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What happens when a cybersecurity engineer walks into a fashion boutique? For Harish Chandramowli, it sparked an idea that’s now helping small fashion brands save time, money, and sanity. A chance observation in a New York store became a mission to untangle problems in inventory, communication, and operations many brands struggle with. In this episode, I speak with Harish, founder of Flair Software, about how he went from working at Bloomberg and MongoDB to building a platform that fixes the messy back-office problems fashion brands face. Harish explains why seasonal inventory is a high-stakes game, how communication breakdowns can cost thousands, and why he built his solution to integrate with Shopify instead of competing against it. Tune in now to learn more. --- Listen to the podcast here: From Cybersecurity to Fashion Tech with Harish Chandramowli Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We have a lot of technological advances, a lot of digital technology, and a lot of the efforts around it have been used primarily around digital products, primarily around some of the platforms and everything else, but there’s also an aspect that I’m hopeful around that really takes some of the digital technology that we have and uses it to enhance the physical products and the actual life that we have outside of our computers in real life. My guest today, Harish Chandramowli, is the founder of Flaire Software and he has some interesting solutions for the fashion industry and other kind of inventory-related pursuits. ---   Harish, welcome to the program.   It’s a pleasure to be here.    Thank you for joining us. Now, first of all, kind of have your feet in both worlds, whether it be kind of our technological world as well as the world of fashion, the world of some of these in-real-life types of pursuits. Tell me a bit about your story, where you started and how you came up with the idea, what you observed that led to Flaire Software.   Yeah. Just taking a step back, I am not from fashion industry. It’s all pretty new to me. I did my master’s in cyber security actually in Johns Hopkins, then I worked as security engineer in a bunch of very data-related platforms like Bloomberg, MongoDB. And MongoDB was my last gig where I primarily started as cloud security engineer but moved on to like an Atlas dedicated team where you see how lot of different people use databases. And, interestingly, there are a lot of retail companies using databases very heavily. That made me more and more curious on how software is being used in retail industry and why database is like one of the biggest line expenditures. On top of that, when I was looking into ERPs, Oracle is one of the biggest player in the ERP market, which made me even more curious on what this space is. What happens around here? Why is a database company spending so much on an ERP, on like a data workflow?    Yeah.   This kind of made me curious but, again, it was more like I don’t think I was into fashion or any of those things. I went to this store called ONS in Soho. It’s a great store you should check out if you are ever in like downtown area in New York.    What’s the store called again?   ONS.   Okay.   Orange, Naples, San Diego. So if you go to Soho and like downtown in the fashion districts, you will notice a lot of these small, small brands which is not your typical H&Ms or Zara.   Yeah.    So I was there, I was actually listening to their team meetings, talking a lot with their founder. I was looking at how they are operating in the back office. The first thing that stood out to me is that fashion as a whole uses a lot of software. One aspect of it which we are all familiar with is designing the fashion, like the threading, modeling and like the cut and everything. Another easier to relate option is like e-commerce site, where you list, sell products, and then there is a big piece of back office operation which kind of brings together your design teams to your sales team, your customer service team, which is ERP. And what I really noticed is that, especially in fashion, T-shirts are looked at size and colors, whereas a female swimwear product has cup size, torso length, color, and regular sizes. That means everyone looks at product in a very different way, and, often, people spend 100k, 200k hiring software engineers to customize the product structure on how they look at their business in the back office, how they analyze is my orange color moving faster than my red color, or is this torso length moving more than the other length? And it was very expensive, and having worked at MongoDB, having seen how a schemaless database, how giving the power to user to define schema can help people, it just stood out to me that why haven’t we done that in ERP? And that’s what led to Flaire.   Essentially you looked at what happens at a lot of these smaller fashion companies and figured out a way that you could really kind of simplify their operation.    Yes.   You didn’t originally come from the fashion industry. Does the fashion industry have a special meaning to you or is this just the industry that you happened to observe this retail issue where you’re going to be taking this to kind of other components of retail?    So I was looking at different retail things. One of the things that really stood out for me in fashion industry is the season. One, even within our customers, I have seen some of our customers go bankrupt just because they had one bad season. So the need for inventory planning, the need to analyze your business comes very early in your life cycle compared to other businesses.Share on X You need to move fast. You can’t sit on a lot of inventories. At the end of every four months, you need to decide do I sell my inventory at 50 percent loss or do I sit on it for the next season? Sitting on it for the next season means your cash is locked up, you can’t buy new products for the next season, and you are not making profit on it. So, all this decision making and all the need for an ERP or need for a workflow automation platform comes very early in the cycle. That’s one of the reason I took fashion industry. Apart from that, I was always curious. Because when I grew up, I grew up in a place where all these manufacturing happens, so we used to buy clothing in kgs and pounds. You don’t go and buy a t-shirt, you buy a pound of t-shirt.    Oh, yeah. Oh my gosh ––   –– the factory. So I was always curious on how things have changed between factories and how you buy clothes to here. So there was a bit of curiosity. But the main reason I picked fashion is because the need for these kind of innovative solutions comes very early in your business life cycle. So you alluded to like right now or before your solution, most of these companies were essentially hiring data scientists to comb through all this data, seeing what color was moving, probably looking at factors like month of the year, trends in style and stuff like that, right?    Primarily, more than that, people use engineers to push into some kind of like a data store where they can do the analysis. But then at mid-level, people are not even doing that. They are trying to handle everything in spreadsheet because they don’t have the money to hire those engineers so they were literally doing that in spreadsheets.    When you looked at these organizations, what are the size? How many total employees would one of these brands that you see in Soho, one of these kind of stores have?    If I look at our customer profile, various customer profile, it varies anywhere from like 6 to 7 employees to 25, 30 employees, based on the size. $30 million brands, which is like one of our lower end of the customer base would be like 5 to 10 employees, whereas the $60, $70 million brands have like 20 employees.    When I think about companies around that size, there’s certain hyper-specialized positions that not necessarily being hired out unless it’s like specific to industry, so when I think about a company that’s a thousand people, say, almost every one of them is going to have data engineers, data scientists, something even for just their operations, whereas the smaller ones probably not. So, these companies, let’s say one of them has 15 employees in your end, what is that makeup of the employees? Is it just like kind of a marketing person, a CEO, and a bunch of, you know…   Exactly. Most of them are tech savvy. One, they know what information they need to make decisions, but they have no idea how to get those information. That’s where they look up to us and be like, “Hey, if I have this information, I can make a better business decision on how to plan, how much inventory to buy, when to expect an inventory, when to book a marketing campaign,” whereas they have no idea how to get those information because your CRM is very decoupled from your ERP which is very decoupled from the interactions that a purchase manager is having with a factory on, “Can we produce this? Can we not produce this? When this can be produced?” So, they are looking to us and be like, “Hey, I have all these separate information, how do I bring these things together? Can you make a software that can help us and give us the detail in the simplest possible way?”    Typically, if I just look at what the situation would be, a CRM would have, say, I don’t know, the number of a certain item that’s selling each day. That information would be there, right?    Two things, most of often than not, CRM, especially in this industry, happens is with B2B businesses, so what would happen is that you will –– so you are sitting in July and you will be selling your winter clothes as bulk orders. So you will be negotiating with other shops on like, “Hey,

We have more options than ever in modern life, but is that really a good thing? Digital technologies that claim to make our lives easier, like restaurant ratings and dating apps, are all around us, but they usually end up making us feel even more stressed. In this episode,I speak with Emily Pabst, the founder of Remake the Rules and a decision-making coach. Emily discusses how our lives are being shaped by "choice tech" and how to regain control. We look at the mental traps that undermine our thinking, how having too many options can lead to anxiety, and how to prevent decision fatigue. Emily explains how small business owners, corporate executives, and regular people can simplify their decisions, live more clearly, and reconsider their relationship with technology. --- Listen to the podcast here: Rethinking Choices and Tech Overload with Emily Pabst Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. In today’s world, we just have a lot of decisions to make and a lot of choices to make them from. I often make the reference to doing a Google search for something like a therapist, something that a lot of people will look for at some point in their lives, and if you ever look for a therapist, you’ll see a Google search and you may see the people who do, say, the type of therapy you’re looking for, work with the type of people, whether it’s individual, couples, family, stuff like that, whether it’s specific to addiction counseling versus just kind of trying to get a leg up on life, but it’s really hard to know what you really want because you’re going to meet the therapist and you’re going to find out more about the person and whether or not you vibe, and I think that paradigm applies to a lot of other places in life, especially in our technical world where you just have so many choices and so much information and you’re like how do I sort through it all and how do I avoid getting decision fatigue? My guest today is Emily Pabst, and she is the founder of Remake the Rules, a decision-making coaching service. ---   Emily, welcome to the program.   Yeah, thank you so much for having me.    Thank you so much for joining from the other side of town here in Denver. And first, to I guess orient, tell us a little bit about Remake the Rules, because I think the idea may be a little bit new to some people out there listening about someone to coach you to make decisions other than whatever, probably the four or five family members they all have giving them advice.   My background is in information science and data analysis, actually, and, throughout these last few decades, what I’ve really noticed both in my professional and then also in my personal life is that the overwhelming addition to what I call choice tech tools to our lives, so those are going to be tools that are digital information tools that impact how we think, how we feel, and, most importantly, how we make decisions. That the addition of those tools, while they promise a lot, a lot of additional knowledge, a lot of additional tools, they often do not deliver and they often do the exact opposite. They create a lot of uncertainty, a lot of frustration, a lot of overwhelm. And so I essentially help people live and thrive well within this sort of overwhelming information environment that we’ve created for ourselves.   So, give us an example of a choice tech tool that did overpromise, underdeliver, and essentially make things more frustrating.   Sure. I think the number one for many, many people, it’s going to be online dating.   Oh, yeah.   Yeah.   I’ve seen so many videos and essays about how 90 some percent of people involved in it are frustrated with the online dating world, that there’s like this idea that there’s maybe 5 or 10 percent of people that are really thriving in it, and then the other 95, 90 percent are just fed up.   Yeah. I mean, the frustration is absolutely real, and sort of the stance that I take on these information tools, regardless of if it’s online dating, I tend to focus on sort of high stakes environments. So, in many cases, a choice tech tool like online dating has now fully taken over how folks make decisions in regards to who they choose to meet and spend time with and potentially become a partner, a life partner, so this is a very high stakes choice that we are now inviting these technology tools into to be a major part of, but it can be a lot of different things. Small business ownership involves a ton of tools very similar to this that are intended to help you thrive in your business and often are confusing and overwhelming, and same with leading large organizations. Those are sort of the three realms where I work with people most frequently because they are both so inundated with these tools while also really needing the outcomes to be positive and to work productively for them.   So, you talk about online dating, of course, being high stakes because, and possibly even the highest stakes because the person you choose to spend your life with ends up being one of the most important decisions, an important part of it. What would be an example of a low stakes tool that people sometimes maybe think about too much but it’s really just not that highest stakes?   Interesting. Well, so part of kind of the way that I help folks to sort of reframe the frustration and the overwhelm that they’re feeling is how pervasive these tools are, and the pervasiveness of them is actually significantly altering just how we go about our patterns of day-to-day life. So one sort of example significantly lower stakes is how you feed yourself, how you choose what restaurant you go to, how you choose how to get groceries. So there are many, many more information tools that are available to us to achieve that than there were 10, 15, 20 years ago, but because of the advent of them, it kind of disrupted those old patterns, so now we are trying to relearn what really works for us again now that we have so many different options.   This reminds me of a TV show from several years back. Aziz Ansari had a show called Master of None, which I kind of think of as the millennial guide to life myself, and there’s an episode of this show where he gets online and starts researching the best taco truck, I think it is, in his neighborhood, and I don’t even remember what neighborhood, this was many years ago that I watched this, but it’s a neighborhood in New York City, he’s trying to find the best taco truck, and by the time he does all the research to find out which one is, they’re out of food or they’re closed.   100 percent. And also, I think that there’s a lot to be said for the accuracy of that information. This idea that that is something that is available to us through some means, like Google mapping or what have you, these review platforms, it can be kind of accurate for some locations, for some questions, but can be just a very poor option for information in other scenarios.    And I’ve seen a lot of people do this where they’re looking at Google Maps, they’re like, “Oh, there’s a Chinese restaurant at the block and it has a 4.7,” and that’s supposed to signify that it’s good, whereas some other place may have been there that has a 3.9 and maybe it’s not as good, whereas maybe the item on the Google Map with the number of dollar signs is actually a more important indicator because that tells you how much money you’re going to spend on that meal.   Certainly, and it’s conversations like this that I end up having with folks is really just recontextualizing what we’re looking at, what we’re interacting with, what we’re talking about, that sort of has become so normalized and such a strong default for folks, like you want to figure out where you want to eat, the default is to look at online reviews on one, maybe two different platforms. But then there’s ideas about who is completing that information, who is providing it, how it is coming to be, whether or not they are genuine, whether or not they are from a subculture that is going to have the same food ideas and preferences that you do. So I enjoy traveling a lot and I also really enjoy sort of looking at places through the lens of some of these very large platforms because you can really tell when only a very specific population is engaging with it, and that population, if you go abroad, is unlikely to be the population that actually lives in a place. So, there, we can really see an example of how we are just sort of entrenching into a very singular viewpoint, but because it’s on the internet and there’s so much data, it feels like it’s actually really well sourced and well informed.   Yeah, it feels like ground truth, and an example, it has a 4.7, 4.8 rating that almost is taken by most people as ground truth that this is a quality restaurant.   Yes, yeah.    So, with this example, I know this example has nothing to do with business, it’s just kind of a normal life example, where someone looks at Google reviews, they see that number and sometimes they just look at a couple reviews or whatever and then they choose the restaurant, what is the bigger issue? Is the bigger issue the fact that this information may not be reflective of what you really want or the fact that this may not be the best use of our mental and cognitive energy of, okay, this meal might be slightly less good if we don’t do all the success of research versus all the other things that we could be thinking about in life and some of the things that may have higher stakes?   Yeah, certainly the latter. We have an unlimited amount of energy and information at our disposal at any given time, so making a choice and saying, good enough, and being like, “Well, I’ve had better pizza in my life but that’s okay.”Share on X

Most of us focus on the obvious when it comes to wellness, what we eat, how we move, and how much we rest. But there’s another daily habit that could quietly be affecting our health: the water we drink. We often think about diet, exercise, and even sleep when it comes to our health, but how often do we think about our water? In this episode, I talk with Cydian Kaufman, water quality expert CEO of Pure Water Northwest, about what’s really in your tap water and how it could be affecting your energy, skin, and long-term health. Cydian explains the difference between “legal” and “healthy” water standards and shares practical tips on improving your water at home, from reverse osmosis systems to dealing with PFAS and other hidden contaminants. Know what you drink. Tune in now. --- Listen to the podcast here: Tapping into Health and Water Wellness with Cydian Kauffman Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Growing up on Long Island, my family, we always used some form of a water filter. It was always –– it was before Brita but there was a predecessor to it, now a lot of people use Brita, or we would use bottled water. However, living in Denver, we recently had a project where we reconstructed our water pipelines to get the lead out of the water. Since then, I’ve actually drank all my water out of the tap here in Denver, Colorado. Whether that’s the right decision or not, I am not sure, so I’m going to introduce to you my guest, Cydian Kauffman, who is one of the owners of Pure Northwest Water, to tell me about water as well as whether or not I’m making the right decision with this current situation. ---   Cydian, welcome to the program.   Thanks for having me on. Appreciate being here. It’s Pure Water Northwest, by the way, just so you know. I love talking about water. I’d be happy to jump right in and talk about Denver specifically, if you like, however you want to approach it.   Yeah, I mean, I didn’t know. All I do remember is that a few years ago, they reconstructed the pipelines here in Denver and they said the project was to get the lead out of the water and that, since then, I’ve, at least, in my head, felt like just drinking the water out of the tap was perfectly fine.    It might be. What zip code are you in? What, if you don’t mind saying that?   Oh, wow. Yeah, we’re getting fine-tuned here. I’m in 80205.   Right. Let’s get specific. So, you’re on the Denver Water Board, water quality ––   Yeah, but I’m not elected to any water position here. I just ––   Yeah, I know. I mean, you’re on the main water in Denver, Colorado,   Yeah, I assume. I mean, I’m only like a mile and a half east of downtown.   All right, so if you look up, and most people in the country can do this, you can actually go look up water quality reports for whatever water quality you’re on, and there’s two ways to go about this. One is to just literally look up the water quality report for your municipality, which I’ve got right in front of me, two seconds of doing a Google search, I got the Denver Water Quality Report. Yeah, that’s going to bring you to a page with a bunch of lists of what they do and how they do it and, eventually, you’re going to get to exact contaminants that they test for and their results. If you don’t want to just take their word for it, though, you can go to a website called the EWG, the Environmental Working Group, then go to their tap water database, type in your zip code and find your municipality that way, and then you can kind of compare those two. Now, unfortunately for most people, this is going to be more annoying than good experience because there’s so much confusion in these lists, like what does it mean to have eight parts per billion of bromodichloromethane, which happens to be in Denver water. If you talk to someone like myself, we will know right away, bromodichloromethane, it’s a chlorine byproduct. It happens when you put chlorine in the water and it’s one of the total trihalomethanes, which is basically a category of chlorine byproduct that can be in the water. At really, really high amounts, you can have cancer from that. At the amounts that tend to be in municipalities, you would have to be very susceptible in order to get cancer from the amount of bromodichloromethane that happens to be in most municipalities. Some municipalities, though, have it at extremely high amounts. So, the particular water that you’re dealing with, it’s so much about your susceptibility to it and it’s so much about the amount that’s in the water, and it does require some expertise to interpret it and understand it, but doing that is definitely worthwhile. There’s a lot of solutions to get you there too.    You mentioned certain chemicals, and I don’t think it’s going to be that easy for anyone listening to follow bromodimethyl –– I’m probably ––   Bromodichloromethane, yeah.   You know what I mean? To follow all those chemicals. What are the general dangers that, say, the average person in any city across North America can face by drinking their city’s tap water on a daily basis?    Well, they can face radium. They can face arsenic. They can face hexavalent chromium, which is that Aaron Brockovich chemical, nitrates, pesticides, PFAs, forever chemicals, pharmaceuticals, all of those things are in city water. Some of them are not properly or fully, let’s say, restricted by the Environmental Protection Agency. So, all of these things can be in city water. Additionally, the infrastructure of the city that you’re in may have wood pipes, may have old metal pipes that have lead in them. They can have over-chlorination, they can have under-chlorination. They can have any of these problems, and it becomes so burdensome to people that they just use a shorthand, “My water is good,” or, “My water is bad,” or, “The water in our city is good,” “The water in our city is bad.” The water in Denver is considered pretty good. And it is considered pretty good despite the fact that it has a little bit of radium in it, and that’s known by the municipality, and radium is radioactive. It’s got a ton of chlorine and chlorine byproducts, and it’s got some other volatile organic compounds, some metals, some herbicides, hexavalent chromium is in the water at very low amounts. Now, the reason why this doesn’t get reported or have anything done about it is because the human body is incredible at filtering. So, the EPA sets two standards for drinking water. They set a legal level, which is called the maximum contaminant level, and then they set a health level, which is called the maximum contaminant level goal, so it’s the MCL versus the MCLG. The MCL is less restrictive than the MCLG, so the legal level is less restrictive than the health level, meaning you can get water that is exceeding the EPA’s own health level but it’s legal, so the municipalities are allowed to have that be in the water. And the reason is, is because the cost of those municipalities actually removing it down to the levels that are healthy is virtually impossible for some of them. So then a choice is made. The EPA had to make a choice. They were like do we insist that they get us to the health level and risk that municipalities literally have to close their doors and hundreds of thousands of people don’t get water or do we allow some water through and put it on the homeowner to treat their own water if it’s over that level?   So, obviously, they chose to not bankrupt these municipalities.    Right.    Now, if there is some contaminants, okay, I would say, I’m assuming that the EPA legal level, the relatively looser standard, if a municipality exceeds that, then it’s likely a really, really extreme health risk that people can encounter. But for the ones that are in between those two levels, in between the gold level and the standard level, what kind of health risks can occur, say, someone decides to drink that water and how effective is things like using a Brita filter or buying bottled water on preventing some of those?   Great questions. How likely are those things to have an effect on people? Very unlikely. That is why they are at that level, because the majority of people do not feel effects from it. What effects have I seen? I’ve seen people have miscarriages because of it. I’ve seen people be sick, consistently sick, and not know why. I’ve seen my own daughter actually got eczema from very low levels of hardness in the water. And so the actual effects are very person based. These are rare occurrences that I’m noticing because I am in water treatment so I have customers talking to me and telling me what they’re dealing with, then I test their water and then I have to research outliers and kind of help them figure out what the cause is and then help them fix it. As far as standard solutions, like the simple solutions that you buy off the shelf, like Brita, that’s helpful a little bit with some things. The tricky part of that is this is science so we can’t just throw one thing at everything and have it work. Brita is carbon. It’s called granulated activated carbon and all it is is literally really finely chopped-up pieces of carbon. And carbon is amazing because a single gram of carbon, if spread out, the surface area of it is spread out, it would cover three tennis courts. That is how much filtration capacity it has. It’s incredible at filtering, but it’s not incredible at filtering everything. EPA level of arsenic, for the legal level of arsenic is 0.01 parts per million. If you’ve got 0.005 parts per million in your municipality, which I’ve seen a lot, carbon may remove it or it may not. You may be drinking arsenic, you may not be. If, on the other hand, you have chlorinated water, like you

You’ve got the skills, the service, maybe even a killer website, but how do you actually get people to notice? In a world flooded with content and AI-generated everything, standing out feels harder than ever. So, what do you do? In this episode of Action Antidote, we’re joined by Reed Hansen, Chief Growth Officer at Market Surge, to break it all down. From finding your true audience to navigating tech overwhelm (hello, AI everything), Reed shares practical tips on marketing smarter, not louder. He also drops insights on how to stay human in your message, even as the internet gets noisier by the minute. If you’re running a business, building a brand, or just trying to get traction in a crowded world, this one's for you. --- Listen to the podcast here: How to Get Your Business Noticed Without Losing Yourself in the Noise with Reed Hansen Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about getting a business noticed, and this conversation may even get into this broader concept of getting noticed in general, because anyone that starts a business, your product could be amazing but you would need to actually get that product noticed. But, increasingly, in the traditional job market, we’re also seeing people need to find a way to get noticed, in the sense of every single job you apply for online now has 700 or whatever resumes, all kind of pointing in and it’s just a pretty crowded world out there in general with the internet having kind of connected everything with everything, everyone with everyone, and we’ll talk a little bit about whether or not AI tools have the potential to change that. But here to talk about just what you need to do to get your business noticed, I would like to invite my guest, Reed Hansen, the chief growth officer of MarketSurge and owner. ---   Thank you. I’m really glad to be here.    Oh, thank you for coming on. And so, I’m envisioning a situation a lot of people have where, okay, you’ve developed a product or a service, let’s just say someone just decides to go freelance because they got laid off or their job didn’t really work out well, it wasn’t what they wanted to do and someone just has a skill, say, you’re even like a graphic designer or something like that and this is a great skill set for a freelance option. So, if someone’s doing something along those lines, what do they need to be thinking about as far as, “Okay, I have this great skill set but now I need to get customers. Now, I need to get people to buy it,” essentially?   Yeah, no, that’s a great question, and I think really the essential question is you’re going into business for yourself. Obviously, you will have a certain set of skills from previous experience and attributes and talents but you want to be super hyper-focused on the needs of the customers you want to work with. And that is tricky because you want to understand both where are they located? Where are they found? Where is their attention focused on? And we talk about social media platforms. Is your audience more of a Facebook audience or more of a Discord or Reddit audience? And you need to understand those things and put yourself in the shoe, because you are not your customer. You don’t just instinctively have all the same interests and likes as your customer. You have to understand where they are and that’s the first thing. Where are they? And then you want to think about what do they need, what do they value. Some roles might be a little easier, like if you are an expert plumber, you kind of know what is needed and what they need, but if you come in as a creative, you have a wide, broad range of things that you need to tailor your offering.    An example, the plumber, right? I mean, your customer is a homeowner who had some sort of plumbing problem happen to their home. That’s just great, like 100 percent clear example.   I think it’s well established what those kinds of needs are, but I think a lot of us get into businesses that could work across a wide variety of different use cases and we need to decide which of those use cases we want to work on. It’s like you don’t start by saying, like, “I really like to blog and, therefore, I’m gonna sell blogs,” or, “I’m going to sell writing.” That’s just not enough. You have to make it more tailored and actually understand a group or a cluster of customers to take that to market.   And what goes into the understanding of the customers? Because a lot of people have traditionally talked about customers as in, okay, your customers tend to be upper middle class, age 35 to 50 something like that, right? But that’s not really a deep understanding of someone. I think what you’re talking about is understanding the customer’s needs, their pain points, what they’re going through when they’re going to see your service, and why they’re going to want to buy your service.   Right, exactly. And so if you have previous experience in this role, it’s helpful to understand the people that you’ve worked with previously, and you want to look at motivations. You want to look at what are their needs.Share on X And even I think people might do the surface level of what are their needs and kind of cherry pick like, well, they need photographs, and I’m a photographer, so that’s what they need. It’s like, no, no, you need to go one or two more levels deep. Why do they need photographs? Do they see a visual medium is really important to preserving their memories and relationship with family? Do they have family that’s far away? Do they like to send out Christmas cards or holiday cards? Understanding what drives that need is really important. Say they really want to preserve the memories of their family. Okay, well, what’s important about their family to them? Is this an activity to create closeness or is this something –– do they just like wearing nice clothes or is this –– think about the depth to that and know the other products that might be part of this scenario as well, like, oh, they’re shopping for new clothes, or they really like to spend a lot around the holidays or –– like knowing the timing and all those things will affect what you go to market with.   And is there a possibility of going too deep?   Certainly, yeah, because you can definitely go too deep and be too focused on too small of a group. I like to use the customer persona approach and create usually it’s like a one page sheet and you’ve described your customer demographically, age, maybe gender, but also some like range of like incomes and kind of housing or maybe family status and maybe even occupation. But then you add little snippets of like frames of like if they were speaking their thoughts out loud, what would be some bullet points you jot out? And you can even give this person a name. You can create multiple of these personas, but that helps you identify your approach to messaging, any of the content you create or the platforms you focus on, are they primarily looking at the mobile website or the desktop website, and understanding those things through your persona.   Yeah. And how often do those things change? Because platforms seem to always be really fluid and I have some ideas about who’s on what platforms, but it seems like that’s something that like every year could be different.   Yeah, and I agree. I think yearly is a good –– that’s a good exercise to revisit your ideal customer profiles or personas every year, and maybe even more often, as our technology landscape has changed and big events happen, like the COVID shutdowns and that disruption, things like that can really affect buying processes for people and decision making. So, I’d say revisit it when there are major events that affect your ideal customers and annually.   Yeah, and I can’t speak to anyone listening any of your specific businesses but I know one kind of big event that’s happening right now that I think everyone is thinking about is AI and how AI is unfolding and how it has a potential to transform, I guess, everything about how businesses get themselves noticed.    I’m following this closely because I use a lot of AI tools for the work I do, but also I’ve just become aware that it’s a disruptor, it could replace things that I do, it could help accelerate things that I do, but also that it’s like changing at a logarithmic pace, like it seems to be even accelerating the rate of change within the AI world. And it’s a little intimidating because it’s hard to stay on top of all of it and I think, unlike some of the previous big leaps forward in technology, it’s like really cheap for consumers and businesses to use. At first, there was high barriers to entry with like phones or personal computers or things like that. It required some setup. But with AI, people that just try it, you can kind of take off right from when you start with ChatGPT. All of a sudden, you’re really using it and getting a lot of value out of it. So many factors kind of combine that make it concerning, and, of course, we’ve all seen the horror movies, the Terminators, the Matrix movies, and we fear this major cultural collapse or societal disruption. Doesn’t seem to have happened yet but I think it’s something to be attentive to.   Yeah. How attentive? I mean, because we’re thinking about, obviously, how AI has potential to disrupt industries, and when I think about historic disruptions, I think of disruptions that just kind of changed the way we do things. So, for example, the car kind of put the horse and buggy business out because it changed how we get around but it wasn’t a catastrophe, unless someone had invested their entire life savings in a blacksmith shop or something like that, kind of became a different way in which we get around.

Ever feel like you're putting your message out there and... nothing? No response, no engagement, just silence. In today’s world of nonstop content and ever-changing algorithms, just showing up isn’t enough. You have to show up the right way. On this episode of Action Antidote, we're joined by Joshua Altman, Chief Marketing Officer at Beltway Media, to talk about what it really takes to get your message to land. With a background in journalism and social media strategy, Joshua knows how attention works and how to earn it. He shares why a message often needs more than one shot to stick, how to find the signal in all the digital noise, and why staying human is your greatest advantage in a crowded space. If you’re tired of guessing what works and ready to start communicating with clarity and impact, this episode is your cheat code. --- Listen to the podcast here: Your Message Doesn’t Matter If No One Hears It with Joshua Altman Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about getting your message out and about all the different ways that we have available to get our messages out and even how this landscape is changing quite a bit. I’m sure you’ve all heard a little bit about AI and the hype around where AI might be taking some things, but there are plenty of other progressions and other trends taking place. To stay updated on that and to give us some information about all the different platforms, all the different methods, all the different places we can go and also the ways we can craft our messages to our audience, I would like to bring on my guest today, Joshua Altman, who is the chief marketing officer of beltway.media, a company that provides fractional services to small- to medium-sized businesses. ---   Joshua, welcome to the program.   Thanks for having me so.    So, yeah, let’s start out by talking about your story. Has marketing, getting crafting messages, getting messages out, has that always been part of your path?   In a way. I did not start in corporate or in marketing or anything along those lines. I went to journalism school and started as a journalist, and then went from being a congressional news producer and reporter to being a corporate communications person. I left my job, I was with The Hill newspaper for about five years and I left that to what I thought would be freelance reporting and producing. I was a cameraman, I was an editor, I was a producer, so very hands-on technical side of things in addition to the reporting, doing the interviews, the research. All the things people associate with print reporting, I was doing that plus video. That’s what I went to college for. I did my masters while I was a reporter. I was all in DC. I did that in something called communications, culture and technology and I thought I’d spend my career as a journalist. That wasn’t what ultimately happened. I left my job as a journalist, thinking, like I said, I’d be freelance, and then I kind of just fell into the corporate work, which is kind of what I’ve been doing since.    So what made you leave your job? What was the –– was there an event that made you leave it? A certain realization?   No. I mean, in terms of an event or a realization, I’ve been there just, like I said, for five years. I was kind of looking to grow and do something a little different than what I had been doing. I had great experiences where I was, was just looking to do more, again, as a reporter. I ended up doing something entirely different.   So, when you were on the path of being a reporter, it seems like you had your hand in a lot of the areas of content creation or what we would call content creation now,. You talked about filming the video, video editing, doing everything. Was there certain aspects of it that started to intrigue you more, because you talk now quite a bit about how our messages are crafted, how are we actually reaching an audience?   So in addition to doing video with The Hill newspaper, I also did a lot of their social media, not for my whole time there but for about the last 18 months or so, I was doing their social media as well. So, what I did a lot of was pooling things and making it fit how we wanted to communicate that story. So, sometimes, it was a longer three- to five-minute piece, sometimes it was just a sound bite. Sometimes, we have an interactive map. Sometimes, it was, primarily a social post. One thing we did a lot of there were vote counts, who’s going to vote for or against this bill that’s coming up. And a lot of that was literally on the website, it was a list. How can we make that list more engaging? That was a lot of things on social media, that was regular updates through different channels. At that point, it was Twitter, Twitter posts, Twitter accounts so if it was an energy bill, we had special ones for energy. How can we profile things? If this person’s likely going to vote for this but here was their past voting record on similar things. What groups could we make of people?   So, when you’re looking at crafting this content, what was the process that came to mind? Was there a certain amount of analytics around who you’re trying to reach, how you’re trying to reach them as well as what you want them to get out of the engagement in your platform?   A lot of is what do we want them to get out of it.   Yeah.   And some things are just, like I said, better suited for a forty-second clip, a sound bite versus that five-minute long to sit down interviews, longer piece, and we would look at things like this story did well on this platform, this got a lot of social media engagement. What made that happen? Was it a particular topic? Was it time of day? Was it people –– there was nothing else going on on that Tuesday and it just happened to be that Tuesday was really good, which happens more often than people would like to admit that, that is just a day people were paying attention to you.   I think the phrase slow news day comes to mind.   Yeah, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. It could be a fast news day and they’re paying attention to something else on your website and that got collateral traffic, which is great and, of course, any website is going to plan for that. That’s why you see related stories on everything. It’s to get people to click again and they’re related, they’re based on your interests, based on that story. So, we’re always looking at those sorts of things and I wish that was some sort of great secret but you could see it on every website, news website you go to, you see related stories, you see you might also be interested in. It’s to keep you on the website. It’s to keep you clicking and reading.   So, is there an actual way to determine why any particular story or any particular thing that anyone posts anywhere on the internet gets engagement or doesn’t get engagement?   I would love that to be yes. Other than asking people directly, “Why did you click on this?” pretty much no, unfortunately, because there are so many factors. I mean, sometimes you can make good, reasonable assumptions. A picture was particularly compelling, the headline was good, or it got picked up by an influencer, sorts of things, but, at the same time, unless someone tells you, “I clicked this because of that,” it’s very hard to know with 100 percent certainty.   Yeah, so if anyone’s like looking at their posts or something and say, “Oh, this one got a lot more traction than that one,” but they keep scratching their head as to like why because the one that got less traction maybe was even the post they were more proud of for some reason.    Yeah. In that case, you look at what was different. It could be time of day, if you’re doing your corporate posts, it could be time of day. Your audience is a lunchtime audience and you posted that around breakfast. Well, okay, you’ll know that if you do five more posts and the lunch ones do better than the breakfast time ones, that’s a way that you can start figuring that out. It could be the topic. I worked with one company and they did email newsletters, among other, they had their social channels and books as well, other things like that. What we found was posts, if we use pictures, if the pictures show people who were more real looking as opposed to supermodel looking, the real people got a lot more engagement.    Really?   Well, these were stock photo models, all of them, ultimately, but people who kind of looked like you, your friend, your neighbors, the guy in your office, those got more engagement. Could I say that was 100 percent the reason why? Probably not, but it was a trend over enough posts of trying different things that it made a difference when we kind of stuck with it.   And you saw that, and it makes me wonder if the same is true for AI where a lot of people say they can tell if something’s an AI-generated image and if that also kind of handicaps people in that way?   Sometimes, the tells are really easy. Someone has seven fingers, three hands, things like that, all your people are cross-eyed in a photo of six people, the odds of having that, six people in your photo cross-eyed are relatively slim in real, so those are kind of more obvious tells in AI. Sometimes, it does pretty good when you’re trying to get something that looks like a person but I’ve noticed, been doing this for however many years it’s been, humans have a natural ability to tell a real face from a fake one. It’s just an evolutionary trait we have is we can tell genuine expression from fake expression. We all kind of see that in our normal, everyday, going about our lives. Okay, that person’s really not as happy as they’re pretending to be. We see that every day. We can just tell when a face isn’t real. There’s just ––

Are you living life on autopilot, checking all the boxes but still feeling stuck? Ever wonder if the path that feels safe is actually keeping you small? What if the real key to freedom and fulfillment is creativity, not just in art, but in how you live, decide, and grow? In this episode of Actions Antidotes, we're joined by Pia Liechter, founder of Kollectiv Studio and author of Welcome to the Creative Club. Pia opens up about how divorce, burnout, and losing her job became the turning point that helped her reconnect with her creative power. She takes us through her journey, including a bold ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and shares what it means to truly direct your own life instead of following someone else’s script. Pia reminds us that you don’t need permission to rewrite your story. Even small “firsts” can be powerful steps toward a life that feels more like your own. Listen in and discover how to tap into your creativity, take meaningful risks, and explore a version of life that’s built on your terms, not someone else’s. --- Listen to the podcast here: Why Playing It Safe Is Keeping You Small (And What to Do About It) with  Pia Liechter Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about something that can often get ignored in the modern world, and that is creativity, creative pursuits, and creative suits can take on so many different forms but can often fall into this bucket of things that the modern day cult of productivity, if you want to call it that, can really ignore as like, okay, it wasn’t really productive for you to spend a Thursday afternoon drawing a picture or something like that. My guest today has her own story around creativity. Pia Leichter is the founder of the Kollektiv Studio. ---   Welcome to the program.   Thank you, Stephen. It’s so nice to be here.    Yeah, it’s nice to have you here. And let’s start with your story, because you recently published a book covering your story around kind of discovering your creativity.   Yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s called Welcome to the Creative Club and it smashes the myth that creativity is reserved for the chosen few and invites everyone to access and apply creativity to the design of their lives, and I do share stories about how I lost and found my creative power and also really exploring what creativity means in moving into a much more expansive definition, because, often, what stops us from being creative is the belief or idea that I’m not the creative type. I want to debunk that one, because if you’re human, you’re an artist at play.   So, this sounds like a story that a lot of people have, and if I had a dollar for every time I heard someone around my age say something along the lines of, “I’m just not a creative person, it just happens.” So let’s start with the specifics of your story. So you said you lost and found your creative abilities of some sort.   Well, power, really, because, first, it starts with shifting my own experience or definition of creativity, which happened through different moments or pivots or sticky junctures in my life. For me, growing up with an artist father on the Lower East Side Manhattan, abstract, my dad is an abstract painter, creativity was just something we did. It was just a natural part of life. He’d be painting, I’d be writing stories as a little kid or poems or whatnot. And creativity, later on, I moved into the realm of commercial creativity. I worked in creative studios and age brand agencies for the majority of my career, well over –– 15 years, until I left to start my own business. And so creativity was still very much something I did. When life threw me through the windshield of the car I was driving that needed to get fixed, changed, traded in through a series of events that, say, the divorce, unhealthy rebound relationship, and then getting fired from my six-figure cushy creative partner and creative director role, I kind of sat looking at the shards of what my life was in that moment and decided to, instead of stressing and staying and trying to figure out what to do next, I decided to check off a bucket list desire and go on the Trans-Siberian Express, which I’ve always dreamed about. Felt like every –– I had lost everything, felt like I was lost, so I decided to change it up. And it was while I was on the train, hurtling through Siberia, looking around me, looking at the Russian man who drank too much vodka who was punching the steel wall and looking at the socks hanging and the smell of sauerkraut and looking at the scenery and kind of sitting back and reflecting on, I had the epiphany that, “Oh, I’m creatively directing my life. I creatively directed this scene. I brought myself here.” I could have chosen a variety of different things, but I chose to put myself on a train across China, Mongolia, and Russia and switch the scenery, switch the set design, and kind of rediscover that I’m the one sitting in the director’s chair. And so creativity started to shift for me. So what creativity meant started to change. So, creativity wasn’t just something that we do. It is that too, but it’s a way of being in the world.Share on X So, what I’m ––   That was losing and finding my creative power. So, creative power is my ability to create my experience. So I lost that. I was in the middle of three Ds, drunk, divorce, and actually then death later on but there’s another story. It’s also in the book. It kind of shook me. It felt like life was happening to me. It felt like I was just a passenger, an extra on set. And then making that big decision and choosing to go on the Trans-Siberian and then sitting and just kind of reflect on it, it’s like, “Oh, wait a minute, I’m not an extra. This is main character energy right here. I made this. I creatively directed this,” and that’s sort of some of the background of what prompted me to write the book.   So, you’re talking about kind of this creative power but you’re also talking about this perspective shift, and I think kind of even going back to the way I introduced the podcast is the way a lot of people think about creativity, of, okay, creativity means getting out a canvas and drawing a painting or I’m going to play a little beat and do a little bit of freestyle rapping into the mirror, but it has that kind of somewhat narrow, I don’t know, just only in the fine arts type definition, and maybe there are some people where those types of pursuits don’t really call them. They’re not going to go to the open mic night and do kind of a random standup or do impromptu speaking somewhere, but you’re saying that it has a bigger definition and it sounds like it could be around even just all these decisions that you make, even if like today, between recording podcasts, it’s like am I going to cook something for lunch or am I going to go to Taco Bell or something.   Totally, totally. And, I mean, what you just described is creativity is often associated solely with artistic expression. And that is one big form of creativity, absolutely, but it’s not the only one. Science is immensely creative. Crime is creative but, ultimately, how we choose to create our next scene, how when we’re in touch with our unique essence, the way we see life, the way we respond to everyday challenges in novel, original, unexpected, and delightful and useful ways and throughout one day is immensely creative. The way our brain works, neuroscience points to this, we’re wired for creativity. It’s what enabled our survival. So, that is the invitation to see it in a much more expansive way because that’s how we reclaim it.   Do the two forms of creativity, the more narrow artistic definition that many people think of it as as well as your expanded version of it relate to one another? Can someone take on artistic pursuits and that kind of train their brain around this more expansive type of creativity around designing your life?   Well, because creativity isn’t just solely artistic pursuits, and it’s so much more than that, that’s not the only way to build your creative muscle. That is one way but really interesting in my research, travel actually is a fantastic way, based on research, to build your creative muscle because you are going to be in new and unexpected environments, and travel could be far or nearby, and it’s going to require different creative responses.   Does that mean also just taking on, say, a different type of activity, like let’s just say ––   Definitely.    –– you never played pickleball before for some reason, and just being like, “Okay, I’m gonna try it out now.”   Yeah, definitely. I think there’s a correlation between uncertainty in first times and experimentation and building our creative capacity, for sure, but that can take many different forms because, again, when we look at the story of, “Well, if I’m drawing, does that help me creating my life?” it’s still equating creativity with artistic, like, yes, that is one way but there are many others.   Yeah, it sounds like there’s a ton of others. What do you think gets in the way of people being creative today? You have your story around the things that happened to you in your life. What do you think happens to a lot of other people?   Well, I think we’re handed scripts about how we should live. Often, stories. I call them scripts but they’re beliefs or stories about life, about what we’re capable of, about how it’s supposed to be, about the path we’re supposed to be on and what’s meant for us but someone else dictates it that can shrivel our creative expression. And so many times it’s about becoming aware of what script am I reading from? Is it, for example, life is working with me or is life, is it a dog eat dog world? What sto

Are your dreams just ideas floating in your mind or are you ready to turn them into action? Most of us have big goals, but the real challenge is execution. How do you stay focused, avoid burnout, and actually get things done, especially when life gets messy or plans fall apart? In this episode of Actions Antidotes, we’re joined by Joshua Kalinowski, former professional athlete, business leader, and the founder of Kalinowski Enterprises. Joshua shares what it really takes to “dream big and execute bigger”, his personal mantra that goes beyond motivation and into sustainable strategy. From building systems that support success to understanding your own rhythms and energy, Joshua talks about making smart, intentional moves even when life doesn’t go as planned. He opens up about losing his identity after baseball and how that led him to build not just businesses, but people from within. You’ll also hear how his “PILL” framework (Painful, Intentional, Lazy, and Loving) can transform your daily habits into lasting personal wins. Whether you're chasing growth in business, relationships, health, or simply looking to reclaim your time and energy, this conversation is a must-listen.Tune in now to learn how to build a life where your actions match your ambitions. --- Listen to the podcast here: How High Performers Break Through with Joshua Kalinowski Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. This year, on this podcast, we’ve been covering a lot about practical tools in which to help you get going. There’s always a period of time to dream, to plan, to figure out what you want is, but, at some point, you have to actually, as my last episode we discussed, take action, and taking action requires some practical tools. So, to talk a little bit more about some of these practical tools that you can use in order to dream big but execute bigger, I would like to invite onto the show Joshua Kalinowski, the president and visionary for Kalinowski Enterprises, which involves a lot of things so we’re going to cover that all in the episode. ---   Joshua, welcome to the program.   My man, appreciate it. Man, it is so good to be here. Thanks for the intro.   Oh, yeah, wonderful. And let’s start right with this whole dream big, execute bigger. That’s kind of your motto.   It is, yes. Well, it really came, it’s just kind of, for me, it’s more of like just reminding me constantly that as much as I dream, I’ve got to take action on it so I’ve got to take action and execute on things at an even larger scale because, as we know, it takes so much more to actually get fulfillment out of that. It takes so much more to actually have these things that accomplishes so much harder so it’s just another like a mantra for me to remind myself that if I’m going to dream big, I’ve got to execute at an even bigger stage.    So, yeah, so that execute bigger part of it, and I think this is something that, obviously, we talk a lot about people who just talk up a storm and talk is cheap, anyone can say, “One day, I’m gonna write a book,” “One day, I’m gonna do the Grand Canyon rim to rim to rim,” as we kind of discussed before ––   Good example, I love it.   Yeah, so one day we’re going to do that, but most people acknowledge that you have to do something, but this whole execute bigger, do you encounter a lot of people who dream big but then execute, but their execution is not as big as it needs to be in order to make that dream a reality?   Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, you mentioned earlier, I’m the CEO and president of Kalinowski Enterprises and so I get to see a lot of entrepreneurs, and we hire a lot of people within our company so we go anywhere from real estate all the way to roofing and everything in between there. And so, yeah, you see so many people that say, “Hey, listen, I wanna be successful in this industry. I think I’m gonna be really good in this industry,” and you start to ask them, “Why do you think you’re gonna be good? Why is this industry something that’s attractive to you?” and they try to tell you a lot of like the reasons why in their mind that they’re going to be successful at it, but we see, oftentimes, those aren’t going to be the motivating factors. There’s going to be things, like it’s going to be eventually hard. You’re going to have to figure out, not everything about this industry is glamorous, and, in order to be successful, what are you willing to do in order to succeed? And like you were talking about, usually, what ends up happening is people are dreaming so large that they don’t even know how to start.   So, how does someone dream big and execute bigger without burning themselves out?   Well, you’re the expert in that, right? We should probably be talking more to you about this stuff. What I would say just complimentary to, you and I have a lot in common on literally how do we make sure that we’re performing and executing at a high level but also not burning ourselves out? How are we making sure that we are staying healthy? Both not only mentally but also physically. And so it is the staple in our company to make sure that our people are doing well emotionally as much as they are doing well in the business structure that they’re under. And so, so much of it is making sure that you’re surrounding yourself with good people, surrounding yourself with people that are positive and we have standards that we have at our company to make sure that we are all on the same page and if you don’t live by those standards, then you don’t really fit in our culture and so we really make sure and protect our culture so much. And because of our culture, because of the way that we actually are building our companies, we are attracting the right people and the people that are not that type of a person, that don’t want to actually improve, that don’t want to take action. They don’t really last too well in our environment because they don’t really enjoy the people they’re around so we kind of self-eliminate people for their sake and for our sake.   So, it sounds like what you’re saying is that being around the wrong people can be one of these kind of energy drains and these energy drains are these unnecessary contributors to burnout, like you can burn yourself out just by doing too much, doing too much all the time, but you can probably do a lot more if you eliminate some of these energy drains, such as a person that you’re perpetually in conflict with.   Yeah. They just did a recent study out there. You know in the classroom setting, you typically have the high achievers are usually gravitating closer towards the front of the room, so they did this test on that and what they found is that those that were sitting in the front of the room compared to those that were sitting in the back of the room, one where they were so much more focused and they understood the content and they actually were writing the content down, but they were 37 percent more successful in the areas that they were achieving than those that sat in the back of the room. It just goes to show you, you sit in front, one, for those purposes, but also now you’re surrounding yourself with other likeminded people that are high achieving people that want to actually learn, that want to get better, and then eventually want to implement as well.    So you say that in any classroom, does this apply to even something basic, like fourth grade?   It was talking about like college and actually people like post college, people that were going to seminars. So when they were like adults that were going for continuing education or adults that were going to like a seminar that was helping them improve in a certain expertise or area of business that they were in, those adults were actually seeing dramatically bigger improvements from those that actually stood closer to the actual stage.   Okay, and that could be anything, like I recently attended in Boulder, Colorado, a startup week, and startup week, we have one in Denver, they have them kind of all the country, it’s just a series of different workshops, panel discussions, presentations, all these things where you go into these different rooms and you sit there. So is that true even if something like that where, if I would look at the people who chose to sit in the back or the people who chose to sit in the front barring time constraints and all the people showing up late, that those people sitting in the front are more likely to at least get more out of that particular event?   Yep, 100 percent. Well, you think about it, they’re the most engaged. They’re the ones making eye contact with the speakers. The speakers are making eye contact with them as well too. They’re typically the ones in the rooms that are asking the questions when there’s a Q and A opportunity. So, yeah, you’re making a much deeper connection, and when you start to feel like that person as a speaker is actually looking at you, then you really are actually taking ownership of the things that are said.    So I talk a lot about these small habits and these small habit changes that whether or not that can actually have a much larger impact on your mindset over time if you implement a small change day in and day out, is sitting toward the front of the room at any kind of event, even if you’re, say, at a normal corporate job and they are bringing in people for some sort of corporate training from time to time, is getting in the habit of sitting in that front of the room something that could actually help people get more in the mindset of a high achiever?   What do you think people are going to start to say about you if you were the person that was staying in maybe in the middle of the room to the back of the room, and now, all of a sudden,

Ever feel like you’re living a life that doesn’t quite feel like yours? Maybe you’re stuck in a job you don’t love, caught in routines you never really chose, or just feeling like something’s holding you back, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. A lot of that might be coming from beliefs buried deep in your subconscious, beliefs you didn’t even realize were running the show. In this episode of Actions Antidotes, I chat with Albert Bramante, psychology professor, talent agent, and author of Rise Above the Script. We dig into what it really means to live “by the script,” how to spot the limiting beliefs that keep us stuck, and why small, consistent actions (not huge leaps) are the real game changers. Albert shares insights from his own journey and the work he’s done helping people shift their mindset and build a life they actually want to live.  So if you’ve been saying “someday” a little too often…maybe today’s the day to start taking that first step. --- Listen to the podcast here: Stop Living by Someone Else’s Script with Albert Bramante Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about kind of achieving your potential and achieving your potential through various different mechanisms. There’s no one set way, despite what they may have told you in school or some other traditional childhood component of your life, that there is no one set way in which you can achieve your potential. There are plenty of ways that we could all, as my guest today would say, Rise Above the Script. That’s the name of his book. My guest today, Albert Bramante, not only is an author but also a psychology professor and talent agent. ---   Albert, welcome to the program.   Thank you, Stephen, so much for inviting me. I’m really happy to be here and really happy to be part of the community here and happy to have a conversation, answer any questions and offer any insights that can be helpful.   Yeah, that is wonderful. And so the core message behind this podcast is always about different ways that we can kind of achieve the life that we want, and it’s interesting that your book is titled Rise Above the Script because one of the common expressions I use is “living by the script.” When we talk about the script, I’m curious about if your understanding of the script is similar to the way mine is.   Yeah, I’m not talking about the literal sense of a script, like for a play or for a movie. What I’m talking about, the script that we use as our internal mind and our internal guiding system, in a sense, so it’s what navigates our life, what navigates our purpose, and particularly our conscious and subconscious mind. And I use the metaphor of a script because the book was written for performing artists who use scripts all the time, so I used that as a metaphor to kind of help understand exactly what the message is and that is really working, rewiring our mindset, and changing our mindset and changing the approach that we live our life on a day-to-day basis.   And is this rewiring of the mindset something that spans kind of almost any kind of pursuit? Because you talk about working with performing artists, we’ll encounter people who say, “I wanna level up at my job.” Maybe we’ll encounter some other people that’ll say, “I wanna leave the nine to five and I wanna build my own business,” or even someone that just wants to create a different community or some other aspect of their lives or they’re like, “I want my relationship to better. I wanna have a relationship.” All those different pursuits that we’re all having in order to level up our lives, is it similar subconscious pursuit?    A hundred percent, yes, because all of that requires you to optimize your mindset and your subconscious beliefs and your conscious beliefs. And what can hold you back from any of these endeavors that you had indicated is limiting beliefs, and these limiting beliefs cannot just be conscious but they can also be subconscious, which means that they really guide the behavior on a really broad level. And so that’s why I kind of talk about the idea of rising above that so that you can transcend and change your life and create the life that you desire, create the action that you desire.    Now, how would someone go about determining whether their limiting belief is conscious or subconscious?   Well, I would say most likely it’s subconscious if you’re trying all the time, you feel that you can’t do anything right or you’re always struggling to get through your day or you’re starting and stopping and starting and stopping and you really don’t know exactly what is going on here. And that’s where it might be subconscious. Because I’m a psychologist, Sigmund Freud, for example, one of the iconic psychologists of our time, came up with the idea of the iceberg metaphor, which is if you ever look at the actual idea of an iceberg, the iceberg only is a tip on top of the ocean, really tiny, but what you don’t see underwater is 95 percent of the iceberg, which is a huge mass. And, of course, that’s what sunk the Titanic. So if you think about our mind like the iceberg metaphor, the conscious is just the tip of the iceberg, which is only 5 percent of our thoughts and actions. The other 95 percent and the bulk of the weight of our actions is subconscious. And so that’s why it’s important to examine these. And this takes a lot of work, and it can be done. It certainly is very possible and that could sometimes come through coaching, either meditation or deep thoughts or just really gain some insights. But even working with a coach I think sometimes can really help with that to address whatever is limiting or holding you back.   So if 95 percent of our beliefs are subconscious, then would you say it’s safe to think of that as like the place where it’s most likely housed? Like if you’re trying, trying and just not seem to be getting there.   Sometimes it’s like you don’t know what you don’t know, in a sense, that’s where the subconscious comes in, because there may be things that are holding you back that you don’t even realize that are holding you back until you address those and say, okay, now, once you know and this maybe it’s subconsciously, now it’s like, okay, you know what you don’t know and that’s where you can work with a coach and say, “Okay, how do I deal with this limiting belief?” And then it’s through that insight and a lot of things that we do things subtly and that might be taking action. And that’s the biggest thing about if you want to rise above the script, you have to take action.Share on X So maybe something small, I’m not talking about doing anything drastic right away, but something tiny, a little tiny change here and there, and after that, that can eventually head up.    So if someone were to make a tiny change, just even a small change in something you do in your day-to-day life, does that then map down into the subconscious and change those subconscious beliefs?   Absolutely. Over time, it will, because you’re making some changes. And I see a lot of people who are always like, “I wanna change my life, I want things to change,” but they’re not doing anything. And, case in point, especially when it comes around the end of the year, you see all these posts on social media, like, “I hope the new year is gonna be my year,” or, “New year, new me,” and if there’s no change, it can’t happen. It’s impossible. If you look at the definition of insanity, it’s like doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. So, you got to change. You want to see different results, you have to start making changes in your life.Share on X And then you’ll start to see the results and you’ll start to see changes and you’ll start to change and rewire some of the subconscious beliefs.    So would you be willing to walk through kind of just maybe a really, really base level example where someone comes in and they’re like, “Okay, my life is not what I want it to be,” and let’s just say, “I don’t like my job and I don’t even like what I do on weekends.” What does that starting point look like and what does that realization point look like?   The starting point would be like, okay, you don’t like your weekends, what would be the ideal weekend for you? And start planning that. You would think about that. Map that out entirely, and don’t hold it in the back. What would your ideal weekend look like? And if you don’t like your job, focus on, a, what don’t you like about it? Is there anything you could change? Maybe there’s something you could talk to, have a talk with your boss, have a talk with your coworkers, or anything minor that you can change. And then, what is your dream job? What is your ideal thing that you want? What is your ideal vision of employment? If it’s working on your own, what are the steps that you can start to take? Now, I’m not talking about, I don’t mean like tomorrow quitting your job, that would probably not be realistic for 90 percent of the people right off the bat. So what would be things that you can do? Start doing some research. Look at your downtime. Maybe instead of doing an hour of social media, scrolling, doom scrolling, take that hour and do some research. Even if it’s just an hour a week to start, do something, and start to change that. If you don’t like your weekends, is it because you’re not doing anything? Is it because you’re too wrapped up in your work? It really would depend on what you don’t like about that weekend. So specifically, it would map down, okay, when you say you don’t like your weekend, what is it about that weekend you don’t like? That’s great, but I wouldn’t know

Leadership today isn’t just about managing people—it’s also about managing yourself. With so much change happening around us, how can leaders stay grounded and show up for their teams in the best way possible? In this episode, I talk with Chris Thyberg, a leadership coach and founder of The Serving Way. We chat about what it really takes to lead people in today’s world—whether it’s dealing with AI, figuring out remote vs. office work, or building trust in your team. Chris shares helpful advice on how to lead yourself first, and how being honest, curious, and human can make you a better leader. This is a down-to-earth, thoughtful conversation for anyone trying to grow as a leader in 2025 and beyond. Tune in and learn more. --- Listen to the podcast here: Being a Good Leader—Inside and Out with Chris Thyberg Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Last fall, I had Chris Thyberg on the program and we talked about leadership from both the perspective of an inner game and an outer game, how you need to take care of yourself in order to take care of the people that you’re a leader for. Since that episode, a lot has changed in the world, because the year 2025 has been marked by just a really rapid kind of pace of change on many different fronts, and that has caused a lot of people who have, say, different reactions. The range of reactions to these changes have been quite variant, as would be expected, and that has caused some additional challenges with regards to group cohesion as well as being able to delegate and trust the people who you’re working with. So, once again, I would like to bring back to the program Chris Thyberg to talk to us a little bit about what we need to do to be good leaders from both internally and externally now where we sit well into the year 2025. ---   Chris, welcome back.   Thank you, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be back with you after an excellent conversation last time.    Well, thank you for coming back. This podcast has had maybe, I’m going to say three or four repeat guests, not that often, but it is something that’s changed quite a bit since we talked in September of 2024. I think we’re all familiar with what types of changes and, as you know, this is not a political show in the sense that I’m not here to tell anyone how they should or shouldn’t be responding to that aspect, nor is it telling anyone how they should or shouldn’t be responding to things such as AI, the number of layoffs, and the additional challenges and anxiety in the workforce today. All we can really do is kind of respond to it. Chris, what are you observing as far as the people that you work with and how they’re responding to all the different forms in which this change is taking place?   Yeah, thank you. The last time we talked together, I described the conditions that leaders are under as white water conditions, as paddling down the river in the rapids and they’re starting to get class 4, class 5, maybe there’s even a waterfall that you can see coming up. All right. So, here are a few things that have been contributing to now what feels like windsurfing in a hurricane. If we thought the river trip was a little hard, sometimes, yeah, let’s try windsurfing when the swells are 20 feet high and we’re in driving down rain.    Right, so you got a whole new situation here. Yep, let’s go.   So, one aspect is the place of AI, how disruptive it is, the anxieties it’s creating for everyone, from longstanding employees to folks coming out of college, those entry-level positions that now people are arguing can be done just as well by a well-trained bot as that expensive college grad. So, what I like to remember in this space is that, right now, generative AI is like a very eager, tireless, relentless, driven intern that absolutely knows nothing at all about you, your business, your people, your leadership. All of it, right? So they need a lot of training and to invite people to see that, now, if these could be kind of really enthusiastic helpers on the side, then maybe now we can see that we can contribute the unique brain power and even more the emotional, cultural, social, human-to-human intelligence that is the bottom line. And so that’s how I’m thinking in terms of AI and starting to use AI in interesting ways in my practice to help support the coaching process. All right. So, now, that sort of flows down, I’d say, into coming back from working at home, the struggles over how much in-the-office time, how much freedom. Are we building a culture? Do we have cohesion if we’re kind of spread out and everyone’s sitting with their own little chats and playing around? Yeah, that’s gotten a lot harder, and so I want to explore that a bit more with you in the conversation. And then the last thing I’m noticing, again, without political comment, but I work a lot with nonprofit and social sector entities, and the flow downstream of impact on budgets and grants and getting great work done in their neighborhoods and the context that they’re in, it’s harder, and so I’m sitting with leaders in a great deal more pain often than when I started this in 2018.   So, would you say that these are the three primary forms in which the anxiety is taking place right now, in general, in the workforce, of like how is AI going to force me to transition, force me to adapt? What does it really mean? Are we abandoning remote work? Are we all coming back to the office? What’s the right amount of flexibility as well as, in many sectors, where is the funding coming from? Where is some of these budget cuts and some of these transformations in what gets funded going to impact certain organizations?   Yeah, that’s what I see with my thinking partners, aka clients, because I don’t fix people, I don’t fix –– well, I don’t fix problems, I really help people grow up into their greatness.Share on X And so, from my point of view, those kind of leaders, that’s what I’m seeing. I’m sure other people see other things as well but that’s what I’ve got a line of sight on particularly.   Now, so let’s go through those in order, since those are the ones brought up. So we start with AI and, with AI, is there a certain type of role, you talked about the new college graduates and whether or not people think that the AI tools can do it just as well for a lot less money. Are there other types of roles that people are really getting anxious on? Because I’ve read some materials and seen some videos that have mentioned specific roles, I’m not going to specifically say, not to scare specifically, but there’s types of people that are feeling a higher level of anxiety versus others that are feeling maybe a little bit calmer about it.    From the kind of leaders I’m seeing who are sort of senior, middle entering the exec ranks and C-suite, some of the things they are bringing into the room with me is how do we keep intact teams that trust one another? And how do I delegate to people really effectively? And how do the teams beneath me delegate really effectively? When we say AI first, I’m in a number of companies like Duolingo in my backyard here in Pittsburgh are saying, AI first, don’t do your work until you’ve started with AI. Well, that can make people anxious if they don’t feel very skillful. But I think if I were a senior leader, I’d really be wanting to know how much hallucination am I getting back?   Yeah.   I asked my people to go first to AI. And are they exercising their human judgment, their own brilliance with this really eager intern who doesn’t really know anything? So I’m seeing that it’s less the people that I’m with are worried about job displacement for them but they are taking a bigger, systemic, strategic point of view at it. And I’m finding with some leaders, curiously, they’re actually using AI with me between sessions to kind of sort out insights that they’ve gotten, books or articles I’ve recommended that they can’t read the whole things but they could ask ChatGPT to summarize what’s the essential stuff from these free resources that I talked about with Chris and they seem really relevant to what I want to do. It’s like the good old Executive Book Summaries on steroids.   Yeah, exactly.    So that’s what I’m seeing there and helping them use the tool for themselves to support their own leadership growth as well as getting a sense for the real human-to-human cultural stuff that they really have to be responsible for as sort of the primary culture officers of their organizations, the chief value officers. That’s all going to be human, human, human.   Now, this reminds me of another conversation that I’ve had a few times recently around the phenomenon of people using AI tools, specifically ChatGPT but sometimes others, quote, unquote, as their “therapist,” and I’ve actually talked with a couple of people last week who both do that as well as having a therapist of their own, which reminds me of the situation with you and your clients. And in both conversations I had last week, they told me that they actually let their therapist know that they had done this AI therapy and it is to be expected. Do you have any feelings about when your clients also use AI in conjunction with your coaching, how that could be done right or how it could potentially be done wrong?   That is exactly the right question. Because coaches, like therapists, we sit around and say, “Are we gonna be out of a job in two years? No one needs us.” They’ll just, quote, “self-medicate” by playing with somebody’s hot off the press coaching bot. Right, so here’s what I’m experiencing. First, it’s always working with each leader on what they most want to get done, what’s most important, and so coaching is all about where are you now

When life suddenly changes, it can feel like everything is falling apart. You might wonder, Where do I find the strength to keep going? Resilience is about finding that courage inside yourself to face the hardest moments and keep moving forward no matter what. In this episode of Actions Antidotes, we are joined by Kijuan Amey, founder of Amey Motivation—a U.S. Air Force veteran, speaker, author, and resilience coach who shares his powerful story of resilience following a life-changing motorcycle accident. Kijuan recounts his background in the Air Force, his transition to civilian life, and the fateful day in May 2017 that altered his life's trajectory. He discusses the immediate aftermath of his accident, the extensive medical procedures and recovery process, and how he overcame the physical and emotional challenges to regain his sense of self-worth and purpose.  Kijuan’s journey from being in a medically induced coma to becoming a motivational speaker and author of Don't Focus on Why Me offers valuable lessons on resilience, the importance of a supportive mindset, and finding direction after a dramatic life event. If you’ve ever faced a major setback or want to build your ability to bounce back from life’s ups and downs, this episode is for you. --- Listen to the podcast here: Resilience and Triumph: Overcoming Life-Altering Challenges with Kijuan Amey Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about resilience, and resilience can mean a lot of different things, but if you go about your life long enough, eventually, you’ll have some sort of event, some sort of event happen to you, whether it be something like losing a job, losing a key family member, losing a good friend, and, in this particular case, an accident that can happen anytime you’re going about your day to day life that can really change your life’s trajectory. My guest today is Kijuan Amey and he has a story about an accident as well and his resilience around it. He is an Air Force veteran and a motivational speaker. ---   Kijuan, welcome to the program.   Thank you so much for having me here, Stephen. I truly appreciate you having me on to speak about my story on your platform.    Well, thank you for your willingness to share your story with my audience. I know we’re all trying to be better people in one way or another or trying to achieve something, and it is a real big deal when something specific happens to you, so tell us a little bit about where your story begins.    This was May 5, 2017. I was, at the time, in the United States Air Force Reserve. I did four years active and I said, “I’m done with this.” I wanted to get away from that lifestyle, shall I say. And I think I made the best choice for me, personally. Other people, they love the active duty world, but I made the best decision for my life, and then not only just to be a reservist but to also go to school full time so I was pursuing my bachelor’s degree because I also wanted to become a pilot ultimately, and the job that I was doing in the Air Force was in-flight refueling and that’s where you refuel planes in midair. Amazing. To me, hands down, I think the best enlisted job I’ve ever heard. I don’t care what anybody says. So just amazing to see another plane fly up to you, right behind you as you’re flying in the air and you can refuel them, and I just call it a flying gas station, basically.    So, quickly, how did that work? Because I’m trying to picture it in my head now, the idea that one plane is flying and another one is kind of coming up. Does someone have to actually jump out of the airplane and connect it the way we fill up our cars at the gas station?   Yeah, no, if we had army guys on the plane, we would make them do that. But, no, we don’t do that.   Okay.   Yeah, no, so we have this thing we call the boom and what you do is you lower it, basically like the nozzle at the gas station, you lower it down and I can control it from the inside of the plane.    Oh, so you’re remotely controlling it.   I’m literally in the KCN-35 that I was flying in, which is a Boeing 707 body type so you can get a picture. That plane, I can walk to the back of the plane, just like you would do on any commercial airliner, but there’s a crawl space that I had to go into so you stepped down two steps and you get in the middle, literally the middle of the airplane, and lay down on your stomach, and what we say is we lay down on our stomach and pass gas. And so I controlled the boom with my right hand, with the ruddervator control stick, and I extended and retracted it with the extension lever –– telescope lever, there you go, that’s the name of that. And so the plane comes up to you and you’re flying that thing around, whether it’s a fighter, another tanker, because some of them can be refueled, they’re also air refuel capable. You can have cargo planes such as a C-5, C-17, or the C-130 come up behind you, or even some reconnaissance planes like the AWACS or you can have a bomber, a B-1, B-2, B-52, because that’s actually what our plan was made for, the B-52, to carry out missions for the Cold War. That’s literally what those plans were made for. They were to be exhausted, glide somewhere, hopefully. That’s literally how those planes were built. They were built to exhaust all gas into this bomber for it to make it over to Russia and then it was going to glide wherever it could.    Oh, so we can make it all the way across from the US or from like a naval base in Germany.    Yeah, the bombers would make it from what we gave them, because they couldn’t take off with all that gas with the payloads that they were carrying, which means all the bombs that they’re carrying. So we would give them gas in the sky and they would take all of our gas and we would just be like, “Well, guys, it’s been real. Hopefully we make it somewhere.”    And then, yeah, so then you had to like find a place to land, usually.   In regular times, yes. But if the Cold War actually would have happened, like they would have actually turned keys and shot off those missiles, there was nowhere to land.    Oh, I see.   That would have literally been the end of the US.    Wow.   Yeah, no, the fallout was going to be real. That was it. If you’ve ever seen those, I guess depictions of Hiroshima, yeah, it would have been way worse. We also have what we call probe and drogue adapters, which is a hose that connects a basket, or Iron Maiden is what we call it, but it’s a huge basket. That thing’s massive, and it’s for like those Navy guys and the Harrier, which is a Marine plane. But those guys, they use a probe, which is like a –– how can I put it? It’s literally something that kind of wants to poke into something else. You have the basket and then probing that and it seats and cups it and so that’s how they get their fuel is through that versus what our planes do, we just –– we basically poke them.    Oh, yeah.    We poke them instead of having –– the Navy guys try to poke us because they miss. But, anyway…   So, yes, so you have that job, sorry to put everything ––   Yeah, no worries. And my thought process, because we were getting ready to switch planes and get new ones that I didn’t want to be a part of the air refueling boom operator side of it, I didn’t mind flying it with the boom operator side –– they were basically putting computers on the plane.    Oh, yeah, yeah, one of those.   Why would I want to look at a computer screen and I’m on the plane?   Yeah. I mean, they’re putting computers everywhere right now so ––   I’m like this is stupid. What can go wrong with cameras, right? Like, really? But, anyway, they’re still having problems with that plane, to say the least, and it’s been out for a while now.    Yeah. So that’s when you decided you were done with that job and going to the reserves.    I mean, honestly, my ultimate goal is to become a pilot anyway, because they make the real money. And so I wanted to make the six figures. I went to school to get my bachelor’s in computer information systems with a specialization in systems analysis and integration, which is a long way of saying, “Hey, you know how to code and build user interfaces.” That’s really all the same. And so they just know how to make it cute.   Yeah, yeah, it is but all those words.   Yeah, fancy, fancy-schmancy. And then I also had my own business. I was the CEO and founder of Kiwi Enterprise, which was where I did website design and management, which is I learned that in my degree. Social media marketing, I actually learned that online. And photography, I learned that through YouTube University. So I’m very, very self-taught and I also love to learn. I never stop learning, even ’til today, I just do not stop learning because ––   I love that YouTube University ––   –– there’s so much. There’s so much out here to learn.    Yeah, there’s always something to learn.    And I’m not saying I want to learn it all because, good Lord, I think my brain would explode, but what I’m saying is I like to keep my mind busy.   And that that brings me to another side topic. Sorry, we keep going off on tangents ––    Yeah, go ahead.   –– with your story but I read some things about the difference between pursuit of learning and the pursuit of entertainment. And, obviously, there’s a lot of things, and sometimes we just need to be entertained, because sometimes we need to give our brains a break and just watch a funny show or something like that, like there is some sort of correlation with success, with people who at least have some level of drive for learning with their spare time in addition t

Homelessness is a complex crisis—one that can't be solved by temporary fixes alone. It takes compassion, innovation, and the courage to rethink how we support those in need. What if we could build communities that restore dignity, stability, and hope? In this episode, I’m joined by Ashley Garcia, founder and executive director of Tiny Villages Inc. We dive into the deeper issues behind homelessness and explore bold, community-centered solutions. Ashley shares how her team is building small, self-contained homes and community spaces that give people not just a place to live, but the support they need to move forward. It’s a reminder that even small ideas can lead to big change. --- Listen to the podcast here: Innovative Solutions That Are Changing Homelessness with Ashley Garcia Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about addressing some of these major societal issues. Now, we all have our different reasons for why we’re taking on the initiatives we have, but some of us are really moved by things that we see in the world, some major issues, and, sometimes, it could be pretty daunting to think about something that has been an issue for sometimes decades, centuries, even millennia, and really dig in and take it on. My guest today is Ashley Garcia and she is the founder and executive director of a Colorado nonprofit called Tiny Villages, the address is tinyvillages.org.  ---     Ashley is taking on a major societal issue and, Ashley, welcome to the program.   Thank you, Stephen, for having me today. I’m excited to talk a little bit more about Tiny Villages Inc.   Let’s start out by, first of all, describing your story about the issue that you were moved to address and what made you decide that you have the capacity, have the talent, everything else to dive into it.    So, Tiny Villages Inc. is a 501(c)(3) Colorado nonprofit corporation where we’re providing permanent housing solutions to citizens in the United States, and this includes safe housing with high quality of life and we’re folding that into three different parts so there’s housing, agriculture, and innovation. And with that, there’s going to be things like solar panels being used, there’s going to be over 110 acres on each of the tiny villages where we will provide agriculture that will give food to the villagers when they move in. And, with that, right now, we’re focusing on the unhoused population. The reason being is, back in 2021, one of my businesses is real estate investing, and so with that company, myself and several of my business partners went and traveled the United States because we’re looking for property so that we could have landing strips and have resorts and have gated communities, 24-hour security so that all the elitist in the United States could come, or actually in the world, could come and mastermind and just figure out and collaborate how to solve big world problems. And, the reality is, when we went and did this trip, we found out that there’s a lot of land, and every single state that we went to, there was the unhoused population. So that’s when I flipped all of this around and started Tiny Villages Inc.    So you noticed a lot of land, and another part of your mission is related to agriculture so did you notice a lot of land not only, and I’m specifically thinking about some places I’ve been to or used to live in like Illinois and Iowa where there’s a lot of land but I just imagine a lot of it being corn fields, soy fields, and stuff like that, but I’m guessing you observed a lot of land that wasn’t also already being used for agriculture?   That is correct. There’s a lot of undeveloped land or there’s a lot of like little towns and cities that have folded up because the people have actually left and went to the major cities where jobs are and so it was just eye opening to even see that. But one thing that I did notice is that the government was building a lot of highways even in those areas and so it’s a good place to at least start to develop something like this.    So are you talking about what people sometimes refer to as a ghost town and you can probably drive through, see six abandoned buildings and maybe there’s a person or two living there still, I don’t know, but you know what I’m saying, right?    Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly what it is. And then there’s a lot of land that’s just for sale but nobody’s trying to buy it or anything because it’s out in the middle of nowhere. So when you’re talking about like out in the middle of nowhere or in a ghost town, now, we both live in Denver where there is a lot going on, so in a situation like this, thinking about, say, from downtown Denver, what would be the nearest place where there would be this undeveloped land and area for these housing units to be placed?   So, a goal of ours is that we are within 45 minutes to an hour of major cities, and so here in Denver, we’re actually looking out by DIA because there’s a lot of land out around DIA that’s undeveloped and for sale.    And then what constitutes a major city, like with something, say, middle of the road like Wichita, Kansas, or even something, say, much more tiny, I don’t know, like Fayetteville, Arkansas, still count as a major city?    Well, it depends on each state because we’re going to have a village in every single state, and so, depending on that state will depend on what we classify as a major city, but, hopefully, or similarly, it would be within like near the capitals of each state. When I first started this program, there was about half a million people that were unhoused according to the survey that the United States does every single year, and so we tailored that to those numbers, meaning that we want 10,000 people in each village in all 50 states so that would have made that possible. Now, since then, mind you, this was founded in 2022, since then, we are up to 750,000 people that are unhoused.    Okay.    So it’s gone up a lot in the last few years, 250,000 people more. And so, yes, we’re going to have one in each state but we might like in several other states, just to try and get as many people as we can to be in permanent housing situations instead of them being in temporary shelters, we might have a few states like California and Texas, things like that, have more people, more unhoused population, and we’ll have several different villages throughout.    We have four states that are way bigger than most states in the country, California, Texas, Florida, and New York, and they’re just going to have more of everything because they just have such high populations.   That is very, very true. And so in those situations, we might have several. And, obviously, then we’re not going to have them both next to the capital, we’ll have them in different areas, especially with like California being how big it is, there might be several throughout, like a north, south, and a central.   Yeah. And New York, Florida, and Illinois are all states where the capital is not even close to the biggest city in the state.    Right. So those are all the different factors that we’re going to have to take into consideration when we go to each state. And then, obviously, the villagers are going to have a say in where we place the villages if we have several different opportunities.   And then you’ve also done extensive design work on what these actual houses are going to look like.   That is very correct. You can actually go on our YouTube channel and see a mockup of what we have as a design for the villages. The idea is that every single block is going to be similar so they’re going to have a city center –– or we have our city center which is where the external meets the villagers and that’s going to be your main hub where people come and we have our emergency rooms, urgent care, we have a retail, car repair, and then event center so that the villagers can meet with anyone in the entire world if they want to or anyone that wants to promote to the villagers or vice versa. And then inside the villages, we’re going to have a community center and then tiny homes around and the cool thing is is that each of the villages will have green space all around the tiny homes. There’ll be gravel with solar panel carports and then the tiny home which is self-contained so what that means is that there’s going to be a wet room, a kitchenette, and a sleeping area at minimum for each of the tiny homes. Because of how we designed it, it’s a cookie cutter so we’re able to just keep reproducing blocks. And the cool thing about the community centers, the villagers, once they can get to the community center, they can get out to the city center, because these are going to be large, we’re requesting around 440 acres of land for each of the villages.    So 440 acres, how many homes is that?    Roughly, depending on how many families we have, it’ll be about 7,400, depending on families. But if there is, let’s say, less families or more families than that could vary with the number of houses, but the idea is max capacity 10,000 per village.    So we can say like maybe 5,000 to 10,000 units per village.    Correct.    What is the experience going to be like for someone in these villages? Because I’m assuming the most people moving into these villages are going to be people who currently don’t have a home. You talked about permanence, but if, say, someone is brought into the villages but then later they get a job and then they buy a different house, how is that all going to work?    Okay, so how we –– the cycle of life for a villager is they start as unhoused, and this is, again, this is our first phase of our project so we’re starting with

Sales can be intimidating—especially when you're chasing a passion that doesn't come with a natural knack for selling. For many, mindset is the missing piece, not just in business but in life. But what happens when you combine strategy with psychology to unlock real growth? In this episode, I have Christopher Philippi, a seasoned sales consultant and coach for CEOs. He helps people overcome the fear of selling and client acquisition by blending both coaching and consulting to support real growth. In our conversation, Christopher shares how mindset shapes our actions, why clarity and consistency matter, and how to shift your thoughts to get better results in business and life. Tune in to learn how the right strategy and mindset can change everything. --- Listen to the podcast here: Mastering Sales and Mindset with Christopher Filipiak Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. A lot of us have ideas, a lot of us have passions, and a lot of us have the impact that we want to make onto the world and maybe you’re listening and you’re thinking about it a little bit, thinking, okay, should I get serious about this? It’s springtime, there’s a new energy going on, maybe it’s time to actually get serious. But we have a series of things that oftentimes trip us up, make us a little bit intimidated, make us kind of question whether or not we want to hit that proverbial Start button. And one of the things that can really intimidate a lot of people is sales or kind of building a client base/audience, how do you actually connect your product to the market that you’re trying to connect it to, i.e., how do you actually sell the thing? Is someone going to ever pay me for this? Today, to talk about that subject, I would like to bring on my guest, Christopher Filipiak, who is a sales consultant and a coach for CEOs. ---     Christopher, welcome to the program.   Hey, Stephen. It’s so good to be here today. Thanks for having me on the show.    Yeah, thank you for popping on. So not kind of a normal combination, sales consultant and coach for CEOs. What does that mean in tandem?    Yeah, sure. It’s a good question because consulting is its own unique thing and coaching is its own unique thing so when I think of consulting, you kind of think of three buckets, strategy, planning, and implementation of something, and a consultant is really someone who provides expert advice and a proven process, meaning, know how to get something done and they’re there to be an expert and go, “Hey, this is how you do that.” A coach is more there to help you create clarity on what you want and help you discover your own truths. So a coach isn’t there to tell you how to do it, a coach is really there to help you figure out how you want to do it and provide you some support and some challenge and a container for you to do that. So, when it comes to sales, I think both things are important, because my clients need someone who can help them set up a sales system, a sales process, the skills around the strategy and tactics of building a business that’s competent and making sales, and so much of sales deals with what’s going on in your own head and your own confidence and your own leadership and your own material around money and strangers that having coaching is also really supportive so that’s why I do both.    And are your clients often the same for both the coaching and the consulting or is it usually separate endeavors based on what someone at a certain time?    Yeah, that’s a really good question. So, they tend to be the same. When I work with my clients, what happens is we’ll have calls that are focused on building skill sets or implementation work around the strategies and tactics around sales and then we’ll have separate calls that are coaching-only calls. And so most of my engagements with my clients, I do both things, but they’re in –– I kind of play a different role dependent on the intention of what we’re doing together.    And then is there an order in the process? Can someone usually say, “I need a coach or a coaching service before I need the sales consultant,” because you have to understand where you’re going before, okay, I’m going to implement a way to sell this product to these people?  It’s a good question. So, I have plenty of engagements that are coaching only, where someone is just looking for coaching so coaching is really the starting point with me. If you want to do just consulting, I probably wouldn’t do it with you because I don’t think it is really serving you, and the reason that is and you and your audience will understand this is we live in a human body and we have a mind, which means we have a mindset, and so much about sales, most of my clients want a different result. Primarily, the clients that come to me are looking for a different result, and I know that that result is going to start or that transformation is really going to happen when that person decides that they want to make a change that requires coaching. And the reason that is, Stephen, is because how we think determines how we feel and feeling is what drives action for humans. If you want a different result, we have to work on what’s going on in your mind and we have to work on the feelings in your body.Share on X And then once those two things are willing to change and grow, then we can start to bring in the different strategies and tactics that’ll enable sales to happen really, really quickly and really easily for people. So I would say that the order of operations there is coaching either by itself or coaching plus consulting is how I would do that.   Now, a lot of people are familiar with that term, “Thought creates form,” kind of the general idea being that it all starts with your thoughts and then those thoughts somehow become a reality and there’s probably eight to ten different paths depending on if someone’s more spiritually inclined, practically inclined, and stuff like that. Do you believe in that adage of thought creates form or is there more complexity based on how you approach it?    Yeah, I think it’s a belief but I also think whether you look at a science perspective or spiritual perspective or a psychological perspective, it’s how humans create. It’s how humans have always created. And I know that some people think the whole manifestation, law of vibration, law of attraction stuff is like b******t and then some people are like the ––   All about it, right?   Yeah, just full of it. I think if you get yourself too polarized on one side or the other side, you can get confused about what it actually takes to be a creative and create the thing that you want. I would go a step further and say that, at the moment you have the thought, it’s real. That thing starts to be real the moment that you have the thought, and then you have to start holding the image or thinking is a skill set on to its own, like understanding how to operate your mind and your body is its own skill set so that’s one skill set and then the skill set that has to follow that is you have to understand the strategies and tactics or the activity, the actions that you need to do to complete the creation of whatever you want, but both things are real, and when you have the thought in your mind, that means it exists, right? That’s kind of the first stage and I think that’s where people can start to think like, “Oh, it doesn’t really exist until I have it on my desk or I have it in my hand, physically happen,” but that’s not actually true. The moment you start to think about it, you have it. That can be difficult. That can be a new thought and a new way of operating. Whether you can get yourself there or not determines whether you’re going to be able to create it or not because if you start to think that that’s not true, you’re going to operate your body and your mind in such a way that makes it difficult to actually create that.   What I think this intersects with a little bit is that you described yourself as a coach for CEOs and one of the things that I’m wanting to clarify a little bit is that, let’s say someone out there listening just registered for an LLC with their bank, registered with their state, registered a website domain, and just started doing a few things on their own. They don’t have any customers yet, they don’t have any clients yet, they’re just there. Can that person think of themselves as a CEO at that point in time?   I think you can think of yourself however you want to think about yourself. It’s not on me to tell you who to be or how to think about yourself, and it’s not on other people. I think that comes down to, you know, we were talking about names as we started the podcast and asked you, “Hey, do you go by Steve or Stephen?” and you’re like you go by Stephen. Names are really important, and you get to think about yourself however you want to think about yourself. And if you want to think of yourself as a CEO of yourself, we are sovereign entities as humans and if we want to think of ourselves as CEOs of ourselves, CEOs of our lives, CEOs of our family, all that title really means is you’re the leader for that group of things. Now, in the business community, people will say that you’re not actually a CEO until you have team and other people that you’re leading. Again, it is a mindset thing, and stepping into your own leadership and power and if you see yourself leading a company or leading team or building a business, you want to start to think of yourself as a CEO. Not from an ego perspective, I think, but from a place of truth that, yeah, I’m a leader and a creator of my life and of this business and I’m here to help people and build something beautiful that helps people.    Yeah, so I’m wondering how that inters

Family legacy means different things to different people. For some, it’s a big part of who they are, with strong traditions and high expectations. For others, it’s something they’re still trying to figure out. But how do you build something new while honoring where you came from? In this episode, I have Leslie Lane, the founder and lead photographer of Studio 13. Photography runs in her family, and she’s been able to take that legacy and shape it into something of her own. In our conversation, Leslie shares what it was like growing up in a photography family, how she found her own style, and what it means to her to carry that legacy forward while doing things her way. Tune in and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: What It Means to Carry Legacy Forward with Lesle Lane Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about a topic that we’ve yet to really cover in this particular podcast, and that is the idea of a family legacy. I know some people have a stronger family legacy than others. For some people, it really looms large and there’s a lot of expectations, and, for others, it’s maybe even lacking direction too much. But my guest today, Lesle Lane, is the founder and lead photographer of Studio 13 but she comes from a family that has a legacy of photography and she’s been able to take their business and kind of move it in a direction that puts her own mark on it. ---     Lesle, welcome to the program.   Thank you so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure.   Definitely. So, tell us first about how photography is part of your family legacy.   I sure will. So, my grandfather actually started the business. He came into the photographic industry because when he was an eighth grader, his father tried to kill him with a garden hoe and so he ran away from home. You’ve got the shocked look on your face. It’s true. He ran away from home and they didn’t have Child Protective Services and so he ended up getting in with traveling salespeople, nomadic people, that’s what they did, and one of the things that they did was teach him how to be a photographer. And so he would go from town to town taking pictures and then going back several weeks later to deliver the pictures and, finally, came upon my grandmother, who he ended up marrying, though he was hired to shoot her engagement portrait so that was quite scandalous. And then they settled, started their portrait photography business in Columbus, Georgia. And then my mother and father divorced where we moved to Indiana together, she married my stepfather and then I took over his version of the photography studio, which was corporate and commercial work.    It’s just shocking to hear someone trying to kill their own son with a garden hoe because people will oftentimes joke about it and they’re like, funny, like, “Oh, I could kill you,” or something like that, but like this was a literal attempt to end his own son’s life.   Yes, and, actually, I misspoke, it was a stepfather, but still, the man that was married to his mother, and it was during the Depression times, things were not good, there was no work, there was no money. It doesn’t excuse it at all but he had no choice. And so my grandfather, he survived and ended up running a very successful business and dying a multimillionaire. He made something amazing of himself after leaving home in the eighth grade. That is a legacy. That is something you can grab on to. Great father, great grandfather, and I’m blessed to have known him.   One of the things that I’ve done personally and I know a lot of other people have talked about recently and it gets a little bit spiritual sometimes is this idea of multigenerational patterns and how they affect anyone’s life going forward. And so you have this family legacy of photography, which I definitely want to talk about as well as that’s your business, but is part of your family legacy also this event that, no matter what time period, is still really, really messed up but also what your grandfather went through, he left home he was in eighth grade so that means he was probably 13 or 14 years old, so being a 13- or 14-year-old suddenly being a nomad whereas most people at the age of 13 or 14 are, I don’t know –– well, I mean, nowadays they’re teasing each other on Instagram but, in general, for what I remember 13, 14, it’s like, okay, you’re getting into the cool music, you’re hoping that your parents will take you to a show, you’re anticipating getting your driver’s license and trying to figure out where you fit into the social circle of your junior high into high school.    Yeah. I mean, some of us were still eating mud at 13, let’s be clear, and he’s out there making a difference. And certainly that level of grit and determination, there is no doubt that it is deeply ingrained in our family.Share on X I was just talking to my mother about it this week and none of us were really allowed to quit, if that makes any sense. And so, of course, as messed up as that was, my grandfather made a commitment as a pacifist. Because of it, had real problems when world wars came along and when Korea and Vietnam came along and raised his children to believe in peace and love, and, yes, there is a spiritual level to it but he passed that on because he wanted it to end with him. And, for the most part, it did end with him.    So he wanted what his stepfather had done and whatever patterns led to his mother inviting that person into her home because I sometimes think about nowadays how sometimes if someone’s marrying into a family with someone that already has kids, they’ll make sure that the children are okay with that. And that’s a part of the process now. So whatever pattern that was, he was like, “Okay, this ends now,” and then he established this new pattern, this new multigenerational pattern which is that grit that he had to turn to to get this business started when he was just a teenager.    Yeah. He and my grandmother were married for 64 years and good, bad, or indifferent, no one ever heard them argue publicly. We know that they did because there are accounts of them having words behind closed doors but that was part of how they raised my mother and her three sisters and everyone was expected to respect each other and that translated into the business because both my grandparents and my parents ran their businesses out of their home and so talking about connecting the legacy of kindness and respect with each other, we used to joke all the time, we all lived on the top floor, that was our apartment. You walk down the stairs and that was the business. And so it came from that legacy of perseverance and kindness and respect. It came down from the apartment on the second floor to the business on the first floor for both my grandparents and my parents.    So your grandfather started the business and I’m assuming that means that he did photography for his entire life.    My mother was born in the 40s and my grandmother was helping him run that business so a strong lineage of strong women on top of it, and so she handled the money, she handled the business side of it, and he handled the photography and the processing of the film.    And then did he pass it along to your mother then or was there ––   Yeah, actually, my aunts took it over. So my mom is the oldest, and because she relocated to Indiana and my other aunts were younger, my grandfather didn’t retire until he was old enough, and so they were actually the ones that ended up taking it over and then my mom and I came to Indiana.   I see. So, are your aunts, are they still in Georgia then or do they run the business out of Georgia?    Yeah, they ran the business for a long, long time out of Georgia. In fact, up until when my grandmother passed away, and then my two aunts decided that they were going to sell the big home where the business was and my youngest aunt continued on to do fine art photography for quite some time but they are now both retired and enjoying the spoils that they deserve.    I see. So then the mantle was somehow passed along to you. Is this indicative of a tight knit family where you got to see how your aunts were doing it, how they were running the business, and, of course, how photography works?   Sure, we have a very tight knit family, especially when it comes to this photography. They’re constantly, when I launched a new website last year, everybody in the family was sending me emails to tell me their opinion on what was going on, but just the mentorship that comes from having people behind you. My stepfather, unfortunately, got taken out of the business before I could get fully trained and so my mom was there, my grandparents were there, they were still alive, and there was just a group of people supporting me. And it’s not that there hasn’t been bumps in the roads, there certainly have, but each bump that I had, there were people propping me up. We kind of joke in the family, it’s the difference between jumping from the springboard in the swimming pool to jumping from the platform. So that’s what happens in a family business is that you shouldn’t have to redo the steps that your parents and grandparents did. You stand on the shoulders of the people that fought so that you could have this opportunity. It’s fully your business at this point, right?    It is fully my business at this point, but it has changed a lot. So I took it over when I was, oh, 23 years old, I think was when I ended up taking it over because my stepfather had a stroke and he was unable to continue on and I was still growing up. I got married, I had children, I got divorced, just so many roads of trying to get from here to there so that I might carry that mantle on for the family. 

Starting a business is a big decision, and people do it for different reasons. Maybe you have a passion you really care about, or you just want more freedom in how you spend your time. For some, it's about doing something different from the usual 9-to-5 job and having control over their own path. But what does it really take to start a business—and is passion enough to keep you going?  In this episode, I have Clara Ansel, CEO and Founder of Business Powerhouse. Clara shares valuable insights into managing business growth sustainably without burning out. The conversation delves into the importance of having a clear destination or 'Point B,' the role of mindset in business success, and practical steps to avoid chaos and inefficiency. Clara also discusses the significance of decluttering one's mind and surroundings, actionable advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, and her personal journey from corporate consultancy to empowering small business owners. Tune in to learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Starting and Scaling up a Business with Claire Ansell Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidotes to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about starting and scaling up businesses. Now, perhaps you have your reasons for wanting to start a business and, usually, it's about passion that you have or just the desire to have a life where you have a little bit more autonomy over what you do and when you do it, something other than the corporate life, but maybe you're looking at these processes of starting a business and seeing how daunting the process is, how much it really goes on, especially if you do end up with an investor that expects you to scale or if you personally have the desire to scale because whatever mission you're serving, you're kind of wanting to bring to more or more people. My guest today is Claire Ansell, and she is the CEO and founder of Business Powerhouse and she has some good thoughts about how we could go about managing this whole process without kind of burning out, without kind of ending up doing too much in a more sustainable fashion. ---     Claire, welcome to the program.   Hey, Stephen. How are you?    I'm doing pretty well today. It's actually a nice 70 degrees here.    Nice. That's good. Summer is coming.    It always feels nice at this time of year. How are you today?    I'm pretty good. It’s been an exciting day with doing lots of –– actually like in the same realm as what you're talking about. We launched a new kind of series in our hub called Awaken, which is all about mindset so it's pretty exciting to be jumping on here with you today and kind of continuing the conversation.    Yeah, and that's a good place to start. We can talk a little bit about mindset because I'm assuming you work with a lot of people who are either starting businesses or have a business and they're just starting to become overwhelmed as their web traffic, their client base, something kind of picks up.    Yeah, and I think it doesn't really matter what phase of business you're in, whether you're a startup or a ten-million-dollar business, the reality –– or a hundred-million-dollar business. I mean, I've seen it right up to 600 million. I mean, at some point, a business owner is overwhelmed in chaos and facing that burnout. It's just the reality of the way in which we structure and grow our businesses.   Now, given your role in your business, is there any way to prevent that burnout? Is there any way someone that's starting a business now can adopt either a mindset or a set of operational practical you want to start a business but you don't want to burn yourself out?  Yeah, 100 percent, and I think one of the biggest pieces the business owners really miss is they don't understand what their point B is. We talk about point A is where you are today and point B is where are you going in the future and that could be at the end of the month, at the end of the year, in five years or ten years from now. When you start your business, you have a vision or an idea but you don't necessarily have a destination or a point B.Share on X And without that destination and without that point B, you lack direction. And that means –– I mean, the statistics show that a business that doesn't have direction only has a 10 percent success rate. And so that really shows that the 90 percent of businesses that fail, in my mind, of all the businesses that I've seen and understood, really failed because the business owners lacks that direction.   Now, when you talk about point B, how specific does that need to be? Because a lot of people come into a business and say, “I have this mission, I desire to have this impact,” which is, I guess, somewhat vague but do people need to have an exact dollar amount in revenue and exact number of buy-ins or exact type of people and where you're spending Wednesday at 1:30 PM?   I mean, not necessarily Wednesday at 1 PM. I mean, I always ask a great question to a business owner and I can ask you the same question. It’s December 31, 2025, it’s the end of the year, it's kind of two hours before midnight, what did you do this year? Do you know what your business will have looked like for the last year? Do you have a clear vision and direction and can you imagine and can you feel it? Can you know what this year will end like before you even started it?   Now, when people come up with that, and I'm assuming that this is most commonly something people do, say, around the New Years, so it's January 1st and you're saying, “One year from today, this is where I'm gonna be,” how do people need to balance, say, being ambitious and being realistic? Because I can say something like, “Well, December 31st, I am now the president of Ukraine,” and that's never going to happen.   Yeah, no, exactly, and we so we have a process that we call a tactical acceleration plan and so that's basically determining what your point B is going to be. What would you like it to be? Then what's your point A? Where are you at today? And then what's the gap between point A and point B? And in that gap, you develop your roadmap. And by developing that roadmap, you can determine and be realistic. I mean, you could turn around and say you want to be the president of Ukraine but if it's not achievable, then what's the point? And that's on the business owner. I can't control the imagination of what people have. What I can say is, if you truly don't want to be burnt out, you want to be successful, I would make it as realistic and drive yourself, push yourself a little bit, but know that you can get there and you want to do that, and when you do that, you actually activate the RAS system in your brain and then your subconscious actually starts to do the work here. That's the cool part, I would say. Most small business owners, they actually have everything that they need already inside themselves, they just haven't activated it yet. So it starts with a conversation, and when you work with your clients, they probably have a more realistic idea around something along the lines of, “I'll have a dozen clients,” or ––   No. To be honest with you, most small business owners that come to me really have no clue about point B at all. It's very, very rare, especially the smaller ones, especially like under a million dollars. I mean, they might be setting some budgets and some targets but do they really know where they want to be from a directional standpoint? And it's not just about a revenue number. It's not about just getting to a million dollars or $500,000. It's about what type of business are you actually building to?   And so, if people have more vague ideas, is part of the conversation asking someone, okay, if you say you want to grow the business, why do you want to grow the business? Why does this business need to get bigger as opposed to you just being happy where you are and just wanting to tweak a few other things about the business, say, it's off boarding some of the tasks that you just really don't enjoy doing?   Yeah, 100 percent. I mean, most of the time, most business owners don't actually know what their options are and so we don't know what we don't know, but there's definitely a lack of going out there and doing that research and saying, “Okay, well, what's the possibility of what –– am I gonna sell this business? Am I keeping it? Am I handing it over to my children?” What are you actually trying to do with the business ultimately is a good starting point to figure that out and then what's your mission. My mission is to help 100,000 small business owners. I'm very clear on what my mission is. And so, with that, it's easy for me to determine and work backwards on how I'm going to do that and realistically figure out what the strategy is, helping them understand what is the possibilities and then, from that, their why and, actually, most business owners have limited themselves and when they do the exercise with us, they're like, “Oh, wow. I can actually do this.”   I see. So you're saying as much as some people will shoot the moon and come up with something along the lines of, “I wanna be the CEO of Google by next year,” something also is really not going to happen unless something ridiculously crazy happens, but you're saying more often people are limiting themselves in the sense that what they think they can accomplish is way more small scale than what they're actually possibly capable of doing.    Yeah, and I think being a small business owner is emotional. They tend to do a lot of self-sabotaging, a lot of, “I'm not gonna get my goals, I'm gonna be stuck in these weeds,” because then I don't actually have to go after what I really want, so I didn't actually fail because I never really truly defined it.

Stress is part of life, but learning how to handle it well can make a big difference for your health and well-being. When we don’t have the right tools, even small problems can start to feel overwhelming. The good news is, there are easy ways to bounce back and stay on track. But what if there was a way to actually measure how well you're handling stress? In this episode, I talk with Matt Bennett, founder of Optimal HRV. We dive into heart rate variability (HRV) and how it relates to your body’s ability to recover from stress. Matt shares how HRV tracking can give you early signs of health issues before symptoms even show up. He also talks about affordable tools and breathing techniques that can help anyone improve their stress response and build resilience. --- Listen to the podcast here: Understanding HRV and Managing Stress with Matt Bennett Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about stress and, in some aspect, our response to stress, because that’s one of the things that can really get in the way of us following our passions, and you can easily ruin a good reputation you built with one terrible stress response and that’s something that is really sad to see because we all are human and we all have the times where we don’t quite respond the right way but it can be a little bit difficult. So, one of the tools that a lot of people are using to manage their stress as well as their overall health is HRV which, my guest today, Matt Bennett, the owner and founder of Optimal HRV, is going to talk to us more about. ---     HRV is the heart rate variability and, Matt, welcome to the program.   Thanks for having me. Big fan of the show so it’s an honor to be on.   Thank you so much for coming on and I want to start off with explaining to the audience to make sure we’re all oriented, I know some people are probably pretty familiar with what HRV is, others maybe not as much, but I think most people probably aren’t familiar with it and its significance on the level that you are.   Really, when you get down to what is heart rate variability, it’s your body and mind’s ability to handle or recover from stress. And, as you said in your intro, the stress response is so fundamental to everything we do. Now, stress can be an illness. Stress can be a very, very difficult workout. Stress is often you talk about on your show, can be, I’ve got five, six hours of screen time today and we know that can add stress to the system as well. So, your ability to handle or recover from stress is the best foundational definition for heart rate variability that I have seen. Now, we’re doing that by measuring millisecond variations in your heartbeat, and I’m happy to explore the science behind that, but that gives us, I think, a good working definition to start out our conversation with.   So you’re talking about like millisecond variance in heart rate and some people might be thinking why there should be variance at all because one of the key aspects of it that might be good to orient people to is that is there a too low, a too high number, or is it just a matter of keeping it at or above a certain level?   Right. So, we’re in a time where consistency is usually leading to a good outcome. You and I want to turn our computers on and, for the most part, we want it to do the same thing it did yesterday and the day before. You don’t want to sit in your car and have it operate totally different than it did the last time you drove it. In this high tech environment, mechanized environment that we modern humans live in, consistency is usually equated with good quality. We are biological systems so this variation is actually a positive thing. Now, you could have variation in your heartbeats to an extent where you have a medical issue, arrhythmias and other things are obviously not what we’re talking about here and those need to be addressed with your medical provider. Those are usually bigger variations, though, so those are sort of we can put those aside because really not what we’re looking at with heart rate variability. So, we’re looking at, because the heart rate modulates with every inhale and exhale, and when we inhale, our heart rate goes up slightly. When we exhale, the heart rate goes down slightly. And so the more fluctuation we have there, you can think about this as flexibility, though, really, what we’re showing is the better we’re regulated from a stress perspective, the more we have our prefrontal cortex or executive functions available to us. So it is a really great biometric to show, if you think about executive functioning, cognitive functioning, emotional regulation, we’re emotionally regulated, we’re going to be better socially but also drops in heart rate variability because higher is better predicts a lot of chronic diseases. People were paying attention to it during COVID because it was an early indicator before symptoms. I would say 10 out of the 10 leading causes of death, the car accident one is the one that’s hard to measure with HRV, so nine out of the 10 are shown to, early on and throughout the course of the disease, see very, very significant dips in heart rate variability.   So, I just want to make sure that we develop this foundation, this orientation that when you’re talking about heart rate variability, you’re not talking about how your heart rate goes up when you have a stressor response. So let’s say you have someone says something that triggers a traumatic memory and your heart rate starts going up because your subconscious memories start anticipating some sort of bad result, that fight, flight, freeze response, that’s not what you’re talking about. What we’re talking about with heart rate variability is that breathe in and breathe out. Well, yes and, because if you think about somebody experiencing, let’s just say, a minor stressor, because we’ll see this exaggerated with a fight, flight, or freeze response, for sure, but we know as cortisol levels or the stress hormone levels increase, our heart rate increases as well, so you don’t need an advanced degree in mathematics to know if you have more heart beats per second, the room for variation decreases just naturally. We get stress and our heart rate increases, heart rate variability is going to decrease dramatically. During something that may trigger, whether it’s just a stress response or a re-traumatization, we’re going to see more significant increases in heart rate, more significant decreases in HRV. So those are intertwined.Share on X There is an interesting exception to the rule where you could have a low resting heart rate but there still could be very little variation there as well. So it’s not always due to increases or decreases in heart rate. So, we are measuring –– and this is where heart rate variability is a much more sensitive and much more effective biometric for the stress response than heart rate alone.   I see. So, when we talk about the stress response, that’s like kind of an acute reduction in heart rate variability, whereas if we talk about someone that’s generally unhealthy for the variety of reasons that people can be unhealthy, both physically and emotionally, and they can have a chronically low heart rate variability.   So you think about something like burnout, for example, that is usually not something that you’ll experience at 1 PM this afternoon but then be totally healthy again at 3 PM this afternoon. It’s something longer term. So we’ll see HRV baselines dip for significant periods of time until that burnout is addressed. Same thing that if you have one of those big events, we can measure that acutely as well. So this is where it becomes such a powerful metric of overall health and wellness.    And then can HRV be too high?    Yes, but is it worth really talking about those small, small exceptions? Not really. Arrhythmias, for example, can cause that. There may be a handful of others that the research may point to. Bulimia, this is kind of the detail we have to get in. Folks that struggle with bulimia have higher heart rate variabilities. Obviously, that’s not a healthy sort of diagnosis to have so maybe because of the forced vomiting, we may see more vagal stimulation, but, as you see, we got to get lost in the weeds to get there. So, too high, maybe a percentage of 1 percent of the population really need to be concerned with your HRV is too high. The rest of us, we want our HRV to be high.   I see. So it’s like the inverse of sodium intake, where it can be too low but it’s such a small amount and the real issue in our culture is, in that case, too high, but here it’s too low. And so when someone has a chronically low heart rate variability, does that show up in people’s daily lives, whether it be stress responses or anything else?   A variety of different ways. We will see increases as HRV can be a predictor of a range of chronic diseases, so chronic pain, chronic fatigue, things like diabetes, those sort of things. So we can talk about a range of medical health issues associated with, again, chronic, long-term low HRV. Mental health issues as well, anxiety, depression, PTSD has been highly, as you talk about, trauma as well. Burnout. Long COVID is something that’s being studied because HRV gives you a great metric of recovery from that as well. So, chronic disease or a chronic mental health condition, that’s going to really impact your nervous system and that’s going to show up in your heart rate variability. Regardless, the good thing is we get this baseline so if you start a new treatment, start building new, healthier habits, that’s where we should see heart rate variability start to increase that baseline over time.   So if someone starts a workout routine or just, I’m gonna,