The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi

Renee Carbone Fleming grew up on the second floor of a tenement house, sharing a pullout sofa in the living room with her sister, in a home where the expected trajectory was secretarial school, a pension, a social security check, and a slow death. Her biological father committed suicide when she was six or seven. Her mother remarried. The family scraped. Nobody had money, so nobody talked about it in a healthy way, and by the time Renee was a young woman earning her first real income, money managed her before she could manage it. Bankruptcy at nineteen or twenty years old. No college degree. Just grit, and a growing fire that had nowhere good to go yet.

She channeled that fire into corporate sales, built a real career through sheer outwork-everyone determination, fell in love, built a marriage, became a stay-at-home mom by choice, then discovered in the quiet of that season that she had slowly stopped being a person. She was everyone's everything except her own. When the marriage ended after seventeen years, she was over forty, had two daughters aged twelve and nine, and an ex-husband who genuinely did not think she could tie her shoes without him. She wrote two words on post-it notes and stuck them everywhere. On the mirror. On the car. In the office. Watch me.

Those two words became a business philosophy, then a book, then a brand. The W is withdraw from explanation. A is act before approval. T is take up space publicly. C is commit without consensus. H is hold a vision when no one else does. That is how she built over thirteen million dollars in retail sales through the organizations she has led. That is how a sparkle queen from a tenement house in the northeast ended up on the Nasdaq billboard in Times Square, on Fox, NBC, CBS, CW, and Telemundo, and named Top Empowerment Coach of the Year in twenty twenty-five by the International Association of Top Professionals.

Underneath all of that is a mother navigating estrangement from her youngest daughter for three years and counting, pouring into her oldest the only way she knows how, showing her what it looks like to keep going anyway. This is not a polished story. It is a real one. And it is still being written.

This episode is for any woman over forty who has been sitting at her kitchen table wondering if it is too late. It is not. This is what fifty-six looks like when you refuse to accept anyone else's definition of it.