Episodes

Amy Doerksen ran for her local hockey board, lost, and decided she did not need permission to build the thing she wanted to see. That thing became Fierce Female Hockey, a camp in Brandon, Manitoba where everything is designed for girls. In this episode of Strong Like a Girl, Amy and Tanya talk about crossing over from ringette to hockey, the difference between being invited and being welcomed, why young women coaches get undermined, and what real male allyship looks like. LINKS AND RESOURCES A...

Grief shows up in almost every story we tell on Strong Like a Girl, so this episode we sit down with someone who has spent years walking people through it. Shelley Wray is a grief seminar counsellor and certified funeral celebrant who found her calling as the counsellor at CFB Shilo during the Afghanistan war. We talk about why "what happened" beats "I'm so sorry," why rituals save us, and her belief that grief never really leaves, it just becomes a diamond you learn to carry.Chapters0:00 Tellin...

Willie Van Lankvelt was 21 when she packed up her life in the Netherlands and crossed an ocean to start over in rural Manitoba. She didn't speak much English. She'd never grain farmed. She was leaving seven siblings behind. None of that stopped her, and 46 years later she's still here, still building, still showing up. In this conversation Tanya sits down with Willie to trace a life that doesn't look loud from the outside but has been quietly remarkable from the inside. They cover the move from...

Lyndsay Seafoot didn't grow up loud. She grew up watching. Born in a small town on the northeast tip of Scotland, raised in rural Manitoba alongside eight siblings spread across three continents, she learned early that quiet kids notice things other people miss. Two decades later, that habit became the foundation of an HR company. Lyndsay sits down with Tanya to talk about how her family roots, her grandfather Hugh's farm, and a few unexpected detours led her to start Kerbridge Group in 2020. F...

Debi Cost-Finn raised her son alone on food stamps, built a career bringing therapeutic music into hospitals, was diagnosed with breast cancer 85 days after her wedding, and flushed her medication down the toilet rather than lose herself. Her story is proof that strength isn't about holding it together. It's about what you do when you can't. MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: - Coro (therapeutic music in healthcare): https://www.coro.health - The Doe Project (cold case organization): https://www.dnad...

Tami-Rae Rourke is the kind of person who makes everything look effortless. A career that spans telecommunications, real estate, financial advising, and board leadership. A telecom company she co-built from the ground up that sold for over $50 million. Chamber of Commerce president. Honorary Lieutenant Colonel. The resume reads like someone who never had a bad day. But that's not the full story. Behind every boardroom win and business deal, Tami was quietly battling severe anxiety and phobias...

What if the strongest leaders are not the loudest in the room, but the ones who quietly keep building when nobody is watching?In this Season 2 kickoff of Strong Like a Girl, host Tanya sits down with her aunt, Lyn Radford, for a deep conversation on leadership, service, and legacy. Lyn shares how she moved from being labeled as a homemaker in boardrooms to leading major community initiatives, including a dedicated gymnastics facility in Red Deer and a large-scale Ronald McDonald House capital ca...