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Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/ At seven or eight years old, Guy Finley was riding in the Hollywood Christmas parade, where his father was the honorary marshal, sitting on the lap of one of the biggest stars of the day. He remembers thinking, what’s wrong here? Everybody was so fearful, so angry and so anxious. Born into a show business family, he grew up with a contradiction he could not reconcile. That question, what is this pain, set him on a path he has walked for almost 70 years, and he says he is still just beginning. Today Guy is the Founding Director of Life of Learning Foundation, a nonprofit centre for spiritual discovery, and the acclaimed author of The Secret of Letting Go and more than 50 other books and audio programmes, translated into 30 languages. Not the problem, but the mirror Letting go, Guy says, is an inside story. We tend to look out at the world as the party responsible for the pain we are in, and he believes it is just not true. You cannot separate the experience of life from the nature having that experience. When he has a problem with another person, that person isn’t the problem. They are here to show him where parts of him are still clinging to certain ideas and demands. He calls them secret agents of God. And the work, he says, is done by seeing into our consciousness, not by fighting with it. You cannot satisfy a fear So why do we chase validation? Guy believes that affirming qualities we do not have only leaves us living in fear of proving we are what we imagine ourselves to be. He remembers being 12 at his father’s business meetings, in a suit and tie, his left shoulder hurting so badly he wanted to cry. Even that child, already conditioned to want approval, was afraid he would not get it. You cannot satisfy a fear, Guy says. You can dope it up or distract yourself from it, but until you understand the nature of fear itself, you will live in it. In his words, people bother us for only one reason: what we want from them. The circle of self Guy describes it as dominoes. Desire gives rise to image, image to identity, identity to attachment, attachment is dependency, and dependency is fear. He calls it the circle of self, and he is clear that a conditioned nature cannot free itself from its own conditioning. What can help is a light that reveals where we are conditioned. Escaping desire, he says, is lunacy. We are here to transcend the nature that believes it can complete itself through its desire. Relationship is revelation Why are we drawn to anyone at all? Guy believes we discover ourselves through relationship. At first everything is oh yeah. Then oh yeah turns into oh no, and we meet the part of us that wants to blame the other person for not loving us the way they said they would. There is no bad revelation, he says. He is just as clear that trying to change the world is, in his words, egotism of the worst kind. You don’t change a rose. Guy has been with his wife for 46 years, and says he has never once raised his voice to her. The dragon never had any teeth From around 18 to 25, Guy lived a celibate life, almost in a cave, only to find he still got angry. Awakening, he came to see, isn’t some sudden aha. It is the gradual recognition that who and what you are cannot be defined by any experience the mind wants to create. He tells the story of a knight who puts down his sword and shield and leaps into the dragon’s mouth, only to find it never had any teeth. It was all gums. For Guy, that is what an awakening is: the collapse of a false identity that produces false shadows in order to be the slayer of them. Guy left us with three shiny golden nuggets, gathered into one practice he calls Stop, Drop, Endure. Stop: the moment you feel a fear or an anxiety, come to a stop, as present as you can in your body. Drop: catch the thoughts that rush in to explain why you feel the way you do, and be the observer of your consciousness rather than its servant. Endure: be willing to stay with what you feel, without reaching for a time to come when the pain will be gone. Useless suffering, Guy explains, believes escape is coming. Conscious suffering stays and watches. Watch the full conversation on YouTube Find Out More About Guy Finley Website: https://www.guyfinley.org Instagram: @guyfinleyofficial YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/GuyFinley Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/guyfinleyofficial/ Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/ Well over 20 years ago, Catherine Clinton was in naturopathic medical school when the long hours caught up with her and she was diagnosed with two autoimmune conditions and Lyme disease. She had access to all kinds of healing modalities, yet the model was the same chemical and mechanical one modern medicine uses today. A physician she worked under during clinical rotations urged her to look into psychoneuroimmunology- how our thoughts and emotions impact our health- and at the same time she came across research on quantum biology. It all came together in an aha moment: the body isn’t just chemical and mechanical and physical, it’s energetic. Today Dr Clinton is a licensed naturopathic doctor and the author of Optimize: A Groundbreaking Seven-Step Plan to Health and Longevity Through Quantum Biology. Symptoms are messages Dr Clinton believes the body is brilliant, and that symptoms are signals rather than faults. Environmental stressors are danger signals, and the body is responding appropriately to the information it receives. Rather than quieting the symptoms and killing the bugs, which she sees as a militaristic view of the body, she suggests tweaking the landscape, both externally and internally, so the body no longer needs to respond. Our cells are always listening, she says. Our mitochondria, our DNA, our fascia and our nervous system are always listening for signals of safety or danger, and our thoughts are one of the primary signals, running 24/7. Energy first before chemistry Our cells run on a negative electrical charge, Dr Clinton explains, and she points to research showing that when we lose that charge we start to see pain, inflammation and immune system dysregulation. We are electric beings. She has had patients on supplements for years that helped a little, and found those supplements worked much better once the electrical capacity of the body was addressed. Pain, inflammation and fatigue are broad markers of an energetic component, and tending to the mitochondria looks like movement, natural light, being circadian aligned and tending to our thoughts and emotions. Much of it, she says, is free and accessible. Remembrance, not willpower Mind over matter, Dr Clinton says, is hard when we are sick. Instead, she returned to the relationships humans have evolved with over millennia: the rising and setting of the sun, the trees, the ground beneath our feet, birdsong and our own internal joy. In her words, it is less a matter of willpower and more a matter of remembrance. She sees a kernel of disconnection at the root of so much suffering, and coherence as the conductor of health, like a symphony where every instrument finally plays the same song. An antenna, not a machine The first idea in her book is that our body is an antenna. We’ve been taught to think of it as a machine, she says, and that’s not what it is. It is always receiving signals and information from our external and internal environment. Water in the body can take on a liquid crystal structure that holds information, which is why, for Dr Clinton, hydration isn’t just drinking water. A little mineral content helps water get into the cell, and she points to research, including work by Professor Gerald Pollack and his team at the University of Washington, on energising water with sunlight, infrared, stirring, tea and some traditional Ayurvedic remedies. Nobody’s talking about rest maxing A little stress can be good, Dr Clinton says, but modern life rarely stops at a little. We live in a biohack hustle culture where we are trying to maximise every single thing, and nobody’s talking about rest maxing, the pause, silence or the power of not doing. She finds it ironic that gym lighting can change our metabolism in the very place we go to change it, and that health checklists can override the intuition that says today rest might be better. Cells do not heal, she says, if they are not in a parasympathetic state or a sense of safety. Dr Clinton left us with three shiny golden nuggets. Align with the rhythm of the sun: go outside within 30 to 45 minutes of waking, take little light breaks through the day and lower the lights at night, rather than reaching for a phone whose bright LED light tells your body it’s noon. Be conscious of your water, drinking with gratitude, adding minerals and supporting the water in your body with movement, warm baths and sauna. And work on your internal coherence through gratitude, a heart coherence or mindfulness practice, or simply a pause. Her own non-negotiable is a gratitude practice before she even opens her eyes. Watch the full conversation on YouTube Find Out More About Dr Catherine Clinton Website: https://www.drcatherineclinton.com Instagram: @dr.catherineclinton YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dr.catherineclinton Facebook: @dr.catherineclintonnd Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/ Latha Jay works with celebrities and politicians who, from the outside, have manifested beautiful lives. People look at them and wonder how they could possibly be miserable. A manifestation teacher, speaker and author of The 24/7 Manifestation Method, with degrees in psychology and biology and advanced training in integrative medicine, Latha understands that gap. Before this work she attempted many other paths, and regardless of the external success, none of them felt successful internally. What she does now feels like a deep calling. As a child, she described manifestation as thinking with your heart, and she still believes that is exactly what it is. Alone in the mansion If you manifest a mansion but you are all alone in it, Latha says, it is not going to feel like fulfilment. She sees it all the time: someone hits a goal, falls in love or reaches a money target, and suddenly realises they feel empty. What she teaches is the expansion of your identity, so that your nervous system feels safe in whatever you are going after. The nervous system is there for protection. Anything unfamiliar or new, it pushes away to keep you safe, and sometimes that safety is really keeping you small. Always manifesting Latha is clear that manifesting is not something you start once you are ready. It is occurring 24/7. The difference is whether you are creating consciously or from a default state, where limiting beliefs tend to run the show. You’re not good enough. You can’t have that. You’re not pretty enough. Her work is not about removing those lies but identifying them, so that when they come up again, and they will, they are quieter and you can make a different choice. She believes words create our world, so she encourages affirmations in the positive present tense: not being grateful that a partner doesn’t cheat, but being grateful for a loyal partner. 24 times, seven days Her 24/7 Manifestation Method is simple. Choose one short affirmation and write it 24 times as soon as you wake and 24 times right before bed, for seven consecutive days. Latha explains that it taps into the hypnagogic state between wakefulness and rest, when she says the subconscious is most impressionable, and that repetition there creates new pathways in the brain. Put emotion into it, she says, because feelings are the jet fuel of manifestation. And she is honest that your manifestation might not arrive within the seven days. What shifts is your thought pattern. As for how it arrives, that is none of our business. We are not micromanaging the universe. Finding the shadow Latha had long wanted to be on the cover of a magazine, and for a long time she carried the belief that someone who looks like her would not be shown on one. When she moved past it and told herself she should be on that cover, it happened very quickly, along with a billboard. Now, when something on her vision board is taking a long time, she gets curious and looks for the shadow underneath. Knowing your why matters too. When people want more money, she says, it is never just about the money, and asking why again and again uncovers the emotion that fuels it. The friends who can’t come with you Why do people stay stuck? Latha points to familiarity, and to the fear of stepping into something bigger. Some people stay committed to struggle because it feels safe, and she is careful to say this is not toxic positivity: horrible things happen, and people are strong enough to move through them. Growth has a cost too. Clients who make more money or lose weight often tell her their friend circle has completely changed. She has been through it herself, letting go of friends she had for 30 years who were not meant to be part of her journey to this version of who she is. Latha left us with three shiny golden nuggets. Do an identity audit: ask yourself what version of you would naturally create the life you want, write down the qualities that version has, then choose one and practise it again and again. Before any important decision, take a 90-second nervous system pause. Breathe slowly and ask whether you are responding from the fear of who you are now or as your future self. And for one day, listen closely to your language. Replace “I hope”, “I’m trying” and “maybe someday” with “I’m becoming”, “I’m choosing” and “I’m available for”, because your words reinforce your identity, and your identity shapes your actions. Watch the full conversation on YouTube Find Out More About Latha Jay Website: https://www.lathajay.com The 24/7 Manifestation Method: https://www.lathajay.com/247manifestationbook Instagram: @latha_jay_ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lathajayShorts Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LathaJay8/ Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Have you ever apologised to furniture? Do you reread a message you sent four hours ago, checking the tone? When someone praises your work, do you find the floor for them before they can get to it? Did you feel guilty resting the last time you were unwell? If more than two of those landed, this one is about you. In this Moment of Awe, we explore the AstroPsychology of self-worth: why the second house is not the money house, what Carl Rogers, Jennifer Crocker, Francis Flynn and Vanessa Bohns can tell us about proving and receiving and three ways to stop answering a question that was never yours. The Second House Is the Room Behind the Door The second house is the house of Taurus, and it is ruled by Venus. On the surface, it looks like the money house: wealth, finance, possessions. It is not. It asks one of the most uncomfortable questions in the entire chart: what do you believe you are worth? Not financially, not professionally, not socially, but at your core. If the first house is the door, this is the room immediately behind it, and it is the harder one. There was a year when I was still at the kitchen bench at eleven o’clock at night, eating something over the sink, answering emails that could comfortably have waited until Tuesday. I told myself this was simply what building something looked like. It was not. It was proof of purchase. Venus Is the Principle of Value Venus is not about what you own. It is about what you value, what you find beautiful and what you allow yourself to take in. Which is exactly why worth and possessions ended up sharing a room. Human beings have always confused what they have with what they are. Carl Rogers called this conditions of worth. As children, we receive love that arrives with terms attached. Be quiet, be good, achieve, do not need too much, do not be difficult. And a child who cannot survive without that love does the only sensible thing available: they work out which parts of themselves are acceptable and quietly exile the rest. So here is the distinction I want you to hold. Your values are what is genuinely important to you. Your usefulness is what you produce. Most people have not looked at the first in about twenty years, and keep an extremely detailed spreadsheet on the second. Proving Is an Unpaid Invoice In shadow, the second house looks like overworking, undervaluing yourself and feeling that you must prove your worth. Sit with that word, prove. You only prove something that is in doubt. Nobody wakes up and proves the sun came up. If you are still proving, at some point you agreed the question was worth asking, and nobody makes that agreement on their own. Somebody asked you first. Jennifer Crocker at the University of Michigan identified seven domains in which people stake their sense of worth: academics, appearance, approval from others, competition, family support, virtue and God’s love. Following students across their first year at university, she found that those who had staked their worth on the external ones were more likely to develop depressive symptoms. The problem was not how much self-esteem they had. It was what they had to keep doing to hold on to it. Proving is not a character strength. It is an unpaid invoice you inherited. Receiving Is a Skill In light, the second house looks like receiving, honouring your value, creating abundance from wholeness and knowing you are enough. Look at that first word: not earning, not achieving, receiving. Across their work, Francis Flynn and Vanessa Bohns have had participants approach more than 14,000 strangers with direct requests. On average, people underestimate the likelihood that somebody will say yes by roughly half. We are so focused on what it will cost the other person to say yes that we never consider how uncomfortable it would be for them to say no. Most of us are walking around with a wildly inaccurate estimate of how welcome we are. For most of my life, I carried the private sense that I was too much. Too intense, too fast, too many ideas arriving at once. So I learned to package myself down. And here is what I did not expect: the thing I spent thirty years apologising for is the thing people actually come to me for. Three Ways to Stop Proving Find the sentence. Finish this honestly: “I am okay as long as I…” Whatever fills the gap is not your worth. It is your condition. You cannot renegotiate a contract you have never actually read. Separate your values from your usefulness. Write down five things you genuinely value, and not one of them may be something you produce, achieve or deliver. If you stall at three, that pause is not a failure of imagination. It is the sound of a life organised entirely around output. Practise receiving. Once this week, ask somebody for something small, real and slightly inconvenient, and take it without paying for it. No favour back, no apology, no explanation. And when somebody compliments you, your entire response is thank you. You Were Not Born Asking This Somebody handed you this question a very long time ago, and you have been answering it ever since. You are not worth what you produce, what you hold together or how little you need from anyone. Those are your receipts. They were never your value. The chart does not tell you what you are worth. It shows you the room where you first agreed to prove it. And you are allowed to stop answering. The work was never to become worth it. It was to stop agreeing to the question. Because the more human we are with each other, the more we all rise. You can watch the video of this episode on YouTube. If you have been having the same conversation with yourself for weeks, meet Bridget, your AI coach. She asks rather than tells, and the thinking stays yours: https://bridget.riseandthriveglobal.com/ If you are a coach, psychologist or therapist and this framework felt like a language you already speak, explore the AstroPsychology Practitioner Programme: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/astropsychology-practitioner-programme/ Or book a 20-minute clarity call, no obligation, just a conversation: https://calendly.com/catherineplano/meet-greet Newsletter: Catherine Plano for transformation. Instagram: @catherineplano for inspiration.

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/ Christine Hassler sees so many high-achieving, emotionally intelligent, spiritually focused women going from shaman to astrologer to course, trying to work out what they need to do to find love. She advises against it, because the searching itself reinforces the belief that something is wrong with you. A master coach, spiritual psychologist and best-selling author of three books, including Expectation Hangover, Christine knows the territory personally. In her early twenties, she was a successful agent in the entertainment industry, and the money, the job and the guy all arrived. She still was not happy. Then her health, her engagement, her job and her family relationships fell apart at once, and she came face to face with how little self-worth she had. It was all outsourced. She had been seeing psychiatrists and psychologists since she was 11, but the question that changed things was a new one: what is this here to teach me? The old programme of being chosen Christine believes many women have bought into a very old programme about being chosen. When partnership does not arrive, the belief, conscious or not, becomes there must be something wrong with me, and every new course or healer reinforces it. The better question, she says, is what is my partnership to myself? She finds the women who struggle most to draw in a partner have often had to become hyper-independent, whether through being hurt or parentified too early. They long for love, but a protector part steps in front of the part that wants it and says we are safer on our own. The work is not fixing something broken. It is remembering who you really are. A guard, not a wall Catherine admitted that even when she practises love, a wall goes up. Christine offered a different image. There is no wall around the heart. There is a guard who believes it is her job to keep you from getting hurt. Christine calls discernment one of the feminine superpowers that is not talked about enough, a clear bodily yes or no that is different from intuition. Once you have done the work, that wisdom is embodied, and the guard can take a break. Override it, and you simply get a do over, the chance to learn the same lesson again. You can trust below the neck over between the ears, she says, most of the time. Finding the rage At her Women’s Retreat, Christine leads a grief release and then an anger burn, in that order, because women will give themselves permission to feel sadness but rarely go for their rage. She is clear this is intentional, trauma-informed work, not reactivity and not just catharsis. She thinks something that kills women, both literally and metaphorically, is holding rage inside until it becomes resentment, depression and disease. Our anger, she says, is our power and our passion. Of course I did that Asked whether we should aim to live in our hearts all the time, Christine pushed back on the pressure. When a nationwide shortage of estrogen patches in America had her calling ten pharmacies, she was not in her heart, and she did not judge herself for it. Of course she was fired up. She forgave herself and moved on with her day. The pressure she sees women put on themselves never to be triggered is, in her words, ridiculous. Brains get hijacked. What matters is having tools to come back. Not fixing, but giving Christine was engaged three times, married twice and divorced once before meeting her husband Steph at around 40. Looking back, each relationship reflected something she was learning. She is firm that inner child work is not fixing. It is giving yourself the childhood you never had and becoming your own advocate. Her advice on where to start is to dig where you are. Find your biggest expectation hangover and ask, what does this remind me of? Christine left us with three shiny golden nuggets. When you notice yourself reacting, put a hand on your heart and try the “Of Course” method: of course I feel this way, it makes sense, it is not a problem. When you feel dysregulated, gently knock on your bones, elbows and ribs especially, while you breathe, to give your nervous system parasympathetic input. And remember you are a spiritual being having a human experience. Take the pressure off, and have compassion for your humanity. Watch the full conversation on YouTube Find Out More About Christine Hassler Website: https://christinehassler.com/catherine Instagram: @christinehassler YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/christinehassler Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/ Tom Cronin will tell you that thinking is very overrated, and he has 26 years on a trading floor to explain why. He is an international keynote speaker, author of six books, leadership trainer and the producer of the feature-length documentary The Portal, and he has taught meditation to everyone from six-year-olds in classrooms to senior executives at Amazon, Oracle, Qantas and Coca-Cola. None of that was the plan. He spent a decade as one of Australia’s leading bond and swap brokers, starting in the late 80s in a world he describes as very Wolf of Wall Street, and by his late 20s it had cost him chronic panic attacks, anxiety, depression, addictions, insomnia and eventually agoraphobia. He was diagnosed as having a nervous breakdown. Psychiatrists, doctors and medication followed, and none of it felt quite right. Not a spiritual practice What changed things was a style of meditation known as Vedic or Transcendental Meditation, in which a qualified teacher allocates you a mantra, a resonance you repeat silently that shifts your brain out of its busy waking frequency and moves the body from the sympathetic nervous system, where we fight or flee, into the parasympathetic, where we rest and repair. Most people assume meditation is spiritual. Tom sees it as physiological. Most of our challenges, he argues, are not psychological at all. They are stresses held in the body, what the Vedic tradition calls samskara, and deep rest is what lets the body release them. Uncomfortable is not the same as worse Catherine asked the obvious question: does it get worse before it gets better? Tom reframed it. Stress releasing is not the same as stress inputting. Think of the twitch you feel falling asleep after a frantic day, he says. That is the same process, and it is not a crisis, it is a healthy expenditure of energy. On retreats, where the work goes deeper, tears and frustration do surface, but they are held in a safe space and understood as a good sign rather than a bad one. What the body does when you leave it alone His favourite illustration is a broken bone. No doctor, no medicine and no therapist can mend it. All the cast does is create stillness, and the body’s own intelligence does the rest. Cut your arm on a rose bush and the bandage keeps your clothes clean while your body coagulates the blood, grows scab cells and then skin cells, with no instruction from anyone. Meditation, in his view, is simply the same principle applied to the nervous system. He is careful about what he claims. He will not say meditation cures disease. What he will say is that his own biological age was measured at 37 when he was 29, that stress is one of the biggest factors in ageing, and that he stayed in the same high-pressure job for another 13 years and the number went the other way. The story is not happening now This is where Tom departs most sharply from conventional therapy. We do not need to regurgitate the story, he says, because the story is not happening right now. What keeps the mind replaying it is the energy of it still sitting in the body. Clear that, and the memory loses its charge. He can retell his own history on a stage, in a book or on a podcast without being triggered by it, not because he has analysed it enough, but because the stress behind it has gone. The sky behind the clouds If you have ever said you cannot meditate because your mind will not stop, Tom has an analogy for that too. A fidgety four-year-old will not sit still if you tell him to, but give him something charming to hold and he will. The mantra charms the mind. And beyond the thinking there is a state he calls Samadhi, where the mind trades the charm of thought for the bliss of being. Imagine a lifetime of cloudy days, he says. You would assume the sky is grey. Then one day the clouds part and you realise the grey was never the sky at all. Tom left us with three shiny golden nuggets. Start the day deliberately, with movement, hydration, meditation and clear intention rather than a scroll and a double shot. End it deliberately too, shutting down technology by around nine, stretching, reading and naming five things you are grateful for. And if you have no teacher and no mantra yet, close your eyes and rest your attention on the cool air at the rim of your nostrils. Three to five minutes is enough to begin slowing everything down. Watch the full conversation on YouTube Find Out More About Tom Cronin Website: http://www.tomcronin.com/ | https://entertheportal.com/ Instagram: @tomcronin YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/stillnessproject Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tomcronincoach Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Have you ever been called the strong one so often that being tired now feels like a betrayal? Do you use a slightly different voice for your mother than you do for everyone else? Is there a version of you that only exists in the car, in the ninety seconds before you walk into a room? If any of that landed, I was not reading your mind. I was reading a door. In this Moment of Awe, we explore the AstroPsychology of identity, why the first house is not who you are, what Jung, Winnicott and Higgins can tell us about the mask, and three ways to begin widening the entrance. The First House Is the Door In AstroPsychology, the first house is the point of contact. It is the version of you the world meets first, before anybody has had time to look further in. Your rising sign, your ascendant, is the shape of that entrance. And here is the line I most want you to carry: the first house is not who you are. It is the door you come through. Most of us confuse the two. We spend years polishing the entrance and then wonder why nobody seems to know us. The Mask Is Not the Problem Carl Jung called this door the persona, after the mask a Roman actor held in front of his face so the audience would know which character was speaking. Notice what the mask is for. It is not deception. It is contact. It lets the play happen. The persona is not a lie or a flaw, and the danger was never in having one. The danger is identifying with it. It is the moment you forget you are holding the mask and start to believe the mask is holding you. Donald Winnicott went further back, into the nursery. When a child learns that their real needs are inconvenient or unwelcome, they build a compliant self to protect the true self from harm. He called it the false self, and I want to be careful with that word. The false self is not your enemy. It was competent. It worked. Somewhere along the way it stopped being a strategy and became the whole house, and the true self is still in there, waiting to see if it is safe to come out. Two Kinds of Identity Pain In 1987, Tory Higgins mapped the three selves we carry: the actual self, the ideal self we aspire to be, and the ought self we feel obliged to be. The gap between actual and ideal gives you disappointment and deflation, the quiet sense of having missed something. The gap between actual and ought gives you anxiety and guilt, the sense of having failed someone. The texture of your discomfort tells you which gap you are standing in, and once you can name the gap, you are no longer inside it. Laid over the chart, it looks like this. The rising sign is the door. The sun is what you are here to become. The moon is what you actually need in order to feel safe. Most of the tiredness I encounter in people’s lives lives in the gap between the door and the moon. Three Ways to Widen the Entrance Map the three. Write down who the world meets first, who you are here to become, and what you actually need to feel safe. Do not edit. Just look at the three lines together and notice where the contradiction sits. Name the quality of the ache. Is it deflation, or is it anxiety? Is it disappointment, or is it guilt? That answer alone tells you which gap you are standing in, and which one to close. Bring one exiled part through the door. Pick something that never makes it into the room and let it in once, somewhere safe. Then watch what happens. Identity Is Not Discovered, It Is Authored You will not find yourself, and that is not pessimism. You cannot find a thing that was never an object. Jennifer Campbell’s research on self-concept clarity shows that people do not become well when they uncover the truth of who they are. They become well when they build a self that is clear, coherent, and stable enough to stand on. So you are not the mask, and you are not hiding behind it either. You are the one who chose it, in a room where it was the most sensible thing to wear. The first house is not a verdict on who you are. It is a description of the door, and the door can be widened. The work was never to find yourself. It was to widen the entrance. Because the more human we are with each other, the more we all rise. You can watch the video of this episode on YouTube. If you have been having the same conversation with yourself for weeks, meet Bridget, your AI coach. She asks rather than tells, and the thinking stays yours: https://bridget.riseandthriveglobal.com/ If you are a coach, psychologist or therapist and this framework felt like a language you already speak, explore the AstroPsychology Practitioner Programme: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/astropsychology-practitioner-programme/ Or book a 20-minute clarity call, no obligation, just a conversation: https://calendly.com/catherineplano/meet-greet Newsletter: Catherine Plano for transformation. Instagram: @catherineplano for inspiration.

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/ Alli Schaper will tell you that the most important things she knows about living, she learned from mushrooms, including how to die. She is the CEO and cofounder of SuperMush, a functional mushroom brand backed by globally recognised artists, athletes and founders, a co-founder of Microdosing Collective, the first US nonprofit dedicated to legal microdosing advocacy, and the host of Into The Multiverse, a podcast exploring consciousness and psychedelics. Her path there did not begin on a stage. By the time she was 21, she had been prescribed around twelve different pharmaceutical medications for chronic gut issues she had carried since childhood. The tuning fork Alli’s way out was not a magic pill, and that, she says, was the whole lesson. Functional mushrooms, lion’s mane instead of high doses of caffeine, chaga for immune function, reishi to wind down for sleep, acted as what she calls a tuning fork for her nervous system. They slowed her down enough for her body to follow its natural rhythm, and for her gut, our second brain, to function well again. She is quick to add that not all mushrooms are made equal. The gold standard is the fruiting body of the fungus, double extracted through hot water and alcohol, and she is passionate about people learning to read the label of what they put in their body. The lie of the quick fix Society, Alli argues, has sold us a massive lie: that everything we take should fix us immediately. An Advil numbs the pain, a Xanax puts you to sleep. Adaptogens are different. They work to bring the body into homeostasis, and sometimes the first week feels worse, not better, as the body works through what it has been holding, the way a sauna stirs up what it is helping you release. Stay the course, she says, and the discomfort is the detox. What fungi know about death Then the conversation goes somewhere most wellness interviews never do. Humans share almost 50 per cent of our DNA with fungi, and Alli believes we have barely begun to learn from them. Beneath every step we take runs the mycelium network, and when something dies on the forest floor, the fungi decompose it and return its nutrients to the soil as new life. Mushrooms, she says, are great alchemisers of death and dying. That teaching became personal when her father passed away unexpectedly, five days before he was due to retire. Her whole family had experienced mushrooms together before he died, and it gave her mother, married to him for 36 years, a profoundly different relationship with grief. His passing also left Alli with a warning she now carries everywhere: beware destination happiness, the habit of parking your joy at some future date you may never reach. A breath between trigger and response Microdosing, Alli explains, is a sub-perceptual dose of a psychedelic taken like a supplement, no visuals, no hallucinations, on a protocol of a few days a week over about three months. By quieting the default mode network, where our habit loops live, it opens a window of neuroplasticity. Her favourite example is disarmingly ordinary: her mum calls, says something triggering, and where the old programme would answer like a six-year-old, microdosing gives her a breath to choose her response. Those subtle shifts, she believes, could change the world. It is not a panacea, she is careful to say, and used unconsciously psychedelics can cause real trouble. Used consciously, with reverence, they helped her look at herself honestly. Not a magic pill For 15 to 20 years, Alli sat on the crinkly paper of doctors’ offices waiting to be told what was wrong with her. The turning point was deciding her health was her own responsibility, and seeing clearly, in her words, how much of her life her mind was making her sick. What the mushrooms unlayered was something she believes we all carry underneath: your natural state is joy. Alli left us with three shiny golden nuggets. Functional mushrooms can be a tuning fork for your nervous system. Microdosing can create open-mindedness and the ability to pattern-interrupt yourself. And mushrooms are incredible teachers of death that can teach us how to live more fully. Watch the full conversation on YouTube. Find Out More About Alli Schaper Website: https://www.supermush.com | https://www.allischaper.com Instagram: @allischaper YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@iamsupermush Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Dr Bruce Lipton will tell you that the most dangerous idea in modern health is also the most widely believed one. That your genes control your life. He is a world-renowned stem cell biologist, former medical school professor, bestselling author of The Biology of Belief and now Beyond Darwin, and one of the pioneering voices of the science of epigenetics. His fascination began in second grade, the first time he looked through a microscope and watched amoebas moving with what he swears was intention. Years later, growing cells in a petri dish as a research scientist, those cells taught him something that contradicted the very curriculum he was teaching. Genes do not control life. So when Catherine opened the conversation, Bruce did not ease into it. There is no gene, he says, that causes cancer. The victim programme Bruce’s argument starts with what the standard story does to us. If genes turn themselves on and off, and you did not choose your genes, then your health is out of your hands. That belief, he says, programmes people into victimhood, and victims hand their power to someone else. He points to the research he finds most telling: children adopted into families where cancer runs through the generations go on to develop the same family cancer, despite carrying completely different genetics. What travels down a family line, Bruce argues, is not a faulty gene. It is programming, beliefs, identity and ways of living passed from parent to child. What stress actually does to your body The mechanism at the centre of it all is stress. Bruce walks through it with the relish of a man who has explained it a thousand times and still finds it astonishing. Stress hormones squeeze shut the blood vessels of the gut, halting the maintenance and repair of the body. They shut down the immune system to conserve energy. And they push blood from the conscious forebrain to the reactive hindbrain, so we literally become less intelligent under pressure. That response was designed for fifteen minutes of running from a sabre-toothed tiger. Today it runs 24 hours a day, and Bruce’s number is stark: over 90 per cent of illness on this planet traces back to stress, while less than 1 per cent of disease is meaningfully connected to genes. The architect above the blueprint This is where epigenetics comes in, and Bruce’s metaphor makes it land. Genes are blueprints, and blueprints cannot build anything on their own. They need an architect. The architect, he says, is the mind. Epi means above, so epigenetics literally means control above the genes. If your consciousness is in harmony with the world, your biology follows. If your consciousness is in conflict, your biology becomes the battlefield, which is why so much modern illness is autoimmune, the body quite literally attacking itself. You are not the TV, you are the broadcast The most memorable stretch of the conversation is Bruce’s answer to the question of who we actually are. Every cell in your body carries a unique set of self-receptors, antennas found on no other human being alive. What are they receiving? An energy field. In physics, an invisible moving force that influences the physical world. In every spiritual tradition, that same definition has a shorter name: spirit. Your body, Bruce says, is a television set playing your broadcast. When the TV breaks, the broadcast does not disappear. It is the TVs that come and go. The programmes running your life Bruce’s most practical point is also his most confronting. In the first seven years of life, a child’s brain downloads its environment without filtering it, and criticism heard in those years becomes programming: not good enough, not lovable, not safe. Two beliefs, he says, fail in 80 to 90 per cent of people when tested: I love myself, and I am safe. And because 95 per cent of daily life runs from subconscious programmes rather than conscious wishes, learning new facts changes nothing on its own. You have to rewrite the programme. Bruce speaks from experience. For his first 40 years, he ran his father’s downloaded behaviour through every relationship he had, until he recognised the programme, rewrote it, and has spent the 30 years since, in his words, living heaven on earth, honeymoon every day. Bruce leaves the audience with a simple charge. Do not wait to die to experience heaven. We were born into it, and we manifest it, or its opposite, through the consciousness we bring. Change the programme, and you change the life. Watch the full conversation on YouTube. Get Bruce’s new book, Beyond Darwin: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Beyond-Darwin/Bruce-H-Lipton/9781637749364 Find Out More About Dr Bruce Lipton Website: https://www.brucelipton.com (free articles and subconscious reprogramming resources) Instagram: @brucelipton Facebook: Bruce H. Lipton, PhD

Have you ever grieved something that no one else could see? A friendship that quietly dissolved. A version of yourself you left behind. A relationship that is still technically intact but has become unrecognisable. And wondered why it hurt so much when, on paper, nothing had actually ended? There is a kind of grief that has no funeral. No flowers. No one checking in to ask how you are holding up. Because nothing has technically ended. No one has died. And yet something in you is grieving, quietly, persistently, and completely alone. In this Moment of Awe, we explore what ambiguous grief actually is, why it is one of the most isolating forms of human suffering, and three ways to begin honouring it. The Grief That Has No Name Maybe it is a friendship that slowly dissolved without a single defining moment. A version of yourself you left behind when life took a different turn. A relationship that is still technically intact but has become unrecognisable. A dream you set down so long ago you barely remember putting it there. This is ambiguous grief. And it is one of the most common, most isolating, and least validated forms of human suffering I encounter in my work. The reason it is so hard to carry is that the world only makes room for grief it can see. But the grief that has no name is often the heaviest kind. What Ambiguous Grief Actually Is Psychologist Pauline Boss first coined the term ambiguous loss in the 1970s to describe grief that occurs without closure, without the social permission to mourn, and without a clear ending. She identified two types. The first is when someone is physically absent but psychologically present. A parent with dementia who is still alive but no longer quite there. An estranged child. Someone you lost to addiction or mental illness who is still breathing but unreachable. The second is when someone is physically present but psychologically absent. A partner you have slowly grown away from. A friendship that became surface-level without either of you noticing. A version of yourself that showed up before the grief, before the loss, before life reshaped you. But ambiguous grief extends further than Boss originally mapped. It lives in identity loss, the grief of who you were before burnout, before motherhood, before the career change, before the diagnosis. It lives in life chapters closing without ceremony. In the slow fade of a relationship that was never officially over. What makes it so destabilising is that without a clear ending, there is no clear permission to grieve. And grief without permission goes underground, where it quietly shapes everything. Three Ways to Begin Honouring It Name it. Say it out loud, or write it down. I am grieving this friendship. I am grieving the version of myself I was before this happened. I am grieving the life I thought I was going to have. Naming it does not fix it, but it brings it out of the shadows and into the light where you can actually work with it. Grief that is named is grief that can move. Create your own ritual of acknowledgement. Ambiguous grief struggles because it has no funeral, no marker, no moment of collective recognition. So create one privately. Write a letter you never send. Light a candle. Take yourself somewhere meaningful and simply sit with what you are carrying. Ritual tells your nervous system that something real happened here, and that it is worth acknowledging. Resist the pressure to resolve it. Ambiguous grief does not always have a tidy ending. Sometimes the most psychologically healthy thing you can do is learn to hold the uncertainty without needing it to close. Not toxic positivity. Not forced forgiveness. Just the gentle, courageous act of saying: this is real, it matters, and I do not have to be over it yet. The Sadness You Have Been Trying to Outrun So here is the invitation. What if the sadness you have been trying to outrun is not a sign that something is wrong with you, but a sign that something mattered deeply to you? What if giving yourself permission to grieve the things that had no funeral is one of the most profound acts of self-compassion available to you right now? You do not need a reason the world would recognise to deserve to grieve. You just need something that mattered. And if it mattered to you, it was real. And real things deserve to be mourned. Because the more human we are with each other, the more we all rise. You can watch the video of this episode on YouTube. Newsletter: Catherine Plano for transformation. Instagram: @catherineplano for inspiration.

Annalie Howling will tell you that shame is the hardest emotion in the room to name, and that this is precisely why it runs so much of our lives. Ask a group who is feeling anxious, and every hand goes up, and each person can list what they are anxious about. Ask about shame, and you get silence. She is an elite performance coach, a trauma specialist and certified EMDR practitioner, and the author of the bestselling Unapologetic: Unshackle Your Shame, Reclaim Your Power. In 2026 Spear’s Magazine ranked her among the world’s best life and performance coaches. Over twenty years, she has worked with Hollywood actors, PGA Tour golfers, self-made billionaires, corporate executives and members of the UK Special Forces. So when Catherine asked her to unpack what shame actually is, Annalie did not reach for a definition. She reached for a distinction. Guilt is something you did. Shame is something you believe yourself to be. A weed, not a feeling The model Annalie offers reframes almost everything sitting on top of it, and it asks nobody to become a therapist. Picture a weed in the garden. The leaves are guilt and anxiety, the emotions we can name and discuss. Guilt is coulda, woulda, shoulda, and it lives in the past. Anxiety lives in the future, trying to control the uncontrollable by rehearsing every possible scenario before it happens. Beneath the leaves is the stem, which is the inner critic, or what many of us call imposter syndrome. Its only job is to make sure we are never rejected, and the only method it knows is to keep us inside the comfort zone it patrols. So it makes us perfect, people-pleasing, hyper-vigilant, chameleon-like. Should, in Annalie’s view, should be a swear word. Should is the fuel of the inner critic. And beneath all of it, always, is the root. Shame. You can trim the leaves with an intervention. You can even get partway down the stem with something you read online. But if you never reach the root, it grows back, in a different form, at a different time. Shame always begins with “I am” That is how you recognise it. I am broken. I am unworthy. I am unlovable. I am not enough. Guilt says I did something bad. Shame says I am bad, and it is believed at the core rather than felt on a difficult day. Annalie is candid that this is not theory for her. She grew up in a violent household where her parents told her she made her father beat her, and her mother colluded and told her it was her fault. She believed it. She internalised it. What followed was decades of people pleasing and performing, accepting scraps in relationships, overworking into burnout, and years of self-harm, all built on the belief that she was bad and therefore deserved none of what she had built. Nobody is born with shame. It arrives through a significant emotional event, and that event can be far smaller than you would expect. Annalie describes a client whose entire path of self-belief shifted because a head teacher pulled them aside at eight years old and told them they would probably not achieve very much. The line that releases people The most freeing moment in the conversation is a piece of science. In a traumatic event, the prefrontal cortex goes offline, and so does Broca’s area, which holds language. The limbic system takes over. Fight, flight, freeze, and the two we rarely discuss: flop and fawn. Crucially, you never get to choose your trauma response. It is selected for you, far faster than cognitive thought can arrive. Meanwhile, the body is tagging everything: colours, smells, people, storing what it might need later. It is why someone can be floored in a supermarket years afterwards, or why a person who sat with a loved one in a hospice suddenly cannot fly, because airports use the same cleaning products. Annalie leaves the audience with three golden nuggets: If self-compassion feels impossible, place someone you love into the memory and watch the scene through them. Treat a compliment like a gift in a box, because you would never throw it on the floor. When your inner critic is riding you, imagine it is true and dream into it. The point is not that the critic disappears. It is that you learn to play with it. Watch the full conversation on YouTube. Find Out More About Annalie Howling Website: https://annaliehowling.com Instagram: @annaliehowling YouTube: @annaliehowling

Dr Sarah McKay will tell you that the most common question she hears from women is also the least useful one. What is wrong with my brain? She is an Oxford-educated neuroscientist, founder of Think Brain and The Neuroscience Academy, presenter on ABC Catalyst and the author of The Women’s Brain Book, Baby Brain and Brain Health For Dummies. She has been a neuroscientist since 1993, when she fell in love with the subject in a first year undergraduate lecture, and she has spent the years since translating brain research into something people can actually use. So when Catherine raised the widely repeated idea that the ageing brain shrinks, Sarah did not soften her answer. No, your brain is not shrinking. Some menopause research actually shows grey matter volume increasing across the transition. Other research shows very little change beyond what ageing alone would explain. The volume loss we do see, through adolescence and first pregnancy, is a streamlining and refinement of connections rather than a decline. Sarah is careful to point out that a big part of what she tries to do is counter the assumption that the brain is inherently broken, or inevitably will be. She would rather learn something new about it than berate herself for not knowing it sooner. A map, not a diagnosis What Sarah offers instead is the most useful thing in the conversation, and it asks nobody to become a neuroscientist. Picture your brain inside your body, inside your world, and ask what information it is receiving and making meaning of. That information arrives from three directions. Bottom up is the body talking to the brain: sleep, hormones, stress physiology, inflammation, movement, nutrition, pain and energy. Outside in is the world shaping the brain: relationships, caregiving, work, culture, safety, expectations, social connection and cognitive load. Top down is the mind shaping experience: attention, beliefs, predictions, identity, self-talk and what we think our symptoms mean. Across puberty, cycles, pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, menopause and ageing, all three are always at work. Which is why Sarah swaps the question. Not what is wrong with my brain, but what is my brain responding to, and which system needs support first? Brain fog is a systems puzzle Applied to brain fog, the map changes everything. Oestrogen helps set the thermostat in your brain, and as it shifts the thermoregulatory zone narrows, so a small rise in body temperature gets read as an emergency. If that happens overnight, sleep architecture fractures. Waking once at 3am is not great. Waking for weeks or months on end is different. As Sarah puts it, it does not take long until you are lying there thinking, I am always awake, and then you will find something to worry about. Tired but wired slides into hypervigilance, and hypervigilance slides into anxiousness, which disrupts sleep further. Alongside that, oestrogen is one regulator of how neurons take up glucose to make energy, so thinking can feel slower and more effortful. Brain networks also become less specialised with age, so reaching a solution takes a little more mental labour. None of it is decline. All of it is a system under load. The input almost nobody counts Then there is the piece that surprised Catherine most. Research shows that a phone face down on the table still drains you, because the effort of not looking at it consumes working memory. Sarah’s own view is that mobile phones have reached a level of salience close to that of a newborn baby. Her solution is refreshingly physical: a small device on her fridge that blocks apps until she walks over and taps her phone against it. Friction, deliberately restored. Why you cannot think your way out Sarah’s most contrarian point is worth sitting with. Knowing how the brain changes does not mean you can think your way into changing it. Using your thoughts to change your thoughts, she says, is the hard way around, and often the road to rumination. Change an input instead. Move your body into a different environment, the way she did in Antarctica, where her anxiety simply faded because life became linear. Sarah leaves the audience with three golden nuggets: What is draining my brain this week? What is nourishing my brain this week? What is one thing I can change? Not a full renovation. One thing. Get it out of your head and onto pen and paper, and Sarah guarantees you will come up with a far more strategic plan, and it will change your brain. Watch the full conversation on YouTube. Find Out More About Dr Sarah McKay Website: https://www.drsarahmckay.com Instagram: @drsarahmckay Facebook: Your Brain Health

Have you ever made a decision that, on reflection, made no sense? Stayed in a job you hated, a relationship that was wrong, a group that did not value you? And wondered why you could not just leave? The answer is not weakness. The answer is biology. We are wired to belong. Not as a preference, not as a personality trait, but as a survival imperative. And when that wiring is running quietly in the background, it shapes far more of our lives than we realise. In this Moment of Awe, we explore what the science reveals about belonging, why the pull to fit in is so powerful, and three ways to begin cultivating the kind of belonging that fills you rather than depletes you. The Hunger You Did Not Choose For most of human history, being cast out of your group meant death. Your nervous system has not forgotten that. It still treats rejection and exclusion as a physical threat, and it responds accordingly. This is not poetic language. Neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman, in his research at UCLA, found that the brain processes social rejection in the same region it processes physical pain. Being left out hurts, literally, in the same way a broken bone does. Psychologist Roy Baumeister found something similar from a different angle: the need to belong is one of the most fundamental human motivations, operating across cultures, ages and contexts. When that need goes unmet, people will go to extraordinary lengths to satisfy it, often at significant cost to themselves. I call this belonging hunger. It is the background drive that makes you shrink yourself to fit in. It keeps you in rooms that diminish you, because being in the room feels safer than being outside it. It makes you agree when you disagree, perform when you are exhausted, and betray your own values to avoid the terror of exclusion. And most people have no idea it is happening. That is what makes it so powerful. Belonging hunger does not announce itself. It simply distorts everything quietly: your choices, your relationships, the way you see yourself. Counterfeit Belonging and the Real Thing Here is the distinction that changes everything. Counterfeit belonging requires you to hide parts of yourself in order to be accepted. It feels like belonging from the outside. It looks like belonging on paper. But there is always a cost, and you pay it in the quiet exhaustion of maintaining a version of yourself that is not quite true. Genuine belonging is what happens when you are accepted because of who you actually are, not in spite of it. Brené Brown puts it perfectly: fitting in is the opposite of belonging. Fitting in requires you to change yourself. Belonging requires you to be yourself. Three Ways to Cultivate Genuine Belonging This is not a single dramatic act. It happens in small, honest moments. Here is where to begin: Audit where you currently belong. Look at the groups, relationships and environments in your life and ask honestly: do I feel safe to be myself here? If the answer is no, that is not belonging. That is performance. And performance is exhausting. Risk being seen in one relationship. Genuine belonging begins with one moment of authentic self-disclosure. Not a dramatic revelation, simply a real opinion, a real feeling, a real admission. Then notice what happens. The people who respond with warmth to your authenticity are the ones worth investing in. Build your belonging from the inside out. The most durable sense of belonging comes not from finding the right group, but from belonging to yourself first. When you are deeply connected to your own values, your own truth, your own sense of who you are, you carry belonging with you. No one can grant it, and no one can take it away. The Distance You Have Been Feeling So here is the invitation. What if the loneliness you have been feeling is not about the people around you, but about the distance between who you are with them and who you actually are? What if genuine belonging, the kind that actually fills you rather than depletes you, is available to you right now? Not when you find the right people or the right place, but when you stop hiding the person you already are. You were not made to fit in. You were made to belong. And belonging begins the moment you stop asking permission to be yourself. Because the more human we are with each other, the more we all rise. You can watch the video of this episode on YouTube. Newsletter: Catherine Plano for transformation. Instagram: @catherineplano for inspiration.

Judi Holler will happily tell you she is one of the biggest fraidy cats you will ever meet. She is afraid of all the things. She is also a keynote speaker, USA TODAY bestselling author of Fear Is My Homeboy and a self-described professional experimenter who has spent nearly twenty years treating fear as her most important advisor. That contradiction is precisely the point of this conversation, because as Judi sees it, the goal was never fearless. The goal is brave. Her courage was built in unlikely places. Working in corporate America by day, Judi spent her nights in the dark, dingy little theatres of Chicago’s improv scene, eventually training at the legendary Second City. She calls improv her fear yoga. With no script and no safety net, those basement stages taught her how to make mistakes, recover, listen and act before she felt ready. Then she started smuggling those lessons into the office: speaking up first in meetings, sitting in the front row, going for the promotion, asking for the raise. Small brave moves that walked new people and opportunities into her life, until the morning her boss sat her down over breakfast and told her to choose between her corporate career and her growing speaking work. She set down her fork and knife, looked at him and said, I don’t choose you. I’m going to choose me on this one. I quit. A decade later, she has never looked back. Fearless is for five-year-olds and sociopaths Judi takes issue with the word fearless, plastered as it is across t-shirts, bumper stickers and tattoos. If you were truly fearless, she points out, you would never see a doctor, you would eat poisonous food on purpose, you would punch a shark in the face. Borrowing a line from Elizabeth Gilbert, she reminds us that the only genuinely fearless people are five-year-olds and sociopaths. Fear is wisdom. The work is not to eliminate it but to fear your fear less, and bravery, like confidence and creativity, is a muscle built through daily experimentation. Your brain versus your soul At the heart of Judi’s methodology sits a tension we all live with: our brains are louder, faster and more practised than our souls. The brain has one job, safety, and it can only reference past data, endlessly auditing your life and pulling you back towards the familiar. But life does not follow old data. Life is improv. There is no script. The soul is your capacity to trust yourself and make decisions inside uncertainty, and Judi is quick to note this is no longer woo. She points to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Work research, where skills like resilience, creative thinking, motivation and self-awareness now top the list of what the world needs, and every one of them lives in the soul. Reclaim, don’t reinvent When Judi felt creatively caged five years ago, she resisted the urge to tear it all down. Reinvention, she says, whispers that what you have built is not good enough. Reclamation says the opposite: I love what you have made here, and I want to see more. Through a confrontational journey of self-discovery, she realised nothing was ever wrong with her. She had simply been painting the canvas of her life with everybody else’s brush. Out of that season came the HOLLER Method, a personal operating system for courage built letter by letter from her own surname, along with nightly rituals like her 9.30pm glitch list, where she captures the ideas her brain would rather she forgot. Judi leaves the audience with three golden nuggets: Trust it all. Every twist, delay and detour is preparing you for what comes next. Experiment with your fear. Every day. On purpose. Small brave moves compound into a courageous life. Honour the graveyard rule. As Les Brown says, the graveyard is the richest place on earth, full of dreams that were never acted on. Do not let yours be buried there. It is a funny, honest and deeply practical conversation about courage, self-trust and the experiments that bring us back to ourselves. Whatever you have been waiting to do, take the first step. Go scared. Watch the full conversation on YouTube. Find Out More About Judi Holler Website: https://judiholler.com Instagram: @judiholler Facebook: Judi Holler Fan Page YouTube: @JudiHoller

Heather Parady never set out to build a brand. Growing up in the Southern Christian Bible Belt of the USA, she wanted one thing from the time she was a little girl: full-time ministry. That was what you did if you loved the Lord. But a series of events left her in an empty, dark place, and it was there, through podcasts and YouTube channels she never knew existed, that she stumbled into the world of mindset and personal development. The idea that changed everything was simple: the cards you were given are not the cards you have to end up with. What began as a sense of indebtedness, a need to pass on what she was learning, has evolved into a body of work helping unconventional leaders build an online presence that reaches hearts and souls. A former therapist, Heather now builds narrative strategies for people who want their message to genuinely connect. Her philosophy is refreshingly countercultural: real impact goes deep before it ever goes wide, and when your message truly resonates, you don’t have to worry about reach. It follows naturally. Tools are not fuel Much of the conversation centres on the trap most creators fall into. We’re taught the formula: open with a hook, deliver three points, close the loop. Heather doesn’t dismiss any of it. They’re tools in your tool belt. But tools are not fuel. We’ve all watched a video that was formatted beautifully and still felt like ninety wasted seconds, because there was no soul or heart in it. The fuel, she explains, is being sold on your message with deep conviction, and that’s the harder work, because conviction drags every insecurity to the surface. Who am I to say this? Without that foundation, no hook on earth will make your message land. She also offers a distinction every creator needs to sit with: are you sharing to serve your audience, or are you using your audience to feel validated? One is service. The other is an unhealed wound wearing the costume of authenticity. Vulnerability is not weakness Heather is quick to dismantle what online culture has done to the word vulnerable. It doesn’t mean airing your dirty laundry or crying on Instagram every afternoon. It isn’t handing strangers what belongs to your therapist, your spouse, your journal and the Lord. Vulnerability is speaking into the wound and sharing the strength that came from it, showing the parts of your story you have overcome and the resolve it took. That requires doing your inner work first, and Heather is open about the fact that it never ends. She was in therapy the day before this recording and will be there again next week. It’s a continuum, not a destination. That inner work is also the answer to the fear of visibility. We say we want to be seen, yet at our core many of us are terrified of it. When the identity-level work has been done, when you know who you are and what you were put on this earth to do, criticism from a stranger online can be met with empathy without shaking you in your bones. Heather knows this personally. The story that took her years to tell publicly, her break from organised religion, cost her relationships with family and people she grew up with. It still stings. It no longer shakes her. Heather leaves the audience with three golden nuggets: This generation does not have a short attention span. We binge entire series in a weekend. What’s missing is depth, so build your message on resonance and conviction, not hooks and formulas. The more robotic and manufactured the digital world becomes, the more light will shine on people pointing to truth and wholeness. Your humanity is your advantage. The thing we think is the thing is not the thing. The real work behind an elevated message is your own deep internal work, so prioritise your soul over the internet. It is an honest, fiery conversation about conviction, identity and why your message matters more than your metrics. Watch the full conversation on YouTube. Find Out More About Heather Parady Website: https://www.heatherparady.com Instagram: @heatherparady Facebook: Unconventional Leaders Podcast YouTube: @HeatherParady