Pentimento Podcast

What does it feel like when you just know?Elsa Elbert built a career without ever quite meaning to — fifteen years in healthcare administration, a leap into data center operations, and then a brief and painful (though informative) stint at a financial institution that put her off corporate ladders… perhaps for good. She’s now the founder of Composed Living, a professional organizing business she’s run for a decade and that’s grown from a solo operation into a team of fifteen, complete with a retail storefront in Woodland Hills. She also has her own podcast on the side.Elsa is a deliberate, careful thinker by nature — she reads, studies, and doesn’t rush decisions. But she traces nearly every major turn in her life back to something else: a handful of moments that arrived as sudden, whole-body certainty, moments she believes were only possible because of all that quieter groundwork. She talks about what that kind of intuition asks of a person, and a well-worn book of hers that keeps handing her something new depending on where she is in life.

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.