Shows / Grace & Grit Podcast
Grace & Grit Podcast
The Grace and Grit Podcast takes the health fairy tale you've heard all your life and turns it upside down and inside out, helping women rebuild their relationship with their body once and for all. Placing the focus on love and respect, rather than the aggressive demands and unrealistic expectations that have become the norm, Courtney Townley is determined to help women mend the fabric of what is driving the female health story.
Episodes
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 717: The Exhaustion of Being the Reliable One
I know this role well: the capable one. The woman who figures it out. Makes the call. Remembers the details. Handles the logistics. Notices what everyone else…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 716: You Don't Have to Solve Everything Today
Some problems have solutions. And some problems simply don't have solutions yet. That distinction can be incredibly difficult to tolerate when your brain wants…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 715: What Are You Carrying That Isn't Yours?
There's a difference between loving someone and assuming responsibility for their experience. A very big difference. And yet many of us have spent years…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 714: Your Attention Is More Valuable Than You Think
There is an extraordinary number of people, platforms, problems, and algorithms competing for your attention every single day. And most of them are very good…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 713: Why You Need More White Space in Your Life
A piece of music without rests isn't richer because every second contains sound. Eventually, it just becomes noise. Life isn't all that different. Yet we've…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 712: Are You Living at the Speed of Your Anxiety?
Have you ever caught yourself racing through your day when absolutely nothing is chasing you? Walking faster. Eating faster. Answering messages immediately…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 711: Maybe You Don't Need More Motivation
When something important keeps falling off your list, it's easy to assume you have a motivation problem. Maybe you need more discipline. More commitment. A…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 710: The Invisible Things Draining Your Energy
You can look at your calendar and think, "I shouldn't be this tired." But your calendar only shows what you're doing. It doesn't show everything you're…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 709: What Gets the Best of You—and What Gets the Scraps?
We say our health matters. Our relationships matter. Creativity matters. Joy matters. Being present for the people we love matters. But do those things…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 708: Your Energy Is Not an Unlimited Resource
We're pretty good at understanding that money is finite. If there's $300 in the account, spending $900 is eventually going to create a problem. And yet, we…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 707: When Your Life No Longer Fits Who You're Becoming
There comes a point in midlife when the strategies, expectations, roles, and routines that once worked beautifully start creating more friction than flow. Our…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 706: Finishing Strong vs Finishing Perfect
Strong does not always mean pushing harder. Sometimes it means knowing when to rest, when to ask for help, and when to give yourself permission to release…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 705: The Woman You Want to Be on January 1st Is Built Right Now
Every January, millions of women vow to start fresh. And most of them are starting from a significant deficit. What if the preparation started now instead? In…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 704: The Comparison Trap Gets Worse in the Fourth Quarter
Something specific happens at the end of the year that makes comparison particularly sharp. The natural impulse to take stock collides with the curated…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 703: What Does Your Body Need This Time of Year?
This time of year, a lot of attention goes toward what other people need. What the family needs. What the gatherings require. What the season demands. And…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 702: Rest Before the Rush Is a Strategy
In endurance sports there is a practice called tapering. In the weeks before a major race, athletes deliberately reduce their training volume. Not because they…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 701: How to Protect Your Non-Negotiables When Life Gets Full
The season will expand to fill whatever space you give it. You get to decide how much that is. In this episode I distinguish between what is truly…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 700: The Difference Between Coping and Recovering
Coping and recovering can look remarkably similar from the outside. Both involve a pause in the difficulty. Both offer some form of relief. But they produce…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 699: Your Relationship With Alcohol Deserves an Honest Look
There is something interesting about the things we have done long enough that we stop questioning them. They become invisible. We cannot imagine life without…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 698: Self-Expression Is a Health Practice
There is a particular kind of aliveness that comes from doing something that is completely, authentically yours. Not a template. Not someone else's version of…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 697: The Art of Saying No Without Explaining Yourself
Most of us were never taught to say no cleanly. We were taught to soften it, justify it, apologize for it, and wrap it in so much explanation that the other…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 696: Finding Your Center
Most of us treat feeling centered as something that happens to us when circumstances are favorable. But what if center is not something you feel when things…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 695: Regulating Your Nervous System Will Make Some People Uncomfortable
When you start doing the work of regulating your nervous system, something interesting happens. You feel better. You make clearer decisions. You stop absorbing…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 694: Emotional Hunger vs Physical Hunger
We spend enormous amounts of time and energy managing what we eat. Very few of us have been taught to ask why we are eating. In this episode I explore the…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 693: Accountability Tools vs Self-Leadership
The wellness market is full of tools designed to hold you accountable. And most of them are genuinely useful. But there is something none of them can do. And…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 692: Find Out Who You Are and Do It on Purpose
Dolly Parton once said: find out who you are and do it on purpose. In a world that constantly invites us to be something other than ourselves, doing it on…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 691: What You Practice Now You Will Live in December
Every year, millions of women arrive in January exhausted, depleted, and vowing to start over. And every year, the same pattern produced that outcome: a slow…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 690: The Sleep Divorce and Other Brave Sleep Decisions
There is a decision that a growing number of women are making quietly, usually without telling many people, because they are not sure how it will be received…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 689: Letting Go as a Form of Nutrition
We talk about nutrition almost exclusively in terms of food. But there is another kind of nourishment that rarely gets discussed: the kind that becomes…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 688: Boundaries Are Not a Personality Trait
There is a story we tell about boundaries that sounds like this: some people just have them and some people do not. Today I want to dismantle that story…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 687: The Portfolio Mindset for Your Body
What if you thought about your body the way a smart investor thinks about a financial portfolio? Some assets are highly liquid and relatively easy to adjust…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 686: Defining Enough
If you do not define what enough means for yourself, you will spend your entire life chasing it. And here is the cruelest part: you will never catch it. In…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 685: How to Stay Yourself When Everyone Wants Something From You
The fourth quarter of the year has a particular quality to it. Demands increase. Schedules fill. Other people's needs multiply. And if you have not decided in…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 684: Food Without the Fuss
Before you follow anyone else's food rules, do you even know what your own are? And where did the beliefs you are currently living by actually come from? In…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 683: You Get to Change Your Mind
There is a version of commitment that has nothing to do with integrity. It is the stubborn adherence to a decision you made in a different season of your life…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 682: Intentional Periodization
You would not expect a professional athlete to train at peak intensity fifty-two weeks a year. Their coach would never allow it. In this episode I make the…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 681: The Power of Critical Thinking for Your Health
The wellness world is extraordinarily good at selling certainty. And most of us, somewhere between the compelling testimonial and the limited-time offer, stop…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 680: How You Show Up Is a Choice
There are two sentences I use in coaching that have the power to completely shift how someone moves through a difficult relationship. They are not complicated…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 679: The Stories We Tell About Our Bodies in the Mirror
There is a voice that shows up every time you step in front of the mirror. It has opinions. It compares, it critiques, it comments on everything. And most of…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 678: Define Success Before You Chase It
Most people spend their lives chasing success without ever stopping to define what that word means to them. And the cost of that oversight is enormous. In this…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 677: Resentment Is a Signal, Not a Sentence
Resentment has a bad reputation. We treat it like something to be ashamed of, pushed through, or managed away as quickly as possible. But resentment is not the…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 676: Your Power Statement
Most of us make decisions reactively. Something comes up and we respond based on how we feel in that moment, what someone else needs, or what seems like the…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 675: Are You Becoming More Alive as You Age?
We have a lot of metrics for health. Steps, sleep scores, bloodwork, body composition, VO2 max. And I am not dismissing any of them. But there is a question…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 674: Stop Gaslighting Your Own Body
Your body is sending you signals constantly. Hunger. Fullness. Fatigue. Tension. Overstimulation. The need to move. The need to stop. And most of us have spent…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 673: When Did You Make Going Outside Hard?
It is too hot. It is too cold. There are no sidewalks in my neighborhood. I do not have the right shoes. I do not have enough time. We have become…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 672: The Case for Eating With Other People
In the Blue Zones, the regions of the world where people consistently live past 100 in good health, researchers kept finding the same things. And one of the…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 671: Stop Trying to Get Your Old Body Back
It is not a privilege that our bodies change. It is a privilege that we lived long enough to change. In this episode I challenge the assumption that a past…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 670: Your Environment Is Coaching You
In 2012, Google noticed its employees were eating too much candy. Rather than lecturing them about nutrition or appealing to their willpower, a team of…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 669: The Return on Ordinary Days
Almost no one talks about the Tuesday. The ordinary, unmemorable, nothing-particularly-special Tuesday that is, in fact, the primary unit of a life. In this…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 668: Your Sleep Is a Report Card
Sleep is not a switch. It is a harvest. And what you harvest at night depends almost entirely on what you planted during the day. In this episode I reframe…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 667: Are You Lonely or Just Under-Connected?
Loneliness and under-connection are not the same thing. And if you are treating them as the same problem, you may be reaching for the wrong remedy entirely. In…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 666: You Probably Don't Need a Better Morning Routine
The wellness world has sold us a very elaborate lie about mornings. That the quality of your day depends on a precise sequence of activities completed before…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 665: The Health Benefits of Being Bad at Something
When was the last time you did something you were genuinely not good at? Not working toward being good at it. Just doing it, badly, for the pure experience of…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 664: The Art of Doing One Thing at a Time
We pride ourselves on multitasking. But the research on this is unambiguous: what we call multitasking is actually task-switching. And we do everything worse…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 663: Simplicity Is a Health Practice
The women who tend to their health most consistently are not always the most informed. They are often the ones who have simplified enough to actually follow…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 662: A Love Letter to Walking
Back in July I made the research case for walking. Today I want to do something different. I want to tell you what walking has actually given me. In this…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 661: Your Life Needs More Awe
Rachel Carson wrote that those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. I have been thinking about that…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 660: Rest Is Not the Same as Doing Nothing
Lying on the couch scrolling your phone is inactivity. But it is not rest. In this episode I draw a clear distinction between what restores a human being and…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 659: Where Is Your Third Place?
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg spent his career studying something most of us have never thought to name. He called it the third place. Not home. Not work. The…
- Grace & Grit Podcast
Episode 658: You Are Not What You Consume. You Are What You Absorb.
The more accurate version of "you are what you eat" is this: you are what you absorb. And the same is true of information. In this episode I explore the…