Pentimento Podcast

What happens when the story you've told about yourself turns out to be wrong?Joe Albert spent his early years labeled a slow kid — tracked out of college prep as a freshman and found himself on a vocational track with a group of boys who nicknamed themselves accordingly. A single class at a Jesuit college in Philadelphia changed that, launching him into decades of work in peace and justice ministry, education, and eventually the founding of a storytelling movement that's still running strong today.Years later, in the same stretch of time that brought the loss of his wife and a cardiac arrest that nearly killed him, two old friends — independently, months apart — told him something about himself he had never let himself consider. The story he'd carried his entire life turned out to be one he'd gotten wrong.

What happens when it falls apart slowly?Janet Clancy-Feliciano didn't set out to find her path. A phone call from a family member in the middle of the night led her to grad school almost by accident — and from there into a career she never would have guessed for herself, one that has stayed genuinely curious about her studies all the way through her current doctoral work at Gonzaga's School of Leadership Studies.But the deeper shift in her life didn't happen in a single moment. It came slowly, in what she describes as "death by a thousand cuts," and it forced her to stop looking outward and start asking a harder question: what was her own part in it.

What happens when you know you want to take a next step, but you have no idea where to place your foot?In this episode, Mike talks with Carrie Donker, a learning experience designer and executive coaching consultant, about a pattern that keeps showing up across her life: stepping into the unknown, from moving to a foreign country alone to volunteer, to leaving a leadership firm she loved at thirty, often before she felt ready. Carrie shares how a season of quiet burnout led to a sabbatical, a hard conversation, and an ending that felt chosen for her more than by her, and the self-trust she had to build in its wake.She also returns to a prayer she first learned as a nightly ritual in Guatemala, one that later found its way back to her through an unexpected gift. A conversation about choosing instead of waiting to be chosen, and learning to trust your own wings more than the branch you're standing on.

What do you do when the path you're insisting on working just isn’t working... because life has something else in mind?In this episode, Mike sits down with Jeff Rosick — composer, actor, graphic artist, and the producer behind this very podcast — to talk about the years that took him from a Gonzaga stage to Friday Night Lights to a decade of quietly resisting what life was trying to tell him. Jeff shares the story of being with his mother in her final weeks, a moment with a hospice nurse that changed how he understood letting go, and a lifelong return to a favorite film and its final act of surrender.A conversation about resistance, release, and what it means to stop steering, start listening, and witness the beauty and awe in allowing life to unfold.

Linda Latto has spent her career asking one question: what is being asked of me right now?She has answered it from Alaska to Georgia to Seattle to Portland to Southern California, across roles in real estate, healthcare, government, and now coaching and consulting. But the through-line was never the job title.In this conversation, Linda traces a world-cracking moment in her mid-twenties, the slow healing that followed, and how a Catholic school she never expected to feel at home in, a cassette tape, and a week in Florence each quietly reoriented the course of her life.She also reflects on what it means to walk beside someone who is struggling without needing to know their story first — and why that has become the heart of her work.