Can you have a fun and lively conversation about a serious and sensitive subject like crippling anxiety?

Well, we just did.

Renee Zukin is an educator, writer, and occasional musician who has openly written about her own struggles with anxiety for a while now, and she joins me on this week’s show to talk about how she has been able to make tremendous strides in facing, overcoming and learning to manage many of the anxieties which had kept her from living as full a life as possible for far too long, and what she’s learned along the way, lessons she’s sharing in her forthcoming new book Every Day, I’m Brave, which drops on August 8th.

It’s entirely possible that Liz Ford loves cats even more than I do.

How do I know? She made them her life. And dogs, too.

Liz is the former director of the Iowa City Animal Care and Adoption Center, who now has her own dog training business, and we talk about her journey from the corporate world to the world of working with animals, common misconceptions people have about their pets, the differences between cats and dogs, what people don’t consider when adopting animals that they really should, and all the good work the folks at the animal shelter do for all kinds of animals that make their way through there.

What’s the old joke?

“Do you know how to get to Carnagie Hall?”

“Practice!”

Well, in a similar vein, I wondered “How does a young woman from tiny little Solon, Iowa, become a sought-after opera singer who’s performed all across Europe and the United States, and just came back to Iowa after three months in New York City working with the Metropolitan Opera?”

And the answer to that question, and the journey she took to get there, was really kind of fascinating to me.

We also talked about what it’s like traveling the world and singing (and living) in places where you don’t speak the language, what opera singers have to do to stay in “opera shape” in between gigs and so much more on this week’s episode with Mezzo-Soprano Leia Lensing.