Many Things with Steph Libby

After months of career counseling, I'm sharing the assessments, exercises, and hard money math that helped me let go of a decades-old "dream job" fantasy and find real clarity as a multi-passionate person. It's an honest look at what it actually costs — financially and emotionally — to figure out what you want from your career.

I'm taking a step back at the six-month mark of 2026 to reflect on my resolutions, my relationship with consistency, and how I'm finally breaking my old summer guilt cycle. I'm getting real about what financial freedom, multi-passionate living, and "building my dream life" actually mean to me.  Plus, my Fourth of July documentary recommendations.

I'm holding myself back. What I've long thought was a motivation or discipline problem is actually a systems issue. In today's episode I talk about this revelation and why it's so hard to just do the things you know, need, and want to do to change your life for the better. 

After a morning in the garden, I'm getting real about what it actually means to have my best summer ever — and it has nothing to do with productivity or a glow-up. This year I'm chasing campfires, river floats, and reading in the backyard, and honestly? That sounds pretty perfect to me.

What happens when you stumble across a piece of your past that completely rewrites the story you've been telling yourself? Have you ever been so convinced you failed at something that you never stopped to check if that was actually true? That's exactly where I found myself this week. I dug up my old master's thesis, and what I found forced me to reckon with how wrong I've been about myself for over a decade.

I called 2026 my Year of Curiosity. I did a life audit to figure out my priorities. So....where has it gotten me? Pretty far, actually. In this episode I review the first quarter of my life audit - where I succeeded, where I didn't, and where I go from here. And I talk about some exciting career news! 

When the world feels chaotic, overwhelming, dark, and adversarial, where does the practice of meeting people with love and kindness factor in? It's easy to extend grace and empathy to people in inner circle, but how and why do we continue that practice when faced with the people we think deserve it the least?

Quitting is a part of life and I think it should be embraced more. This episode I explore a "good" quit vs. a "bad" quit (hint: it involves fear) and how I'm learning to trust myself more when it comes to quitting...because quitting doesn't have to equal failure. 

I'm hyper-focused on creativity lately so this week I'm gabbing about how I unlock creativity, shut down my inner critic, stay inspired, and how my relationship with my creativity has changed throughout the years. And recommendation corner returns! 

It's a wrap on 2025, a year filled with unprecedented highs and lows. Sure, New Year's resolutions are a bit cringey, but we still love them, right? I look back on my 2025, the start of this podcast, and the start of this journey. What have I already learned? What am I looking forward to learning? And if this year was so bad, how could I possibly be looking forward to 2026? 

I can't stop talking about my life audit. I went from emotionally burnt to a crisp to reinvigorated, positive, and ready to realign and reprioritize my focus and live more intentionally and mindfully. So...what is a life audit? What was my approach? And why is it feeling like a life raft right now? 

It's the end of the year, so I'm getting super reflective and looking ahead to the new year. This week I'm gabbing about the big questions I'm asking myself in order to figure out what I really want from life (beyond just next year) so I can figure out the steps and changes I need to make to get there. 

This week I'm gabbing about burnout. At 28, my career feels like a cage. I feel anchored to a job and a lifestyle that doesn't fuel me or fill my soul, yet I feel equally aimless and unsure what my next move could be. But I'm also too tired to push myself in a new direction. Welcome to my burnt to a crisp era. 

Certain phrases spark unbridled anger. For me, that's "it could be worse." Instead of staying upset about it, I'm taking a deeper look at why this phrase gets under my skin and why I think it's time we take this phrase out of our vocabulary.

This week I'm gabbing about my long history with emotional eating, my relationship with food, struggles with eating disorders. How I'm making sense of all of that alongside my body image and weight loss journey and where acceptance, self-love, body positivity, and rejecting peer pressure fits in to the mix. 

This week I'm gabbing about struggles with confidence and getting out of my own head, how movement improves my focus and energy, and why I think my hip pain might be linked to stress. 

This week I'm gabbing about some of my codependency origins and how they're haunting me in the present. Where do I think some of these self-destructive habits came from? Why are they so hard to break away from? How do I keep moving forward when all my old patterns are trying to pull me backwards?