision, and what I mean when I say I can twist the room. I can't know someone else's experience just by imagining it. I can ask and leave room for an answer I didn't expect.

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Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrwvtfCBOAw

Chapters

00:00 Adidas, Puma, and two versions of one moment

02:18 The passenger seat and the third space

05:29 Who gets to tell the story?

12:01 Why our own version feels objective

16:08 Relationships and the moments we turn toward

20:09 People who stepped into the space between

25:44 Follett and the window in the next room

28:36 Seeing several sides at work

31:39 Perspective, empathy, and what we carry

37:00 Analysis paralysis and decisions without certainty

41:32 Twist the room and notice the opportunity

44:34 The Christmas truce

47:19 Asking for the other person's version

I use credit cards for points, pay the balance every month, and save the rewards for travel and hotel stays. I benefit from the system. I also want to understand who pays for it.

In Episode 15 of The Observation Room, I look at how credit cards became a business, what merchants pay to accept them, and why the reward can get more attention than the borrowing cost. I ask why a much cheaper card hasn’t taken over the market, then work through rate caps, financial education, and the difference between showing someone a price and setting it for them.

Come into the community and tell me what you learned about your card after you started using it. Please leave out account numbers and other private details. You can also choose a newsletter at MichelleVaughn.co.

Clarifications and sources

• Rewards are funded within a business with several revenue sources, including interchange, interest, and fees. Carrying a balance does not by itself tell us why someone borrowed or what they understand. See the Federal Reserve’s credit-card profitability analysis and rewards research.

• The economist behind the 1991 paper is Lawrence M. Ausubel. His explanation is one research account of competition, not a complete explanation of every issuer’s pricing. Read the paper’s publication record.

• For a lost or stolen debit card, the initial reporting window is two business days after discovering the loss. The separate 60-day window runs from when the statement is sent. Number-only theft has different rules. FTC guide to card fraud protections.

• Interchange is only part of a merchant’s total processing cost. The EU’s 0.3% consumer-credit-card interchange cap is not a cap on the full merchant service charge, so it is not directly comparable with a total US processing rate. EU regulation.

• At exactly 2.5%, processing $1 million costs $25,000, not $24,000. Minimum-payment payoff times depend on the issuer’s formula and minimum-dollar payment; the episode’s 16-year illustration is not a universal result.

• A purchase grace period can help a qualifying cardholder avoid purchase interest by paying in full on time. Cash advances and carried balances work differently. CFPB explanation.

This episode is general education and personal commentary, not individualized financial or legal advice. Check the terms that apply to your own account.

I miss going to Blockbuster. When I hear the story about Netflix offering to sell to them, I don’t think those people were stupid. I want to understand what they were looking at, what was paying their bills, and why the new thing was so hard to take seriously.

In this episode, I look at how the way we describe ourselves can limit the opportunities we notice. I follow that question through Kodak and Fujifilm, inventions that found an unexpected use, and companies like Lego and Netflix that complicate the idea that changing is always the answer. I also talk about becoming a beginner after years in mortgages and making a small improvement instead of continuing to complain about a process.

You can stay curious and still say no. At least you’ll understand what you’re saying no to.

Watch Episode 14 on YouTube

Join my community and choose the newsletter that fits your interests in finance, business, life, and everything in between.

Corrections and context

Google’s announced purchase price for YouTube was $1.65 billion in stock, not $6.5 billion. Google’s October 2006 announcement, archived.

Kodak did commercialize digital cameras: its professional system launched in 1991 and its DC40 consumer camera in 1995. The phrase “sat in the building for 37 years” should not be taken literally. Kodak’s photography history.

These business histories involve more than a single decision. Curiosity and identity are the questions explored here, not a claim that either one alone explains every outcome. The transcript is automatically generated and may contain transcription errors.

I look at private equity through three different pockets: the firm running the fund, the investors, and the company being bought. Using actual deals, I explain how borrowing, sale-leasebacks and dividends can change what the business has left to work with.

I have no problem with an owner making money. What I want to understand is what they are getting paid for, who still owes the bill, and how much room the business has when something goes wrong.

If you have worked at a company that was bought, I would like to hear what changed and how long it took before you noticed. Bring the conversation to the community.

This episode discusses financial structures and research for general education, not individualized investment or legal advice.

Corrections and source notes

The recording retains my spoken delivery. These notes clarify figures and comparisons discussed in the episode; the video also includes on-screen corrections.

• Dollar General's IPO filing lists 8,577 stores as of July 31, 2009. IPO prospectus.

• The 2007 Claire's acquisition and the 2025 North American asset sale cover different assets and are not a like-for-like price comparison. 2025 court filing.

• Toys R Us liquidation sales announced in March 2018 covered 735 remaining US and Puerto Rico stores, not 1,800 US stores. The $464 million figure discussed is an attributed aggregate of fees, expenses and interest, not established net profit. Liquidation announcement.

• Bankruptcy does not have one simple payment line. Secured claims have rights against collateral, and administrative expenses do not automatically outrank existing liens. Wage and tax priorities have separate rules. Statutory priorities.

• Red Lobster's $190.5 million figure is its total 2023 lease obligation, not solely rent added by the 2014 sale-leaseback. Annual lease costs and the reported shrimp-promotion loss are different measures. First-day declaration.

• Steward's 2016 MPT transaction totaled $1.25 billion across property purchases, debt refinancing and equity. Cerberus sold its ownership in 2020; the remaining sale note was paid in 2021. Cerberus describes nearly $900 million invested by Steward during its ownership, not all as Cerberus equity. Cerberus's account.

• The 2019 Payless closures discussed covered the US, Canada and Puerto Rico; Latin American operations continued. First-day declaration.

• The nursing-home study measures mortality during the stay and the following 90 days. Its revised estimate is an 11% relative increase for the group identified by its research design, not an 11-percentage-point increase for every patient. NBER study.

• The employment comparisons of +15% and -12% are relative to controls over two years for different buyout categories. Approximately 8% productivity growth is an overall sample result. The roughly 20% versus 2% bankruptcy comparison concerns a specific sample of 484 public-to-private buyouts over ten years, not all private-equity investments. Employment and productivity research; Bankruptcy study.

• The pension figure of 89% refers to the 200 public pension funds studied in the American Investment Council's 2025 report. Report.

• Co-tenancy rent relief and termination rights depend on the specific lease. Whether a transaction is lawful depends on the facts, and private arrangements are not necessarily public. SEC investor guidance.

• Blackstone's account of the Hilton investment reports approximately $14 billion in profit, correcting the $16 billion reference near the close. Blackstone account.

I saw a post the other morning asking, “Do you ever feel like the odds are stacked against you?” My immediate reaction was absolutely not.

I know that probably sounds strange coming from someone who has experienced the kind of loss that I have. But I do not experience my life as something that is constantly happening against me. I think I am always in it: making choices, getting information, changing direction, and learning what works and what does not.

Facts matter to me. If something is not working, I want to know why. If I failed, tell me I failed. You cannot build anything useful on top of information that is not true. What I do not accept is the idea that the facts get to decide the rest of the story.

In this episode, I talk about the two questions I keep coming back to: What skill is this trying to teach me? And what do I do now? I get into grief, being a beginner again, AI and judgment, aging, sleep, ownership, and the rules we follow without ever stopping to ask where they came from.

I am not here to tell you the answer to your own life. I am here to put another perspective in your room.

National headlines can describe a stable economy while everyday life still feels tight. This episode follows the gap between inflation and price levels, wages and purchasing power, consumer spending and household margin—and asks what the numbers can actually help you decide.

The Fed raised rates this week. The part I want to hear from business owners about is the decision it made you revisit. Are you rethinking borrowing, pricing, hiring, a purchase, or nothing at all? Tell me what changed, or what did not.

For reference: the Federal Reserve’s September 16 statement.

Content note: This episode discusses death, grief, alcohol use after loss, and the death of my son Dylan.

Visible suffering is not a reliable measurement of love. A person can laugh, work, travel, build something new, love again, and still carry grief through every part of an ordinary day.

In this episode, I begin with the way people judge Patrick Clancy's grief from the outside, then talk about the difference between how I responded when my father died and how I responded thirteen years later when Dylan died. I talk about Destin, continuing to mother both of my sons in different ways, the ordinary text messages and daily rhythms that run into absence, and why "moving on" has never made much sense to me.

I live completely okay. I love my life, and I would change one enormous thing about it immediately if I could. Those truths do not cancel each other out. Grief is not one emotion, one sequence, one visible performance, or one correct way to remain connected to someone you love.

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A hard season is not automatically proof that you are failing. Sometimes it is showing you what you can carry, where an old strategy has reached its limit, or what has to change before the next version of your life can work.

In this episode, I talk about the mean voice in my own head, moving before I feel certain, and why evidence from your actual life can matter more than another motivational quote. I also look at what research on self-efficacy and adversity can and cannot tell us. Some difficulty can give us experience responding. Too much can overwhelm us. Not every painful thing is secretly a gift, and nobody owes gratitude to harm.

The useful question is not whether every struggle was good. It is what you know now because you lived through it, what you are carrying forward, and whether the strategy that helped you survive still belongs in the life you are building.

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What being strong actually feels like from the inside...

I was on a podcast this week, and before the host asked me what being strong means to me, she introduced me by telling pieces of my own life back to me. Twenty-six years in the mortgage industry. Building a company across thirteen states. Losing everything financially more than once. Losing my son. Rebuilding my life, my work and, in a lot of ways, myself.

It always gets me a little when somebody else says it, because when I say it, it is just my life. One thing happened, and then another thing happened, and then something else happened, and life kept going because that is what life does. You wake up the next morning. There are still decisions to make. There are still bills and children and work and people who need something from you. You do not normally stop in the middle of your own life and gather everything that has ever happened into one paragraph.

But when somebody else does, and I hear the whole thing the way another person must hear it, I have this moment where I think, damn.

That really is a lot.

Then she asked me, “What does being strong mean to you?”

Of course, I did what I always do when I am trying to understand what I actually think, which is sit down with a piece of paper and start writing. At first, I started making the obvious list. I lost Dylan when he was twenty-two years old in a freak car accident. I have lost many of the people who made up my family. My mortgage company was crippled more than once. I have moved across the country and started over. I have built multimillion-dollar companies. I homeschooled my boys. I published two books. I have started things, lost things, rebuilt things, walked away from things and kept moving through seasons when not moving would have made complete sense.

The list is long, and honestly, sometimes I impress myself.

But the more I looked at it, the more I realized that the list is what strength looks like to somebody standing outside of my life. It is the evidence people gather after everything has already happened, when they can look backward over the story, point to everything I survived and say, “She is strong.”

That is not what strength feels like when you are living inside of it.

From the inside, I think strength feels like a hallway.

There is a life behind you that you can still see, and there is another life somewhere in front of you that you can almost imagine, but you are standing in the middle and both doors are closed.

Sometimes you chose the hallway. You left the relationship, the job, the organization, the city, the family dynamic, the business or the version of yourself that you could no longer keep being. Other times, you did not choose any of it. Something happened. Somebody died. The money disappeared. The company changed. The future you had already pictured was taken away, and suddenly you were standing there whether you wanted to be or not.

Either way, the old door is familiar.

Even when what was behind it was not good for you, you know how to live there. You know the people. You know the rules. You know what is expected from you. You know the version of yourself you have to become to fit back inside of it, and there is something strangely comforting about knowing exactly how much of yourself you would have to give up to belong there again.

The new door is closed too, except that one is unfamiliar, and that is why the hallway sucks.

You do not know when the new door is going to open. You do not know exactly what is behind it. You do not know whether the business will work, whether the people will come, whether the podcast will grow, whether the money will return, whether the new community will find you, whether the new relationship will arrive, or whether the life you can see in your mind is actually waiting for you anywhere outside of your own imagination.

Nobody can promise you that if you keep walking, everything you are hoping for will be on the other side.

And in the meantime, nobody is applauding because there is nothing visible to applaud yet.

You can start a podcast and have five people listening. You can build a business before you have the clients. You can leave an environment you know you have outgrown and still feel left out when you see everybody carrying on without you. You can know with every logical part of yourself that leaving was the right decision and still miss being inside of something, still miss being known there, still miss having a place where people expected to see you.

I think that is the part we skip when we tell people to be strong.

We make strength sound like certainty, as though the strong person walks away and never looks back because she knows the future is going to be better, and I do not think that is how it feels at all. Sometimes you look backward constantly. Sometimes you miss people you know you cannot keep walking beside. Sometimes you are sad and lonely and completely unconvinced that any of this is going to work.

Strength is not gaslighting yourself into being happy in the hallway or repeating that everything happens for a reason until you no longer feel what you lost. Sometimes strength is simply being able to tell yourself the truth: I miss what was behind me. I do not know what is ahead of me. I am lonely here. I wish the next door would open so I could have some evidence that I made the right decision.

And I am still not going back.

Maybe I understood the hallway long before I had language for it.

My mother lived with paranoid schizophrenia, and for much of my childhood, it was just the two of us. She was institutionalized more than once. There were periods when she was homeless. There were things happening in our home that no child could possibly understand, so I did what children sometimes do when life does not make sense: I tried to become exceptionally good at everything I could control.

I was the little girl who tested into talented and gifted classes, danced, performed, overachieved and tried very hard to make sure the world saw that I was okay. Years later, I would understand that some of that excellence was not simply ambition. It was compensation. It was survival. It was a child trying to build structure around something that had none.

I spent years studying psychology, physiology, behavior and the mind because I wanted to understand my mother. I wrote a book called I Am Not My Mother because I needed to understand where her story ended and mine began. I never really blamed her. I knew she was sick. But I also learned that understanding why somebody behaves the way they do does not mean you can keep allowing their illness to determine your life.

At some point, I had to choose my children, and at some point, I had to choose myself.

That choice did not make me stop loving her. It did not make the loss of having a mother who could not really be my mother disappear. It meant I stopped walking backward into a life that required me to sacrifice the people I had become responsible for protecting.

That was one hallway.

Then Dylan died, and I found myself standing in the most impossible hallway of my life.

I do not think I am strong because my son died and I survived it. Losing him was not an accomplishment. It was not a test I passed, and it was not something that happened so I could become a more inspirational person. I would change it immediately if I could.

The strength was in all the ordinary decisions that came after it, when there was no dramatic transformation, no applause and no promise that I would ever feel like myself again.

People say all the time, “I could never survive losing my child,” and I understand what they mean. It is another way of saying the love is so enormous that the loss feels unimaginable. But when the unimaginable became my actual life, my mind did not experience it as permission to stop living.

I still had another son.

Destin still needed his mother, and I wanted to be a pillar for him—not a woman who pretended she was never devastated, but a woman who allowed herself to be devastated without deciding that the devastation had to become the rest of both of our lives.

I cried. I still cry. I gave myself the space to fall apart when I needed to fall apart, and I did not demand that grief become beautiful or productive. But I also understood that emotion moves. It changes shape. It becomes louder and quieter. It revisits you in ways you did not expect. I could feel it without handing it complete authority over every decision I would ever make again.

I am not telling anybody else how to grieve. I do not know what somebody else needs, how long they need it, or what their life feels like from the inside. I am only telling you what I knew about me.

I knew I could stay in bed, disappear inside the grief, and almost nobody would blame me.

Or I could stand in the hallway and choose a life I could not see yet.

That did not mean choosing a life without Dylan. He is woven through everything. It meant choosing to carry him with me instead of making his death the place where every other part of my life had to end.

Maybe creating has always been one of the ways I move through things. I am a creator, not a consumer. I write. I build. I start companies. I ask questions. I turn ideas over until I understand what I believe about them. Sometimes I have wondered whether creating is how I have grieved my entire life.

Dweewoo came from Dylan. The books came from trying to give language to things that felt impossible to hold. The company I am building now existed in some form before he died, and that matters to me because people sometimes think I became a different person after I lost him, as if grief invented this version of me.

It did not.

It changed me deeply, but I had already started walking toward her.

About nine months before Dylan died, he and I had one of those long conversations we used to have, where we could talk for hours and move through ten subjects without either one of us thinking we had left the original conversation. He told me that my journey would probably continue to get lonelier because I kept making choices about who I wanted to become.

I did not drink. I did not want a life built around things that did not feel good to me. I had ended relationships because I could see that the future the other person wanted was not the future I wanted. I had stepped away from rooms, jobs and organizations where I could have remained successful but no longer felt like myself.

Dylan could see that every time I made one of those choices, the group of people walking in exactly the same direction became smaller.

I wrote about that conversation on Facebook. At the time, it felt like one more beautiful conversation with my son. After he died, the date took on a weight I could never have understood when I wrote it.

But he was right.

For a long time, I would get almost all the way to the next door and then run all the way back down the hallway trying to bring everybody else with me.

I wanted them to see what I could see. I wanted them to grow with me. I wanted them to want what I wanted. I wanted to keep every relationship, every community and every version of belonging while still becoming whoever I was becoming, because I think some part of me believed that if I could bring everybody with me, moving forward would not feel so lonely.

It took me until my forties to understand that not everybody chooses that.

Some people are comfortable where they are. Some people are not asking the same questions. Some people are not trying to become the person you are trying to become. Some people genuinely like their lives, even when the life they are choosing would make me miserable.

That does not make them wrong, and it does not make me better. I cannot judge somebody else’s journey because I have never lived their life from the inside. What looks like fear to me may feel like peace to them. What looks stagnant from where I am standing may be exactly the stability they spent their whole life trying to create.

But I also cannot keep abandoning my journey because I am afraid to walk by myself.

I cannot keep reaching the next door, turning around and running back into the hallway to convince everybody behind me that they should want to come.

I think one of the biggest things I have learned over the last five or six years is that sometimes it is okay to just grab your own hand and walk.

Not angrily. Not because nobody else matters. Not because you have suddenly become so independent that you no longer need love, friendship or community.

You grab your own hand because you are the person who is actually there with you in the hallway. You are the one who knows what it cost to leave the old room. You are the one who knows how much of yourself you had already sacrificed trying to fit there. You are the one who has to live with the life you choose if you turn around, and you are also the one who has to keep believing in the life ahead of you before anybody else can see it.

Grabbing your own hand is not always some grand, cinematic act. A lot of it is ordinary.

It is waking up and paying attention to what is happening in your own mind before the rest of the world gets access to you. It is meditation. It is writing. It is keeping a gratitude list. It is checking in with yourself at the end of the day and asking, “Are you proud of you?”

I ask myself that every day, and I ask Destin too, because it does not really matter whether I am proud of him. I am his mother. I am going to love him no matter what. The more important question is whether he is becoming somebody he respects when nobody else is in the room.

I said on the podcast that probably eighty percent of my battle is cheering myself on, and I meant that literally.

My brain does not always offer me peaceful, wise, perfectly organized thoughts. My brain moves constantly. It imagines things. It remembers things. It tries to protect me from things that have already happened by convincing me that they are about to happen again.

After losing one son in a car accident, of course fear can tell me a thousand horrifying stories about my other son.

I could listen to all of them. I could call him constantly. I could try to control where he goes, what he does, how he drives, who he is with and when he comes home. I could make both of our lives smaller while telling myself that I was only trying to keep him safe.

Or I can hear the fear and understand exactly why she is there.

I do not have to shut her up. I do not have to pretend she is irrational or weak or inconvenient. I can listen to the scared version of me. I can tell her that she makes sense. I can give her space to speak.

She just does not get to make every decision.

That is part of the hallway too. Your subconscious mind is trying to keep you alive. It does not necessarily care whether you are happy, fulfilled, growing, loving freely or living the life you actually want. It cares whether today looks enough like yesterday that it can predict what happens next.

Familiar pain can feel safer than unfamiliar possibility, and that is why we sometimes go backward.

That is why people return to relationships, jobs, habits, identities and environments they already know do not fit them. It is not always because they believe the old life was good. Sometimes the known cost feels easier to tolerate than the uncertainty of a door that has not opened yet.

For a period of two or three years, I spent a lot of time alone. I am not telling anybody they need to copy my timeline. Maybe somebody else can find what I found in three months. Maybe another person needs longer. But for me, that solitude was one of the best things I ever gave myself because I finally became quiet enough to hear how many voices inside my head did not belong to me.

Other people’s expectations. The version of success that looked impressive from the outside. The things women are supposed to want. The things business owners are supposed to build. The last podcast I listened to. The last book I read. The last person who spoke confidently enough that I briefly mistook their certainty for my truth.

There were moments when I had to stop and ask myself, “Is this actually me, or is this just the last podcast I listened to?”

I had made a million dollars in a year. I had traveled. I had done the private-jet thing. I had built the company, checked the boxes and created a life that looked successful, and I still had to sit down with myself and ask, “What are you doing this for?”

Money matters. It creates choices. It removes pressure. It lets you help people. I am not pretending that it does not matter.

But money by itself was not enough to tell me whether the hallway I was walking down was mine.

I had to ask what actually lit me up. What made me happy. What work felt like the fullest use of me. What I would still be interested in if nobody were standing nearby to be impressed by it.

And then I had to give myself permission to change my answer.

While I was learning to hear my own voice, I also had to learn not to reject the versions of me who were scared, chaotic, angry, grieving or unsure. I spent a long time believing growth meant silencing those versions, getting them under control, and becoming calm enough and healed enough that they would no longer interrupt the woman I was trying to become.

Now I think listening to them is part of how I became her.

The five-year-old girl who needed somebody to make the world feel safe. The teenager who dreamed of becoming a graceful, warm, wise grandmother because she did not have that woman in her own life. The young mother who was trying to work from home and build a different life for her boys. The business owner who knew how to fight, produce, survive and prove herself. The mother who lost Dylan. The woman who still gets afraid something will happen to Destin. The woman building a new company before she has every piece of evidence that it will become what she can already see.

None of them had to disappear for me to become who I am.

I think that is why something I said near the end of the podcast stayed with me after we finished recording, because it came out of my mouth before I had really thought about how big the statement was, and when I heard myself say it, I knew immediately that it was true.

I said that if I could pick any person in the world that I wanted to be, I would pick me.

I know that can sound arrogant if you only hear the sentence by itself, because we are not really taught to talk about ourselves that way. We are allowed to say that we are proud of an accomplishment, or that we have grown, or that we finally like ourselves more than we used to, but saying that the one person you dream of being is you almost sounds like you think you have arrived somewhere and have nothing left to learn.

That is not what I mean at all.

I am still changing. I am still learning. I still have fears that do not make any logical sense and moments when my own brain tries to convince me that something terrible is about to happen simply because something terrible has happened before. I still make choices and wonder whether they were the right ones. I still build things that other people cannot see yet and then have days when I cannot see them very clearly either.

I am not saying I would choose some perfect, completed version of myself who never gets scared, never feels lonely, never misses anybody, never questions herself and never finds herself standing in another hallway.

I would choose me exactly as I am now.

The one person I dream of being is me.

And the part that makes me emotional is thinking about the five-year-old little girl I used to be, because if you could put every possible woman in the world in front of her and tell her that she could choose who she would grow up to become, I genuinely believe she would pick me out of the lineup.

She would not understand the mortgage company or the money or the number of states or the books or any of the other things adults use as evidence that somebody built a successful life. She would not care whether I had an impressive résumé or whether other people understood what I was building. None of those things would mean anything to her.

I think she would choose me because I became the woman she needed.

I became a mother who shows up. I became a woman who listens, who lets the scared version of herself speak instead of shaming her for being scared, who writes things down when life feels too large to hold in her head, who asks questions until she understands what she actually believes, and who finally learned that loving people does not require going backward every time moving forward becomes lonely.

She would see a woman who made a home for her children, who created things, who found ways to make life feel safe and interesting and expansive, and who never stopped believing that there was more to learn and more life to live even after life gave her plenty of reasons to become smaller.

And I think she would trust me.

That is the part that took the work.

The businesses took work too. The books took work. Raising my sons took work. Rebuilding financially took work. But becoming somebody that the little girl inside of me would trust required me to stop looking outside of myself for somebody else to tell me who I was supposed to be.

For a long time, I listened to everybody. I listened to what people thought success should look like, what women should want, what a business owner should build, how a mother should behave, how grief should look, how quickly I should recover, what I should forgive, what I should tolerate, what should matter to me and what should not.

I still listen to people. I am curious about almost everything, and I love when somebody introduces me to a way of thinking I had never considered. The difference is that I no longer assume something becomes true for me simply because somebody else said it beautifully.

I let it sit. I listen to all the versions of me who have something to say about it. I give myself enough space and grace to separate what I actually believe from what I have simply heard repeated often enough that it started sounding like my own voice.

That does not mean I always follow my voice perfectly. It means I know what it sounds like now.

I know when I am making a decision because it feels true for me, and I know when I am trying to make myself fit back inside a room simply because I do not want to be alone in the hallway.

I do not think the hallway ever completely ends. I am always building something, learning something, seeing something differently or realizing that a version of my life that once fit me does not fit anymore. Every time I become capable of imagining something new, there is another stretch of time between what I know and what has not arrived yet.

But I do not experience that middle in the same way anymore.

I used to think the point was to get through it as fast as possible, open the next door and finally have enough proof that I could relax. Now I think the point is that I trust the woman standing in there.

I know she might be sad. I know she might get scared and wonder whether she made everything harder than it needed to be. I know she may look backward and miss people and places and versions of belonging that were real and important to her.

But I also know that she is not going to abandon herself just because the next thing is taking longer than she expected.

That is what I was trying to explain when I said sometimes it is okay to grab your own hand and walk. I did not mean that you should never need anybody, or that strength is becoming so independent that nothing can hurt you. I have people I love. I have community now. I know what it feels like to be supported, and I also know that there are choices nobody else can make with you.

Sometimes everybody you love cannot come. Sometimes they do not want the same life. Sometimes they cannot see what you see yet. Sometimes you cannot even see it very clearly yourself.

And you still have to decide whether you are going to keep moving toward the woman you are becoming or return to a life you already know requires you to give up too much of yourself.

You are not dragging yourself down the hallway. You are not pretending you are fearless. You are simply refusing to leave yourself there because nobody else came back to get you.

After Dylan died, one of the hardest questions I had to wrestle with was, “What is life doing for me?”

I do not mean that his death was for me. I would never turn losing my son into some neat spiritual lesson about why everything happens. There are things that are simply devastating, things I would undo in a second, things that do not become good because something meaningful eventually grows beside them.

What I had to decide was whether the fact that I did not get to choose what happened meant I no longer got to choose anything.

And I do not believe that.

I could not choose the reality I received, but I could still choose whether I was going to keep participating in my own life. I could choose how I loved Destin. I could choose what I created, what I carried forward, what I refused to let disappear, and what kind of woman I wanted to become inside a life I would never have planned for myself.

That is what I mean when I say you get to choose your future.

I do not mean that you control every outcome, because obviously we do not. I do not mean that every closed door eventually opens simply because you believed hard enough or kept walking long enough. I mean that what happened to you does not automatically get to decide who you become next.

Other people may look at your circumstances and already have a story about what they are supposed to do to you. They may believe a loss should destroy you, a failure should embarrass you, a bad childhood should define you, or that leaving a familiar life should make you regretful enough to return.

But a lot of that is only their perception based on what they have been shown before.

You still get to decide what you see. You still get to sit with yourself long enough to understand what is true for you, and then make the next choice from there.

Maybe that is what being strong means to me. Not that I am never devastated, never afraid or never tired, and not that I have survived an impressive list of things and can now stand on the other side and explain how everybody else should do it.

It is that through every version of the hallway, I kept making choices toward the woman I wanted to become, even when I could not see her clearly and even when nobody else understood why I was going in that direction.

And somehow, after all of those choices, I became the person I would choose.

The one person I dream of being is me.

I think the five-year-old little girl I used to be would look down that entire lineup, take her time, see me standing there, and say, “Her.”

And honestly, after everything it took for us to find each other, I think becoming the woman that little girl would choose may be the thing I am most proud of.

If a decision keeps landing back on your desk, tell me what was decided, who was supposed to own the next move, and where it reopened.

What can the owner decide without additional approval? What information, budget, or access do they still need? What new fact would reasonably justify reopening the decision?

Bring the actual situation. We can look at what keeps sending the decision back uphill.

Some of the most important information that will change your life is information you do not know to look for. If something is outside your awareness, you cannot search for it, ask an expert about it, or even decide whether you disagree with it yet.

In this episode, I follow that thought through oral history, television, AOL, MapQuest, social media, algorithms, the way I have learned about my own body, and the way I homeschooled Destin. The tools changed, but the human impulse did not. We keep finding ways to move information beyond the person and place where it began.

This is not an argument that everything delivered by an algorithm is trustworthy. Judgment still matters. The part that fascinates me is the possibility that a question, interest, connection, or part of yourself can remain invisible until something places it inside your awareness.

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A leadership message can sound clear in the room and still leave everyone with a different understanding of what happens next. Before an important message goes out, people need to know the decision, why it matters, what changes, what stays the same, who owns the next move, and when they will hear more. Use this check before and after a consequential message: • Can people state the decision in one sentence? • Do they understand why it matters now? • Can they separate what changes from what does not? • Do owners know their authority, action, and deadline? • Are open questions labeled with an owner and date? • Is the written record available? • Is follow-up scheduled? • Has shared understanding been tested rather than assumed? The complete checklist includes a worked example, a before-message review, and follow-through guidance: https://www.michellevaughn.co/p/leadership-communication-checklist Where does leadership communication most often break down in your experience: the decision, the ownership, the boundary, or the follow-up?

Customers can feel the difference between someone who is answering them and someone who owns what happens next. In this episode, Michelle looks at why customer confidence often changes when the CEO enters the conversation and what a company has to transfer as it grows: context, standards, judgment, decision authority, and a clear recovery path.

Using Chick-fil-A, Costco, customer-trust research, frontline-service studies, and evidence from AI-assisted customer support, Michelle explains how a founder's intent becomes something a team can actually carry. AI can help people reach account history, policies, and examples faster, but people still have to verify the information, interpret the situation, and own the decision.

If customers routinely need a senior leader before they believe an issue is handled, the useful question is where context gets lost, authority gets stuck, or ownership disappears.

Everyone wants a season of victory and success, but I think a season of struggle, losing, challenges, and getting tested can be awesome because it shows you that you’re built to do hard things. It prepares you for victory and prepares you better for success, so when that success comes, you have a chance to grab it, hold onto it, and multiply it.

I’ve learned to enjoy the idea of welcoming struggle, even welcoming pain, because that’s how you get better. I love my losses, and that doesn’t mean there aren’t days when I still feel like a failure or an imposter. There are. That mean voice in my brain still tells me I’ve made too many mistakes, made a fool of myself too many times, or gone the wrong direction too many times to turn around and try again. I just decided to tell that voice to shut up.

The day everything changed for me was the day I stopped letting my feelings change my movement. On the days I don’t feel like doing it, I do it anyway. When I don’t feel good enough, I still do it. When I think I’m not smart enough, hardworking enough, or lucky enough, I still do it. I don’t need to feel differently before I move differently.

My losses have turned me into who I am today, and I’m proud of who I am because I’ve been through it. I know I can get through it, and I know I can do hard things because I’ve already done things I never thought I could do.

Stop treating struggle like it’s a bad thing. Change your perspective on what it’s doing for you. It’s either going to control you, or you control you.

It’s the only way.

Three things today. That's it.

What are you grateful for?

Michelle's health routine includes walking, strength training, sleep, recovery, magnesium, creatine, red light, a vibration plate, pressotherapy, Epsom salt baths, food choices, alcohol awareness, and mental and emotional regulation. Her pressotherapy routine goes back years: she uses it every morning for one hour on both her arms and legs and personally associates it with managing inflammation and feeling better. She explains which practices form the foundation, what job each additional tool is supposed to do, and where a person can realistically begin without copying her whole routine.

In this episode, Michelle explains what she does, the plain-language mechanism behind each practice, how family history shaped the way she thinks about health, and why tools and experts should add to a person's understanding rather than replace their participation. The conversation connects health to agency, household stewardship, business, leadership, and the life the body is being asked to carry.

This is not medical advice. It is Michelle's experience, her decision process, and what she has learned by paying attention to her own body.

Before the day gets away from us, what are your three things today?

Let's do our three things for today. What are three things you're grateful for right now?

What are your three things today?

Mine will be in the comments. Add yours when you're ready.

July’s housing report moved in more than one direction. Permits increased from June, while starts and completions fell. That does not tell one household whether to buy, sell, refinance, or wait.

What decision are you trying to make around home or money right now, and what information would actually help you make it?

Today's Advisory looks at four signals before a business changes its plan: demand, cash, capacity, and commitments. Which one would materially change the next decision in your business right now—and what evidence would you need before you changed course?

Read the full issue: https://www.michellevaughn.co/p/latest-economic-data-business-review