Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors: Shatter Limiting Beliefs - Redefine Success - Chase Big Dreams podcast

You Were Never Meant to Be This Lonely, with Shari Foos

7/22/2026

Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors: Shatter Limiting Beliefs - Redefine Success - Chase Big Dreams

0:00

33:50

What if the story you have been keeping to yourself - the one that feels too messy, too personal, too much - is exactly the thing that would make someone else feel less alone? Shari Foos has spent her career building spaces where women write their truth, share it with strangers, and walk out feeling seen for the first time in years. She calls it the Narrative Method. What she is really doing is fighting the epidemic of loneliness one story at a time.

SUMMARY & GUEST INTRO

If you have been surrounded by colleagues, partners, and friends your entire career and still felt profoundly unseen - you are not broken, and you are not alone. That specific kind of loneliness has a name, and it has a cure. Shari Foos spent decades building it. She is a Columbia University-trained narrative medicine expert, marriage and family therapist, former punk rock singer and TV writer, and the founder of the Narrative Method - a nonprofit running free online salons where women write honestly, share without judgment, and walk out feeling seen for the first time in years. Her work has been featured in Shondaland, The Huffington Post, Women's Health, and Real Simple. In this conversation, she makes the case that the story you have been keeping to yourself is not too much. It is exactly the thing that will make someone else feel less alone.

INSIDE THE EPISODE

The Cult of Culture. Social media, marketing, and the constant noise of what we are supposed to want, look like, and be. Shari names the force that has been quietly shaming women into conforming - and explains why the antidote is not more willpower. It is honest expression.
Why Small Talk Is Making Us Lonelier. When you skip the surface and go straight to what actually makes someone tick, something shifts. Shari breaks down why depth creates real connection, why women in corporate America are starving for it, and what gets in the way.
The Night She Went Looking for Herself. At sixteen, Shari walked through her neighborhood alone in the middle of the night. Not because anything was wrong. Because she was trying to find herself. The police brought her home. The next morning she gathered her family and said: 'I wasn't on drugs. I was looking for myself.' That moment became the foundation for everything she built.
We Are So Quick to Blame Ourselves. The patterns that held you back were not character flaws. They were survival responses to circumstances you didn't choose. Shari makes the case for empathy toward your younger self - and explains why that compassion is not softness. It is the beginning of real growth.
You Can't Go Wrong When You Follow Your Passions. Shari gave up a career she loved. It felt like loss. What she could not know at the time was that everything she learned - about performance, about storytelling, about what it means to hold a room - would become the exact foundation of her most meaningful work. The path does not always look like what you imagined. It still leads somewhere.
The Narrative Method: What It Is and How to Try It. Free online salons, writing prompts drawn from 12 core concepts, a community from across the country and beyond. Shari walks through how it works, what happens when women who have been writing for their jobs finally get to write for themselves, and why the prompt 'what part of yourself longs to be expressed' is a question worth sitting with.

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