Tiny Brave Steps: Real Women. Real Fear. Real Courage Stories.
She was told by her own team that if she got into trouble, they wouldn’t come to save her. She showed up anyway—every single day for fourteen years. She walked into literal fires while fighting one inside her own chest. And one day, she decided surviving wasn’t enough anymore.
That’s one story. There are so many more.
Tiny Brave Steps is where real women tell the truth about the hardest things they’ve ever walked through—and how they found their way to the other side.
Not with some dramatic, made-for-TV moment. But with what I call Tiny Brave Steps - the kind of courage that happens one terrified, trembling choice at a time.
These are women who’ve faced the fire.
A surgery that stole everything and gave her more than she ever imagined.
A caregiving journey with no finish line.
A fourteen-year silence finally broken.
These aren’t superhero stories. They’re your-neighbor, your-sister, your-friend stories. The kind where you listen and think, That could be me.
I’m Bernice McDonald, Creator of the Tiny Brave Steps method and author of The Little Books of Courage.
Each episode, I walk you through one woman’s journey using the Courage Map - a path from feeling “not enough” to becoming “brave enough.”
You’ll hear her real voice. Her real fear. And the real moment she decided to take that next step - even though her hands were shaking.
Because here’s the truth I want you to know: Courage is never the absence of fear. It’s the judgment that something matters more than the fear.
If you’ve ever whispered I’m not brave enough for this—this podcast was made for you.
New episodes weekly. Bring your heart. Leave with courage.
Tiny Brave Steps: Real Women. Real Fear. Real Courage Stories.
Lonna's Story: Opening Her Heart's Door
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Lonna found the answer to her prayers — a faithful man, a fresh start in a new state — and still ended up more alone than she’d ever been.
Two wounded people with no tools, ten hard years, and a marriage on life support.
What turned it around wasn’t willpower.
It was a care pastor who told her she’d never even had words for what she’d survived, a counseling room where she rewrote the beliefs she’d been living out of, and one unforgettable moment in a remembered field where she finally saw where Jesus had been all along.
In this episode, Lonna shares -
...how she went from a black-and-white world to Technicolor
...how the depth she’d been told was “too much” became the very thing that saved her and
...how a marriage that nearly ended became one that gives other people hope.
Here is a story of the slow brave work of opening the doors of her heart until the color came back.
Connect with Lonna:
Lonna spent years uncovering the lies she'd believed were truths about herself and others so she could finally tell the truth about her own story — and these days she helps others tell theirs.
As the founder of Seven & Associates, she comes alongside nonprofit leaders to help them think like entrepreneurs, building the strategy, marketing, messaging and fundraising that let a mission-driven organization actually grow and last. She's a Fractional CMO and trained AI Architect. Find her at sevenandassoc.com.
Website: www.sevenandassoc.com
Instagram: Instagram.com/7andassocs
Facebook: www.facebook.com/SevenandAssocs/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lonna-gibson/
Hosted by Bernice McDonald — Life & Courage Strategist, speaker, and author.
Need to find YOUR Next Step through a hard thing you're facing? Have a simple conversation with the Tiny Brave Steps Generator AI: www.tinybravesteps.com.
Connect with Bernice:
Email: bernice@bernicemcdonald.com
Website: www.tinybravesteps.com
Join me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernicemcdonald/
If this episode moved something in you — leave a review, share it with a woman who needs it.
Do YOU have a Courage Story you'd like to share? Send Bernice a message.
Everything. Everything she was supposed to. That's what she did. Yes, she had been married once before, and it had ended. So this time she listened to her grandparents. Find someone whose faith you can actually see in action, they said. So she waited. She prayed about it. And when online dating was so new that she had to keep a spreadsheet to remember who is who, she put up a profile.
SPEAKER_00Put my profile up. And I was working at a children's nonprofit at that time called Challenger and was around a lot of pilots and I had gotten my pilot's license. So my headline was pilot-seeking co-pilot, which was very catchy. Rob, who is now my husband, messaged me he loved the Dallas Cowboys, which was why he chose Dallas. And um but he hated flying. She had her pilot's license.
SPEAKER_01She was in Dallas. He was in California. He hated flying, but he picked Dallas as part of his dating search area because he loved the Dallas Cowboys. And in the same week, neither of them knowing the other had done it, they mailed each other the exact same scripture. That's when she knew this was the man. So here's the question I want you to consider. Why is it that years into that marriage, the right man, God blessing it, she was sitting on the floor of a dark closet with the door shut, more alone than she had ever felt in her life. I'm Bernice McDonald, and this is Lana's courage story. If you're new to these stories, here's all you need to know. We talk about hard things, woman to woman, and help each other find the courage to get through them. And if you've ever found the thing that you longed for, but then found yourself unable to open up to receive it, then this one is for you. Here's something I've learned about courage. It rarely arrives all at once. It's not one brave leap as much as we wish it were. It's more like walking down a long hallway in a house that you thought you knew and stopping in front of a door that you've kept shut for years. Shut because something behind it once hurt you. Courage is putting your hand on that door, then opening it and walking in. Lana's story is a story of many doors. It's about a woman who lived in a world that felt black and white, no color, for a very long time. Her story is about doors she kept tightly closed, and what happened when she began, one at a time, to open them. Act one. Lana had grown up in what she calls a black and white house with an alcoholic father and a stepfather who abused her. Rob's biological mother had left when he was only 11 months old. They walked into that marriage believing love would be enough to cover all of it.
SPEAKER_00We both came from a very traumatic upbringing. I had been abused and I hadn't really, I think, worked through that, even really had a vocabulary for what that had done to me.
SPEAKER_01Neither of them had tools. When you don't have tools, what do you do? You reach for whatever you witnessed growing up. For Rob, unfortunately, that tool was a hammer.
SPEAKER_00So there was a lot of like our own uh abandonment issues, um, rejection and shame, and the way that you know we saw how to relate to each other growing up showed up in our marriage. Initially, like there was a lot of um hurt on both sides, things that were said that that shouldn't have been said. I think that's what happened when you don't have the tools. He says his tool was always the hammer, and you know, that was the only tool in his tool belt, so um that showed up like anger.
SPEAKER_01For Lana, the tool was the opposite of a hammer, it was a door swinging softly shut. She went inward, she went silent, she kept the peace by disappearing. Ten years went by like that. Two beautiful boys arrived, but after the second one, something hardened in her a contempt built out of every conversation that she hadn't felt safe to have. In those years, she'll tell you that she made some choices that still carry a lot of regret for her. And we'll just leave it there because the point of her story isn't the falling, it's what she did after.
SPEAKER_00We were at zero. It was like emergency room life support. We had scriptures around the house, and that was when I really started to dig in, both Rob and I. This is where our fear Fred comes in.
SPEAKER_01Fred isn't our inner critic. Fred is the part of Juana that learned a long time ago in a house that wasn't safe, that speaking up or standing out could cost her a lot. So his job became to protect her. He warned her to keep the doors shut, to stay quiet. He advised her to keep to herself, and he called it safe.
SPEAKER_00I was feeling very alone for sure, not understanding that I could get help, I could go to counseling, and feeling like I had to handle it on my own and that people wouldn't understand what I was going through. Um, what kept me alone, I would say, is just my own thoughts and mindset to not understand that I could go seek help because I had I had nothing um to pull from that that's what you do when you're when you're struggling.
SPEAKER_01Fears keeping her from feeling more pain than she already had. Not a wall someone else built, but a wall she didn't even know was there.
SPEAKER_00I would definitely say uh avoidant personality, um, fear of um how someone's gonna respond to me if I do speak up and say what's really going on on the inside.
SPEAKER_01And then Rob's mother suggested they sit down with a care pastor at their church. Lana went in carrying everything her alcoholic father, the stepfather, and the abuse, the divorce, the years of silence and feeling alone. And this pastor looked at all of it, and then he said the thing she had needed someone to say her whole life. He told her he could see that she didn't even have a vocabulary for what had been done to her for the first time. She wasn't thinking something was wrong with her, she was thinking something happened to me, and I can finally see it. That's the wake up, but seeing it wasn't the brave part, the brave part followed the seeing. It was deciding to fight for their marriage, deciding that she wasn't going to take on the legacy her family had handed down to her, which was divorce. She made a declaration, she would not pass it to her sons.
SPEAKER_00So if I don't want to fight for myself, how do I fight for them? And so that was the turning point that had to kind of change for me because it was. I mean, we still got a counseling, but it was it was um years and years of digging in and doing the hard work.
SPEAKER_01She started out determined to fight for her boys. She would learn much later that she was also fighting for the little girl in the black and white house who never had a voice. Embrace who you are. Embracing who you are is what happens behind the doors you finally open, where you stop managing yourself and let the real thing be seen even by God. What followed wasn't a breakthrough. It was work, the unglamorous, repetitive four times a week kind, both of them in counseling. Lay counselors from the church, individual counselors, a marriage counselor. At the age of 40, a word arrived that Lana had never heard applied to herself.
SPEAKER_00My counselor said, You have PTSD. I didn't even know what that was, never even heard of it. Um, we both have PTSD, but we it shows up differently. His is shows up in anxiety, mine shows up in um the shutting down, basically.
SPEAKER_01They went room by room through the things that she'd believed about herself, beliefs she'd been living out of without ever choosing them. Two of them stand out to her.
SPEAKER_00My value is determined by what Rob thinks of me. So that's just codependency, right? In order to self-protect, I avoid conflict. And so that was that was the biggest one that I had to rewrite.
SPEAKER_01Look at that second one closely. This is our fear Fred's rule, made to look as if she had written it down in her own handwriting. Why? Fear said, if you stay quiet, you stay safe. So Lana did the bravest thing you can do with that old rule. She crossed it out and wrote a true one.
SPEAKER_00That no God is my protector and um put scripture to it. And when I when you understand what those beliefs are that you're living out of and you rewrite them, it's life-changing. It was pretty amazing because I I also think that because of the abuse, the faith piece, I got saved when I was was little, like seven. My grandmother was like, Jesus was skin on to me. And she was my protector, and she just was like love concentrated.
SPEAKER_01Still underneath all of it, there was a question she had never said out loud.
SPEAKER_00But in my heart, I still had this unanswered thing, but he didn't change that story for me when I was crying out for help and I wanted this abuse to stop. He didn't change it. When I was hiding in the bushes saying, like, change this situation, he didn't change it. So I had to do the hard work of like, where was Jesus in that in those moments?
SPEAKER_01This is the door that in one of her most intensive healing sessions, they asked her to open, to go back into a specific memory, one of the ones that stood out to her, and simply look. What she saw changed everything.
SPEAKER_00Listen, so they had me in that moment go back to that memory and look and see where's Jesus. And I saw him standing there, and he had tears rolling down his eyes. And I thought, okay, he didn't want that to happen to me. He was there, he didn't want that to happen to me either. He was grieving. Um, that was the moment where my brain connected to my heart.
SPEAKER_01Her brain connected to her heart. This was the key that opened the door for most of her life. The faith she had lived in her head, but it was missing something. And she had just found it. Once that door was open, the rest of the house began to fill with light, with color. She started learning a language she had never been taught. The language of her own feelings.
SPEAKER_00I just never even tapped into emotions that I could have a myriad of feelings all day long. Um, I remember going to care class, and he would pull out the feelings chart. And, you know, it goes from anger to happy. He said, like, I want you guys just to sit and think about all the different emotions you had all day long. And I was like, wow, I don't even think I ever pondered that, you know, that I could I could be angry and happy and and all of it, and how it actually impacts you and how that shows up. And then she gives us the picture that holds her whole story. The way I describe it to others, it was almost like I was living in a black and white world and it went to technicolor. You know, all the colors.
SPEAKER_01Black and white to technicolor. That's what it feels like to open the doors of your own heart.
SPEAKER_00It was just another piece of me that was inside there that just was locked up.
SPEAKER_01Now here's the gift Lana lets us see at work in her. It's what let her walk back into that painful memory and find Jesus there, to see him, observing her, feeling her every pain, weeping over what she'd gone through. It was a gift called depth, the willingness to go all the way down into those painful places, into a feeling instead of skating across the top of life.
SPEAKER_00Sometimes people say to us, You're too deep. But I believe when you're deep, this is where God is. I don't want surface relationships. Um, you know, I want to share every single thing with him all the time. He's just, he's one of our biggest champions.
SPEAKER_01As she pressed into the counseling and spiritual care at her church, she took on a different role, a challenging role. Teaching, boundaries classes, and a class called Wounded Hearts for Other Women. But surprisingly, the depth that was growing her was met with criticism by some of those she was closest to. This is a strange jewel, a gift she was made with, misunderstood by some. But it turns out to be exactly what you need in the hardest moments. And that's exactly what it was for Lana. Her depth became the rope she climbed out on, and it's the gift she now hands to other women every day. Lana at last met the little girl who'd been locked in the dark the whole time as the grown woman who was fighting for her to come out. Act three, stand up for you. Standing up for you is when the inside work starts showing on the outside. When the truth you found in private finally reaches your mouth, your posture, the way you let yourself be in the room. Here is the strange hard middle of healing that most of us don't know about. Once you can feel, you have to do something with what you feel. The doors are open. Now the inside has to match the outside. And it can be hard to do. Lana's care pastor proposed that she use a simple question. In the moment something hurt, could she just say, ouch, that hurt? At first, she couldn't do it. The feeling would arrive late, it would be a few beats behind, but Wana being Wana, she kept practicing. And at last she landed it.
SPEAKER_00I really realized, okay, my outside needs to align with my inside. And if I'm going to be a person of integrity, that means I need to use my words if I feel hurt or something's not going, you know, right. And we really looked at what my ungodly beliefs were about myself, people, and others. You can you do this, it's crazy. It's life-changing when you do this and you actually understand you're what you're living out of that's not true. Use her words.
SPEAKER_01For a woman whose whole survival had been built on not using them. That is a warrior's sentence. It's not that it's loud or defiant or ferocious. It's that it's true. And her care pastor, the kind of man who believes in you before you do, kept handing her things she'd never have chosen. Here's one of the biggest ones.
SPEAKER_00He had us stand in front of a hundred people at church and argue on the stage, a true argument. And then he paused us and dissected it. My husband was all about it. He was like, I'll do it. And me, I'm I'm just more of the, I want to sit in the back and and watch somebody else do that, not me. So um I just realized, you know, I gotta put, I gotta get uncomfortable. I've got to do things that that's not me.
SPEAKER_01Now remember who we're talking about. This is the woman who, by her own description, wants to sit in the back of the room, standing on a stage and choosing to fight in front of a hundred people. It is the opposite of everything her fear would encourage her to do. She did it anyway. That's a tiny brave step, the size of a stage. Not so tiny. And none of this, none of this was easy.
SPEAKER_00I would say fighting for a remarriage was harder than the abuse I went through.
SPEAKER_01Let that sink in for a moment. She's not being traumatic. She's saying what's really honest. And she stayed in it anyway, because she had decided what was worth fighting for, and she had finally learned how to stand inside the fight without abandoning herself in it. That last. Part is the whole skill.
SPEAKER_00Now I think I just I remember my words of my grandmother, this too shall pass, and I don't have to solve it right now.
SPEAKER_01Her grandmother's words, the same grandmother who was love concentrated. Lana learned to say those words to herself when the house went intense, to stay on her own two feet when Rob couldn't.
SPEAKER_00In those moments where, you know, I if if things feel uneasy in the house or with Rob, maybe could be struggling with something, I have to actually tell myself, you're okay. Even though he's not okay, you're okay, and you're gonna be okay.
SPEAKER_01That's what standing up for yourself sounds like from the inside. Not standing against him, standing on her own ground so that his bad day didn't get to become hers. Act four, create your impact. Creating your impact is what happens when the courage you build in private stops being only yours and becomes the gold you hand to the next person standing where you once stood. Years before any of this healing, when they could barely be in the same room, Lana and Rob had prayed one strange stubborn prayer together.
SPEAKER_00Rob and I prayed that our love would be evident to others.
SPEAKER_01Hold that next to where they've been, the stonewalling, the silence, the contempt. And it sounds almost impossible. But here's what 24 years of hard fighting for something can do.
SPEAKER_00Our relationship's like a fine wine, you know? It just gets better over the the ages, right?
SPEAKER_01And I have to tell you about Rob here because Lana's courage doesn't make sense without him. He grew up getting beaten down, and it turned him into something unexpected. A fighter who would not quit. She has a name for him.
SPEAKER_00I call him Braveheart, that's his my name for him. But he he's a fighter, and yeah, he never gave up.
SPEAKER_01When she was hiding in that closet, the one from the very beginning of this story, he didn't leave her there. He climbed in with her.
SPEAKER_00He never gave up. And there were so many moments I wanted to, and uh he kept fighting, and I'm just so grateful that he did. I mean, I would be hiding in the closet like I don't want to do this anymore, and he would come in there and sit with me in the closet, and he would bring me macaroni and cheese. All the things my grandmother did to comfort me. And so he's a I call him Braveheart because he's that guy you want in the front. He's so passionate and he's passionate about his family. He's passionate about people and love.
SPEAKER_01Recently, after their 24th anniversary, she sent him a text. Ten things she loved about him. He wrote back something she wanted read out loud, exactly as he said it.
SPEAKER_00He said, I'll probably cry, but would you promise something if I die before you? Please put a picture of us in my pocket. Just in case I get to show everyone I meet who you are and how you help me to be a better person in the man I became because of you.
SPEAKER_01The man with the hammer writing that, their prayer answered, their love evident to anyone paying attention. And the impact didn't stop at their front door. The boys, their sons, got a different mom and dad than the earliers would have given them. And Lana and Rob started doing together the thing they'd learned the hard way. Walking alongside young married couples who are making all the same mistakes, doing the same silent stonewalling, certain they're the only ones. She now leads groups for women who've been abused. She teaches what she once couldn't do, how to know what's yours to carry and what isn't. She describes it like a yard with a fence and a gate. Your yard is you, your heart, your life, and what's been entrusted to your care. Now and then someone will throw something ugly into your yard. You can stand over it, angry that it's there, replaying the offense and arguing that it never should have happened. Or you can remember that the yard is still yours to tend. You may not be able to control what someone throws your way, but you do get to decide how you respond. Lana keeps this scripture from Proverbs 4 23 close. Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. Tend your own yard. Guard your heart and be intentional about what you allow to grow there.
SPEAKER_00There are definitely rooms in your heart that, you know, the doors are shut and they're dark in there. And you I just say, go in there. Like that's where the Lord is. And your relationship with him will change. You will have like such a deeper love. He's really the secrets, he's the healing that everybody needs. Um, but it starts with having a safe person that you can share and be vulnerable with what's going on on the inside.
SPEAKER_01There it is again. The doors, the dark rooms. Except now she's not the one standing in front of them afraid. She's the one holding the lantern, telling another woman it's safe to go in. Today, Lana has left the black and white world behind and instead lives in beautiful technicolor. If you're the woman in the black and white house right now, if you found the thing you longed for and somehow still shut yourself away inside it, Lana has something for you.
SPEAKER_00You're okay. Even though he's not okay, you're okay, and you're gonna be okay.
SPEAKER_01The first door, the first safe person, the first true sentence said out loud to yourself. That's a tiny brave step, and it's enough to start the color coming back. I'm Bernice McDonald. Thank you for listening to Lana's courage story. Lana not only helps counsel women and couples, she's also the founder of Seven and Associates. And she comes alongside nonprofit leaders to help them think like entrepreneurs. You can find her at seven andassociates.com. Her information will be in the episode notes. And if you're ready to find your own first small, honest, doable step that starts the crossing over your bridge into the life that you want to live, come find it at tinybravesteps.com. And remember, you are brave enough for anything that life brings you. You always have been.