Control: What the NICU Took and What It Gave Back

About this episode

Evan Boyer shares his transformative experience during his daughter's NICU stay and how it led him to leave corporate life and start his own business.

Maybe you've felt it too. That sense that if you just did everything right, the story would unfold the way it was supposed to. That the checklist would protect you. That the guardrails were there for a reason. Evan Boyer followed the plan. He was competitive, driven, self-focused in all the ways that tend to work well in corporate America. And then Christmas morning 2021 arrived, and the plan was gone. His wife was rushed to the OR. His daughter was born eleven weeks early, two pounds and six ounces. And Evan sat alone in a hospital room for an hour, waiting for news about whether both of them were okay. Seventy days in the NICU has a way of teaching you things no checklist ever could. For Evan, it planted a seed. And when a second pregnancy and a professional setback arrived at the same time, that seed broke open. He left his corporate job, launched his own PR firm, and started building something that felt like his, for the first time. What You'll Hear: What it felt like to stand beside his daughter in a hazmat suit, not knowing if his wife was okay How seventy days in the NICU quietly rewired his relationship with control The moment two life events collided and made staying put…

People in this episode

Host: Matt Gilhooly

Guest: Evan Boyer

Topics covered

• NICU experience
• parenting
• entrepreneurship
• personal growth
• life challenges

Keywords

• NICU
• parenting
• entrepreneurship
• life changes
• personal development

More episodes of The Life Shift | Conversations About Life Before and After

• Start Here: What Is The Life Shift? · June 12, 2026 · 1 min
• Resilience After Amputation: Rebuilding Life From the Ground Up · June 10, 2026 · 1h 1m
• Lemon-Sized Brain Tumor: The Life That Grew After Surgery · June 7, 2026 · 1h 2m
• How Misha Brown Got Sober and Learned to Be His Own Best Friend · June 3, 2026 · 1h 6m
• Under the Surface: The Shark Attack That Taught Tim Thomas to Trust · May 31, 2026 · 1h 6m
• What Happened to You: Breaking the Cycle Sixty Years in the Making · May 27, 2026 · 56 min