Sharing my personal experiences through the pain of divorce, the healing through spirituality, and music's influence through life's greatest lessons and memories.
How do I stay focused, committed, and keep moving forward—even when things feel uncertain? In this episode, I share a powerful, personal story from the early days of launching this podcast that reveals exactly why I don’t quit. It’s a story about faith, timing, and trusting that things will align exactly as they’re meant to.
I walk you through a series of moments that felt too perfectly orchestrated to be coincidence—from last-minute opportunities to unexpected connections—and how those experiences shaped the way I approach both life and business today. If you’ve ever questioned your path or wondered how to keep going, this one will speak to you.
Episode Highlights
[0:22] - Answering the question: how I stay focused and why I don’t quit
[1:10] - The early days of launching the podcast and facing uncertainty
[2:10] - Letting go and surrendering the outcome to faith
[2:40] - The unexpected opportunity that changed everything
[3:00] - When everything aligns: flight, hotel, and conference pass
[4:00] - First experience at Podfest and the power of connection
[5:27] - Learning balance and avoiding burnout while growing
[6:30] - Returning to Podfest with a new mindset and strategy
[7:10] - Trusting intuition like a personal navigation system
[8:30] - Faith, intuition, and recognizing divine direction
[9:00] - Lessons learned from listening—and not listening—to intuition
If this episode resonated with you, I’d love for you to rate, follow, share, and leave a review. Your support helps this podcast reach more people who need these messages. Thank you for being here—I’ll see you next week!
Caryn Portnoy:
hi everyone, and welcome to the music of Life. I'm your host. Caryn Portnoy, before I get into this episode, please comment, ask questions, share some of your experiences, and don't forget to subscribe. Hi everyone. So somebody recently asked me, How do I keep going? How am I so focused? How am I so committed to moving forward, and why haven't I quit, and all of that stuff? So I wanted to share a story with you that happened at the beginning when this podcast was first launched, and this may help you understand why I'm so focused. So this podcast was launched in November of 2024 I was a brand new podcaster, and pod fest, which I believe is the biggest podcasting conference in the industry, was, I believe it was like the mid, mid of January, 25 or like, closer to the end, I don't remember exactly, but somewhere in the second half of January. And so I was kind of going back and forth, hemming and hawing, do I go? Do I not go? I was only my podcast was only out for two months. At that point. I didn't know anyone. I didn't know anything. I was brand new, and I was looking around at flights and and hotel rooms and all of that, and everything was booked, sold out the flights the hotel. I didn't even know where I would get a pass that I needed. So I was just like, I guess I'm not meant to go. But then I surrendered the whole thing to God, and I basically said, If I am meant to be here, you will make a way for me to be here. And I just kind of let it go after that. So, you know, from time to time, I would just kind of think about it again, and maybe I do want to go. Maybe it'll be a great opportunity for me, or, you know, whatever. And so as I was getting closer to the date of pod fest, I started poking around on Facebook, and my producer of this podcast had a conversation in one of his feeds and talking about pod fest, and I saw that somebody had posted something about they had an extra hotel room for that weekend for pod fest. Does anyone need it? And I thought to myself, What are the odds? I mean, really, this person posted in this group at this moment with an extra room. Nobody else had claimed it. And here I am showing up in this feed, and I come across this, and I need this room, like all the things that had to align for me to say to her, I'll Take it. So, okay, great. I got the hotel room. Now I look at the airlines, because all this time I was looking for flights, they were all sold out. So I go back and I look for a flight. And don't you know, on the flight, at the date and time that I was interested in, there was one seat left on the entire plane. I mean, come on, can't make this shit up. And then also, in my producer's feed, I saw some other woman who said she had an emergency and wasn't going to be able to go to the conference. And does anyone need a pass? So I commented, well, I need a creator pass. And she's like, that's what I have, and I'll even give you $100 off. So I mean, how do you explain this? Other than God made a way for me to be there. So I booked my flight, I booked my hotel room, I paid for the pass, and now I'm like, on my way to pod fest. So I didn't know what to expect. All I knew was that there would be an enormous networking opportunity, and I knew there would be a ton of breakout sessions where people speak and you kind of like, listen in and take notes and, you know, learn. So I totally overloaded my schedule with all these breakout sessions. And in between the breakout sessions, I would meet people from the breakout sessions, and we would sit off to the side and talk and, you know, see how we can work together and stuff like that. So, you know, that's kind of like when you collect business cards, and you start a, you know, sort of take notes and and it was just an overload of learning for the entire weekend. I think it was like Thursday to Sunday, or Wednesday to Sunday, I don't remember. And so I met all these great people, and all these creative ideas kept bursting out of my brain. And. And it was crazy. So I really felt like I made the most I could make out of pod fest, and I followed up on the connections and the ideas that I thought would be helpful to me moving forward. I mean, you can't say yes to everything, because then you'll never do anything you and I didn't want to totally overload myself where I had no time for anything else. And you know, I'm very clear that balance in life is key. And you know, you have personal things going on in your life. You have activities you want to do. You have people you want to meet in your personal life. I mean, you know, there are lots of things. It's not just all about work, because I work for myself. It's up to me to balance all of those things for myself. Plus rest is very important too, and I've really learned how to squeeze that in when I need it. So the interesting thing is that I recently attended pod Fest this year in January of 2026 and made so much better use of the time that I had in terms of networking and learning, and I did not overload my schedule with all these breakout sessions this time, I went to the ones that really interested me, or the people that I knew and I wanted to support them, and then I just kind of sat in the middle of everything and just figured that whoever I was meant to network with, it would just show up. And so every single person that I met and networked with like became something, a connection that I followed up with an opportunity, something to advance this podcast or other projects I'm working in. And everything led to something else. So, you know, I have to say that, you know, on top of surrendering all of this to God, I am also hyper tuned in to my intuition. And I listen to my intuition like, like you, like you watch your navigation on your car, like, if you don't know where you're going, and you plug in the address, and you know where you want to end up, but you're you're tuned into your navigation, and wherever they tell you to go, that's where you go, and ultimately you end up where you want to be. So that's what my intuition is like, and I rely so incredibly heavily on it, because I know and I have faith that it's going to take me to where I want to end up, and so far it has. So you know, you keep using it if it keeps working, there's more to this story about last year, which I promise I will share another time. I'm not ready to talk about it now, but it was more than just the plane and the hotel in the past to get to pod fest last year, but I promise I'll share that at the right time. So anyway, I will say that you know between my faith in God and knowing that God is leading the way in my life, in your life, any anyone else's life, who you know is tuned into that, and even the people who are not tuned into that, doesn't mean that God's not directing your life anyway, you're just not aware of it, and maybe you chalk things up to good luck, or, you know, ooh, what a coincidence, or something like that. But I assure you, God in the universe is directing everything for everyone. That's what I believe anyway, and I have proof to back that up for myself. And in the meantime, I show up based on where my intuition tells me to go, go left or go right, go straight, go back. I mean, whatever it is, it's just I trust it. And so far in the last three years, it has not steered me wrong once, not once, and the only time I've made a bad choice is when I don't listen to my intuition. So shame on me. But I have learned. I've lived and learned, and now I know better, so I don't make those mistakes anymore. Anyway, I'm going to wrap it up for this week. Thank you for listening. I'll catch you next time. I have developed a mentorship program that I'm offering to anybody who could use or. Benefit from something like that. It'll be one hour once a week for eight weeks. This is a partnership. This is something that you and I would do together. There are a lot a lot of people out there who need it. Please join me every Thursday for a new episode. You can reach me on my website, which is pod page.com/the, music of life. You can leave me a voicemail, a text message. You can leave your contact information if you want to be anonymous, no problem. I promise to honor that. And you can also find all of my social media platforms there as well, which is Instagram, tick tock, Facebook And LinkedIn. Thanks again. I'll see you next week. You
