Life's Essential Ingredients
Life’s Essential Ingredients is spinoff of C4 Leaders, a California based non-profit who uses PIZZA to guide all people in RISING TOGETHER. The show is hosted by two best friends who were college roommates at the University of San Francisco – (Jeff with a Mike). Season 5 started in 2025 and the show is currently listened to in 113 countries and 1058 cities.
The educational and entertaining show takes a deep, yet humorous look at life’s essential ingredients. The hosts engage in interesting conversation with some of the world’s best leaders, authors, athletes, musicians, chefs, architects, moms, dads, brothers, sisters, comedians, CEOs, coaches, professors, teachers, and many, many, more industries and professions.
The goal of the show is to have the guest highlight their life’s essential ingredients and for the listener to add an ingredient or two to their life recipe.
The hosts create space for the guest to be the star of the show and provide an incredible platform to highlight their life, their business, their passion, and most importantly, their gift they share with the world.
Our listeners are diverse and 9% are 18-24, 18% 25-29, 13% 30-34, 18% 35-44, 18% 45-54, and 55+ 24%.
Life's Essential Ingredients
Season 5 Episode #22 Channeling Authenticity in her Writing with Novelist Heather Colley!
C4 Leaders – the ONLY nonprofit to utilize the pizza making process to create space for our companions to be seen, heard, and loved. We work with businesses, sports teams, hospitals, churches…anyone looking to RISE TOGETHER. We also write children’s books and use the most amazing handmade, hand-tossed, sourdough pizza to bring out the best in each other. Please check out PIZZADAYS.ORG to support our important work.
Season 5 Episode #22 Heather Colley is coming from London, England (inform, inspire, & transform)
You can find Heather via her website heathercolleyauthor.com
About our guest: Heather Colley is a PhD student in English Literature at the University of Oxford (Regents Park College). Her current research is focused on late 19th and early 20th century jazz and blues aesthetics in transatlantic modernist literature, with a particular emphasis on the impacts of musical forms and tropes on literary experimentation and cultural development. Heather completed her Master’s in Modern and Contemporary Literature with Distinction at St Andrews, where she studied lyric and form in the work of mid-twentieth century African American women novelists. She received her Bachelor’s in English Literature/Creative Writing and Sociology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Heather’s writing won The Oxford Review of Books Short Fiction Prize, the Hopwood Award, and inclusion in the Desperate Literature anthology. The Gilded Butterfly Effect is Heather’s debut novel.
Thanks for sharing your many gifts and creativity with the world, having the courage to take your gift and put it on paper and for being our guest on Life’s Essential Ingredients…welcome to the show.
TOTD – “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Maya Angelou
Build a habit - to create intention - to live your purpose!
In this episode:
What was life like growing up?
What are your life’s essential ingredients?
What was your inspiration to study literature? And to go abroad…
50k students to use health services…what are some of the challenges that college students face in finding someone to talk to…
The importance of connection and where fraternities and sororities attempt to fill that gap…
The writing process…what is yours and how do you overcome the challenges and joys that come with it…
How great did it feel to finish your book and to receive the author’s copy…
October 21st…released your first book…Beautiful book cover…
Stella, Penny, Millie, Leah…Thoughts on substances to help with mental health challenges…
Study drugs that help enhance focus… what are your thoughts on the rewiring of our brain leading to needing drugs to help us focus, leading to emotional uncertainty…
What characteristics do college students need to be successful? What characteristics do colleges need to create success for their students?
What is the main takeaway you want the reader to take from your book? How do you want to be perceived as a writer?
Plans for book 2 and so on… dealing with the pressure or excited to get to writing…
Book you recommend?
Legacy