French Kissing Life

What if the scariest decision you make is also the one that finally makes you feel like yourself again?

My guest today is Yvonne Hemmings, a life coach, virtual assistant, digital marketer, and full-time van lifer. Just two years ago, at 58, she sold her house, gave away nearly everything she owned, and moved into a camper van. Not because she'd always dreamed of van life, but because staying the same had started to feel more fright...

My niece told me what she thinks millennials get wrong about life, and honestly, I was shocked. Every generation assumes the one before it doesn't get it, and the one after it has completely lost the plot. I decided it was time to actually put that theory to the test.

So my niece and I sat down and graded each other's generations: communication, fashion, work ethic, dating, boredom, privacy, resilience; no category was off limits. W...

Somewhere along the way, summer stopped being a season and started being a performance. There's pressure to travel, to be outside, to make memories, to say yes to every invitation and somehow have the best summer ever.

Emma Sullivan Ebley joins me for the third installment of our seasonal series on creative rituals to talk about what nature can teach us about doing summer differently. We get into why the season invites joy, play, an...

Picture handing a kid a phone with a cord attached and watching pure confusion take over: turning it over, unsure which end even goes where, treating it like it just beamed in from another planet. That's not a hypothetical. It's happening in kitchens across the country right now, as parents start reintroducing landlines to kids who have never once seen one.

This month I'm loving that trend, and the surprisingly big movement behind i...

Picture this. You're thirty seconds into the talk you've been building toward for months, and your mind goes completely blank. You've forgotten your own story, live, on stage.

That's exactly what happened to today's guest, Ashley Bryant, founder of AB Strategy, where she helps mission-driven brands trade vague messaging for clear communication that builds trust and inspires action. But this conversation isn't about what Ashley write...

Imagine packing up your entire life, selling your house, bringing your dogs, and moving halfway around the world, only to discover that the biggest transformation had nothing to do with the actual destination.

That is exactly what happened to Jennifer Yates. You may remember her from one of my earliest episodes, and she is back on the mic to give us every scoop on uprooting her life in Michigan and starting over in Barcelona, pee-so...

There's a version of summer where the light makes everything feel more possible, and I'm fully in it right now. Longer days, warm evenings, the whole thing.

But here's what I keep noticing underneath all that brightness. Most of us are still living from the neck up. We think and analyze and push through, and meanwhile, the body is down there quietly trying to get a word in. This episode is about what shifts when you finally listen. ...

Picture this. March 3rd, 2026, Paris. The Palais Garnier, all gilded ceilings and red velvet and history, and onto the runway walks the first model in a corseted gown made from a French military parachute. The designer who built it had turned 10 years old two days before.

This month, I am completely obsessed with a kid named Max Alexander. He holds the Guinness World Record for youngest runway fashion designer in the world, and his ...

Time is one of the only things we all share equally, and somehow it's also the thing so many of us feel like we're constantly running out of. We say "I don't have time" almost on autopilot. But what if that phrase is hiding something deeper? What if it isn't really about time at all, but about what we value, what we avoid, and maybe what we're afraid to face if things ever got too quiet?

This conversation felt both grounding and qui...

Have you ever walked away from a conversation thinking, "I know what I meant to say, but somehow it just did not land the way I had hoped"? Maybe it was a pitch, a hard conversation, an interview, or just trying to explain your value in a way another person could actually understand.

This episode is all about that space between what we mean and what actually gets received. My guest is Claire Wang, a pricing strategist and author of ...

Memorial Day has come and gone, which officially means summer has entered the group chat. And today, my niece Sarah is back on the mic, which means things get unhinged very quickly.

We go through our highs and lows for the season, from sweet corn and pool days and the smell of a good thunderstorm to chiggers, birds at 5 AM, and the absolute audacity of assless bikini bottoms at the public pool. We also play a little game where Sarah...

Something has shifted. I don't know exactly when it happened, and it wasn't one moment. It was more like a slow accumulation, small disappointments that added up to something much bigger. Social media used to feel like a peek into someone's real life. Somewhere along the way, it started feeling like performance, like everyone, myself included, was packaging themselves. The more polished it got, the lonelier I felt.

And underneath al...

A few weeks ago, something happened in the world that I genuinely could not stop thinking about. Couldn't sleep. Sending voice memos to friends at weird hours. And even though the news cycle has absolutely moved on, I sure haven't, and I don't think you will either.

Four humans flew to the moon and came back completely undone by how much they love Earth. That's it. That's the whole thing. And I want to bring you into every beautiful...

Starting a business gets this very shiny reputation: freedom, flexibility, being your own boss. And then there's the version nobody talks about as loudly, the one where you're thinking about your business at 2 am because the to-do list is never actually done.

My former professor, Tom Swartwood, has spent decades working with entrepreneurs across industries, countries, and stages of business. He developed the entrepreneurship curricu...

Plants have names for a reason. And once you start learning what those names actually mean, you can't walk past a dandelion or a hawthorn tree the same way again.

In this episode, I'm joined again by Kim Gros, a New York City-based clinical herbalist, educator, and founder of an organic herbal product line. Kim leads plant walks in Central Park and has a gift for making the natural world feel alive through storytelling. We get into ...

Something has been sitting with me lately, a contradiction I couldn't quite shake. I've always thought of myself as someone who loves change. Enneagram Seven, chases novelty, has a podcast called French Kissing Life. And yet when change actually shows up uninvited, I freeze. What I've landed on is that I'm not actually afraid of change. I'm afraid of uncertainty. And once you see the difference, you really can't unsee it. There's a...

Sometimes life gets so full of hard that you forget you're even allowed to want something light. That's where Lori Blachford found herself after seven years of caregiving and loss, and it's what led her to start snatching up small, slightly unpredictable experiences just to feel alive again.

What started as "bucket list quickies" got a necessary rebrand and became bucket list minis, a practice of saying yes to the weird, doable, low...

Spring doesn't always arrive the way we expect it to. One day it's a blizzard, the next it's pushing 80 degrees, and somewhere in the middle of all that, we're supposed to feel refreshed and ready. But what if the transition itself is the invitation, not a problem to push through?

I'm excited to welcome back expressive arts therapist and trauma-informed care consultant Emma Sullivan Uebele for a conversation about what this season a...

What if the first signs of spring have been whispering to us all along?

In this episode, I’m joined by clinical herbalist and educator Kim Gros for a gentle conversation about the plants that quietly announce spring’s arrival. We explore the stories behind these early bloomers, the nourishment found in seasonal greens, and how paying attention to nature can reconnect us with our own rhythms of rest, renewal, and growth.

W...