All Episodes — The Room Between Podcast

All the Seasons at Once | Dr. Sommer Jabber-Pearson

Dr. Sommer Jabber-Pearson

On LinkedIn, Dr. Sommer Jabber Pearson’s life looked like a highlight reel. Off it, she was returning pop cans for grocery money and wondering how to make the mortgage. In two and a half years, nearly everything in her life changed at once: a doctorate, a marriage, a new job and a layoff without warning, a business started out of necessity, and illness and loss in her family. As a first-generation Palestinian American, she carried all of it alongside the daily news from her family’s homeland. And very little of it showed from the outside. Dr. Nicole, talks with her about the distance between the public story and the private one, and why the title "Dr." still doesn't sit easily with her. Sommer also shares something her mother taught her: that joy and grief must coexist. It's a perspective that unsettled Dr. Nicole's belief that life's seasons arrive one at a time, and it may change how you understand your own. Because sometimes our seasons arrive together, celebration and loss at once, and we have to make room for both.

We Question Ourselves, Not the Load

Jovian Zayne — CEO & Founder

Jovian Zayne’s résumé reads like a lifetime achievement award. So Dr. Nicole doesn’t start there. She starts with a question: when did achievement become your identity? Jovian, a leadership coach, business owner, and first-time author, traces achievement back to a Southern childhood as the granddaughter of two Baptist pastors, where success felt like both protection and responsibility. Then she takes us to the hospital bed: her dream client had turned into a nightmare, and the boundaries she taught other people to keep were the first thing she gave up. The client was the circumstance, she says. The commitment to being seen as the capable one was her own. From there the conversation goes somewhere quieter. Jovian talks about the years she spent “sending a representative” to work, the day she realized she missed her old life even as she loved being a mother, and the therapist who told her she’d invited the wrong part of herself to write her book. Together, she and Dr. Nicole sit with the hard question underneath all of it: what happens when the life you built isn’t the life you want anymore? In this episode: - Why achievement can work as armor, and when it becomes a trap - The hidden commitment that put a burnout coach in a hospital bed - “Sending a representative” and the cost of performing fine - Holding two truths: loving your life and missing your old one - How to notice a new season before your body has to scream - Being harder on the systems and softer on yourself - Why so many women are facing a crisis of worthiness right now

Life Unscripted, Not Yet on the Other Side

Dr. Resma Byrne — Ed.D

Dr. Resma Byrne knew she wanted to be a teacher when she was in fourth grade. She spent the next three decades climbing every rung of public education, from classroom teacher to administrator, director, assistant superintendent, and, finally, superintendent. Seven months later, that role was over. What followed was not the tidy pivot we usually hear about. There was grief she didn't feel allowed to say out loud. There was a new job that looked like landing, and a quiet voice inside her that kept saying it wasn't her true north. Now Resma is living in Tulum, Mexico, with her husband and children, in a season she calls "Life Unscripted." She doesn't know yet how it ends. Dr. Nicole and Resma talk about the difference between enduring a life and living it on purpose, what it costs to keep telling everyone you're fine, why a lifelong learner reached for a syllabus every time her life went sideways, and what it means to stop cleaning up the mess long enough to learn from it. Most transition stories are told once the ending is known. This one is told from the middle.

Your Body Already Knows: Dr. Nikki Arguinzoni-Gil on Menopause, Breast Cancer, and Trusting Yourself

Dr. Nicole Arguinzoni-Gil

For five years, Dr. Nicole asked her doctors to check her hormones and heard the same answer: they’re fine. She was exhausted, losing her words mid-sentence, and having anxiety attacks for the first time in her life. Then came the afternoon she collapsed on her couch with nothing left and no explanation. Her naturopathic physician, Dr. Nicole Arguinzoni-Gil (Dr. Nikki), explains what was really happening and the internal transitions every woman will face. Then Dr. Nikki shares a story she has never told publicly: her own breast cancer, found with no lump, only an itch and a feeling she tried to talk herself out of. Together they talk about trusting what your body already knows before anyone confirms it, learning to ask for help, and owning who you are at this stage of life. In this episode: The real difference between perimenopause, menopause and post-menopause, and why treating them the same can backfire What estradiol, progesterone and testosterone each do, and why low testosterone can take your drive with it Why so many women are dismissed when they report hormonal symptoms How Dr. Nikki’s instinct, with no lump, led her to the ultrasound that found her cancer Self-advocacy, second opinions, and trusting yourself when something feels wrong Letting go, surrendering, and learning to receive Disclosure: Dr. Nikki is Dr. Nicole’s own physician. Neither receives any compensation or affiliate benefit for this conversation. Medical disclaimer: This episode is for education and conversation, not medical advice. Hormone therapy is not right for everyone. Talk with your own licensed clinician about any symptoms, testing or treatment, and see a doctor promptly about any change in your breasts, including changes without a lump.

Glimmers: The Nervous System Path to Unapologetic Thriving

Ife Mora — SEP

When life changes, whether it’s a new career, a loss, a new chapter, or a season of becoming, we tend to treat transition as something we figure out in our heads. But you don’t go through transition in your mind alone. Your body moves through it with you. It carries the stress, the uncertainty, and every past overwhelm it never had the chance to release. So the tools and resources you bring into your transition need to support your body, not just your mind. In this episode of The Room: Navigating Life’s Transitions, Dr. Nicole Yeldell Butts welcomes somatic experiencing practitioner and trauma healer Ife Mora to explore what happens in our bodies during life’s chrysalis seasons. Ife shares that while we tell ourselves stories and perform “I’m fine,” our nervous systems are often bracing, numbing, and stuck in survival mode. Together they talk about how the body holds what we’ve been through, why women of color in particular often live in constant survival physiology, and how that shows up as tight shoulders, a locked jaw, restless sleep, gut issues, and chronic pain. They unpack weathering, the Superwoman schema, the difference between being regulated and being numb, and why real resilience isn’t about taking it all. It’s about your body’s ability to return to baseline. Most importantly, you’ll leave with practical tools and resources for your transition that you can use right away. Ife guides three live practices: a body scan to drop your mind into your body, a vagus nerve toning exercise, and a healthy pride exercise to help you move from shrinking to unapologetic thriving. Dr. Nicole also shares the everyday practices that support her own nervous system: grounding barefoot in the grass and a morning ritual of orienting to safety before her day begins. Because you can’t thrive in survival mode, but you can find your glimmers. In this episode: • What somatic healing is, and where it came from • How trauma and chronic stress show up as gut issues, chronic pain, poor sleep, and reactivity • Why systemic oppression registers as a threat in the body, even when the mind says otherwise • Regulated vs. numb: recognizing “faux resilience” • The vagus nerve, glimmers, and the polyvagal ladder • Co-regulation with our children, partners, and communities • Healthy feminine rage, safe rest, and healthy pride

She Didn't Want to Feel. She Wanted to Fix

Monikka — Stallworth

Monikka Stallworth didn't set out to make an exhibition. She set out to stop hiding. In 2016, within moments of her mother's death, a sentence arrived that she couldn't shake: life is for living. It took years to understand what that sentence was asking of her, and years more before she could show anyone the photographs she'd taken of the woman she had spent decades keeping secret. In this conversation, the artist behind Met Mo For This talks with Dr. Nicole about the long middle: the marriage she tried everything to save, a habit she hid from nearly everyone, the night she cut off more than a decade of locs while on the phone with her mother's best friend, and a poem that came to her at the least poetic moment imaginable. Along the way, she makes a case you don't often hear about transformation. Before anything can change, she argues, you need somewhere safe enough to let it, the way a caterpillar finds a protected place before it ever becomes a chrysalis. This is an episode about the difference between fixing and feeling, what grief sets in motion without asking permission, and what it means to reclaim the parts of yourself you were taught to be ashamed of. Monikka also reads her poem "Feel" in full.

Self-Honoring Choices: Culturally Specific Self-Care for Black Women

Dr. Jean Pennicooke — Ed.D

Correction: In this episode, Dr. Jean Pennicooke states that seven of the eight reassigned administrators were Black women. The accurate figure is six. We regret the error and have corrected it in these show notes; the audio/video remains as recorded. "Self-honoring choices" — that's the phrase Dr. Nicole and Dr. Jean Pennicooke return to in this conversation about culturally specific self-care. Dr. Jean coined the term after watching seven Black women principals reassigned in a single afternoon, and realizing the self-care advice she'd been given her whole life was never built for what she was actually carrying. Together, they name three things most women have felt but never had language for — weathering, other mothering, and secondhand trauma — and talk through what it looks like to honor yourself before you're depleted, not after.

Moving From "Why Me?" to "What's Next?"

Tiana Sanchez

For fifteen years, Tiana Sanchez ran a training and development firm with Fortune 500 clients, a team of coaches and consultants, and revenue that grew 454% over four years. Then, in the space of about a week, most of it fell away. Contracts canceled. Clients stopped responding. The public version of Tiana's life stayed exactly the same — the speaking engagements, the recycled photos, the "you're doing so well." The private version didn't. This conversation lives inside the gap between those two versions. Tiana talks about what it actually took to move her family out of necessity rather than choice, why she kept the unraveling hidden for almost a year before posting about it, and what a seven-day water fast taught her about resentment, comparison, and the difference between believing something is over and knowing, quietly, that it isn't. She and Dr. Nicole talk through what it means to separate your worth from your work when the work disappears overnight, why this wasn't Tiana's first unplanned reinvention, and the exercise — "blockers and builders" — she's used twice now to imagine a future she couldn't yet see the shape of. This is Tiana's own Chrysalis Season, and she's still inside it. Not a comeback story told from the other side — a conversation with someone in the middle of Boldly Becoming, in real time.

The Space Nobody Named

There's a particular kind of change that doesn't announce itself. Nothing breaks. No one would know, looking at your life, that anything is different. And yet something in you has gone quiet in a way you can't quite explain, and you've never had a word for what that is. In this opening episode, Dr. Nicole Yeldell Butts names that space: the room between who you've been and who you're becoming. She introduces the idea of a Chrysalis Season — not a waiting room, but a place where something is already stirring beneath the surface, long before it's visible from the outside. SHIFT is the framework for meeting that season with consciousness and courage, so it moves from a transition you simply endure to a transformation you intentionally choose. This episode doesn't offer a plan. It offers something more useful first: permission to notice where you actually are.

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