The WonderMama Coffee Chat | Real Conversations for Moms

What not to say to someone who is grieving, and what to offer instead. Marilyn Morales and Nicky Cuesta join the WonderMama Coffee Chat to talk about Please Don’t Say That: Stories of Loss, Love, and Legacy, the new grief anthology launching October 24, 2026. Some of the most painful words a grieving person hears come from people who love them and never meant to hurt them. Fellow contributing author Ami Maikoski, who wrote chapter 22, joins us too, and I am honored that my own chapter, chapter 23, “This Beautiful Scar,” is the first time I have shared the story of my first son, Muhammad.Marilyn, a nurse of nearly 40 years, shares the story of her daughter Isabella, who was diagnosed with a rare leukemia at seven months old. Nobody in the family was a match for the stem cell transplant she needed, and Marilyn learned how few Latino, Black and mixed heritage donors are on the registry. That discovery became her first book, When the Answer Is No: Finding Purpose Through Pain, and her nonprofit, Izzy’s Legacy, which supports families on a cancer journey. Then, at three o’clock one morning in June, she woke with the title, the cover and the guidebook for Please Don’t Say That, and called the one person she knew could help her bring it to life.That person was Nicky Cuesta, founder of BALM Global, who coordinated, edited and published all 31 chapters in under four months, while honoring her own brother, Milton, in chapter 8. Ami shares why, after years of holding space for others at the end of life, she wrote about the hardest goodbye of all, her own mother’s.In this conversation, we explore the words that wound people who are grieving, and what to offer instead, why this book is meant to be read slowly, one story at a time, how one mother’s loss became a movement,and why every one of us will need this conversation one day.Every purchase gives back. 100% of the proceeds support the families Izzy’s Legacy serves through its partnership with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a portion goes to the Miguel Soto Memorial Fund, which will sponsor a young person through their GED and high school diploma.Get your copy of Please Don’t Say That and the companion guidebook:https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/izzys-legacy-incs-shopConnect with our guestsMarilyn Morales, Izzy’s Legacy Inc.: https://www.izzyslegacyinc.orgNicky Cuesta, BALM Global: https://balm-global.comAmi Maikoski: https://amimaikoski.comConnect with Leonne Sherr, https://LeonneSherr.comJoin usThe conversation continues every week inside The WonderMama Community, where members join our private Q&A with each guest after the live show. https://www.skool.com/the-wondermama-cycle-breakers-5827The WonderMama Coffee Chat is live every Wednesday at noon EST on Facebook, then is posted to YouTube and wherever you listen to podcasts.#TheWonderMama #TheWonderMamaCommunity

If the world feels like it is changing faster than you can keep up with, for yourself and for your kids, this conversation was made for you. Matt Zembruski, founder and CEO of AI Agility and host of the AI Accelerator Podcast, sits down with Leonne Sherr to talk honestly about the fear so many moms carry around AI, and how we can move through it with intention instead of waiting on the sidelines.Matt grew up with two parents who spent their whole careers in human resources, and that is how he is wired, with more than thirty years of helping people through change and a belief that technology should make us faster and happier at the same time. He shares why fear around AI is completely natural, why we are still in the very early days, and why freedom so often lives on the other side of being scared.Together they explore how to begin by playing on purpose, getting clear on what matters most to you before you ever open an AI tool, and how parents can become the layer of safety their kids need right now while the technology is still catching up. Leonne asks whether a parent could set up a Strategic Command Center with clear rules for their child inside Claude or ChatGPT, and Matt explains how that can work. The conversation closes where it always should, with the reminder that no technology replaces the human connection we share with our children.Connect with Matt ZembruskiWebsite: https://leadingaiagility.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattzembruskiPodcast: The AI Accelerator Podcast, on Apple Podcasts and wherever you listenConnect with The WonderMamaThe conversation continues inside The WonderMama Community, where we gather for real conversations, support and our private Q&A after every live show. The door is always open: https://www.skool.com/the-wondermama-cycle-breakers-5827Website: https://TheWonderMama.comNew episodes go live every Wednesday at noon Eastern on Facebook, then on YouTube @TheWonderMamaPlace and wherever you listen to podcasts.#TheWonderMama #TheWonderMamaCommunity

How do we raise kids who can look someone in the eye, really listen, and build relationships that carry them through life, when so many eyes, ours included, are fixed on a screen? On this episode of the WonderMama Coffee Chat, I talk with speaker, author and coach Scott Schilling about raising great connectors, setting healthy screen time boundaries, and why our kids learn connection from what they watch us do far more than from anything we tell them.Scott shares why connection is a skill kids and moms can both learn, why his phone goes down every night at 6:30, what the pandemic years changed for our kids' social skills, and how the small everyday moments at home quietly shape who our children become. It's a warm, honest conversation for moms who want to model the connection they hope to see, with no shame in starting exactly where you are.Chapters0:00 Welcome and meet Scott Schilling2:09 Kids, eye contact and screens3:10 Phone boundaries: "If you don't control them, they will control you"5:16 What real connection feels like7:04 Pandemic kids and learning to reconnect9:50 Why connection is a learnable skill11:07 Kids learn what we model13:26 How to start building the skill at home15:05 Motion is lotion: decisions that change everything16:56 Act as if you're on camera, because kids are always watching18:49 What children witness at home22:18 Moms as their children's first leaders24:34 How to connect with Scott27:03 Notice, decide, moveConnect with Scott: ScottSchilling.com · scott@scottschilling.comJoin us in The WonderMama Community: skool.com/the-wondermama-cycle-breakers-5827/aboutLearn more: TheWonderMama.com#TheWonderMama #TheWonderMamaCommunity

The Person Who Gets Help Is the One Who Sees the Need:Julie Lanphear spent years watching her husband's health come apart under job stress, and then watching him reach for prescriptions and alcohol to steady himself, and for most of that time she believed the only thing that would fix her life was him getting better. She sat in a library one afternoon because she could not bring the books home, and she read a sentence that changed the direction of everything, which was that the person to get help is the person who sees the need for help.In this conversation Julie talks about what it actually took to go get that help, including the night she asked a friend to invite her to dinner so she would have something to tell her husband about where she had been, and what she found when she finally walked into a room she had been calling the club nobody wants to join. She talks about learning that happiness is an inside job, about putting the locus of control back on herself, and about why she now believes that help is everywhere and that there are at least a hundred solutions to any problem.Julie is the founder of Julie Lanphear Coaching, and she brings more than twenty five years across education, healthcare, leadership and coaching to the work of helping people find their footing when life throws changes they did not ask for.Some of what we cover:* Why you do not have to have the whole map, only your next brave step* What it means to hold space for someone without handing them advice they cannot use* Why repressed feelings surface in the grocery store and on client calls, and why that is survivable* Why she starts with people one on one before she ever invites them into community* The question that starts everything, which is whether you are willing to be willingConnect with Julie Lanphearjulielanphear.comlinkedin.com/in/julie-lanphearThe WonderMama Coffee Chat goes live every Wednesday on Facebook, and afterward we drop into a private conversation inside The WonderMama Place with the women of our community.TheWonderMama.comskool.com/the-wondermama-cycle-breakers-5827/about#TheWonderMama #TheWonderMamaCommunity

Tauna Petersen joins Leonne from Colorado to talk about what we learn about money long before anyone sits us down to explain it.Tauna is a financial strategist and the founder of Ohana Financial, and ohana means family, which turns out to be the whole point. She grew up one of eight, went to cosmetology school out of high school because she loved helping women feel good about themselves, and found her way into money through the mortgage industry and a credit union, where she discovered how little financial education anybody is ever given.She was also a single mother doing hair out of a one bedroom apartment while driving for Uber, with her son in the only bedroom and herself in the living room. That part matters, because when she talks about a scarcity mindset she is not describing someone else.In this conversation we get into the three rules of money she teaches every client, what to do when saving twenty five cents is genuinely all you can manage, and why she believes the work is mindset before it is ever maths. Leonne shares the night the lights got shut off and what her sons remember about it, which is not what she remembers at all.Tauna's line, and the one that stayed with us: it's caught, not taught.Come and find us:The WonderMama · https://thewondermama.comThe WonderMama Community · https://www.skool.com/the-wondermama-cycle-breakers-5827/aboutFind Tauna Petersen on LinkedIn.The WonderMama Coffee Chat goes live every Wednesday.

This week on The WonderMama Coffee Chat I sat down with Gail Harris, a certified ghostwriter who works with women on their memoirs and who calls herself a story doula.We all have a story, and I have been thinking about how much of the story we tell ourselves was actually written by us. Some of it comes from what happened to us, and some of it comes from our families, our relationships, the roles we took on, the work we built, and the expectations other people set down in front of us. Somewhere along the way all of that becomes a story about who we are, and most of us never stop to ask who was holding the pen.Gail's answer is that we get to decide what we carry forward and what we set down, and that discovering who we really are begins with letting go of who we are not. She talks about why so many women believe their story could not possibly matter to anyone, and why that is almost never true, because our outward experiences are different but our lessons underneath them overlap, which is exactly why reading someone else's story can make you feel less alone in your own.She also shares her own. The divorce at fourteen that turned her into someone who braced for the worst, the years of not trusting the voice she could already hear, and the book she finally could not not write. She tells us about an author named Brandy and the way a story she was helping someone else carry turned out to be preparing her for something in her own life years later. And then, with a generosity I am still sitting with, she reads a poem she wrote after losing her twin daughters, Susanna and Sophia, and she explains how putting the grief on the page was the thing that let her begin to accept it.Near the end I asked her to describe the woman she most loves working with, and her answer is worth staying for, because if she is describing you, you will know it.If you have ever wondered whether there is a book in you, or whether your story is worth telling, or if you have simply been carrying something you do not know how to put down, this conversation is for you.Writing heals. Even if all you do is open a journal and let the pen start.Connect with Gail HarrisGolden Ghostwritinggoldenghostwriting.comgail@goldenghostwriting.comLinkedIn: Gail Harris@goldenghostwritingConnect with Leonne Sherrthewondermama.comleonne@thewondermama.comlinktr.ee/CoachLeonneThe WonderMama Coffee Chat is live every Wednesday at noon Eastern on Facebook, and the conversation continues afterward inside The WonderMama Community. Come be with us at thewondermama.com.

How to Raise Confident Kids Before the World Defines Them | Mark Papadas, I AM 4 KidsEvery parent wants to raise a confident child, but what shapes a child's confidence and sense of identity long before we realize it? In this episode of the WonderMama Coffee Chat, host Leonne Sherr sits down with Mark Papadas, founder of I AM 4 Kids and "The Be Great Guy," to talk about building confidence, resilience, and a strong sense of self in children before the world's louder voices define them.Mark's mission began with a single night, a "divine download" at 1:30 in the morning after a youth football coach praised his son. He went downstairs, picked up a legal pad, and wrote for six hours. Eighty percent of what I AM 4 Kids is today came from that night.In this conversation, we explore:What an "I AM statement" is, and why most people never consciously chose theirsWhy children are like "wet cement," and what shocked Mark in his pilot classroomsHis five-step process for helping kids (and parents) rewrite the story they carryThe best age to build a child's identity and confidence, before the cement driesThe difference between a child's baggage and the "steamer trunks" the rest of us carryMark's bigger vision, from family and school programs to an animated, reality-based show built on real stories of real kidsIf you are raising children, or raising yourself right alongside them, this is a conversation about the words that shape a life, and the power you already have to change them.Connect with Mark PapadasI AM 4 Kids, "The Be Great Guy"Email: mark@iam4kids.comConnect with Leonne Sherr and The WonderMamaWebsite: theWonderMama.comJoin the community: skool.com/the-wondermama-cycle-breakers-5827/aboutEmail: leonne@theWonderMama.comNew episodes every Wednesday at noon Eastern. Subscribe so you never miss a conversation about motherhood, parenting, confidence, and raising emotionally healthy kids.

The Coaching Method You Have Never Heard Of: Sheli Dodson on Getting Unstuck at the Root This week on The WonderMama Coffee Chat, I sat down with Sheli Dodson, the founder of Desiderata Consulting, for a conversation unlike any we have had on the show. Sheli works with the woman so many of us recognize, the high achiever who looks like she has it all together on the outside, while quietly feeling like she is barely holding it together underneath. She is part cheerleader, part drill sergeant, and she meets a woman right where she actually is.Sheli spent 26 years in banking and finance before she left the corporate world to become a full-time traveler by calling. What made her successful in that career turned out to be the very thing her coaching is built on, the ability to look past the surface, past the story someone tells you, to what is actually happening underneath. As she traveled and stayed in the homes of friends and strangers alike, she watched the polished facade fall away after a few days, and she saw the real, messy middle of people's lives. That is where her work was born.At the heart of our conversation is a modality I had never encountered before, called Splunkna. Sheli explained it as a faith-centered approach that brings body, mind, and spirit back together. Drawing on the idea that the body keeps the score of our experiences, Splunkna gets beneath the why, to the emotions and the stories we have carried for years, so we can finally set them down. She talked about big T trauma and little T trauma, the death or divorce that reshapes a life, and the small moment in seventh grade that quietly taught us a lie about who we are. Both leave their mark, and both can be released.We talked about the fork in the road that opens up when you are no longer ruled by your triggers, the freedom to choose how you respond rather than react. We went deep into the forgiveness work at the center of it all, forgiving ourselves, forgiving others, and even the honest, human struggle of forgiving God. And Sheli shared something beautiful about how she holds space for her clients, the way the heavy things people entrust to her simply do not stay with her afterward. She calls it a God filter. She does not carry it, because it was never hers to carry.This is a tender, honest, and genuinely fascinating conversation about what it takes to get unstuck when you cannot think your way out, and about the kind of grace we so freely give others and so rarely give ourselves.Sometimes the bravest work is letting yourself set down the weight you were never meant to carry.Connect with Sheli DodsonDesiderata Consulting: reach Sheli through the contact form on her website, where you can also explore her three primary programs, SPARK, Splankna, and her immersive live-in experience, or simply schedule a meet and greet to see if you two are a fit.https://desiderataconsulting.com/spark/Connect with meWebsite: https://thewondermama.comJoin our WonderMama Community on Skool: https://www.skool.com/the-wondermama-cycle-breakers-5827/aboutWe go live every Wednesday at noon EST on Facebook, then drop into a private conversation with our WonderMama Community members. Join us live, and if you find yourself wanting to be part of the conversation, come join us inside.

This week I sit down with Jason Palter, Certified Hypnotist and founder of the Greater Toronto Hypnosis Centre, to clear up one of the most misunderstood tools out there. Forget the swinging watch and the stage show. Jason helps people get out of their own heads so they can finally make the changes they have been trying to make for years, breaking habits, reaching goals, and building real confidence from the inside out.We talk about what hypnosis actually is, what it feels like, how it works, and the everyday hypnotic states we all move in and out of without realizing it. If you have ever been curious about hypnosis but were not quite sure what to believe, this is an honest, grounded conversation that will help it finally make sense.Connect with Jason PalterGreater Toronto Hypnosis CentreWebsite: greatertorontohypnosis.comEmail: jason@greatertorontohypnosis.comConnect with Leonne Sherr and The WonderMamaWebsite: theWonderMama.comJoin the community: skool.com/the-wondermama-cycle-breakers-5827/aboutEmail: leonne@theWonderMama.comThe WonderMama Coffee Chat goes live every Wednesday at noon Eastern on Facebook, then continues inside the WonderMama Community for a more intimate live Q&A. Listen to the audio podcast on Apple, Spotify, and Podbean, and subscribe here on YouTube so you never miss a conversation.

Risk is a scary word when you are the one holding everything together.This week on The WonderMama Coffee Chat, I sat down with Luis Guaman, founder of Financially Golden, and we talked about the thing most of us avoid looking at directly. Money. Not in a spreadsheet way, in an honest way.Luis knows this from the inside. Seven years ago he was carrying between fifty and seventy thousand dollars in personal credit card debt with a six hundred credit score. Today he has zero personal debt and an eight ten. But what stayed with me was not the turnaround. It was the three years he spent overthinking after he walked away from his old company, because he had jumped without any stability underneath him. He calls that his strongest failure, and he shares it so nobody listening has to repeat it.We talked about what it actually looks like to start something new when you are responsible for other people. Not leaping. Building quietly alongside the life you already have. Giving a small percentage of your time and your money a specific job, so that trying something new stops feeling like gambling and starts feeling like practice.Luis said something I keep coming back to. Money is a form of life force. So when you put money toward the thing you are curious about, you are not being reckless. You are respecting yourself enough to invest in what might be next.We also got into the parts nobody explains. Why your credit score is only one of seven things lenders look at. Why business credit does not touch your personal credit, and why that matters so much for anyone who has been quietly funding a business with a personal card. And why applying to three places on your own, without knowing what underwriters want, can lock you out of approval for six months through no fault of your own.That last part is where his passion showed. He called it what it is. Not fair.If you have been standing at the edge of something, wondering whether it is possible, this conversation is a good place to start.Financially Golden is currently offering a free credit audit. Luis was clear that this will not last forever.Connect with Luis GuamanWebsite: financiallygolden.comText: 332-244-5740Instagram: @financiallygoldenConnect with Leonne SherrWebsite: thewondermama.comEmail: Leonne@theWonderMama.comInstagram: @thewondermamaplaceCommunity: The WonderMama Place on SkoolThe WonderMama Coffee Chat is live every Wednesday at noon Eastern on Facebook, with a private conversation inside The WonderMama Community right after. Audio on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Podbean.For the mom who is ready to be fully herself.