Episodios

  • Why Playing It Safe Is Keeping You Small (And What to Do About It) with Pia Liechter
    Jul 8 2025
    Are you living life on autopilot, checking all the boxes but still feeling stuck? Ever wonder if the path that feels safe is actually keeping you small? What if the real key to freedom and fulfillment is creativity, not just in art, but in how you live, decide, and grow? In this episode of Actions Antidotes, we're joined by Pia Liechter, founder of Kollectiv Studio and author of Welcome to the Creative Club. Pia opens up about how divorce, burnout, and losing her job became the turning point that helped her reconnect with her creative power. She takes us through her journey, including a bold ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and shares what it means to truly direct your own life instead of following someone else’s script. Pia reminds us that you don’t need permission to rewrite your story. Even small “firsts” can be powerful steps toward a life that feels more like your own. Listen in and discover how to tap into your creativity, take meaningful risks, and explore a version of life that’s built on your terms, not someone else’s. --- Listen to the podcast here: Why Playing It Safe Is Keeping You Small (And What to Do About It) with Pia Liechter Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about something that can often get ignored in the modern world, and that is creativity, creative pursuits, and creative suits can take on so many different forms but can often fall into this bucket of things that the modern day cult of productivity, if you want to call it that, can really ignore as like, okay, it wasn’t really productive for you to spend a Thursday afternoon drawing a picture or something like that. My guest today has her own story around creativity. Pia Leichter is the founder of the Kollektiv Studio. --- Welcome to the program. Thank you, Stephen. It’s so nice to be here. Yeah, it’s nice to have you here. And let’s start with your story, because you recently published a book covering your story around kind of discovering your creativity. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s called Welcome to the Creative Club and it smashes the myth that creativity is reserved for the chosen few and invites everyone to access and apply creativity to the design of their lives, and I do share stories about how I lost and found my creative power and also really exploring what creativity means in moving into a much more expansive definition, because, often, what stops us from being creative is the belief or idea that I’m not the creative type. I want to debunk that one, because if you’re human, you’re an artist at play. So, this sounds like a story that a lot of people have, and if I had a dollar for every time I heard someone around my age say something along the lines of, “I’m just not a creative person, it just happens.” So let’s start with the specifics of your story. So you said you lost and found your creative abilities of some sort. Well, power, really, because, first, it starts with shifting my own experience or definition of creativity, which happened through different moments or pivots or sticky junctures in my life. For me, growing up with an artist father on the Lower East Side Manhattan, abstract, my dad is an abstract painter, creativity was just something we did. It was just a natural part of life. He’d be painting, I’d be writing stories as a little kid or poems or whatnot. And creativity, later on, I moved into the realm of commercial creativity. I worked in creative studios and age brand agencies for the majority of my career, well over –– 15 years, until I left to start my own business. And so creativity was still very much something I did. When life threw me through the windshield of the car I was driving that needed to get fixed, changed, traded in through a series of events that, say, the divorce, unhealthy rebound relationship, and then getting fired from my six-figure cushy creative par...
    Más Menos
    49 m
  • How High Performers Break Through with Joshua Kalinowski
    Jul 1 2025
    Are your dreams just ideas floating in your mind or are you ready to turn them into action? Most of us have big goals, but the real challenge is execution. How do you stay focused, avoid burnout, and actually get things done, especially when life gets messy or plans fall apart? In this episode of Actions Antidotes, we’re joined by Joshua Kalinowski, former professional athlete, business leader, and the founder of Kalinowski Enterprises. Joshua shares what it really takes to “dream big and execute bigger”, his personal mantra that goes beyond motivation and into sustainable strategy. From building systems that support success to understanding your own rhythms and energy, Joshua talks about making smart, intentional moves even when life doesn’t go as planned. He opens up about losing his identity after baseball and how that led him to build not just businesses, but people from within. You’ll also hear how his “PILL” framework (Painful, Intentional, Lazy, and Loving) can transform your daily habits into lasting personal wins. Whether you're chasing growth in business, relationships, health, or simply looking to reclaim your time and energy, this conversation is a must-listen.Tune in now to learn how to build a life where your actions match your ambitions. --- Listen to the podcast here: How High Performers Break Through with Joshua Kalinowski Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. This year, on this podcast, we’ve been covering a lot about practical tools in which to help you get going. There’s always a period of time to dream, to plan, to figure out what you want is, but, at some point, you have to actually, as my last episode we discussed, take action, and taking action requires some practical tools. So, to talk a little bit more about some of these practical tools that you can use in order to dream big but execute bigger, I would like to invite onto the show Joshua Kalinowski, the president and visionary for Kalinowski Enterprises, which involves a lot of things so we’re going to cover that all in the episode. --- Joshua, welcome to the program. My man, appreciate it. Man, it is so good to be here. Thanks for the intro. Oh, yeah, wonderful. And let’s start right with this whole dream big, execute bigger. That’s kind of your motto. It is, yes. Well, it really came, it’s just kind of, for me, it’s more of like just reminding me constantly that as much as I dream, I’ve got to take action on it so I’ve got to take action and execute on things at an even larger scale because, as we know, it takes so much more to actually get fulfillment out of that. It takes so much more to actually have these things that accomplishes so much harder so it’s just another like a mantra for me to remind myself that if I’m going to dream big, I’ve got to execute at an even bigger stage. So, yeah, so that execute bigger part of it, and I think this is something that, obviously, we talk a lot about people who just talk up a storm and talk is cheap, anyone can say, “One day, I’m gonna write a book,” “One day, I’m gonna do the Grand Canyon rim to rim to rim,” as we kind of discussed before –– Good example, I love it. Yeah, so one day we’re going to do that, but most people acknowledge that you have to do something, but this whole execute bigger, do you encounter a lot of people who dream big but then execute, but their execution is not as big as it needs to be in order to make that dream a reality? Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, you mentioned earlier, I’m the CEO and president of Kalinowski Enterprises and so I get to see a lot of entrepreneurs, and we hire a lot of people within our company so we go anywhere from real estate all the way to roofing and everything in between there. And so, yeah, you see so many people that say, “Hey, listen, I wanna be successful in this industry.
    Más Menos
    47 m
  • Stop Living by Someone Else’s Script with Albert Bramante
    Jun 23 2025
    Ever feel like you’re living a life that doesn’t quite feel like yours? Maybe you’re stuck in a job you don’t love, caught in routines you never really chose, or just feeling like something’s holding you back, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. A lot of that might be coming from beliefs buried deep in your subconscious, beliefs you didn’t even realize were running the show. In this episode of Actions Antidotes, I chat with Albert Bramante, psychology professor, talent agent, and author of Rise Above the Script. We dig into what it really means to live “by the script,” how to spot the limiting beliefs that keep us stuck, and why small, consistent actions (not huge leaps) are the real game changers. Albert shares insights from his own journey and the work he’s done helping people shift their mindset and build a life they actually want to live. So if you’ve been saying “someday” a little too often…maybe today’s the day to start taking that first step. --- Listen to the podcast here: Stop Living by Someone Else’s Script with Albert Bramante Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about kind of achieving your potential and achieving your potential through various different mechanisms. There’s no one set way, despite what they may have told you in school or some other traditional childhood component of your life, that there is no one set way in which you can achieve your potential. There are plenty of ways that we could all, as my guest today would say, Rise Above the Script. That’s the name of his book. My guest today, Albert Bramante, not only is an author but also a psychology professor and talent agent. --- Albert, welcome to the program. Thank you, Stephen, so much for inviting me. I’m really happy to be here and really happy to be part of the community here and happy to have a conversation, answer any questions and offer any insights that can be helpful. Yeah, that is wonderful. And so the core message behind this podcast is always about different ways that we can kind of achieve the life that we want, and it’s interesting that your book is titled Rise Above the Script because one of the common expressions I use is “living by the script.” When we talk about the script, I’m curious about if your understanding of the script is similar to the way mine is. Yeah, I’m not talking about the literal sense of a script, like for a play or for a movie. What I’m talking about, the script that we use as our internal mind and our internal guiding system, in a sense, so it’s what navigates our life, what navigates our purpose, and particularly our conscious and subconscious mind. And I use the metaphor of a script because the book was written for performing artists who use scripts all the time, so I used that as a metaphor to kind of help understand exactly what the message is and that is really working, rewiring our mindset, and changing our mindset and changing the approach that we live our life on a day-to-day basis. And is this rewiring of the mindset something that spans kind of almost any kind of pursuit? Because you talk about working with performing artists, we’ll encounter people who say, “I wanna level up at my job.” Maybe we’ll encounter some other people that’ll say, “I wanna leave the nine to five and I wanna build my own business,” or even someone that just wants to create a different community or some other aspect of their lives or they’re like, “I want my relationship to better. I wanna have a relationship.” All those different pursuits that we’re all having in order to level up our lives, is it similar subconscious pursuit? A hundred percent, yes, because all of that requires you to optimize your mindset and your subconscious beliefs and your conscious beliefs. And what can hold you back from any of these endeavors that you had indicated is limiting beliefs,
    Más Menos
    Menos de 1 minuto
  • Being a Good Leader—Inside and Out with Chris Thyberg
    Jun 10 2025
    Leadership today isn’t just about managing people—it’s also about managing yourself. With so much change happening around us, how can leaders stay grounded and show up for their teams in the best way possible? In this episode, I talk with Chris Thyberg, a leadership coach and founder of The Serving Way. We chat about what it really takes to lead people in today’s world—whether it’s dealing with AI, figuring out remote vs. office work, or building trust in your team. Chris shares helpful advice on how to lead yourself first, and how being honest, curious, and human can make you a better leader. This is a down-to-earth, thoughtful conversation for anyone trying to grow as a leader in 2025 and beyond. Tune in and learn more. --- Listen to the podcast here: Being a Good Leader—Inside and Out with Chris Thyberg Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Last fall, I had Chris Thyberg on the program and we talked about leadership from both the perspective of an inner game and an outer game, how you need to take care of yourself in order to take care of the people that you’re a leader for. Since that episode, a lot has changed in the world, because the year 2025 has been marked by just a really rapid kind of pace of change on many different fronts, and that has caused a lot of people who have, say, different reactions. The range of reactions to these changes have been quite variant, as would be expected, and that has caused some additional challenges with regards to group cohesion as well as being able to delegate and trust the people who you’re working with. So, once again, I would like to bring back to the program Chris Thyberg to talk to us a little bit about what we need to do to be good leaders from both internally and externally now where we sit well into the year 2025. --- Chris, welcome back. Thank you, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be back with you after an excellent conversation last time. Well, thank you for coming back. This podcast has had maybe, I’m going to say three or four repeat guests, not that often, but it is something that’s changed quite a bit since we talked in September of 2024. I think we’re all familiar with what types of changes and, as you know, this is not a political show in the sense that I’m not here to tell anyone how they should or shouldn’t be responding to that aspect, nor is it telling anyone how they should or shouldn’t be responding to things such as AI, the number of layoffs, and the additional challenges and anxiety in the workforce today. All we can really do is kind of respond to it. Chris, what are you observing as far as the people that you work with and how they’re responding to all the different forms in which this change is taking place? Yeah, thank you. The last time we talked together, I described the conditions that leaders are under as white water conditions, as paddling down the river in the rapids and they’re starting to get class 4, class 5, maybe there’s even a waterfall that you can see coming up. All right. So, here are a few things that have been contributing to now what feels like windsurfing in a hurricane. If we thought the river trip was a little hard, sometimes, yeah, let’s try windsurfing when the swells are 20 feet high and we’re in driving down rain. Right, so you got a whole new situation here. Yep, let’s go. So, one aspect is the place of AI, how disruptive it is, the anxieties it’s creating for everyone, from longstanding employees to folks coming out of college, those entry-level positions that now people are arguing can be done just as well by a well-trained bot as that expensive college grad. So, what I like to remember in this space is that, right now, generative AI is like a very eager, tireless, relentless, driven intern that absolutely knows nothing at all about you, your business, your people, your leadership. All of it, right?
    Más Menos
    Menos de 1 minuto
  • Resilience and Triumph: Overcoming Life-Altering Challenges with Kijuan Amey
    Jun 3 2025
    When life suddenly changes, it can feel like everything is falling apart. You might wonder, Where do I find the strength to keep going? Resilience is about finding that courage inside yourself to face the hardest moments and keep moving forward no matter what. In this episode of Actions Antidotes, we are joined by Kijuan Amey, founder of Amey Motivation—a U.S. Air Force veteran, speaker, author, and resilience coach who shares his powerful story of resilience following a life-changing motorcycle accident. Kijuan recounts his background in the Air Force, his transition to civilian life, and the fateful day in May 2017 that altered his life's trajectory. He discusses the immediate aftermath of his accident, the extensive medical procedures and recovery process, and how he overcame the physical and emotional challenges to regain his sense of self-worth and purpose. Kijuan’s journey from being in a medically induced coma to becoming a motivational speaker and author of Don't Focus on Why Me offers valuable lessons on resilience, the importance of a supportive mindset, and finding direction after a dramatic life event. If you’ve ever faced a major setback or want to build your ability to bounce back from life’s ups and downs, this episode is for you. --- Listen to the podcast here: Resilience and Triumph: Overcoming Life-Altering Challenges with Kijuan Amey Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about resilience, and resilience can mean a lot of different things, but if you go about your life long enough, eventually, you’ll have some sort of event, some sort of event happen to you, whether it be something like losing a job, losing a key family member, losing a good friend, and, in this particular case, an accident that can happen anytime you’re going about your day to day life that can really change your life’s trajectory. My guest today is Kijuan Amey and he has a story about an accident as well and his resilience around it. He is an Air Force veteran and a motivational speaker. --- Kijuan, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me here, Stephen. I truly appreciate you having me on to speak about my story on your platform. Well, thank you for your willingness to share your story with my audience. I know we’re all trying to be better people in one way or another or trying to achieve something, and it is a real big deal when something specific happens to you, so tell us a little bit about where your story begins. This was May 5, 2017. I was, at the time, in the United States Air Force Reserve. I did four years active and I said, “I’m done with this.” I wanted to get away from that lifestyle, shall I say. And I think I made the best choice for me, personally. Other people, they love the active duty world, but I made the best decision for my life, and then not only just to be a reservist but to also go to school full time so I was pursuing my bachelor’s degree because I also wanted to become a pilot ultimately, and the job that I was doing in the Air Force was in-flight refueling and that’s where you refuel planes in midair. Amazing. To me, hands down, I think the best enlisted job I’ve ever heard. I don’t care what anybody says. So just amazing to see another plane fly up to you, right behind you as you’re flying in the air and you can refuel them, and I just call it a flying gas station, basically. So, quickly, how did that work? Because I’m trying to picture it in my head now, the idea that one plane is flying and another one is kind of coming up. Does someone have to actually jump out of the airplane and connect it the way we fill up our cars at the gas station? Yeah, no, if we had army guys on the plane, we would make them do that. But, no, we don’t do that. Okay. Yeah, no, so we have this thing we call the boom and what you do is you lower it,
    Más Menos
    Menos de 1 minuto
  • Innovative Solutions That Are Changing Homelessness with Ashley Garcia
    May 28 2025
    Homelessness is a complex crisis—one that can't be solved by temporary fixes alone. It takes compassion, innovation, and the courage to rethink how we support those in need. What if we could build communities that restore dignity, stability, and hope? In this episode, I’m joined by Ashley Garcia, founder and executive director of Tiny Villages Inc. We dive into the deeper issues behind homelessness and explore bold, community-centered solutions. Ashley shares how her team is building small, self-contained homes and community spaces that give people not just a place to live, but the support they need to move forward. It’s a reminder that even small ideas can lead to big change. --- Listen to the podcast here: Innovative Solutions That Are Changing Homelessness with Ashley Garcia Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about addressing some of these major societal issues. Now, we all have our different reasons for why we’re taking on the initiatives we have, but some of us are really moved by things that we see in the world, some major issues, and, sometimes, it could be pretty daunting to think about something that has been an issue for sometimes decades, centuries, even millennia, and really dig in and take it on. My guest today is Ashley Garcia and she is the founder and executive director of a Colorado nonprofit called Tiny Villages, the address is tinyvillages.org. --- Ashley is taking on a major societal issue and, Ashley, welcome to the program. Thank you, Stephen, for having me today. I’m excited to talk a little bit more about Tiny Villages Inc. Let’s start out by, first of all, describing your story about the issue that you were moved to address and what made you decide that you have the capacity, have the talent, everything else to dive into it. So, Tiny Villages Inc. is a 501(c)(3) Colorado nonprofit corporation where we’re providing permanent housing solutions to citizens in the United States, and this includes safe housing with high quality of life and we’re folding that into three different parts so there’s housing, agriculture, and innovation. And with that, there’s going to be things like solar panels being used, there’s going to be over 110 acres on each of the tiny villages where we will provide agriculture that will give food to the villagers when they move in. And, with that, right now, we’re focusing on the unhoused population. The reason being is, back in 2021, one of my businesses is real estate investing, and so with that company, myself and several of my business partners went and traveled the United States because we’re looking for property so that we could have landing strips and have resorts and have gated communities, 24-hour security so that all the elitist in the United States could come, or actually in the world, could come and mastermind and just figure out and collaborate how to solve big world problems. And, the reality is, when we went and did this trip, we found out that there’s a lot of land, and every single state that we went to, there was the unhoused population. So that’s when I flipped all of this around and started Tiny Villages Inc. So you noticed a lot of land, and another part of your mission is related to agriculture so did you notice a lot of land not only, and I’m specifically thinking about some places I’ve been to or used to live in like Illinois and Iowa where there’s a lot of land but I just imagine a lot of it being corn fields, soy fields, and stuff like that, but I’m guessing you observed a lot of land that wasn’t also already being used for agriculture? That is correct. There’s a lot of undeveloped land or there’s a lot of like little towns and cities that have folded up because the people have actually left and went to the major cities where jobs are and so it was just eye opening to even see that.
    Más Menos
    Menos de 1 minuto
  • Mastering Sales and Mindset with Christopher Filipiak
    May 22 2025
    Sales can be intimidating—especially when you're chasing a passion that doesn't come with a natural knack for selling. For many, mindset is the missing piece, not just in business but in life. But what happens when you combine strategy with psychology to unlock real growth? In this episode, I have Christopher Philippi, a seasoned sales consultant and coach for CEOs. He helps people overcome the fear of selling and client acquisition by blending both coaching and consulting to support real growth. In our conversation, Christopher shares how mindset shapes our actions, why clarity and consistency matter, and how to shift your thoughts to get better results in business and life. Tune in to learn how the right strategy and mindset can change everything. --- Listen to the podcast here: Mastering Sales and Mindset with Christopher Filipiak Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. A lot of us have ideas, a lot of us have passions, and a lot of us have the impact that we want to make onto the world and maybe you’re listening and you’re thinking about it a little bit, thinking, okay, should I get serious about this? It’s springtime, there’s a new energy going on, maybe it’s time to actually get serious. But we have a series of things that oftentimes trip us up, make us a little bit intimidated, make us kind of question whether or not we want to hit that proverbial Start button. And one of the things that can really intimidate a lot of people is sales or kind of building a client base/audience, how do you actually connect your product to the market that you’re trying to connect it to, i.e., how do you actually sell the thing? Is someone going to ever pay me for this? Today, to talk about that subject, I would like to bring on my guest, Christopher Filipiak, who is a sales consultant and a coach for CEOs. --- Christopher, welcome to the program. Hey, Stephen. It’s so good to be here today. Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, thank you for popping on. So not kind of a normal combination, sales consultant and coach for CEOs. What does that mean in tandem? Yeah, sure. It’s a good question because consulting is its own unique thing and coaching is its own unique thing so when I think of consulting, you kind of think of three buckets, strategy, planning, and implementation of something, and a consultant is really someone who provides expert advice and a proven process, meaning, know how to get something done and they’re there to be an expert and go, “Hey, this is how you do that.” A coach is more there to help you create clarity on what you want and help you discover your own truths. So a coach isn’t there to tell you how to do it, a coach is really there to help you figure out how you want to do it and provide you some support and some challenge and a container for you to do that. So, when it comes to sales, I think both things are important, because my clients need someone who can help them set up a sales system, a sales process, the skills around the strategy and tactics of building a business that’s competent and making sales, and so much of sales deals with what’s going on in your own head and your own confidence and your own leadership and your own material around money and strangers that having coaching is also really supportive so that’s why I do both. And are your clients often the same for both the coaching and the consulting or is it usually separate endeavors based on what someone at a certain time? Yeah, that’s a really good question. So, they tend to be the same. When I work with my clients, what happens is we’ll have calls that are focused on building skill sets or implementation work around the strategies and tactics around sales and then we’ll have separate calls that are coaching-only calls. And so most of my engagements with my clients, I do both things,
    Más Menos
    44 m
  • What It Means to Carry Legacy Forward with Lesle Lane
    May 15 2025
    Family legacy means different things to different people. For some, it’s a big part of who they are, with strong traditions and high expectations. For others, it’s something they’re still trying to figure out. But how do you build something new while honoring where you came from? In this episode, I have Leslie Lane, the founder and lead photographer of Studio 13. Photography runs in her family, and she’s been able to take that legacy and shape it into something of her own. In our conversation, Leslie shares what it was like growing up in a photography family, how she found her own style, and what it means to her to carry that legacy forward while doing things her way. Tune in and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: What It Means to Carry Legacy Forward with Lesle Lane Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about a topic that we’ve yet to really cover in this particular podcast, and that is the idea of a family legacy. I know some people have a stronger family legacy than others. For some people, it really looms large and there’s a lot of expectations, and, for others, it’s maybe even lacking direction too much. But my guest today, Lesle Lane, is the founder and lead photographer of Studio 13 but she comes from a family that has a legacy of photography and she’s been able to take their business and kind of move it in a direction that puts her own mark on it. --- Lesle, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure. Definitely. So, tell us first about how photography is part of your family legacy. I sure will. So, my grandfather actually started the business. He came into the photographic industry because when he was an eighth grader, his father tried to kill him with a garden hoe and so he ran away from home. You’ve got the shocked look on your face. It’s true. He ran away from home and they didn’t have Child Protective Services and so he ended up getting in with traveling salespeople, nomadic people, that’s what they did, and one of the things that they did was teach him how to be a photographer. And so he would go from town to town taking pictures and then going back several weeks later to deliver the pictures and, finally, came upon my grandmother, who he ended up marrying, though he was hired to shoot her engagement portrait so that was quite scandalous. And then they settled, started their portrait photography business in Columbus, Georgia. And then my mother and father divorced where we moved to Indiana together, she married my stepfather and then I took over his version of the photography studio, which was corporate and commercial work. It’s just shocking to hear someone trying to kill their own son with a garden hoe because people will oftentimes joke about it and they’re like, funny, like, “Oh, I could kill you,” or something like that, but like this was a literal attempt to end his own son’s life. Yes, and, actually, I misspoke, it was a stepfather, but still, the man that was married to his mother, and it was during the Depression times, things were not good, there was no work, there was no money. It doesn’t excuse it at all but he had no choice. And so my grandfather, he survived and ended up running a very successful business and dying a multimillionaire. He made something amazing of himself after leaving home in the eighth grade. That is a legacy. That is something you can grab on to. Great father, great grandfather, and I’m blessed to have known him. One of the things that I’ve done personally and I know a lot of other people have talked about recently and it gets a little bit spiritual sometimes is this idea of multigenerational patterns and how they affect anyone’s life going forward. And so you have this family legacy of photography, which I definitely want to talk about as well as that’s your business,
    Más Menos
    48 m