After more than a decade and a few hundred episodes, ZenFounder is becoming Permission.

I'm Dr. Sherry Walling — clinical psychologist, and the voice you've been listening to all along — and this is the next chapter of the show we've built together.

Somewhere along the way, most of us started waiting for permission: to rest, to change our minds, to want a different life than the one we built. Permission is a podcast for people who've done the hard thing — built the company, hit the number, raised the kids — and found themselves wondering what it was all for.

Each week I sit down with founders, entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, and creatives, and we go where most business shows won't. Some weeks it's permission to admit you got everything you wanted and you're still not happy. Some weeks it's permission to be led by pleasure instead of productivity, or to stop earning your worth and simply have it. And every single episode ends the same way — with a permission slip: one thing you didn't know you were allowed to do.

If you've been here since the ZenFounder days: thank you. You've sat with me through hundreds of conversations, and I don't take that for granted. This is the version of the show I've been growing toward for years, and I think it's about to get really good. I can't wait for you to hear it.

If you're new: welcome. This is a good place to land.

Jason Cohen has founded two unicorn companies, WP Engine and Smart Bear, and written at asmartbear.com for almost twenty years. His new book, Hidden Multipliers, opens with a founder lying awake at 4 a.m. feeling like a fraud — which tells you it isn't a normal growth-tactics book, and this isn't a normal growth-tactics conversation.

We get into why the people who love your work often love it for the things you'd call weaknesses, why Jason would rather have fewer followers who actually care than ten times the audience and a version of himself he'd have to fake, the three-word question he keeps on his daily note to save himself in meetings (does this need to be said, by me, right now), and the night a board member named the real reason he didn't want to step down as CEO: "You want the credit."

Underneath all of it: build a company, and a life, in the shape of you.

Jason writes at asmartbear.com. His new book, Hidden Multipliers, is at hiddenmultipliers.com.

New here? Welcome. And if you've been with me since the ZenFounder days, you're in the right place — the whole back catalog is still here.

Follow Permission wherever you listen.

Mia Sundstrom is a CEO who swims in the middle of the workday, on purpose, and can tell you exactly why she gets that hour back. She runs the National Institute for Play, she's a lifelong gymnast, and she's on a mission to reach ten million people with play by 2030.We get into play as both a state (the thing you're doing) and a trait (the way you show up), the neuroscience that play lives in the oldest part of the brain and is something we're born knowing how to do, and the six play styles (I took the quiz and came out mover and explorer.)
We talk about why play is productive, from the $10 trillion cost of disengagement to the fact that nobody's best idea has ever arrived while staring at a monitor, and how to tell real play from the scrolling that only looks like it. Mia's grandfather, the psychiatrist Stuart Brown, built this field after noticing that people who commit serious violence tend to be starved of play, and she carries that work forward.
It's an episode about giving yourself permission to play, and the science that says you'll get the time back.

Take the Play Styles assessment and discover your unique play spark (https://playstyles.nifplay.org/). Stay up to date with the latest play science information by subscribing to their Substack @NIFPlay. And check The Live Playfully Journal: 90-days of reflection and practice to a more playful, joyful you.