so happy to share another specially curated batch of episodes featuring some of the inspiring

women we've had on the show. We talk a lot about changing careers, but wow, Regina Mercer

really switched it up. She went from being a bankruptcy attorney to founding and running a

cosmetics company out of her spare bedroom.

Now, her Reno Rebels de products are on shelves at Target and Walmart.

We talk about an early life crisis, the challenges of carving out space as an independent brand,

and my favorite part of the conversation, the idea of normalizing failure.

2008, you were an associate at a prestigious law firm in Dallas. You worked on lots of high-profile corporate bankruptcy cases. What did that look like? I was at the office till two or

three every morning. I'd go home. I'd sleep with the Blackberry under my pillow. I'd wake up at five.

I'd go back. There was one year where I didn't go home for dinner for like 345 days in a row.

I was actually hired out of law school to be a Lehman Brothers real estate

attorney for their law firm. So I did that for a year. And then we put Lehman into bankruptcy.

So I became a bankruptcy lawyer. So that was like kind of the first sharp turn where things did

not go the way I thought they were going to go or the way

imagined they were going to go.

Why? What did you imagine?

I was wanting to be a transactional attorney. I wanted to work on mergers and deals. I didn't

want to be stuck in litigation for decades of my life. When you're working on bankruptcies,

the psychology of that is very different. And then you combine that

with the 2008 financial crisis on what was happening around the country. It was devastating.

That's to be especially difficult when you have your entire life wanted to be an attorney, right?

When you had an idea of what being an attorney was going to be. So how did the reality compare to your imagined reality of what being an attorney would be?

...