Hey, beautiful boss mom. Pull up a chair. (And forgive the stuffy nose this week. My almost-13-year-old gave me his cold, and when he goes from tween to little boy who wants to cuddle, I cannot help myself. Worth it.)

This week is an interview, and it’s one of my favorites in a long time. I met Keira Brinton at a virtual summit. I took one look at her energy and thought, ooh, okay, this one. We became fast friends. And when she started talking about her motherhood and her stories, I knew I had to get her on the show.

Here is what makes this episode different. Keira is high energy in the exact way I am, so the two of us together will get you fired up to go do the thing. But she also got vulnerable in a way I did not see coming. I asked her a question; she literally said she wasn’t sure she wanted to answer it, and then she answered it anyway. What she said is something almost every mom has felt. I’ll let you find that moment yourself.

The thread running through this whole conversation is simple: trusting your intuition is not woo. It is the fastest path to action. When you stop avoiding the thing you’re scared of, things start moving at the speed of light. Get your coffee. Let’s get into it.

About the Guest: Keira Brinton

Keira Brinton is the founder of JOA Publishing and is known as The People’s Publisher. She’s a single mother of five who built a multi-million-dollar company in three years, and she merges deep spiritual devotion with uncompromising strategy. She sits with authors and helps them write the books that turn them into the leaders they’re called to be. She’s a TEDx speaker, a seven-time author, a podcast host, and the executive producer of Writer’s Island.

If you’ve ever felt the quiet pull to write a book but had no idea where to begin, start with her Mini Book Activator Course ($197). It’s a short, guided training that helps you recognize the message already living inside your experience and how a book can become a doorway to bigger leadership and impact. You can also find her on Instagram, which she says is the fastest way to connect.

Face Your Dragon: The Story That Opens This Episode

Keira told me a story before we even hit record, and I made her tell it again on the mic because it’s that good.

Everything in her business had been working. She left a 20-year marriage three years ago, became financially responsible for five kids overnight, made multiple millions, landed a TV show. And then, about nine months ago, everything started to tank. Same actions, same effort, same hours with her editors and her team. The numbers just stopped matching the work.

She went to her mentor, a man who’d sold his company for tens of millions, expecting a sales fix. Instead, he said:

“You have to face your dragon. You have to figure out what you’re avoiding.” — Keira Brinton

She insisted she wasn’t avoiding anything. She was in therapy. She was doing the work. Then one early morning in her prayer corner, she saw it: a contract she’d been handed nine months earlier and had never signed. A contract that would legally tie her to a big name in her industry for two years. Being owned for two years pulled her right back into the energy of being owned for twenty.

So she hired a lawyer, paid the money, sat down, named exactly what she needed, and had the contract redrafted on her own terms. The other party signed.

Everything worked within two weeks. The TV show got edited. Her software got built. She launched a brand-new live talk show. She had a $144,000 day. Four new people joined her publishing house. Nine months of stuck, gone in fourteen days, because she finally faced the one thing she’d been working around.

What You Feel Inside Shows Up Outside

Here’s the part Keira teaches all the time, and then had to live as a student of her own work:

“Whatever you feel inside will show up on your outer environment. I felt imprisoned, so everywhere in my life I was in a prison.” — Keira Brinton

This is why I’m so big on self-awareness. Most of us are trained to ask the wrong question when things go sideways. We ask, “Why is this bad thing happening to me? Why won’t this work? Why is my partner being the worst?” Those questions keep you stuck in the loop.

The better question is the one Keira lives by: something’s not right, let’s go digging. That little instinct, the one that says this feels off, is your intuition trying to hand you the answer. So much of this comes down to managing the emotion underneath it instead of reacting to it. When you treat the discomfort as information instead of evidence that you’re broken, you get to have a completely different future.

The Friendship Part Nobody Talks About

This is the moment I mentioned. I asked Keira about her friend circle, fully expecting a list of names, and she got quiet and said she didn’t love the question. Then she answered it anyway, because saying the hard thing out loud is almost always where the relief lives.

She walks a fairly lonely road. She’s surrounded by clients and communities she adores, but close friendship has been a tender spot, especially coming off a hard falling-out with someone who’d been her best friend. She loves deeply and fast, and she’s learning to let people in at a pace that feels safe.

What landed for me was how clearly she knows herself in it:

“If you’re gonna be my friend, you have to have the capacity to handle my intensity. I’m no longer going to take care of people in my world. I’m just allowing those who can show up and say, yeah, your intensity is just like breakfast for me.” — Keira Brinton

I sat with that, because I walk a lonely road too. I don’t want proximity friends. I don’t want the neighbor coming over on a Thursday, mostly because I end up coaching the whole neighborhood and it’s exhausting. What I want is what Keira and I have, where we can go three weeks without a message and pick right back up, because we run at the same speed.

Here’s why I’m putting this in the post instead of cutting it. A lot of us are going to lose people as we grow. Some marriages, some friendships, some relationships that were built around a smaller version of us. That’s not failure. The more you know yourself and what you actually want, the more you understand why some of those losses happen, even the painful ones. And it’s okay to be a little guarded right now, as long as you’re self-aware about the fact that you’re guarding.

Why Books Are the Thing That Lasts

Keira’s whole life’s work is helping people write books, so I asked how she fell into it. The short version is anything but short, and it is incredible.

She believes books are the one thing that lives beyond us. Nobody held a cassette tape and assumed it would disappear, and we all assume Instagram and YouTube are forever. A book actually is. And right now, she says, more than half of books are being written by AI, which means a flood of regurgitated content. If we want to genuinely move humanity forward, real leaders, the ones who feel the calling, have to write their lived truth. It’s the same reason a brand built on genuine purpose always wins: the work that’s rooted in something real is the work that lasts.

Her own path here is wild. In 2017, she hit one of the darkest points of her life, a moment she almost didn’t come back from. What she describes is an awakening: a sense of the God of her understanding telling her she had work to do and needed to stay. She made a commitment to do whatever she was asked to do. She was asked to write a book, which made no sense to a former massage therapist with a 2.7 GPA. Then she was asked to start a publishing house, which made even less sense. She did both anyway.

For two years, nothing published. Then, while coaching a client over Zoom, something she’d experienced years earlier as an energetic practitioner came back in a new form. A book “showed up,” and she found she could see what belonged in someone’s book and help them write it fast. That became five-day book intensives in Costa Rica, Kauai, and Mexico, which became a multi-million-dollar business.

And then her body gave out from traveling every seventh day for two and a half years, so she built a new model. Which brings us to one of my favorite reframes from the whole episode.

“Us moms feel like pivoting makes us flaky or bad. That is not true. People in Silicon Valley pivot all the time.” — Dana

When something stops feeling fun and easy, you get to assess whether you’re hitting a growth edge or whether the season is simply over. Both are allowed. Neither makes you flaky.

Ask, Listen, Do

Keira’s core method is three words, and she says it shows up in every holy text: ask, listen, do.

Ask, but get precise. What is the single most important thing I’m here to do right now? Then listen for the answer. Then act on it.

“Inspiration that has no action is just illusions and fantasies, which creates a lot of suffering.” — Keira Brinton

I told her the hard part for most moms is the listening. There’s that old story about the man who prays to be saved from a flood, and God sends a boat, then a helicopter, and he turns them all down, waiting for a miracle. We listen, but we don’t always recognize what we’re hearing. Or we want to listen, and then a kid needs a snack, and we’ve lost the thread entirely.

Keira’s fix is a dedicated space and a daily practice. Hers is the back of her closet, behind all the dresses, a tiny corner devoted to asking and listening before her kids wake up. She compares it to the gym. Going once a month does nothing. The consistency is what trains you to actually hear. (This is where a little self-discipline actually serves you, and I don’t mean the grindy kind. I mean the kind that just keeps you showing up.) That daily practice is how she got from massage therapist to a multi-million-dollar company with a show headed to Amazon.

Mine is my car. I finally bought my Jeep, and I’m not even practical about it. I’m a loud-singing, throat-chakra-first kind of person, so I get in, sing something yelly and loud, and then I can receive my download. People tell me to just pay someone to get my groceries, and they don’t get it. The driving is the practice.

“I never mind spending time in my car, because that is the space where first I get to be vocal, and then I get to listen.” — Dana

The Receiving Part That Stopped Me Cold

I’ve always believed in receiving in the sense of letting good things in. I had never thought of it the way Keira framed it, which is receiving answers, receiving guidance, receiving intuition.

She had five kids in ten years, so she was pregnant or nursing for a solid decade. Her point hit hard: when you spend that long unable to receive even basic things, like the freedom to use the bathroom when your body asks, you get rewired to override yourself constantly. So part of the work with mothers is teaching them they’re allowed to receive again.

“You deserve at least 30 to 45 minutes a day to go in and ask and hear and receive. A mother who is sourced just gives so much more.” — Keira Brinton

That’s not selfish. That’s the whole engine. A sourced mom has something to give. A depleted one is running on fumes and wondering why nothing’s landing.

Say Yes Before You’re Qualified

We ended where I always seem to end up, on inspired action.

Keira had been seeing a vision of a talk show for four months without knowing what it was. Then it clicked, and within three days she had a studio rented, a media team in place, and her first three guests booked. I’ve watched the same thing in my own business. When I decided to write the Boss Mom book years ago, I was seven months pregnant with a toddler at home, and plenty of people told me it was a waste of time and money. We hit six figures within eight months. More recently, a ten-minute session with Keira had me deciding to write Becoming Boss Mom before my 45th birthday, and we rebuilt our entire app and member experience in three weeks to match the mission.

That’s the pattern. Clarity creates speed.

“Inspired action is what always moves the needle. You don’t have to have it perfect. You don’t have to know what you’re doing. You don’t even have to be qualified. You just have to be the one who says yes and who does it.” — Keira Brinton

So if you’ve been waiting to feel ready, to feel qualified, to have a cleaner plan before you let yourself go for the thing: stop waiting. Trusting your intuition and acting on it, even messily, is what changes everything. The dragon you’re avoiding is almost always the doorway.

Your Next Step

If this lit something up:

• Explore Keira’s Mini Book Activator Course ($197) if you’ve felt the pull to write a book and don’t know where to start. It helps you see the message already inside your work.
• Follow Keira on Instagram (she says it’s the fastest way to connect), and keep an eye out for her new evergreen talk show, Lived Mastery. (I’m coming on as a guest, so that’s going to be a party.)
• Come into the free BossMom community. This isn’t just a place to hang out. It’s where we actively help you figure out what you want to focus on, what your real goals are, and how to come back into focus in the middle of motherhood. You get free networking events, mindset workshops, our daily mindset audios, real connection with other members, and so much more. It has its own dedicated app, so it’s completely off social media. And it’s free. There’s genuinely no reason not to come hang out with us.
• When you’re ready to level up, BossMom+ is where you go. This is where we build out the right marketing plan for your business, then give you the ongoing support to actually implement it and hit your financial goals.

And tell me a story. DM me inside the community after you listen and tell me what hit, or which dragon you’ve been avoiding. I read them all.

I’ll see you next week.

xo, Dana