You Are the CEO of Your Own Life: Greg Scheinman on Midlife Male

Nicole DiTommaso is the founder of Sauce Boss Gang, a woman owned brand built on the belief that confidence is the most powerful ingredient. More than a hot sauce company, Sauce Boss Gang is a movement that uses flavor as a vehicle for transformation. Every bottle represents a chapter of Nicole's personal journey, created to remind people that they have the power to begin again, embrace who they are, and live boldly.Nicole grew up being passed between Columbus and Cleveland, shuttled between two sides of a family that never stopped pulling, raised by a mom who was barely 18. She learned early to survive alone and never ask for help. By the time she was running operations for a multistate beauty franchise and managing 50 people, she had achieved everything she was supposed to and felt completely empty. When the burnout finally broke her, she said she couldn't hear herself anymore. Her inner compass was gone.What followed was a year of solitude. She meditated. She journaled. She cooked. Standing in her kitchen making a spicy pepper marinara, the idea arrived: she would build a brand around the one thing she had fought her whole life to reclaim. Confidence. Each of the five hot sauce flavors now carries a chapter on the back, and each chapter is a piece of what she was overcoming when she created it.Brett and Nicole get into what it costs to keep starting over, what happens when you can't trust your own read on things anymore, and why she thinks confidence is something you build rather than something you're handed.Follow NicoleBusiness Instagram: @saucebossgangPersonal: @thefireqweenWebsite: saucebossgang.com

Tim Corcoran is the founder of Purpose Mountain, where he works as a certified Nature Based Purpose Guide for people who feel a call from wild nature to discover why they're here. His path to the work was anything but linear. Raised in South Bend, Indiana, drawn to the woods as the one place his nervous system found peace, he earned a computer science degree from Purdue and was set up for a programmer's life. Instead, within twenty-four hours of graduating, he packed his truck and drove forty hours to the Navajo Reservation in northeast Arizona, chasing a calling he couldn't yet name.What followed was decades of study in earth-based spirituality. A year on the reservation. Training at Tom Brown Jr.'s Tracker School. A five-year apprenticeship at the Vermont Wilderness School, learning vision quest, grief healing, and the Lakota understanding that we are all related. In 2005 he co-founded Twin Eagles Wilderness School in Sandpoint, Idaho, with his wife Jeannine Tidwell. In 2018 he founded Purpose Mountain. He leads men's groups and rites of passage, works through the Ecology of Self and Voice Dialogue, and is a father of two.In this conversation, Brett and Tim trace the arc from a sensitive Midwest kid who was told he was too much to a guide who has run dozens of vision quests. They get into the difference between insight and integration, why a container of mentoring changes what a single ceremony cannot, and the danger Tim sees most in the healing world: getting so lost in rehearsing our wounds that we never reach the purpose they were pointing toward. As he puts it, quoting Jeannine, you can't be the container and be in the container at the same time. Underneath it all sits one conviction. Each of us carries a unique purpose, and it is never too late to say yes to it.Check Out Purpose Mountain:https://www.purposemountain.com/Twin Eagles Wilderness Schoolwww.twineagles.org

Gemma Danielle grew up thirty minutes from Stonehenge in a 250-year-old converted barn and was uprooted to America at eleven without warning. She rebuilt her life as a single mother and self-employed fine artist on the most isolated land mass on the planet, and this conversation follows the full arc of how she got there.The $10 healing event in a Denver bookstore that sent her home to pick up a geometry compass. The first mural that stayed on a community wall for five years instead of one month. The moment she learned her great-grandfather was the Grand Master Freemason of England. And the fires of August 8th, 2023, that she evacuated from and is still living with.Gemma now lives upcountry in Kula, Maui, gathers red clay from the volcano, processes it into pigment, and paints large mandalas by hand with no grid and no spray cans, thousands of straight lines, each one a silent prayer.She calls it painting with the blood of the earth. While she works, she asks the people around her what they need her to pray for, and she paints their names into the lines.This episode is about what it costs to make your life match your calling, and what it looks like when someone finally stops judging the line and lets it become something.

Gemma Danielle grew up thirty minutes from Stonehenge in a 250-year-old converted barn and was uprooted to America at eleven without warning. She rebuilt her life as a single mother and self-employed fine artist on the most isolated land mass on the planet, and this conversation follows the full arc of how she got there. The $10 healing event in a Denver bookstore that sent her home to pick up a geometry compass. The first mural that stayed on a community wall for five years instead of one month. The moment she learned her great-grandfather was the Grand Master Freemason of England. And the fires of August 8th, 2023, that she evacuated from and is still living with.Gemma now lives upcountry in Kula, Maui, gathers red clay from the volcano, processes it into pigment, and paints large mandalas by hand with no grid and no spray cans, thousands of straight lines, each one a silent prayer. She calls it painting with the blood of the earth. While she works, she asks the people around her what they need her to pray for, and she paints their names into the lines. This episode is about what it costs to make your life match your calling, and what it looks like when someone finally stops judging the line and lets it become something.

Greg Scheinman is the founder and CEO of Midlife Male, the premiere digital publication and lifestyle brand for men over 40, with a newsletter that reaches more than 50,000 men every week. He's the author of the bestselling book The Midlife Male, a keynote speaker on transformation and redefining success, and a coach to midlife CEOs, executives, and founders, with two company exits behind him. The path there started with loss.Greg lost his father to cancer at 17 and went off to college carrying it, then spent years numbing the grief instead of facing it. In his twenties he chased the film business in New York, got his start at Miramax, produced independent films, and made a movie dedicated to his dad. He built a sports children's video company out of the trunk of his car, landed licensing deals with the NFL, NBA, NHL, and NASCAR, brought in an investment from former Disney chief Michael Eisner, and sold it. Then he did the opposite of everything he had done and went into insurance, building a million dollar book of business, becoming a partner, and helping sell the firm in 2020. It was his biggest financial success and his least satisfying professional experience.At 47, with resentment building and his wife telling him not to blow what they had built, he got his first coach and started writing what he now calls his Midlife Action Plan. It took thirty days to write and three years to follow, and from 47 to 50 his life changed in every category. The conversation moves through grief, entrepreneurship, fatherhood without a template, and what it actually takes to rebuild a life once you stop running from it, all of it grounded in the idea behind Midlife Male: most men plan the first half of their lives and have no plan at all for the second.

Nate Ebner grew up between two worlds. School weeks in Columbus, and weekends and summers in Springfield, Ohio, working the family junkyard with his father Jeff. Lifting off railroad-tie dumbbells they welded themselves. Chasing robbers through the yard on Sunday mornings.Jeff Ebner was the kind of man who kept a notebook of every workout his son ever did, so they could look back together at what the work had built. He was also the kind of man who made everything an experience worth having. Nate remembers that time more clearly than he remembers most of high school.The day before Nate decided to walk onto the Ohio State football team, he had the best conversation of his life with his dad. The next day, Jeff was murdered at the junkyard. Nate was 19. He dropped out of school and spent weeks in the dark, sitting near the weights they had built together, close to something he couldn't have come back from. Then his mom walked upstairs and said a few sentences that changed the entire direction of his life.What followed is one of the more remarkable athletic careers of the last two decades. A walk-on at Ohio State under Jim Tressel. A sixth-round draft pick of Bill Belichick's New England Patriots. Three Super Bowl championships. The 2016 Olympics in Rio with the US rugby team. An All-Pro season. Now an author and part of the team at Goodwin, Nate tells the full story here: the junkyard, the grief, the grind, and what it looks like to carry someone with you all the way to the Super Bowl.Connect with Nate:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ebs43/Book: Finish Strong: A Father's Code and a Son's Path:https://www.amazon.com/Finish-Strong-Fathers-Code-Sons/dp/0525560858Goodwin: https://www.teamgoodwin.com/Goodwin on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goteamgoodwin/

Emma Gilbert was nine years old when she found herself under her bed, in the depths of a depression no kid should have to carry. That is when she heard a voice, loud and clear: "You're not done yet. You have so much more to do." It snapped her out of the spiral, and she carried it with her. Even at nine, ten, eleven, she kept telling herself she had to keep creating.She grew up in Alabaster, Alabama, about the smallest town you could get, with no art scene and no one around to show her that a life in art was even possible. Teachers told her to have a realistic career. Her own feelings rarely landed at home, where attention came when she created and words or tears got waved off with "you're fine." Art became the one place she was actually heard.This conversation explores the relationship between childhood pain and creativity, what it does to a kid to grow up unheard, and how a family can change when someone finally speaks up. Emma talks about the depression that still shows up today and still fuels her work, the parents who later apologized and learned to listen, and the long road from selling her first painting at twelve to building a real business around her art.Now she travels the country painting large-scale murals, works with a team of ten contractors, and is building toward the day she gets to be just the talent. This one is about turning what nearly broke you into the thing that defines you, and why the voice that saves you can become the work of your life.

Former Ohio Republican Party Chairman Matt Borges lived a life most could only dream of. Traveling with presidential candidates, hosting the first Republican debate of 2016, standing next to history on Air Force One. Then one July morning in 2020, the FBI was at his door with handcuffs.What followed was a federal trial that would test everything Matt thought he knew about himself. Offered a plea deal that would have kept him out of prison, he turned it down rather than confess in open court to something he says wasn’t true. He went to trial, he lost, and, despite appeals that took him all the way to the United States Supreme Court, he ended up serving twenty-seven months in federal prison.In this raw, unfiltered conversation - his first since coming home - Matt opens up about the daily emails he wrote to his wife Kate, that became a lifeline for both of them, and what he learned about what actually matters when the comforts of life are taken away. This isn't a story about politics. It's about a human being tested in the crucible, and facing the question “who are you?” then being brave enough to find that answer – and trust it.Matt's story is one of the most powerful examples of reckoning, resilience, and human connection we've ever shared on Innerspace. A reminder that sometimes losing “everything” is the surest way to find what's real.Learn more: joininnerspace.com

Former Ohio Republican Party Chairman Matt Borges lived a life most could only dream of. Traveling with presidential candidates, hosting the first Republican debate of 2016, standing next to history on Air Force One. Then one July morning in 2020, the FBI was at his door with handcuffs.What followed was a federal trial that would test everything Matt thought he knew about himself. Offered a plea deal that would have kept him out of prison, he turned it down rather than confess in open court to something he says wasn’t true. He went to trial, he lost, and, despite appeals that took him all the way to the United States Supreme Court, he ended up serving twenty-seven months in federal prison.In this raw, unfiltered conversation - his first since coming home - Matt opens up about the daily emails he wrote to his wife Kate, that became a lifeline for both of them, and what he learned about what actually matters when the comforts of life are taken away. This isn't a story about politics. It's about a human being tested in the crucible, and facing the question “who are you?” then being brave enough to find that answer – and trust it.Matt's story is one of the most powerful examples of reckoning, resilience, and human connection we've ever shared on Innerspace. A reminder that sometimes losing “everything” is the surest way to find what's real.

Chet Scott is the founder of Built to Lead, a coaching practice he started in 2002 to help high performers discover who they are at their core. A former tech executive, Chet's path changed in 1993 after a leadership course forced him to confront how he was actually perceived, and he has spent the years since studying human nature and high performance with business teams and sports teams alike. His work has grown to include a book, an app, and a team of coaches he calls builders.In this conversation, Chet shares his philosophy of "oneness within, then oneness with others," and why most people stay stuck blaming external circumstances instead of doing the harder inner work. He and Brett get into his mantra "live hard, love harder," why the work is "for the few," what happens when clients plateau and stop growing, and why learning to run toward hard conversations instead of away from them is what separates chronic pain from acute healing. Chet also talks about the power of curiosity, the seven good minutes exercise that has transformed relationships, and why the people you invest in most are sometimes "built to leave."