Erica Vander Sande on pivoting with AI, handing worry over to God, and learning when to step in and when to stay stepped out.

Erica opens this episode with a picture that has been on her heart: a giant, roaring river carving through the landscape, and everyone she knows being carried along by the rapids. Clients, team members, her kids, her husband, her friends. It feels like we are all being asked to let go of something at the same time.

For Erica, a big part of that is AI. After seven and a half years of running The Mina Company, she is modernizing how her agency works almost daily, which means some services, processes, and even some revenue may need to go. She loves the challenge, but she is honest about the unsteadiness it brings, and about how not everyone on her team feels the same way.

From there the episode gets personal and practical. Erica shares how she makes business decisions through daily meditation and conversations with God, including a very real debate over a spare office desk. She talks about letting go at home too, like the night her daughter came home with a disappointing history test grade and Erica chose not to spiral. She also walks through the energetic box and backpack visualization she uses to hand off anxiety, shame, and dread, and what stepping into a leadership season looks like when you are done doing everything yourself.

• A world in the rapids. Erica explains why this season feels like everyone is being forced to pivot at once, and why letting go is a muscle that gets stronger with practice.
• AI and the shaking ground. How constant change in the digital world is pushing Erica to rethink services, processes, and revenue at The Mina Company, and why she is loving the challenge even when it is unsettling.
• Settling the ground for her team. Erica talks about her role as a leader in helping people who do not thrive on change feel steady while things are shifting.
• Business meetings with God. How Erica uses meditation and daily conversations with her higher power to make decisions, including whether to keep paying for an empty desk heading into Q4.
• Trusting intuition over AI. Why Erica relies on gut feelings and spiritual guidance for the big calls, like when to hire and when to slow down, even while using AI for so much else.
• Letting go at home. Erica shares the story of her fifth grade daughter's history test, and how choosing not to make it about herself turned a stressful moment into a simple plan.
• The energetic box and backpack. The visualization Erica uses to hand over anxiety, dread, and shame, and why she calls it one of the most freeing things she does.
• Letting your team lead. What it looks like to watch someone else own a task, make mistakes, and fix them, and how Erica decides when to step back in.
• Becoming the student again. Erica shares why she wants a peer group of women who are further along in business and AI, and why she is choosing to be a learner in this season instead of the guide.
• Honest friends are gold. A short story about a sales email she almost took seriously, and the friend who set her straight in one sentence.
• Is this a peace worthy mission? Erica leaves listeners with a simple filter for decisions: lead with peace, and go wrestle with whatever feels off.

• Business inquiries: The Mina Company
• Personal connection and coaching: Erica Vander Sande

If this episode helped you loosen your grip on something, leave a review or share it with a friend who is standing at the edge of the river right now. New episodes of Conversations in the Dark are on the way. Subscribe so you don't miss what's next.

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Erica is a few weeks into the school year, navigating a new schedule with two kids in sports five days a week and not enough time to go home in between. In the middle of that chaos, her youngest daughter, seven years old and a spicy ADHDer, got moved up from the beginner jujitsu class to the 7 to 13 age group and completely fell apart in the car on the way to her first class.

What started as a parenting story turns into one of the more useful reframes Erica has offered on the show. She walks through the heart to heart she had with her daughter in that car, about the gap between deciding to grow and actually feeling ready, and why that in between stage is supposed to feel awful. Erica connects it back to her own biggest leaps, a home birth, starting a business eight months pregnant, running that business through her mom's death, and makes the case that bravery was never about feeling confident. It was about doing the thing scared anyway.

The episode closes with a funny, honest twist: the exact thing her daughter was most afraid of actually happened a few classes later, and what it looked like to get through it anyway.

• A packed fall schedule. Erica talks about the reality of sports five days a week, long gaps between school and practice, and choosing to be the one who absorbs her kids' after school meltdowns instead of outsourcing that time.
• Why she still shows up for pickup. Erica explains why she built her business around being able to pick her kids up from school, and what she gets out of those raw first 20 minutes in the car.
• The jujitsu meltdown. A full breakdown of her daughter's spiral before her first class in the older kids group, and what was actually underneath the tears.
• The gap between deciding and doing. Erica names the specific, uncomfortable in between stage that comes after you commit to growth but before you feel any momentum, and why so many people quit right there.
• Bravery is not confidence. Erica revisits her own biggest leaps, a home birth, launching Mina eight months pregnant, and running her business through her mother's death, to make the point that she never felt ready for any of them.
• Do it scared. Why waiting to feel brave before taking action gets the order backward, and what it actually looks like to move forward without the crystal ball.
• When the worst case scenario shows up anyway. The moment her daughter's biggest fear about jujitsu came true in class, and what it taught both of them about resilience.

Erica describes the exact image of growth: a tiny two or three inch window of time between deciding to do something hard and actually feeling momentum, where your inner voice is doing everything it can to talk you out of it.

• Business inquiries: The Mina Company
• Personal connection and coaching: Erica Vander Sande

Conversations in the Dark podcast, Erica Vander Sande, do it scared, parenting an ADHD child, kids and sports anxiety, growth mindset for moms, overcoming fear of failure, raising confident daughters, entrepreneur bravery, jujitsu for kids

If this episode gave you the push you needed, leave a review or share it with someone standing in that scary in between space right now. New episodes of Conversations in the Dark are on the way. Subscribe so you don't miss what's next.

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Erica Vander Sande on her 14th anniversary, the anxiety of good seasons, grief that shows up sideways, and learning to talk yourself off the ledge.

Erica is coming off a great weekend. She and her husband just celebrated their 14th wedding anniversary, and their anniversary dinner turned into a walk down memory lane through every season of their marriage. Somewhere in that conversation, Erica caught herself saying something she didn't expect: she wanted to avoid any more hard seasons.

That comment sat with her for two days, and this episode is her working through it out loud. She talks about why we instinctively try to dodge hard things, why that instinct is actually a waste of energy, and what it looks like to prepare for hard seasons without living in fear of them.

From there, the conversation goes deep into anxiety that shows up even when life is going well, grief that resurfaces in unexpected moments, and a practice Erica uses to talk herself through spirals: picturing every past version of herself sitting around a conference table, reminding her what she has already survived.

• A 14th anniversary and an honest slip. Erica shares what came up during her anniversary dinner and why she caught herself trying to avoid future hardship.
• Why avoiding hard things doesn't work. Erica explains the difference between planning for hard seasons and trying to skip them altogether, and why most of the best things in her life came out of the hardest ones.
• Anxiety that shows up when things are good. Erica opens up about the clenched fist feeling that creeps in even during genuinely good seasons, and why she can't always turn it off.
• The conference table exercise. A real look at how Erica talks to past versions of herself, at 20, 26, 30, and 32 years old, to remind her present self what she is actually capable of handling.
• Grief that shows up sideways. Erica connects her frustration with after school carpool chaos to a deeper grief over losing her mom, and how anger is often standing in for a different feeling entirely.
• The mama bear mentality. Why showing up for yourself first, the way you would for your own kids, changes how you handle stress, anger, and anxiety.
• When to outsource instead of white knuckle it. Erica talks about calling a friend, a family member, or a therapist when you can't think your way out of something on your own.

Erica compares holding onto anxiety during good seasons to her daughter learning to swim, gripping the side of the pool out of habit even though she already knows how to let go and swim on her own.

• Business inquiries: The Mina Company
• Personal connection and coaching: Erica Vander Sande

Conversations in the Dark podcast, Erica Vander Sande, anxiety and grief podcast, avoiding hard conversations, marriage and business owners, motherhood and anxiety, grief after losing a parent, entrepreneur mental health, mama bear mentality, meditation and mindset podcast

If this episode hit home, leave a review or share it with someone who needs a reminder that they have already survived their hardest days. New episodes of Conversations in the Dark are on the way. Subscribe so you don't miss what's next.

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