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Unlimited

176 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★★ - 11 ratings

The Unlimited Podcast is a podcast for badass women who are on a journey to release learned limitations and live a more present, joyful, and intentional life. It's about reaching for the stars while keeping your feet on the ground. Your Host, Valerie Friedlander is an ICF certified coach, sociologist, business owner, and mom. You can find out more at www.valeriefriedlander.com and follow her on Instagram @unlimitedcoachval

Entrepreneurship Business Health & Fitness Mental Health entrepreneurship mental health relationships impactful life live fully alignment motivational intentional personal development
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Episodes

Season 3 Wrap-up and New Year Transition Tips

December 27, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutes - 25.7 MB

Discover valuable New Year transition tips in this Season 3 wrap-up for the Unlimited Podcast. The period between one cycle and the next is a great time to reflect both on where you’ve been and where you’re going. It’s important to create supportive space to engage and focus that reflection. You can set that foundation through honoring your humanity and connecting to what’s really important to you. Celebrating helps you acknowledge yourself even in the small spaces we too often overlook. Fro...

Aligning With Your Astrology with Babs Cheung

December 13, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutes - 31.5 MB

Aligning with your astrology is a way to explore what works for you. From new year plans to parenting, it’s one thing to recognize that there’s no one size fits all, but it can be hard to step outside the norms without some kind of framework to work from. Not to mention, it’s even harder to think outside the box when you’re already exhausted from trying to function within the normalized systems that aren’t working for you. Astrology is a tool that can help you explore other ways to look at c...

Accessing the True Power of Gratitude: Beyond Individualism

November 22, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutes - 24.3 MB

Accessing the true power of gratitude requires going beyond the individual mindset approach that is typically referenced. Expressions of gratitude have been observed among many communally based species. It supports group functioning. Thus, the true power of gratitude is in collective connection, not individual mindset. Studies show that there are a plethora of benefits to gratitude. The problems of toxic positivity and tolerating unacceptable behavior shows up when gratitude is used as a too...

How to Create Belonging with Amena Chaudhry

November 08, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutes - 37.4 MB

How to create belonging starts with understanding that most of us don’t know what belonging really is. It’s hard to create something that you haven’t first experienced and there is a difference between intellectually understanding vs experiencing something. What most of us do experience is strong conditioning from a young age around fitting in - to our families, in our school, and, ultimately, in society. This “fitting in” is part of how we are taught to uphold oppressive social systems beca...

Reclaiming Humanity Through Grief

October 25, 2023 07:00 - 33 minutes - 23.1 MB

Reclaiming humanity through grief is necessary for our ability to intentionally create a world that honors each person's humanity. Understanding and having space to grieve and support each other through our grief helps us to connect to our shared humanity. In so many often unconscious ways, we are encouraged to dehumanize ourselves and others. One way this happens is a disconnect from our emotions and especially a lack of understanding and space to honor grief, not just our individual grief ...

Rethinking Empowerment and Releasing Comparison

October 11, 2023 07:00 - 38 minutes - 26.3 MB

Rethinking empowerment and releasing comparison go hand in hand in a society where empowerment is treated as a commodity and lifestyle is used as a sales tactic. Lifestyle as a sales tactic encourages us to compare how happy we are to how happy someone supposedly living a particular lifestyle appears to be. When empowerment is the commodity being sold, it becomes the way to achieve that lifestyle. These idealized lifestyles tend to uphold societal norms and often become internalized through ...

How to Cure Comparisonitis

September 27, 2023 07:00 - 36 minutes - 25.1 MB

How to cure comparisonitis starts by understanding the cause and that this isn’t just a “you” problem. It’s something that impacts you, your confidence, your sense of self, and your well-being, so it feels deeply personal. Since it’s internal, comparisonitis feels like a habit of comparing yourself to others in one or multiple areas. It’s usually triggered in an area that already feels endangered in some way – often things like financial success or belonging. It turns into a cycle of validat...

Insights from Change Making Feminist Founders with Becky Mollenkamp

September 13, 2023 07:00 - 44 minutes - 30.3 MB

Insights from change making feminist founders are an important type of support for other feminist business owners and leaders. We are surrounded by stories of what success is and what you must do to achieve it that perpetuate exploitation of ourselves, of others, and of our planet. These stories are what is normalized but they aren’t the only way. Hearing other stories and ways of doing business helps us believe and trust in the possibility of change. It helps us tap into and generate ideas ...

How to Create A Schedule That Works For You

August 23, 2023 07:00 - 43 minutes - 30.1 MB

How to create a schedule that works for you cannot take a one size fits all approach. Most so called “successful people” strategies play on the false idea that we all have the same 24 hours and should, therefore, be able to get the same amount done. These strategies fail to factor in our humanity, discount our lived experiences, and fuel self-doubt. Instead of trying to fit someone else’s mold, you deserve routines that honor your humanity and support you where you are. Part of creating a sc...

How to Cultivate Self-Love

August 09, 2023 07:00 - 38 minutes - 26.4 MB

How to cultivate self-love is also how you develop self-confidence, make room for self-care, and show up as your best self. This episode is an updated replay of the season one episode, Relearning Self-Love. Your relationship with yourself is the foundation for your relationship with everyone and everything in your life. Unfortunately, it is also the relationship that we are constantly conditioned to ignore. Even the emphasis on the importance of self-care turns into a pressure when the found...

7 Ways to Relax this Summer and Beyond

July 26, 2023 07:00 - 33 minutes - 22.9 MB

The 7 Ways to Relax this Summer are also the ways we can learn to bring more rest into our lives. We have seven areas that influence our energy and each needs care as we learn to release, relax, and rest. Our society is infused with stories that pull us away from our humanity, which includes devaluing rest. Part of the process of truly relaxing is recognizing the stories we’ve internalized that keep us from relaxing. This allows us to see the systems that feed us these stories more clearly. ...

How to Navigate Societal Gaslighting and Stay Empowered

July 12, 2023 07:00 - 55 minutes - 38.3 MB

How to Navigate Societal Gaslighting and Stay Empowered is an updated replay of the season one episode “No, You’re Not Crazy.” Most information regarding gaslighting focuses on the psychological experience within individual relationships. However, gaslighting is actually a societal phenomenon with roots in social power dynamics. Those roots are why it is common to experience the psychological impact of gaslighting during periods of social change. However, because we tend to think of gaslight...

Resilience Through Unexpected Career Shifts

June 28, 2023 07:00 - 40 minutes - 27.5 MB

Resilience through unexpected career shifts is often something you realize in retrospect. It's natural to feel stress in times of change, especially during unexpected transitions that impact your financial security. It can feel overwhelming when you're walking through them. Once you know that you successfully regained a certain equilibrium in your life you can look back with greater perspective. It's rare these days to have a job that lasts a life time or even to have a linear career journey...

Resilience Through Unexpected Career Shifts with F. John Potter

June 28, 2023 07:00 - 40 minutes - 27.5 MB

Resilience through unexpected career shifts is often something you realize in retrospect. It's natural to feel stress in times of change, especially during unexpected transitions that impact your financial security. It can feel overwhelming when you're walking through them. Once you know that you successfully regained a certain equilibrium in your life you can look back with greater perspective. It's rare these days to have a job that lasts a life time or even to have a linear career journey...

3 Things You Need to Create Stability in Times of Uncertainty

June 14, 2023 07:00 - 28 minutes - 19.6 MB

Three things you need to create stability in times of uncertainty are to know yourself, to stay curious, and to build community. We are in a massive period of change and that comes with a great deal of uncertainty. Uncertainty naturally triggers feelings of overwhelm, which make it hard to take action. This is NOT an individual failing. Much of what feeds this instability is systemic, not individual. With that in mind, I invite you to remember that you are part of the system and you DO have ...

Values Aligned Leadership with Alesia Galati

May 24, 2023 07:00 - 43 minutes - 30.1 MB

Values aligned leadership is central to running a values aligned business. Companies of any size that want to go beyond checking boxes must intentionally cultivate leadership based in clear values. A company’s most valuable asset is its people. Centering humanity at all levels of a company supports morale, efficiency, quality of work, and, ultimately, company health. Unfortunately, many people haven’t experienced examples of values aligned leadership and that makes it hard to create. In thi...

Am I Just Making Excuses?

May 10, 2023 07:00 - 28 minutes - 19.7 MB

“Am I just making excuses?” is something most people wonder at some point when they are not following through on something they say they want to do. From health goals to work goals, the story we’re surrounded by is that of weakness. It’s self-sabotage. You aren’t trying hard enough, so you don’t want it badly enough. It’s lack of maturity. Basically, whatever the details of the message are, the energy is judgmental and shame inducing. This is the messaging because we’ve learned to use shame ...

How to Prioritize Your Needs (beyond Maslow)

April 26, 2023 07:00 - 44 minutes - 30.8 MB

How to Prioritize Your Needs in a supportive way means going beyond Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. People often reference this motivational theory when trying to understand behavior and choices. It's popular because it creates a simple framework that makes sense in our hierarchical, over-individualized society. It's problematic for the same reason, AND because it's based in a highly biased study influenced by the colonial corruption of native wisdom. Additionally, modern neuroscience now provi...

Creating a Human-Centered Work Culture with Marissa Badgley

April 12, 2023 07:00 - 39 minutes - 27.1 MB

Creating a human-centered work culture is the antidote to the burnout that is now pervasive in the work place. While learning how to create a human-centered work culture is of particular importance to managers and leaders in organizations, it is not for them alone. Brains love patterns and, without intentional engagement, people carry this dehumanizing relationship with work when they leave a particular workplace and even into their own entrepreneurship. So, regardless of your current work o...

Leaning into a Mid-life Career Change [coaching]

March 22, 2023 07:00 - 41 minutes - 28.2 MB

Leaning into a mid-life career change isn’t easy. Yet it is a reality for many people, especially Moms, and even more so recently. This change often challenges our identity, worth, and sense of place since we are socialized to intertwine these aspects of our life. The woman I work with in this episode reached out to me feeling STUCK. A recent ADHD diagnosis rocked her world. Due to the reverberations of this diagnosis, she made the decision to leave a job that felt like the perfect fit in ma...

What to Do When You’ve Fallen Behind

March 08, 2023 08:00 - 20 minutes - 13.8 MB

What to do when you’ve fallen behind isn’t push yourself harder. It’s pause and allow yourself to recalibrate. Understandably, you may experience resistance. We are surrounded by stories that tell us that failing to plan for all the things is a personal failing. Additionally, there’s a constant message that we aren’t doing enough. This conditioning programs us to set unreasonable expectations, beat ourselves up when we don’t meet them, and push harder. The good news is that you can change th...

The Pressure to Love Your Job with Cristin Downs

February 22, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutes - 26.4 MB

The pressure to love your job is something you’ve likely experienced whether you love your job or not. In the United States, we are surrounded by the story that you achieve success through having a job you love. Perhaps success is simply that you enjoy the privilege of doing a job you love. Another possibility is that you won't feel like you’re doing work, will then work harder, and therefore create success. (Likewise, this story also perpetuates the idea that working hard will always lead t...

The Pressure to Love Your Job

February 22, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutes - 26.4 MB

 The pressure to love your job is something you’ve likely experienced whether you love your job or not. In the United States, we are surrounded by the story that you achieve success through having a job you love. Perhaps success is simply that you enjoy the privilege of doing a job you love. Another possibility is that you won't feel like you’re doing work, will then work harder, and therefore create success. (Likewise, this story also perpetuates the idea that working hard will always lead ...

Why Work Life Balance Is a Myth

February 08, 2023 08:00 - 27 minutes - 19.2 MB

WHY work life balance is a myth is as important to understand as knowing that it is one. It’s important because the way a topic is framed has a large impact on how we think about it. It directs our focus and influences the options we perceive. Most people I speak with consciously know there is no real balance between work and life. Yet work/life balance is still used to describe a primary challenge facing people. The fundamental issue with the term work/life balance isn’t just that such a th...

A Simple Way to End the Year Strong

December 07, 2022 08:00 - 36 minutes - 25 MB

A simple way to end the year strong involves allowing yourself a little space for three activities. First, focusing your attention. Second, celebrating your accomplishments. Third, assessing what worked and what didn't and feeding that into your new years plans. Sounds simple, right? Yes, it's a simple outline, but the practice of it is less simple. It can actually be rather confusing and messy. There are many factors that go into the decisions about where you put your focus. There nuances t...

How to Say No Without Guilt

November 16, 2022 08:00 - 35 minutes - 24.3 MB

How to say no without guilt is a common struggle for Moms but also for most highly empathetic people. The fear of letting people down or upsetting others can make saying no extremely uncomfortable. You may worry about hurting someone. That worry may feed a fear that you will then be seen as uncaring, lazy, incompetent, or otherwise judged. There are many articles with step-by-step instructions for the logistics of politely saying no. However, it’s one thing to know the steps and another thin...

Setting Healthy Boundaries

November 02, 2022 07:00 - 36 minutes - 25.1 MB

Setting healthy boundaries is a process that improves with practice. Part of the challenge of setting boundaries is that most of us didn’t grow up with examples of healthy boundaries. Additionally, the media often idolize emmeshed relationships. Consider how many songs and stories idealize relationships where someone’s emotional wellbeing is dependent on one other person. In our societal narratives, love and caring look like being able to read someone else’s mind. You most likely first encou...

Dealing with Impostor Syndrome

October 19, 2022 07:00 - 37 minutes - 25.9 MB

Dealing with impostor syndrome is a topic commonly and historically focused on working women. Most women have experienced the feelings of self-doubt and fear of not being good enough despite their accomplishments. Of course, working women aren’t the only ones who experience self-doubt. So, why are we the focus for this topic? We are social beings and our understanding of ourselves is generated in large part from our interactions with others. The experience of what is called impostor syndrome...

Silencing Your Inner Critic

October 05, 2022 07:00 - 35 minutes - 24.4 MB

Silencing your inner critic can help you start to get out of your own way but there’s a more effective way. Using the silencing technique is only a temporary solution for two key reasons: First, it fails to address why the inner critic showed up. Second, it means you’re spending energy fighting yourself instead of harnessing that energy to help you. Most of my clients “know better” when their inner critic shows up, but it still freezes them. That’s normal because it’s not about what you know...

Become Empowered By Your Emotions with Dr. Mavis Mazhura

September 07, 2022 07:00 - 43 minutes - 29.6 MB

Become empowered by your emotions, rather than stuck in them, by understanding their purpose or lack thereof. It's important to remember that though "feelings aren’t facts," they still matter. They are an intrinsic part of our whole humanness. Supporting emotional wellbeing starts with embracing the value of emotional information. Despite some of that information being outdated or maladaptive, it can still provide direction for what support, boundaries, changes, etc. you need to create a mor...

To Emotional Awareness and Beyond

August 17, 2022 07:00 - 31 minutes - 21.8 MB

To emotional awareness and, beyond that, to USING that awareness is this week’s topic. As we explored last week, you must first find the emotions and allow space for them. Following that, you can learn how to use them in a helpful rather than harmful way. This is also called being responsive rather than reactive in our behavior. Reactivity isn't just lashing out. Another facet of reactivity is shutting down or avoiding. Both are rooted in survival mode, which is a natural mode when you haven...

Fantastic Emotions and Where to Find Them

August 03, 2022 07:00 - 32 minutes - 22.3 MB

Fantastic emotions and where to find them guides you to where you begin to access your power within your emotions. You often hear emotions spoken of as powerful. However, it's really YOU who are powerful. The problem is we aren’t taught to understand the dynamics of our emotions. Instead, we are conditioned to avoid unpleasant emotions and simultaneously hope that the enjoyable ones will eventually be earned. This leaves us feeling at the mercy of our emotions instead of empowered by them.  ...

Deep Self-Care to Shift Habits

July 20, 2022 07:00 - 35 minutes - 24.3 MB

Deep self-care is necessary to shift habits in an effective and healthy way. The “stop it” or “just do it” model often isn’t sustainable and can even be harmful. Habits make up a lot of the way we show up in life. Thus, they can become confused with personality and limit what we believe possible. Our societal norms are made up of collective habits. Similarly, most collective habits are so internalized that we stop seeing them as aspects we have power over.  One of the overarching collective ...

Deep Self-Care to Shift Habits [coaching]

July 20, 2022 07:00 - 35 minutes - 24.3 MB

Deep self-care is necessary to shift habits in an effective and healthy way. The “stop it” or “just do it” model often isn’t sustainable and can even be harmful. Habits make up a lot of the way we show up in life. Thus, they can become confused with personality and limit what we believe possible. Our societal norms are made up of collective habits. Similarly, most collective habits are so internalized that we stop seeing them as aspects we have power over.  One of the overarching collective ...

Do You Want To Build A Habit?

July 06, 2022 07:00 - 42 minutes - 29.5 MB

Do you want to build a habit? Or does the idea stress you out? Habits are often a focal point in conversations around personal development, business development, career development, etc. When we talk about habits the conversation is usually about changing them and the emphasis is on control. These conversations are often full of sense of judgment around what are deemed "good" and "bad" habits and a pressure "be better." For many people the idea of habits feels stressful. It brings up thought...

Bonus Episode: Give Yourself A Break

June 29, 2022 07:00 - 21 minutes - 15.1 MB

Give yourself a break, you are not a machine. Hustle culture tells us that we should have everything planned, systematized, and organized. It says that, if you do this well enough, then you will be successful, happy, and stress-free. But failure is part of growth. Unhappiness, discomfort, anger, overwhelm, etc. are normal emotions when it's time to do something different. In this time of change that is naturally, understandably, necessarily stressful, this episode is a little love note from ...

Finding Time to Proactively Plan

June 15, 2022 07:00 - 32 minutes - 22.5 MB

Finding time to proactively plan is hard in a world where our attention is constantly in demand. It is especially difficult to find time to plan when your plan involves doing something new. First, you must navigate a society designed to keep you busy – physically busy, mentally busy, emotionally busy. Second, you must face your own internal resistance from fear based in limiting beliefs, conflicting values, shifting relationships, etc. The key to finding time is the self-awareness to make in...

How to Create A Plan You’ll Follow Through On

June 01, 2022 07:00 - 34 minutes - 23.7 MB

How to create a plan you’ll follow through on starts with setting a clear foundation for that plan. Many clients come to me when they aren’t following through on achieving something they want. Even when they have a plan, they still aren’t doing what they think they need to do to achieve it. Once we dig in the reason is usually based in a lack of clarity around what they really want. Or more specifically, the motivation underneath what they think they want. Without that clarity, most people e...

The Courage To Change

May 18, 2022 07:00 - 34 minutes - 23.5 MB

The courage to change comes from inside of you but requires and deserves support from others. You need other people to help you see and hear yourself clearly as well as to see more clearly what needs to change. This is especially true the easier it is for you to fit into and follow the conventional rules of society. One of those rules being that we’re supposed to be fully self-reliant. If you are not it indicates weakness and deficiency. Change is inherently stressful, and this rule blocks u...

Break Free From Assumptions & Misaligned Rules

May 04, 2022 07:00 - 44 minutes - 30.7 MB

Breaking free from assumptions and misaligned rules is a multi-layered process. We all have rules for how we believe we are supposed to do life. They are tied to our values, to societal norms, and the stories we’ve been told about who we are and the way the world is. Since we do not exist outside of a societal context, we must acknowledge the influence of societal stories as we engage our own programing. First, looking at the rules for the roles that we occupy and whether they fit who you ar...

A Roundtable to Improve Your Perception with Aleia Walker

April 20, 2022 07:00 - 39 minutes - 27.4 MB

A roundtable to improve your perception is necessary because perception isn’t just an inside job. The inside part is only the first step. You do need the willingness to expand and the courage to change. Then, improving your perception requires conversations and learning from others who have different experiences. Only through this next level of awareness expansion can we make the meaningful and effective changes needed to make a better world for everyone.  For me, the ultimate purpose of doi...

Helpful vs Harmful Mindset Work

April 06, 2022 07:00 - 38 minutes - 26.5 MB

Helpful vs harmful mindset work is a critical distinction to make for anyone interested in real change. Too many of the problems our society faces are framed as individual issues and placed on individuals to solve. First, this fails to address the real issues and instead perpetuates them. Second, it has developed a billion-dollar industry that feeds on itself. Mindset work IS powerful and CAN make a huge difference in your life.  The key is to know the difference between individual thought p...

Helpful vs Harmful Mindset Shifts

April 06, 2022 07:00 - 38 minutes - 26.4 MB

Helpful vs harmful mindset work is a critical distinction to make for anyone interested in real change. Too many of the problems our society faces are framed as individual issues and placed on individuals to solve. First, this fails to address the real issues and instead perpetuates them. Second, it has developed a billion-dollar industry that feeds on itself. Mindset work IS powerful and CAN make a huge difference in your life.  The key is to know the difference between individual thought p...

Shift From Drained to Motivated

March 16, 2022 07:00 - 38 minutes - 26.8 MB

Shift from drained to motivated by understanding five commonly internalized values that often work against women. Our values are beliefs that motivate us and drive our decisions. Not all the values we hold are intentionally chosen values. Actually, many of them are internalized beliefs from important adults when we were young, as well as beliefs emphasized by the society that we live in. Even if we consciously think about them one way, they may be motivating us in a way we don’t realize. If ...

How to Stop Reacting and Start Responding

March 02, 2022 08:00 - 32 minutes - 22.1 MB

How to stop reacting and start responding starts with understanding that internal reactivity is normal. It happens when your brain perceives a threat. That internal reaction doesn’t differentiate between a real or imagined threat or between an emotional or physical threat. Some of our most common reactivity comes from a perceived threat to our values. When this happens it’s important to first acknowledge that there’s nothing wrong with you that you’ve had a reaction. The stories we’ve intern...

Clarifying What You Want

February 16, 2022 08:00 - 36 minutes - 25 MB

Clarifying what you want can be overwhelming, especially when you’re stressed out where you are now.  Gaining clarity is something a lot of clients initially come to me for help with. It’s one thing to recognize that you don’t like the way things are. That’s a helpful first step. Next, you want to find what you DO want, which is much harder because there are so many obstacles to clarity. Many of these obstacles are internalized stories that block your ability to hear yourselves and your intu...

How to Manifest What You Want

February 02, 2022 08:00 - 39 minutes - 27.1 MB

How to manifest what you want in life is a fairly mainstream topic these days, yet it's also typically misunderstood. It's misunderstood because it's a concept popularized by books like The Secret and The Law of Attraction. This concept of manifestation is based in problematic pseudoscience. It relates to believing something into existence and it is closely related to the toxic use of positivity. True manifestation does have roots in psychology and does have practical applications. The real ...

Done With New Year, New You

January 19, 2022 08:00 - 39 minutes - 27.4 MB

I’m done with the "new year, new you" thing. It’s really common messaging at both the end and beginning of the year. We hear it ALL the time from people trying to sell you things. You could even say we’re bombarded with it. At least, that’s how I feel about it because it really pushes my buttons. I know that no one can push a button I don’t have but I also know I’m not alone in being bothered by it. The reason it bothers me so much is because underneath this message is the idea that you need...

Bonus Episode: Seven Ways to Reduce Holiday Stress

November 24, 2021 08:00 - 40 minutes - 28.2 MB

Seven ways to reduce holiday stress and really stress in your life in general is the theme for this bonus episode! Despite the joyful intention of the season, many life stressors expand this time of year. Stressors such as time, money, and family dynamics. Throw in a dose of inclement weather and you can suddenly find you’ve flipped from the warm and cozy person you want to be, to a cold and prickly “just get through it” kind of you. In this episode of Unlimited, I share seven ways to reduc...

#52 Seven Ways to Reduce Holiday Stress [Holiday Bonus Episode]

November 24, 2021 08:00 - 40 minutes - 28.2 MB

Seven ways to reduce holiday stress and really stress in your life in general is the theme for this bonus episode! Despite the joyful intention of the season, many life stressors expand this time of year. Stressors such as time, money, and family dynamics. Throw in a dose of inclement weather and you can suddenly find you’ve flipped from the warm and cozy person you want to be, to a cold and prickly “just get through it” kind of you. In this episode of Unlimited, I share seven ways to reduc...

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