Something shifted. You can feel it. You just can't name it yet.
Stand Tall & Own It is for women in the second half of life who are high-functioning on the outside and quietly disoriented on the inside. You built your life inside systems you trusted completely — until you realized you couldn't tell what was actually yours from what you'd just learned to navigate well.
Host Andrea Johnson doesn't offer formulas. She offers honest thinking, sharp observation, and the kind of conversation that makes you pull over and sit in your driveway.
1 BIG IDEA Gratitude isn’t about pretending everything’s fine. It’s the practice of seeing clearly what remains true—of letting awareness, not avoidance, steady your heart. When life feels uncertain, gratitude grounds you in your Core Values and helps you lead from what’s still real, good, and enduring.
3 WAYS TO APPLY THIS
Pause before reacting. Name one truth that still holds steady, even in change.
Write a note of thanks for a value that showed up this season—in yourself or someone else.
Use Intentional Optimism to move your values into action: choose curiosity, courage, and presence over reactivity.
3 QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF
What value has anchored me through this season?
Where have I seen growth or grace, even in hardship?
Who might need to hear a word of thanks from me today?
ACTION STEP:
Choose one Core Value and one simple way to honor it this week—through gratitude, action, or acknowledgment. Let that be your steady place to lead from what’s still true.
🎁 Black Friday Special:When you purchase the Uncovering Your Core Values Digital Course between Friday, Nov 28-Dec 1, you’ll receive a free one-hour coaching session with me as a bonus. It’s the perfect time to get anchored in your Core Values — and step fully into the work that matters most.
You're listening to Stand Tall and Own It, a podcast for high-performing female leaders who are ready to make an impact by discovering the safety that comes from understanding their own values and exercising their own authority. I'm your host, Andrea Johnson, and I'm here to tell you it is time to just truly be you, my strong friend. It's time to stand tall and own it. You know, this week isn't about assuming that everyone is gathered around a big table. For some it's quiet, for others, it's complicated. And for many of us, it's just somewhere in between. You know, a mix of joy and loss, of connection or distance, of things we hoped would look different by now. Wherever you find yourself, surrounded by people, traveling, spending time and reflection, this is your space to pause and remember what's still true. Gratitude doesn't require celebration, it just asks for awareness. It's not about pretending things are fine or bypassing what's hard. It's about noticing what remains steady and allowing that truth to bring you peace. Welcome to Stand Tall and Own It, the podcast where we explore what it means to lead with authenticity and courage. I'm Andrea Johnson, leadership educator, consultant, and coach, and founder of The Intentional Optimist. Each week here, I share insights, frameworks, and real life stories to help you lead from your core values to think critically and to show up with quiet confidence in a noisy world. You know, gratitude is one of those words that gets tossed around a lot this time of year. We hear it in commercials, we see it printed in home decor, grateful, thankful, blessed. And while those words are beautiful, they can start to lose their meaning when they're used as a kind of emotional wallpaper. Because real gratitude, the kind that changes us, rarely shows up in perfectly framed moments. It shows up in the cracks, in the messy middle, in the ordinary, imperfect, ongoing story of our lives. For me, gratitude really isn't about a holiday or a list or even a ritual, though all of those things can be very meaningful. It's about awareness. It's the daily choice to notice what's still good, what's still real, still worth loving. And sometimes that noticing is the hardest work of all. Gratitude is not denial. It's not pretending everything is okay when it's not, or turning away from what's painful because it's uncomfortable. It doesn't require you to smile through grief or find silver linings in injustice, ever. That is not gratitude. That is performance. And gratitude isn't bypassing either. It's not a spiritual sleight of hand. Like these are not the hard things you're looking for, you know? It's meant to disturb or this spiritual sleight of hand that maybe is meant to distract us from what from what's actually going on. It's not about skipping the hard parts or moving too quickly to everything happens for a reason. Gratitude is something deeper, much truer. It's a kind of discernment. It helps us pause long enough to see clearly, to recognize what remains even when everything else is shifting. It is a form of spiritual and emotional clarity. Because when you stop and look closely, gratitude shows you what's still holding steady underneath all the noise. It's what allows us to say, yeah, this part really hurts. And yet, this other part is still really good. Yes, this changed, but this truth still remains. Gratitude is how we hold both the ache and the beauty without having to collapse into either one. It's the reminder that life doesn't have to be perfect to be worthy of thanks. And that's what makes gratitude so powerful as a leadership and life practice. It teaches us to tell the truth about our lives without losing hope in the process. Because the world doesn't slow down to give us time to process, does it? Change just keeps on coming. The ground keeps shifting, and gratitude, in its most honest form, says, you know, I see what's changing, and I also see what's not. It points us back to what endures, the constants that shape who we are when everything else feels very uncertain. This is your core values. They're not just words on a page or ideals that you revisit when life feels stable. They're the anchors you can return to when everything else feels unmoored. They're your through lines, the steady hum beneath all the noise, reminding you who you are and what still matters most. So maybe just take a breath with me for a second, breathe in, and as you breathe out, just let your shoulders drop and ask yourself quietly what truth still holds steady for me even as everything else changes? That question, that moment of pause is the beginning of real gratitude. Not the kind that demands a silver lining, but the kind that brings you back to the center. That's all the things that are true to bring you back to the things that are still true. Now, when life stretches us, and of course it will, our core values reveal what endures. They're the truths that hold steady even when everything else feels uncertain. If you're stretched thin and you can actually see through all the individual, you know, in-between parts, the core values are what you see underneath. They're like your bones. They remind us who we are and how we want to move through the world, even when the world around us feels like it's spinning. But here's the thing: values on their own are stillness. They're rooted, grounding, clarifying. But they can also feel a little abstract, like words just hanging in the air, waiting for something to activate them. And that's where intentional optimism is so helpful. It's the set of attitudes and mindsets that help you live your values out loud. They are the practices that keep your values from staying trapped in theory, the ways that you keep your inner world and your outer world actions completely aligned. When life gets loud or complicated, intentional optimism helps you remember what is true. It helps you move again so that you're not stuck in fear or frozen in place or isolating from the very things that could bring you back to life. So if your core values are the foundation, intentional optimism is the movement. It's how you take the truth of who you are and turn it into how you show up in the world. So let's walk through a little of what that looks like. For optimistic, it's that I still believe in possibility, even when the outcome is uncertain. I can trust that new doors do exist and that I am capable of finding them. In present, I can notice beauty right here, right now, and gratitude grows stronger when I slow down long enough to see what's already really good. Energetic, I can choose joy. Not the loud kind that ignores pain, but the quiet kind that fuels resilience. Courageous, I can just keep showing up. Even when I don't have all the answers, even when I'm tired or afraid. And wise means I can trust the lessons, all of them. I can learn from what's happened without letting it define me. And then intentional is choosing what matters next. I can take one small purposeful step toward alignment, even if the whole path isn't clear yet. These aren't about pretending everything is okay. I hope you didn't hear anything like that in those, in, in the examples of how I walked through the tenets, but they're about choosing how you want to move through whatever is happening. They're about staying aligned with your core values, not just when it's easy, but especially when it's not. And that's what gratitude makes visible. It helps you see how your values and these optimistic, courageous, intentional attitudes have quietly carried you through some of the hardest parts of your journey. When you pause to look back, gratitude reveals the steady thread. You've already been practicing alignment. Many times, you've already been moving in hope, even when you didn't realize it. If I'm honest, 2025 has been a hard year on many levels. In my family, in my church, in my country. Maybe you felt it too, that low, steady under girding of tension and change, where it's just hard to tell whether things are unraveling or finally getting reshaped into something truer. And looking back, I can see the sheer amount of transformation that's taken place. Some of it because of hardship, the kind that shakes us awake and forces us to completely see what we'd rather ignore, like shakes all the things loose and all the blinds are gone, right? Or the kind of hard work that builds strong muscles and new wisdom. The slow daily effort that makes us more resilient than we ever meant to be. But more often, I think growth has happened in spite of those hardships, because not every storm is the teacher. Sometimes it's just simply the backdrop that makes your strength visible. It reveals how much you've already grown and how much truth you were already living, how deeply your roots had already taken hold. And gratitude helps us notice the difference, the subtle but sacred contrast between what's been hard and what's been holy or sacred. It reminds us that both can exist at the same time. And when I look back over this year, I can see moments that felt like true endings, but were really beginnings in disguise. I can see relationships that stretched and strained yet somehow held. And I can see how even in the places that still ache, there's been a quiet undercurrent of goodness and a kind of grace that never really left. That's what gratitude does. It doesn't erase the struggle, it reframes it. It helps us hold the whole picture, the loss and the learning, the fatigue and the faith, the frustration and the forward motion. The shear's meant all of it. Heavy and hopeful, disorienting and clarifying, exhausting and formative. Gratitude lets us see it that way. Whole, complex, and still somehow beautiful. Because we stop long enough to notice we can see where the light still breaks through, where truth still anchors us, and where goodness, quiet, steady, and faithful, still persists. And maybe that's enough for now. To see it, to name it, to let it be enough. So today, let us take a moment to kind of pause together. Now, if you can, set down whatever's in your hands and cross your arms and let your shoulders relax. And place a hand on your heart. Take a slow breath in and let it out. Notice that you're here in this moment. Breathing, listening, reflecting. That's enough. Now ask yourself, what value anchored me in this season? What value anchored me? Maybe it was compassion. Maybe integrity. Maybe courage, patience, or creativity. Whatever it is, name it gently. And of course, keeping your hand on your heart, because this is sometimes we have to do this to remind us to be present, right? Where did you see that value in motion? Was it alive in your choices? Did you witness it in someone else? Did your community reflect it back to you in some small, unexpected way? Let your mind land on a clear image, a moment, a person, a memory that shows that value at work. And now I'd like to invite you to actually write a note. I'm not going to do it right here on the podcast, but it doesn't have to be long or perfect, but please do this. Just a few honest sentences to yourself or someone else. Naming that value and expressing gratitude for how it showed up. Because too often we think about what we're thankful for, but we never actually say it. We wait for the right moment or we assume that they know. I had a hard experience my junior year of high school. I had been to this, I grew up in Korea, so I went to an international school and I had been a cheerleader since seventh grade. My 10th grade year, I went back to the States and was in the marching band and enjoyed that, but came back and wanted to be a cheerleader again. And just in one year, things had changed so much. Like the cheerleading and the cheerleading uh teacher, instructor, coach, whatever was different. Um, there were new people there, old people were gone. And I was a little bit of a different person. I had grown a lot in that year. And when I auditioned and tried out, I didn't make it. I was so devastated. I did, it was part of my identity. I didn't know what to do with myself. And I had a teacher, a man named Jack Moon, Mr. Moon, and he came and found me and offered me a job with the basketball team, because that was the only, that was the main sport that we had, offered me a job with the basketball team as the statistician. I didn't know what that was. I didn't know how to do it, but it meant I could still, he made it very clear, you will travel with the team. My identity of being involved in the extracurricular activities with the basketball team, doing something with the basketball team, and being able to travel and be, I mean, I had a small school. There were only 30 people in my senior class. So when you've got 40 or 50 kids traveling for this stuff, it's like if you're not the one traveling, you can really feel left out. And something in him doing that, it clicked. It just it I felt seen. Um, statistician is a simple, you know, it's like you keep all the stats for the game. I learned a lot about basketball that year that I hadn't learned when I was a cheerleader. I met all the refs, I met all the players from all the other teams. Um, it was a delightful experience. Now I did become a cheerleader the next year. I went back to that, but there was something about that year with that offering, that being seen, that doing that for me in that really hard time in my life. I was, what, 16, 17? And I always wanted to thank him, but I didn't really realize how big of a difference he made until it was later. And it took me a long time. Finally, uh, I think several years ago, I was at a reunion and I saw him and I said, I have been meaning to like, I wanted to do it perfectly. I wanted to write this beautiful letter, or I wanted to like, uh, I don't know, email something. I wanted to make sure that I said it beautifully and poetically, you know, and all that stuff. But I realized I needed to just tell him, right? Before that moment doesn't come. And he's he's still alive. Don't worry. Um, there's no sad ending to the story. It's a good ending. I'm so glad I got to do that. Because how many times do we forget to thank someone or to express gratitude even to ourselves when and and then it's too late, right? So don't wait. Put it into words now. Let gratitude have a voice, not just a feeling. Whether you write it down, speak it out loud, or whisper it quietly. That simple act of acknowledgement turns gratitude into something tangible. It's how to keep the truth of what's still good alive in the world. One note, one breath, one act of thanks at a time. You know, gratitude turns what we have into enough. Not because it shrinks our desires, but because it reminds us we already stand on solid ground. Even in change, even in uncertainty, there's always something true to return to. Something that anchors us and steadies our feet when the world feels unsteady. So let this be your invitation to rest in that truth and to carry it with you into what's next. If you'd like to keep reflecting this week, here are a few questions to sit with. Because I know that this podcast is airing Tuesday before Thanksgiving on Thursday here in the United States, okay? So as you're walking into this week, what value has anchored you through the season? Where have you seen growth or grace even in hardship? What is still true no matter what's changed? And what might need to, and who, excuse me, who might need to hear a word of thanks from you today? Now, next week, it'll be December, Lord have mercy. We're gonna be looking ahead to 2026, but not in the usual way. Before you rush into new goals and fresh starts, we're gonna slow down and ask better questions, because that's just what we do here. Because sometimes real growth isn't about adding more, it's about recognizing what's already true and building from there. If you're ready for true reflection, a more intentional, grounded way to step into what's next, that's where we're gonna begin. And if you're ready to turn this reflection into practice, here's a good place to start. Download the Free Core Values Blueprint, the simplest way to get anchored in who you are and how you lead. Jump into the Uncovering Your Core Values Digital course. It's a guided way to connect your values to real decisions and moments of fear. You can join the Core Values Coaching program with me, where we pair one-on-one coaching with a self-paced course to help you build your steady, values-based confidence and keep doing the work that matters most. You'll find all the links in the show notes and grab what you need and keep this momentum going. And a quick heads up: a Black Friday special is coming for the Uncovering Your Core Values digital course. When you purchase between Friday, November 28th and Monday, December 1st, you're going to receive a free one-hour coaching session with me as a bonus. So you can do the course and then we will walk through it and make sure that you've got a really solid foundation. I'll share more details online and through social media, but if you've been waiting for a reason to jump in, this is it, okay? Now, before we close, I do want to thank two partners that help us make this work possible and who support leaders like you in growing with purpose. First is PodMatch. It's the platform that connected me with over a hundred podcasts in 2024. If you've been thinking or listening here and thinking, hmm, it might be time for me to use my voice, both PodMatch is the perfect place to start either your own podcast or to find the right podcast to share your message and connect with audiences who need what you have to say. So you can click, uh you can totally check it out at joinpodmatch.com forward slash the intentional optimist, or just find it in the show notes. And second is Liz Wilcox's email marketing membership. It's just $9 a month and it gives you everything you need to build your email list and stay consistent. And when you join through my link, you'll also get my Healthy Boundaries Make Happy Holidays masterclass free as a bonus, because now's the time to decide how you're going to navigate the holidays. They start this week. The conversations at the table, the long road trips, and all those differing opinions on, you know, just about everything, especially when they're unsolicited. This is where all of the core values work and leadership work shows up. And when you choose to stay steady, speak thoughtfully, and lead without shrinking, you will have peace yourself. But if you'd prefer to just grab the Healthy Boundaries Make Happy Holidays masterclass on its own, you'll find that link in the show notes as well. Both of the previous ones I mentioned are tools I personally use and I proudly recommend because they help leaders like you keep showing up fully, using your voice, leading with discernment, and staying grounded in courage. But for now, stand tall, lead like you mean it, and remember, gratitude isn't pretending everything is okay. It's recognizing what is still true and letting that be enough. Until next time.
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