Alexandra's Podcast

You can download the habit tracker, start the morning routine, read all the books. And still find yourself right back where you started. That's what happens when you skip the foundation and that's the first thing needs fixing.In this solo episode I'm breaking down why creating new habits after divorce is harder than anyone tells you and what actually has to happen first before any of the outer work can stick.I share the framework I use with the women I work with: identify the habitual response you want to change, trace it back to its origin, rewrite the story attached to it, and then, and only then, build the new habits on top of that new foundation. Skip any of those steps and you're renovating a house with a cracked foundation. It looks good until it doesn't.I also share something personal: a belief I carried for years that food was safety, born from the loneliness of arriving in a new country at 15 and not knowing how to belong. And yes, some beliefs can take time to dismantle. This episode is for the woman who keeps starting over and wondering why nothing holds. The answer isn't more discipline. It's deeper work, and it's absolutely doable.Grab your journal. You're going to want it for this one.

Most women going through divorce know they need a lawyer. What they don't always know is that the negotiation happening outside the courtroom, not inside it, is where the real financial decisions get made. And if you don't understand the numbers, you can't negotiate for what you actually deserve.Donna Cates has spent 25 years as a wealth manager working specifically with women in transition. Divorce is her specialty. And in this conversation, she gets into the financial realities that most people don't talk about until it's too late.We cover What equitable distribution actually means, and why equal isn't always fairWhy your retirement account and your house are not the same asset even if they're worth the same on paperThe one document you should pull together before you ever say the word divorce out loudHow to start a financial conversation with your spouse when you've never had one, without triggering alarm bellsWhat to do when you have no idea what your household finances actually look like, and Why the negotiation process, not the courtroom, is where you keep control of your own lifeDonna also shares her own divorce story, coming home from a work trip to find her world turned upside down, and the pattern she kept repeating in relationships until she finally did the inner work to understand her part in it.Her parting message: don't be afraid of money. Make yourself a seat at the financial conversation table. Knowledge isn't intimidating. It's the thing that protects you.

Tammy Scarlett didn't go through one hard thing. She went through several: breast cancer, divorce, a capsule rupture from her implants that left her sicker than the cancer ever had, all within a few years of each other. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, she realized they weren't separate events. They were the same message, delivered louder each time.She just wasn't home enough to hear it.Tammy is the founder of the Women's Wellness Network and a student of holistic health whose work was born not from theory but from necessity, figuring out her own path when the conventional answers ran out.In this conversation, we get into the real stuff.We talk about:What it means to walk side by side with your own life instead of actually living itWhy the body starts sending signals when you've been disconnected too long and what happens when you keep ignoring themThe moment Tammy asked herself what her part was in the demise of her marriage and why that question changed everythingOne surprisingly simple language shift that rewired how she thought about what she wanted, and How to start identifying your blind spots by looking at how you respond when you're in fear, fight, flight, or freeze.She also talks about GUS, her name for God, universe, spirit, and the slow, deliberate work of learning to hear her own voice again after years of dismissing it.Her parting message: figure out how you show up in fear. Start there. Everything else, your relationships, your choices, your healing, flows from that one piece of awareness.

The day Sara Fishkin stood in her shower, everything had fallen apart. Her marriage was over. And in that moment, instead of collapsing further into it, something shifted. She decided to stop being the victim of her story and get curious about what was in it for her.What she found changed everything, including what she does now.Sara is a transformational mindset and prosperity coach whose work is built on one core idea: your subconscious patterns, the ones you picked up in childhood, the ones modeled by your parents, the ones you never consciously chose, are running the show. And until you change the film, the movie on the screen stays the same.In this conversation, we go deep.We talk about how Sara's divorce played out as an almost exact replica of her parents' divorce and why that's not a coincidence, what it actually means that your behaviors in marriage were mostly automatic, not intentional, the difference between watching your life and leading it and the moment both of us realized we'd been doing the former, why saying yes to a marriage when you're not fully in it is itself a generational pattern and how we pass that down without knowing it, and what it looks like to work at the level of subconscious belief rather than just mindset or motivation.Sara uses an analogy that's going to stick with you: the old-fashioned movie projector. The light is always shining. The question is what film you're running through it.Her message to women newly out of divorce: it can be pretty dark at the beginning. But if you can just start asking, what's the gift in this?, it becomes able to find you.

Louise was ready to leave her marriage before she even walked down the aisle. Fear kept her there for years. Fear of being alone, of breaking up her family, of what people would think. The day her husband finally moved out, she drove her kids to nursery school and noticed something she hadn't felt in years: a real smile. Not a performance. The actual thing.That moment set off twenty years of becoming from personal trainer, to studio owner, to Certified High Performance and Somatic coach, and a lot of hard-won clarity about why we stay stuck long after we know better.Louise is a mind-body coach who combines somatics with high performance coaching to help women release what they've been carrying in their bodies, not just their minds, for years. And in this conversation, she is as honest as it gets.We talk about what it actually means to hold trauma in your body and why you can't think your way out of it. Why achieving more, more certifications, more credentials, more results, still left her feeling like it wasn't enough. What somatic work looks like in practice and the moment she realized something had genuinely shifted. We talk about the question she asks every woman she works with: what do you really, really want?, how to know when you're giving yourself a dishonest answer, and why stop gatekeeping other people's emotions might be the most important thing you hear today.She also says something about her children that I think is going to stay with you: she could still see the impact of her first marriage on her kids, now in their mid-twenties. Not as a guilt trip. As a reminder of what's actually at stake when we stay too long.Her parting message: you will always figure it out. And if the divorce wasn't your choice, the only question worth asking is, how could this be the best thing that's ever happened to me?

Grief doesn't wait for the divorce to be final. For many women, it starts long before the papers are signed, sometimes before the decision is even spoken out loud.In this episode, I'm walking you through the five stages of grief after divorce: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But here's what I want you to know going in: the process is not linear. You'll move forward, loop back, and sometimes sit in two stages at the same time. That's not you doing it wrong. That's just how it works.I share what each stage actually looked like for me, including the moment I felt sucker punched by my own decision, the marriage counseling request that came ten years too late, and how I ate my way through depression (not my finest chapter, but a real one).I also cover the coping strategies that genuinely help, and the ones that feel like help but aren't.If you're in the thick of it right now, this episode is your reminder that you're human and that you're moving through something that deserves to be moved through, not around.