Interviews with people who have had a pentimento experience: that is, when something in their life pushed them to see things differently than they had previously.
How far does one act of conscience travel?
Jim McGarry spent nearly four decades teaching in Catholic high schools in the Bay Area and beyond, where he became known for a particular kind of teaching: bringing Holocaust survivors into the classroom to speak directly to students, a practice he started after his first training as a Holocaust educator in 1992.
At the center of the conversation is a story Jim returns to often — about the person who refuses to serve something they perceive as harmful, and is willing to lose everything to hold that line. It’s not a portrait of solitary heroism. It’s something far more connected: the quiet, essential presence of the people who make that courage possible in the first place.
15 Sept 2026
When You Just Know with Elsa Elbert
What does it feel like when you just know?
Elsa Elbert built a career without ever quite meaning to — fifteen years in healthcare administration, a leap into data center operations, and then a brief and painful (though informative) stint at a financial institution that put her off corporate ladders… perhaps for good. She’s now the founder of Composed Living, a professional organizing business she’s run for a decade and that’s grown from a solo operation into a team of fifteen, complete with a retail storefront in Woodland Hills. She also has her own podcast on the side.
Elsa is a deliberate, careful thinker by nature — she reads, studies, and doesn’t rush decisions. But she traces nearly every major turn in her life back to something else: a handful of moments that arrived as sudden, whole-body certainty, moments she believes were only possible because of all that quieter groundwork. She talks about what that kind of intuition asks of a person, and a well-worn book of hers that keeps handing her something new depending on where she is in life.
1 Sept 2026
The Gold Within You with Joe Albert
What happens when the story you've told about yourself turns out to be wrong?
Joe Albert spent his early years labeled a slow kid — tracked out of college prep as a freshman and found himself on a vocational track with a group of boys who nicknamed themselves accordingly. A single class at a Jesuit college in Philadelphia changed that, launching him into decades of work in peace and justice ministry, education, and eventually the founding of a storytelling movement that's still running strong today.
Years later, in the same stretch of time that brought the loss of his wife and a cardiac arrest that nearly killed him, two old friends — independently, months apart — told him something about himself he had never let himself consider. The story he'd carried his entire life turned out to be one he'd gotten wrong.
18 Aug 2026
My Part in It with Janet Clancy-Feliciano
What happens when it falls apart slowly?
Janet Clancy-Feliciano didn't set out to find her path. A phone call from a family member in the middle of the night led her to grad school almost by accident — and from there into a career she never would have guessed for herself, one that has stayed genuinely curious about her studies all the way through her current doctoral work at Gonzaga's School of Leadership Studies.
But the deeper shift in her life didn't happen in a single moment. It came slowly, in what she describes as "death by a thousand cuts," and it forced her to stop looking outward and start asking a harder question: what was her own part in it.
4 Aug 2026
Say Yes First with Carrie DeDonker
What happens when you know you want to take a next step, but you have no idea where to place your foot?
In this episode, Mike talks with Carrie Donker, a learning experience designer and executive coaching consultant, about a pattern that keeps showing up across her life: stepping into the unknown, from moving to a foreign country alone to volunteer, to leaving a leadership firm she loved at thirty, often before she felt ready. Carrie shares how a season of quiet burnout led to a sabbatical, a hard conversation, and an ending that felt chosen for her more than by her, and the self-trust she had to build in its wake.
She also returns to a prayer she first learned as a nightly ritual in Guatemala, one that later found its way back to her through an unexpected gift. A conversation about choosing instead of waiting to be chosen, and learning to trust your own wings more than the branch you're standing on.
21 Jul 2026
This Isn't Your Flight with Jeff Rosick
What do you do when the path you're insisting on working just isn’t working... because life has something else in mind?
In this episode, Mike sits down with Jeff Rosick — composer, actor, graphic artist, and the producer behind this very podcast — to talk about the years that took him from a Gonzaga stage to Friday Night Lights to a decade of quietly resisting what life was trying to tell him. Jeff shares the story of being with his mother in her final weeks, a moment with a hospice nurse that changed how he understood letting go, and a lifelong return to a favorite film and its final act of surrender.
A conversation about resistance, release, and what it means to stop steering, start listening, and witness the beauty and awe in allowing life to unfold.
7 Jul 2026
Grace Allows with Linda Latto
Linda Latto has spent her career asking one question: what is being asked of me right now?
She has answered it from Alaska to Georgia to Seattle to Portland to Southern California, across roles in real estate, healthcare, government, and now coaching and consulting. But the through-line was never the job title.
In this conversation, Linda traces a world-cracking moment in her mid-twenties, the slow healing that followed, and how a Catholic school she never expected to feel at home in, a cassette tape, and a week in Florence each quietly reoriented the course of her life.
She also reflects on what it means to walk beside someone who is struggling without needing to know their story first — and why that has become the heart of her work.
23 Jun 2026
Revise Your Thinking with Laura Miner
What if the greatest obstacle to your growth was never your circumstances — but your certainty?
Laura Miner spent much of her life in a world where questioning wasn't allowed. She learned early that you defend what you see — or else. It wasn't until her mid-40s, with no bachelor's degree and a funny argument with her husband, that everything began to shift.
In this conversation, Michael Carey sits down with Laura Miner — leadership coach, scholar, and PhD in organizational leadership — to trace the arc of a woman who rebuilt her thinking from the ground up. Laura shares how a string of bad leadership examples pushed her out of corporate America for good, how a mentor she never expected pointed her toward her next ascent, and why seven words at the heart of her dissertation took everything she’d been through to truly understand.
Along the way, they explore what it means to pause long enough to actually see something, why a book Laura reads every few years feels like a different book every time, and how the Socratic art of asking questions became her primary tool for helping others discover what they already know.
This is an episode about intellectual humility, the slow work of becoming, and giving yourself permission to think again.
9 Jun 2026
"Recalculating Route..." with Joel Junker
Joel Junker was always told that leaders get results, and that leaders are measured based on the results that they get. But, after decades of building an identity around results — Army officer, Notre Dame grad, and a 27-year career helping military leaders transition into business, he realized it all came with a cost that he didn't fully see until life stopped cooperating with his plan.
In this conversation, Joel traces the slow erosion of a control-driven leadership model and the unexpected forces that accelerated it: a Gonzaga master's program that quietly rewired how he thought about people, his wife's breast cancer diagnosis, a climb up Mount Adams, and a Jesuit priest who spent 25 years in Soviet prisons and came out talking about surrender. The result isn't a story about slowing down. It's about finally leading in a way that's actually sustainable — and, it turns out, more joyful.
26 May 2026
Invitations to Change with Sherri Lynch
What does it look like to stop chasing your life and start receiving it?
Dr. Sherri Lynch has spent decades building things — programs, degrees, careers, community — including Women Lead, a program she founded at Gonzaga University that has grown over eleven years into a gathering place for women in leadership.
But some of the most meaningful moments in her story weren't planned.
They arrived.
In this conversation, Sherri reflects on the interior life she's been quietly tending since her teens, the moments that forced her to let go of control, and what happens when you finally loosen your grip long enough to notice what's being offered.
12 May 2026
Mercy is the DNA of The Universe with Barry Barfield
Barry Barfield has spent his adult life following a pull he didn't choose so much as discover — through theology, law, liturgical dance, campus ministry, and decades of quiet service in places most people never think to go.
In this conversation, Barry and Mike trace a journey that has wound through Los Angeles, San Francisco, Jerusalem, and 34 years at Gonzaga Preparatory High School. Along the way, Barry reflects on the writers and thinkers who have helped to shape how he sees the world, and on a moment behind a curtain when he looked out at a standing ovation and realized something he hadn't understood before.
At the center of it all is a simple idea. Not a rule, not an aspiration. Something older and larger than that. The DNA of the universe.
3 May 2026
An Unexpected Message with Jay Ballinger
Jay Ballinger came home to help his father for six months in 1982. He never left.
Forty-four years later, Jay is still with the same family-owned company — moving from sales rep to division manager to his current role as Director of Leadership Development, and earning the unofficial title of "culture cop" along the way. It's a career he never planned, in a field he never studied, that turned out to be exactly right.
But the path there wasn't straight. There were seasons of genuine lostness — moments of standing at a crossroads with no clear sign, asking the kind of question that only comes when you've run out of your own answers.
In this first conversation, Michael Carey sits down with Jay — a former student, a longtime friend, and the first guest of the Pentimento Podcast — to talk about what it looks like to build a life with intention, and what you discover when you finally stop and look beneath the surface.
3 May 2026
Welcome to Pentimento
An introduction to the Pentimento Podcast — what it is, what it asks, and what it hopes to find. Narrated by Michael Carey.
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Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
12 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
9 ratings
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