Written by Dr. Brooklyn Storme, Business Mentor Dr. Brooklyn Storme is a business advisor and private mentor with a PhD in Psychology and more than 30 years of experience in psychology and human behavior. A former psychologist, she works at the intersection of business, psychology, and manifestation, helping women create meaningful results in business. Building a successful private practice takes more than opening your doors and waiting for clients to find you. From defining your niche and optimising your website to building visibility and trust, these four steps can help therapists attract the right clients and create a practice positioned for long-term growth. You’ve heard the horror stories of therapists who rent consulting rooms only to realise on opening day that they don’t have clients booked. Luckily, there is a way to set your practice up for success. Step 1: Become the go-to practice. First, your practice should ideally be known for something. This is referred to as positioning. Recognition makes it easier for people to refer to you because they know what you do and who you work with. Second, it builds the authority artificial intelligence (AI) search engines use to recommend businesses. Third, it becomes the foundation for your marketing. You could: Focus on a particular client demographic, i.e., busy working single mums with ADHD. Focus on a favourite modality, i.e., Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Focus on a presentation you enjoy working with, i.e., school refusal. Focus on a philosophy you have, i.e., a belief that all people have potential. Focus on a strong point of view, i.e., talk therapies should be the first line of intervention. Combining some of these helps to clarify further who you are to a referrer. For example: ACT for Busy Working Single Mums with ADHD Talk Therapies Like ACT Should Be the First Line of Treatment for Busy Working Single Mums with ADHD When a doctor, colleague, or third party needs to refer a client, your practice should come to mind immediately. Step 2: Optimise the website One main job of the website is to guide people from visiting to taking action, like booking an inquiry call. This is called conversion, and on average, 1 to 2 visitors out of every 100 will convert. Practices with higher conversions: Offer a simple way to book a session instead of relying on email or forms. Include clear next steps so that people know what to do next or what happens after booking. Reply quickly to contacts from visitors or use automated replies. Demonstrate the therapists’ wisdom, practice insights, stories, and experience in a way that’s relevant to the challenges their ideal client may be experiencing. Include fee information in a dedicated tab for transparency. People should know they are in the right place the moment they land on your website, so place your positioning at the top of the homepage. Step 3: Create a LinkedIn™ profile Traffic to websites from search engines like Google™ has been decreasing since the introduction of the AI Summary. Because the summary synthesises relevant information for the user, the need to scroll down and click on the blue website links has reduced. The summary includes citations of key sources, and ideally, yours should be one of them. This is because the data shows that visitors to your website that come from an AI recommendation convert at 12 to 16% compared to 1 to 2% from a search engine. LinkedIn™ is the number one source for AI search engines for professional inquiries. Consider adding your positioning as a headline with two or three proof points, complete your profile fully to increase the potential for it to surface in searches, and post regularly, especially if you need clients to fill your diary. LinkedIn™ favours thoughtful content that demonstrates experience, insights, and/or data. You could write a post about a challenge your clients often face, what the typical guidance is, and your take on it. Give your audience insight into how you think, your point of view, and your values to build trust and rapport. Step 4: Get visible With these foundations in place, the next step is to get the business in front of your ideal clients. Use a combination of short-form content, content that can be consumed in 2 to 3 minutes, and long-form content. Short-form content examples: social media post, Instagram™ reel, blog post, Google Business™ post, LinkedIn™ article, directory listing, like Psychology Today™, and an email. Long-form content examples: podcast episode (audio), podcast episode (video), YouTube™ video, mini course, presentation or workshop. It’s been suggested that people new to your world need to hear from you about 50 times before they’ll take action. Sharing content often can help a potential client move through those touchpoints more quickly and, hopefully, take action with your practice. Paid versus organic visibility The fastest way to get more people to your website is with paid ads. Organic traffic takes longer but can bring higher-quality inquiries because it's earned through trust and relevance. If it’s in your budget, a helpful strategy for getting clients quickly is to use a hybrid approach. Your private practice marketing checklist Be known for something. Create your marketing plan and strategy. Market the practice frequently to the same people, where they spend most of their time. Track your numbers and refine the strategy. Start marketing 90 days before you open and set yourself up to work with paying clients from day one. Need a client attraction strategy for your private practice from a mentor with 30+ years of industry experience? Book a consultation here. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Dr. Brooklyn Storme Dr. Brooklyn Storme, Business Mentor Dr. Brooklyn Storme is a business advisor and private mentor for women who want to develop their manifestation skills and apply them in business. With a PhD in Psychology and more than 30 years’ experience working with the mind and human behaviour, she brings a distinctive, evidence-informed perspective to manifestation in business. A former psychologist, Brooklyn helps women who are already familiar with manifestation deepen their knowledge and build the skills to support their business goals, ambitions, and growth. She also hosts the MENTORED podcast. Related article: From Competitors to Clients - Own Your Niche in Allied Healthcare

Written by Lee Suet Fong Wendy, Holistic Healer & Trauma-Informed Coach Wendy Lee is a Holistic Healer and Trauma-Informed Coach from Hong Kong, now based in Italy. She founded KusalaFlow® and specializes in nervous system regulation, energy medicine, and emotional healing through the Spinal Flow® Technique, breathwork, and Compassionate Inquiry. I came across Dr. Issam Nemeh's work because of a question that has been growing inside me for years. What is actually happening when one person helps another person heal? Dr. Nemeh is a physician who is also known for his faith-based healing work. One statement he repeatedly makes stayed with me: “I don’t do the healing.” For him, God is the source of healing. My language is different, but something in that statement felt deeply familiar. I have always felt like a healer. I do not want to deny that part of who I am. But over time, I have come to understand that healing is not something I can force with my mind. The healing energy is within me and moves through me. It is part of me, but I experience it as connected to something deeper and greater than the identity I know as “me.” The client is not passive either. Their body has its own awareness, responses, and innate intelligence. The more I understood this, the less I felt I had to force healing. Strangely, the less I tried to control healing, the more clearly I could support it. What is healing? As healers, we naturally want the person in front of us to get better. We want their pain to change. We want the session to help. Of course we do. We care. But caring about someone and believing that we must personally make their healing happen are not the same thing. This distinction changed the way I work. Instead of asking: “How can I heal this person?” I began asking: “How can I support this person’s own healing intelligence to respond?” That shift changed everything for me. I still see myself as a healer, but also as a facilitator. I bring what I have learned, what I sense, and the healing presence I carry. My role is to create and support the conditions for something within the client to respond. Healing, for me, happens through that meeting. Why healers try so hard I think many people who become healers, coaches, therapists, yoga teachers, bodyworkers, or caregivers are naturally sensitive to other people’s needs. Sometimes that sensitivity began very early. We may have learned that being good, helpful, successful, easy, or useful brought us love, approval, or safety. So we became very good at giving. We learned to notice what other people needed. We learned to help. Later, helping became part of our identity. There is nothing wrong with that. But sometimes an old pattern quietly follows us into our healing work. If another person improves, we feel successful. If they do not improve, something inside us wonders whether we have failed. That is where helping can quietly become proving. When helping becomes proving This is hard for healers to admit. Sometimes we become attached to the outcome. We need the client to feel better. We want the transformation to happen. We want them to recognize that something important happened. If it does not happen quickly enough, we may start trying harder. More techniques, explanation, effort, and intervention. But healing does not always respond to force. The person in front of us has their own history, beliefs, body, awareness, readiness, and timing. We cannot control all of that. We are not meant to. What faith taught me I used to think faith meant certainty. Now I think of it differently. Faith is the willingness to stay open when you do not know exactly what will happen next. For Dr. Nemeh, that openness is grounded in his faith in God. In my own work, I experience something related through trust in healing energy, the body, and innate intelligence. I trust that the body is not simply broken. I trust that symptoms may be communicating something. I trust that beneath fear, tension, protection, and pain, intelligence still works within us to move toward balance. This does not mean every symptom disappears. It does not mean we reject medicine. It does not mean belief alone cures disease. It means we stop approaching the body as something we must fight or force. We begin listening. The love we learned This question became very personal for me. One day, I sat quietly with my hand over my heart. I explored the question of love, not romantic love, but the love many of us spend our whole lives trying to earn. I said softly to myself: “I am here. I am with you.” Something changed. My chest softened. I felt warmth. Then I noticed a wave of nausea. I cannot tell you exactly why my body responded that way, and I no longer feel that every physical sensation needs an explanation. What mattered was that something happened when I stopped analyzing myself and simply stayed present. It felt as though something I had held for a very long time was beginning to soften. Underneath it was a simple realisation. So much of the love I had searched for outside myself had been connected to doing. Helping. Achieving. Being useful. Being needed. But in that moment, I did not have to do anything. I simply stayed. You do not earn love Many of us learned love conditionally. Be good. Do well. Make people happy. Do not cause trouble. Help others. Achieve more. Give more. Eventually, we can begin to experience love and worth as something connected to performance. So even when we are exhausted, we continue doing. Even when we need rest, we keep giving. Even when another person has their own healing journey, we may still feel responsible for carrying them through it. Eventually, healing asks us to stop. Not to stop caring. Not to stop serving. But to stop proving our worth through service. That change matters for the healer as much as it matters for the client. What I see in my studio This understanding has changed the way I work with clients through Spinal Flow®. Many of the people who come to me are not looking for a spiritual experience. They come because something hurts. It may be persistent physical pain, tension, headaches, back or neck discomfort, or a body that never seems to fully relax. For others, the pain is more emotional. They may feel overwhelmed, disconnected, anxious, exhausted, stuck, or aware that they have been carrying something for a very long time. Sometimes physical and emotional pain cannot be separated so easily. I do not need to decide which part is “physical” and which part is “emotional” before we begin. I listen to the person. I listen to the body. I work with what is present. During Spinal Flow® sessions, I use gentle contact and work with specific areas of the spine and body while observing how the person responds. Sometimes there is movement. Sometimes breathing changes. Sometimes the body softens. Clients may describe warmth, waves, tingling, spaciousness, emotional shifts, or energy moving through them. Other times, the changes are much quieter. What matters to me is not producing a particular response. It is noticing what is happening and helping the client notice it too. The aim is not to force something out of them. It is to create enough support, awareness, connection, and safety for the body to begin responding in its own way. At the same time, I honour my own role. I am a healer. The healing energy I work with is within me and moves through me. During a session, I still use my mind, but not to force the healing. I use it to remind myself to trust. To trust the love. To trust the deeper source within me. To trust what is unfolding. For me, healing feels most natural when my mind and heart are connected in that state of love. From there, I can be present rather than constantly asking myself whether I am doing enough. We all respond differently Every person comes to healing from a different place. Some already practice yoga, meditation, breathwork, energy work, or other forms of inner exploration. Through these practices, they may have developed greater body awareness, so they often notice subtle sensations more easily and understand the language of breath, energy, movement, or inner awareness more quickly. What may be different is not the amount of healing intelligence within them, but how familiar they already are with noticing what is happening inside. That intelligence is already within all of us. Someone with no spiritual background may respond deeply when they are open to the possibility that their body can heal. Someone with years of spiritual practice may still need time if a deeper part of them continues to believe something is fundamentally wrong with them. This is why I have become increasingly interested in perception. How do we see ourselves? Do we believe our body has failed us, or can we begin to see it as something intelligent that has protected, adapted, and communicated with us? For me, healing is not about becoming more spiritual or more advanced. It is about gradually changing our relationship with ourselves and becoming more able to recognize and trust the intelligence that was already there. Trust yourself first One of the most important things I want a client to understand is this: The first thing is not to trust me. The first thing is to trust yourself. Trust what you feel. Trust your boundaries. Trust when something feels right. Trust when you need to slow down. Trust that you do not have to perform healing correctly. I do not want someone leaving a session thinking only: “Wendy healed me.” But I also do not want to erase my own role. I would rather they leave with a fuller understanding: “Wendy helped me, and my body responded.” That feels closer to the truth for me. I honour what moves through me, and I honour what responds within them. Neither side needs to disappear. Healers must stop forcing healing This is why I believe healers must stop trying to heal. Not because we are not healers. Not because our presence does not matter. Not because the healing energy we experience is unimportant. We need to stop trying because trying can become forcing. Forcing can become controlling, and controlling can make us believe that everything depends on us. I no longer want to carry healing that way. I can use my skill. I can bring my presence. I can connect with the deeper source within me. Then I can trust. Trust what I feel. Trust the person in front of me. Trust their body. Trust what unfolds between us. My role is not to own another person’s healing. My role is to participate in it. Perhaps that is one of the deepest lessons this work has taught me. Not, “How can I heal you?” But, “How can I support the healing intelligence already within you?” Try this today Place one hand over your heart. Take a slow breath. Then say quietly: “I am here. I am with you.” Do not try to create an experience. Do not search for a release. Do not decide what should happen. Just notice. What happens in your chest? Your breath? Your belly? Your jaw? Your shoulders? Maybe you feel warmth, tension, sadness, or maybe nothing at all. Whatever you notice, let it be enough. The practice is not about producing a result. It is about learning to stay with yourself without immediately trying to change yourself. Begin your ReTune journey People often come to KusalaFlow® because they are living with physical pain, emotional pain, chronic tension, stress, or a feeling that their body has been holding too much for too long. Through the ReTune Pathway®, I work with the whole person: body, nervous system, emotions, awareness, and innate healing capacity. This work isn't about forcing pain to disappear. It is about creating the conditions for the body to begin to soften, release, regulate, reconnect, and respond differently. Whether you already practice yoga, meditation, breathwork, energy work, or none of these, you do not need to understand healing before you begin. You only need a willingness to become curious about what your body may be trying to tell you. I work with people both in person in Italy and online. You can learn more here. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Lee Suet Fong Wendy Lee Suet Fong Wendy, Holistic Healer & Trauma-Informed Coach Wendy Lee is a Holistic Healer, Trauma-Informed Coach, and the founder of KusalaFlow®, a healing studio based in Italy devoted to energy medicine, nervous system regulation, and trauma-informed care. Born in Hong Kong, Wendy draws from an integrative healing toolkit that includes Spinal Flow® Technique, breathwork, sound healing, Compassionate Inquiry, and Star Magic remote healing. She helps clients release emotional, physical, and energetic pain, supporting them as they reconnect with their true selves and awaken their innate intelligence.

Las Vegas, Nevada, September 12, 2026. Phillip B. Shoemaker, the founding director of App Store Review at Apple, will publish Unbreakable: Secure Your Digital Life in a World Built to Breach You on October 26, 2026, with John Wiley & Sons. Most cybersecurity books are written for the people who already work in security. Unbreakable is written for everyone else: the parent setting up a first phone, the small business owner taking payments, the retiree getting a text that looks a little too real. Shoemaker argues that criminals don't select targets based on who understands the threat. They select based on who is easy to reach. The book explains how today's scams, account takeovers, deepfakes, and identity attacks actually work, then gives readers an ordered system for shutting off the access those attacks depend on. It closes with a 30-day program that walks readers through securing their identity, money, accounts, reputation, and family one step at a time. Shoemaker built Apple's App Store Review team, its fraud detection systems, and the review processes that screened millions of submissions, working under Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. He has also faced multiple attacks. A SIM-swap attack and a sustained impersonation campaign against his own identity run through the book as a narrative thread. "I spent years watching fraud from the inside, and then I got hit by it anyway," Shoemaker said. "The advice people get is either too vague to act on or written for engineers. I wanted a book that tells you exactly what to do, in what order, and why it works. Be intentional, not paranoid." Shoemaker founded PersonaShield.com, a likeness authentication and monitoring service, and co-founded identity.org. He also founded NobodyReadsThat.com, which analyzes terms of service agreements, and The Unbreakable Group, a cybersecurity consulting practice serving executives and high-exposure families. He lives in Las Vegas. Unbreakable: Secure Your Digital Life in a World Built to Breach You (ISBN 9781394445547) is available for pre-order now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent booksellers. Media contact Phillip B. Shoemaker Email Amazon

Written by Sass Allard, Strategic Coach & Change Consultant Sass Allard is a strategic coach and change consultant helping leaders and high-performing women navigate complex change with clarity and resilience. She brings over 20 years of experience in global organisations, offering practical insights to support meaningful transformation and growth. She had been on hold with a GP surgery since twenty past seven and was still on hold when her brother rang to offer his views on their mother's medication. Her 17-year-old sent several text messages with increasingly demanding questions and requests. By eleven, she was chairing a meeting that involved the CEO. Sound familiar? The ONS counts around 1.4 million sandwich carers in the UK, meaning people raising a dependent child while also providing unpaid care to an older, ill, or disabled relative. Sixty-one per cent are women, and just over half are aged 45 to 64, with more than a quarter providing twenty hours a week or more on top of caring for their children. Carers UK found that 69 percent of employed carers felt unable to give their careers the attention they wanted, and 21 percent had taken a more junior or lower-paid role as a result. This often gets filed under welfare. It isn’t viewed as a commercial problem, and that starts to quietly cost organisations their most experienced women. Change management, without the job title Running a parent's care means coordinating across health services, social care, and family members holding incompatible views, on incomplete information, with no authority over anyone involved, against a situation that alters without notice at a pace somebody else sets. There is no contingency budget and nowhere to escalate. The negotiation is often with an elderly person whose settled position is that nothing needs to change at all. What gets built doing this is the capability organisations claim to be short of, which is judgement under ambiguity and the capacity to keep several conflicting interests in play without losing your footing. It shows up nowhere on a curriculum vitae (CV), and it is never once mentioned in a conversation about succession. Why it stays off the record The concealment is deliberate and mostly rational. A woman disclosing this in her forties or fifties adds to a set of assumptions already forming about her availability and her appetite for what comes next. She has watched what happened to colleagues who brought their ‘problems’ into the workplace, and she has concluded that silence will cost her less. Organisations therefore lose these women at the point of their greatest value. Carers UK's most recent research found 47 percent of working carers considering reducing their hours or leaving altogether, and very few of them will say why at the time. Stages worth working through Treat disclosure as a decision. Telling your employer you have a caring responsibility that requires certain arrangements gives them something to act on. Narrating the whole situation invites an assessment of your capacity that you did not request. Aviva's research found 89 percent of UK adults rated a supportive line manager as what mattered most, which makes who you tell far more consequential than how much you tell them. Work out what will still be there later. A stretch project turned down this year is usually still available next year. Sleep, health, and the people who hold you up do not operate that way, and some of that damage does not undo. Work commitments arrive with dates attached while everything else waits quietly, which is why the quiet things are what get dropped first. Ask for the specific thing. Organisations are often unequipped to manage distress, but respond reasonably well to requests. Thursday mornings until March is something a manager can say yes to, whereas anything vaguer puts the job of inventing a solution on them, and they will decline rather than guess. For the organisations losing them Twelve per cent of employees report having any paid carer's leave, and a third say their workplace has no carer policy at all. Where policies do exist, the difficulty is usually that nobody feels safe using them. People take their cue from what they have watched happen to someone else, so the useful question for any leadership team is whether a manager has ever handled this disclosure well in front of an audience. This group is growing, driven by later childbearing and longer lives, and it maps almost exactly onto the population organisations say they are developing for senior roles. None of this appears on a CV. Holding a complicated situation together with no budget, no authority, and no end date is work most organisations would pay well for, and a great many women are doing it before they have even arrived at their desks. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Sass Allard Sass Allard, Strategic Coach & Change Consultant Sass Allard works at the intersection of leadership, behaviour, and wellbeing, supporting individuals and organisations as they navigate demanding periods of change. Her background spans two decades in global companies, where she has helped senior leaders strengthen culture, clarity, and capability. She brings a grounded understanding of how hormonal shifts shape women’s experience at work without limiting the broader conversation. As a UN Women delegate to the Commission on the Status of Women, she brings a global lens to agency and progress. Sass writes about adaptation, resilience, and the practical shifts that create real movement in work and life.

Written by Lotte Mikkelsen, Laughter Yoga Master Trainer Lotte Mikkelsen’s journey from early entrepreneurial ventures to becoming a Laughter Yoga Master Trainer reflects a lifelong dedication to well-being and joy. Since founding UnitedMind in 2002, she has pioneered innovative stress-relief methods and trained thousands to harness laughter's transformative power. When I named this part of the news story Neuroplastic Fantastic, I was playing on the title of Plastic Fantastic, a famous 1970s Danish avant-garde poem collection by Britta Sandqvist. Back then, “plastic fantastic” was a cheeky nod to synthetic, mass-produced materials that could be moulded into any shape you could possibly imagine. But the word “plastic” actually comes from the ancient Greek word plastikos, which means “able to be moulded, shaped, or formed.” By calling this newsletter Neuroplastic Fantastic, we take that concept back from artificial factories and give it to our biology and nature. Our brain is the ultimate mouldable material. It is a true shapeshifter, physically rewriting its own pathways based on how we use it. Last time, I talked about using laughter to destroy old, automated habits. This time, let’s look at the secret chemical key required to mould a new, positive habit into place: acetylcholine. Our brain’s yellow highlighter Whenever you perform an action on autopilot, your brain glides through existing pathways without changing anything. However, the moment you bring intense, concentrated focus to a new action, your brain releases a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. You can imagine or think of acetylcholine as a biological yellow highlighter. It marks/highlights the exact neural circuit you are using at that particular moment and tells your brain, “This is important. Save this change during sleep tonight.” Without this chemical highlighter, your brain simply forgets the new routine. Three steps to trigger the focus chemical Remove and completely banish micro-distractions: Your brain cannot highlight a new pathway if your attention is fragmented. When you practice a new habit, put your phone away. Even a 2-second glance at a notification immediately halts acetylcholine production. Lean into the friction of discomfort: When you try a new behaviour, it feels awkward, clunky, uncomfortable, and difficult. The mental strain these feelings provide is a good thing. That exact feeling of effort is the physical sensation of acetylcholine flooding your brain to force these important structural changes. Anchor the newbie with a micro-win: Straight after putting intense focus into your new routine, celebrate! A quick fist-pump or a positive thought triggers a secondary splish-splash of dopamine, which permanently seals the highlighted pathway into your long-term memory. Your neuro-action step for this week Pick one positive behaviour you want to automate this week. When you do it, don't multitask. Give it 5 minutes of your complete, undivided, super-focused attention. You are forcing your brain to highlight the new, vulnerable circuit and letting neuroplasticity do the ‘heavy lifting’ while you sleep. Tell me how you can benefit from workshops and training. You can reach me by email here or by mobile at +44 (0) 7736341717. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Lotte Mikkelsen Lotte Mikkelsen, Laughter Yoga Master Trainer Lotte Mikkelsen’s legacy is one of laughter, growth, and positive change, echoing her mission to enrich lives through laughter and joyfulness. Since founding her business, she has trained over 2,000 individuals and shared laughter at thousands of festivals, conferences, and wellbeing events around the UK and Europe. With a background in corporate, national, and international workplaces, she has a deep understanding of how stress can affect physical, psychological, and emotional health and wellbeing.

Written by Reese Maskwa, Entrepreneur Reese Maskwa is an entrepreneur, visionary, and founder of Quanta-versity and Sacred Roots. Her ventures explore human potential, consciousness, business energetics, and quantum energetics, while creating transformational education and immersive travel experiences in Costa Rica, with a long-term vision for global expansion. For decades, researchers have investigated children who describe lives they never lived, memories they shouldn't have, and physical marks that appear to correspond to people who died before they were born. So what happens when science starts asking the same questions spirituality has been asking for thousands of years? What if the story you tell yourself about who you are isn't the whole story? What if some of the fears you carry, the relationships that feel strangely familiar, the places that seem to awaken something inside you, or even certain patterns you cannot explain have roots that reach further back than this lifetime? For most of my life, those questions haven't been theoretical. I was talking about past lives as a child, long before I understood what reincarnation was supposed to mean. I would tell my parents about a life before this one and talk about experiences that, from my perspective, were memories. I wasn't trying to be mystical. I wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything. I was a child describing what I knew, and understandably, my parents had absolutely no idea what to do with it. I probably drove them a little crazy. As I grew older, those experiences became something I couldn't easily categorize. Eventually, my curiosity about consciousness became much more intentional. After a debilitating car accident changed my life, I began studying neuroscience because I wanted to understand what had happened to me and what the human brain and body were actually capable of. I wanted to understand healing. I wanted to understand why some people recover from seemingly impossible circumstances and why others remain trapped in patterns that seem to have no obvious origin. The further I went into neuroscience, however, the bigger the questions became. I found myself fascinated not only by the brain, but by consciousness itself. Where does consciousness come from? Is it entirely produced by the brain? What exactly is memory? Why do human beings experience intuition, déjà vu, dreams, profound connections, and altered states of consciousness? Perhaps most importantly, are we truly limited to what we can currently measure? Those questions eventually led me far beyond what I had originally set out to study. They led me into consciousness, energy, spirituality, past lives, and what I now teach through my work in quantum energetics. But rather than making me less interested in science, the journey made me more interested in it. The more I learned, the more I realized that there are areas where science and spirituality are asking surprisingly similar questions, just using very different languages. The question science couldn't quite ignore Past lives are often dismissed as a spiritual belief, and certainly reincarnation has existed as a spiritual and religious concept for thousands of years. But something changes when the question isn't being asked by someone who already believes in reincarnation. It changes when a child of two starts telling their parents about another mother, another house, another name, another family, or another death, and when those statements can sometimes be investigated against historical records. That is precisely what researchers at the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies have been doing for decades. The scale of their work is remarkable. The University of Virginia reports that its researchers have collected more than 2,500 cases of the reincarnation type over approximately 60 years. The cases come from around the world, and most involve young children, commonly between the ages of two and five, who spontaneously report memories they believe belong to a previous life. Researchers have documented cases in which children's statements correspond to the life and death of a deceased individual, as well as cases in which children display unusual phobias or preferences and cases involving birthmarks or birth defects that appear to correspond with wounds or marks associated with the deceased person. The research is not hidden away in a collection of paranormal websites. Psychiatrist JimB. Tucker, who directs the Division of Perceptual Studies, published a 2025 review in the International Review of Psychiatry examining approximately six decades of this research. His review states that more than 2,500 cases have been investigated worldwide and notes that, in the strongest cases, children have provided details that proved strikingly accurate for an individual who lived in the past, sometimes at considerable geographical distance from the child's family. That doesn't prove reincarnation. It does something arguably more interesting: it gives us a phenomenon that can be investigated. Once you begin looking at the research, the subject becomes much harder to reduce to a simple question of whether someone "believes" in past lives. There is more research than most people realize In 2021, researchers conducted a scoping review of the academic literature on claimed past life memories. They searched six major databases: Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed and the Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE), APA PsycINFO, the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), and OpenGrey. They initially identified 1,784 studies. After removing duplicates, irrelevant studies, and studies that did not meet their criteria, the researchers arrived at 78 studies for their final review. The results were striking: 84% of the studies involved children, 60% were case reports, 73% used interviews, and 50% included documentary analysis. Birthmarks or physical defects were investigated in 37% of the studies, while unusual behaviours were investigated in 74%. The study, Academic Studies on Claimed Past Life Memories: A Scoping Review, is available through PubMed and ScienceDirect. There is an important caveat here. Most of this research is observational. A large proportion consists of case reports rather than randomized controlled experiments, and the authors themselves call for better methodologies and more research across cultures. That means these studies cannot be treated as if they have demonstrated reincarnation in the same way that a controlled clinical trial might establish the efficacy of a medication. But there is a difference between saying that evidence is not conclusive and saying that there is no evidence. There is evidence. There is a substantial body of it. The debate is about what the evidence means. Why children’s memories make the question so difficult One of the reasons these cases are so compelling is that many of them involve children who are not deliberately attempting to access a past life. They are not sitting in a regression session being asked to imagine who they were. They often begin speaking spontaneously. University of Virginia (UVA) describes children, usually between two and five years old, who may talk about another family, another home, another occupation, or another death. The apparent memories generally fade as children grow older, often around the age of seven. Some children also demonstrate behaviours or phobias that researchers say are unusual within their current family circumstances. This is particularly interesting to me because of my own childhood. I didn't have a framework for what I was experiencing. I wasn't thinking about the philosophical implications of reincarnation. I simply remembered things. Looking back now, I can see how easy it would have been for an adult to assume a child was imagining things, making up stories, or seeking attention. Perhaps that explanation is correct in some cases. Children absolutely have extraordinary imaginations. But what happens when the child provides details that can be checked? What happens when researchers find a deceased person whose life corresponds with those statements? What happens when the child knows things that appear difficult to explain through ordinary exposure? Those are the cases that have kept researchers investigating this phenomenon for decades. The birthmarks that raise even more questions Perhaps the most unusual part of the research involves something that cannot simply be explained as a story: the physical body. According to UVA's database, approximately 30% of its cases contain a birthmark and/or birth defect. Researchers have reported cases in which these marks appear to correspond with wounds or identifying marks associated with the deceased individual the child claims to remember. A 2023 systematic review published in Explore specifically investigated birthmarks and birth defects of the head and neck in cases involving alleged past life memories. Researchers searched MEDLINE/PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Excerpta Medica Database (EMBASE), and PsycINFO and identified six studies containing 19 cases. The lesions ranged from 0.5 to 12 centimetres, and nine of the cases included some form of verified official report. The researchers concluded that the existing literature was intriguing but also limited, emphasizing the need for additional high-quality primary research. The full study, Birthmarks and Birth Defects in the Head and Neck Region and Claims of Past Life Memories: A Systematic Review, can be read through PubMed or ScienceDirect. Ian Stevenson, the psychiatrist whose work formed much of the foundation for the University of Virginia's reincarnation research, devoted decades to investigating these types of cases. His two-volume work, Reincarnation and Biology, documented a much larger collection of birthmark and birth defect cases. A later analysis identified 75 head and neck cases in Stevenson's books and compared them with the 19 cases identified in the systematic review of journal literature. Again, none of this gives us a simple laboratory demonstration of reincarnation. But it does create a fascinating problem. If a child is born with a distinctive physical mark and later describes a previous person who supposedly died with an injury in the same location, what is the mechanism? Is it coincidence? Is it selection bias? Is it a psychological or developmental phenomenon? Is there information being transmitted through some ordinary mechanism that researchers have not identified? Or is there something else happening? Those are very different possibilities, and science has not yet settled the question. Now we have a new statistical question One of the most fascinating developments is that researchers are beginning to move beyond individual stories and investigate patterns across large numbers of cases. In August 2026, researchers from the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies published a large-scale analysis of 1,678 cases in which a deceased previous person had apparently been identified. The study examined what researchers call the "intermission time," the period between the reported death of the previous person and the birth of the child who later appeared to remember that life. The researchers found a statistically significant relationship between characteristics of the reported death and the length of this interval. Median intervals decreased from approximately 21 months for the least unexpected deaths to 12 months for the most unexpected deaths, representing a reduction of approximately 40 to 45%. The association remained after the researchers examined several potential sources of bias, including verification quality, memory contamination, family association, social status motivation, and family beliefs about reincarnation. That is a very strange finding, but it is also important not to overstate what it means. The researchers themselves describe the data as observational and call for further research into the underlying mechanism. The finding does not establish that a consciousness literally moved from one body to another. But it does demonstrate something scientifically valuable: there may be patterns within these cases that can be statistically examined rather than merely described as stories. You can read the research through the University of Virginia's publication page or the study's Digital Object Identifier (DOI) through the American Psychological Association. That is the direction I find most exciting, not trying to force science to validate spirituality, but allowing unusual observations to generate hypotheses that can actually be tested. What happens to these children when they grow up? Another question researchers have only recently begun exploring is what happens to these children later in life. In 2024, University of Virginia researchers published the first observational follow-up study of American adults who had originally been interviewed as children about alleged past life memories. The study included 23 adults. The researchers found that these individuals generally appeared to lead normal, productive lives and had high educational attainment compared with the general population. Sixty-five percent reported that the experiences had some impact on their lives, while relatively few reported negative effects. The study is particularly interesting because it moves the conversation away from simply asking whether a child's statements were "real" and toward asking what these experiences actually do to a person's life. That matters because extraordinary experiences don't necessarily have to be pathological simply because they are difficult to explain. A person can have an unusual experience and still live a completely ordinary, productive life. For me, that is an important distinction. But what about memory? This is where we have to slow down. If we're going to bridge spirituality and science honestly, we can't only present the evidence that supports our preferred interpretation. We also have to examine the explanations that challenge it. Human memory is not a perfect recording system. Memories are reconstructed. They can be influenced by suggestion, emotion, context, and later information. This is particularly important when discussing adult past life regression. Someone can undergo hypnosis or guided imagery and experience an incredibly vivid narrative about another lifetime. They might see a name, a place, a family, an occupation, or a death. The emotional experience can be profound, but an experience feeling real does not automatically establish that it is historically accurate. That is why I see a significant difference between spontaneous childhood cases and adult regression experiences. The first may occur before a child has even developed a sophisticated understanding of reincarnation. The second can involve suggestion and expectation. They are both worthy of exploration, but they should not be treated as identical forms of evidence. For me, this doesn't diminish the mystery. It makes the investigation more interesting. Perhaps some experiences are memories. Perhaps some are symbolic. Perhaps some are created by the brain. Perhaps some involve information acquired unconsciously. Perhaps some are coincidences. Perhaps there are experiences that current models of consciousness simply don't explain yet. The bigger question is consciousness Eventually, the conversation about past lives becomes a conversation about something much bigger: what consciousness actually is. Modern neuroscience has given us extraordinary insight into the brain. We can observe neural activity, investigate memory, identify changes associated with perception, and study what happens when different areas of the brain are damaged or stimulated. But despite everything we know, consciousness remains one of the great unanswered questions. We can describe increasingly sophisticated relationships between brain activity and conscious experience, but the deeper question remains: why does physical processing produce subjective experience at all? Why does seeing something feel like something? Why does pain have an internal quality? Why do we experience ourselves as a continuous "I"? If consciousness is something we still don't completely understand while we are alive, how confident can we really be about what happens to it when the body dies? That doesn't prove that consciousness survives death, but it does mean the question remains scientifically and philosophically alive. Where science and spirituality begin to overlap For thousands of years, spiritual traditions have proposed that consciousness is more than the physical body. Different cultures have developed different concepts to explain it: souls, reincarnation, ancestral consciousness, subtle bodies, spiritual realms, and countless other frameworks. Science approaches the same territory differently. It asks what can be observed, measured, replicated, and falsified. These approaches don't have to be enemies. In fact, I think the most fascinating conversations happen when we allow both to ask questions without pretending they have already answered them. Spirituality can offer hypotheses about meaning and consciousness. Science can test what can actually be tested and tell us what the evidence currently supports. Spiritual exploration can sometimes lead us toward questions science has not yet developed the tools to investigate. The danger is when either side becomes absolutely certain. Science becomes limited when it assumes that what cannot currently be measured cannot possibly exist. Spirituality becomes limited when it assumes that a powerful personal experience automatically proves a particular explanation. The most interesting space is somewhere in between. Maybe we are still discovering what human beings are capable of This is ultimately what past lives have come to represent for me. Not simply the question of who I was before I was born, but the larger question of what human beings are capable of knowing, remembering, and experiencing. My childhood experiences were the beginning of that question for me. My accident and my study of neuroscience gave me another doorway into it. My exploration of energy, consciousness, and spirituality gave me another. The more I have explored, the more convinced I have become that we should be careful about placing a final boundary around human potential simply because we don't yet understand what lies beyond it. That doesn't mean believing everything. It means remaining willing to investigate. Because if the research eventually demonstrates that past life memories have a conventional explanation, we will have learned something remarkable about memory and consciousness. If future research demonstrates that some cases cannot be explained through known mechanisms, that will be remarkable too. If humanity eventually discovers that consciousness has capacities we have not yet imagined, the implications will be enormous. Either way, the investigation is worth having. Then there is another place people have been looking for answers This is where my own work takes the conversation into territory that is less established scientifically but deeply significant within spiritual traditions. There is a concept known as the Akashic Records, often described as a kind of energetic or nonphysical record containing information about experiences, consciousness, and the journey of a soul. The history of the concept itself is fascinating. The modern idea of the Akashic Records developed through Theosophical traditions and was influenced by concepts associated with the Sanskrit term akasha, as well as Western philosophy, religious ideas, and interpretations of physics. Religious studies scholar Alex Nash examined this history in the Central European Journal for Contemporary Religion, tracing how the concept developed into the modern idea of an ethereal archive containing information about the past. You can read Nash's academic paper, The Akashic Records: Origins and Relation to Western Concepts, through the Central and Eastern European Online Library (CEEOL) or EBSCOhost. There is an important distinction here: academic research has examined the history and development of the Akashic Records concept, but there is not currently a body of controlled scientific research establishing the Akashic Records as a measurable information field. I don't think we need to pretend otherwise, because what I can speak about is my own experience. Over the years, I have learned to work with what I understand as the Akashic Records, and I have used this process in sessions with other people. There have been countless moments when someone has sat in front of me and information has come through that I had no conscious way of knowing about them beforehand. Sometimes it has involved childhood experiences, family dynamics, personal events, or patterns that the person had never shared with me. I've watched people become completely stunned because the information was so specific and personal that they couldn't understand how I could possibly know it. Those experiences are not laboratory proof of an Akashic field, and I don't claim that they are. They are firsthand experiences that have profoundly shaped my understanding of consciousness and information, and they are part of the reason I became so passionate about teaching other people how to explore this territory for themselves. What fascinates me most is not asking someone to blindly believe that an Akashic Record exists. It is teaching them a technique for exploring consciousness and then allowing their own experience to become part of the investigation. That is the work I now teach through Quanta-Versity. For me, the Akashic Records sit at the very edge of the larger conversation we've been having throughout this article: where does information come from, how much are we capable of accessing, and is consciousness more expansive than the models we currently have available to explain it? I don't think we have all the answers, but I don't think we need to. The child who once drove her parents crazy talking about a life before this one never stopped asking the question. She simply grew up and learned how to ask it differently. Perhaps that is what exploring past lives ultimately offers us. Not simply an opportunity to discover who we may have been, but an opportunity to question who we are now, why we are here, which patterns we are carrying, and how much of our potential remains unexplored. Maybe your story began when you were born. Maybe it didn't. Maybe past lives are exactly what they appear to be. Maybe the explanation will turn out to be something entirely different. But after more than 2,500 investigated cases, 78 academic studies identified in one major scoping review, decades of research into birthmarks and behavioural patterns, new statistical analysis of 1,678 cases, and a growing scientific interest in consciousness itself, I don't think the question deserves to be dismissed. I think it deserves to be explored. Because perhaps the most extraordinary discovery isn't finding out who you were before. Perhaps it's discovering what becomes possible when you finally understand who you are now. That is the question that has driven my work for years: what if we are capable of far more than we have ever been taught to believe? Follow me on Facebook and visit my website for more info! Read more from Reese Maskwa Reese Maskwa, Entrepreneur Reese Maskwa's entrepreneurial journey grew from transforming her own life in ways she once believed were almost impossible and discovering just how capable humans can be. Through Quanta-Versity, she is reimagining education around consciousness, human potential, and the forces that shape our reality, while Sacred Roots brings education into the real world through immersive experiences in Costa Rica. Her vision is to create education that doesn't simply teach, but changes what people believe is possible. Her ultimate goal is to use education and experience as catalysts for personal and global transformation, and she believes we're only beginning to understand what humans are truly capable of.

Written by Maya Akai Monet Gavin, Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor Maya Akai, MA, LCPC, CADC, is a seasoned professional whose extensive life experiences inform her practice. She possesses over twenty years of professional experience in mental health, complemented by expertise in broadcasting, social services, and education fields. We like to think that adulthood is a destination, a point we reach once we accumulate the right degrees, secure career stability or success, pay our taxes, and dress the part, but behind closed doors, many highly capable, successful people harbor a striking secret, inside our mature, rational exterior lives a sad, confused, or defensive child who never actually left, or who was trapped by the pain of disappointment and failure from not being protected by those who were supposed to protect us. The truth is, we never completely grow up. Instead, the child we once were persists beneath the surface, often influencing our ability to lead, make decisions, and navigate interpersonal relationships. To build authentic emotional resilience and step into our true selves, we must understand how childhood wounds shape the present and how the adult brain can finally break the cycle. Trauma's master disguise: Hiding and resurfacing Trauma does not quietly fade away with age. It is a master of disguise. When we experience emotional neglect, hyper-criticism, instability, or fear during our formative years, our brains develop a brilliant defense strategy. They tuck those painful memories deep into the subconscious mind just so we can survive, keep moving forward, and adapt to our environments. However, those buried memories are never truly dead, they merely lie dormant inside. They lie in wait for a triggering event. These hidden emotions, lying dormant, can wear many disguises, including: Sensitivity to criticism: For example, a minor critique from a manager can feel like public humiliation linked to a negative experience with a childhood teacher. Fear of abandonment: A partner or colleague pulling away for a justifiable reason can instantly trigger the weight of childhood abandonment. Struggles with change: An unexpected shift in a plan can mirror the chaos of an unstable household. When trauma is disguised or masked with incomplete healing, the trigger can pull the pin, and decades of maturity vanish in an instant. For some, these hidden triggers can then subjugate an adult into feeling lost and retraumatized. Hence, the inner child is again cast into feeling unprotected, and its mature counterpart often feels like a failure for still feeling vulnerable. The default setting: Navigating fight-or-flight When these hidden wounds are poked, our instinct takes the wheel. The nervous system defaults to its primitive defense mechanism, fight or flight. What does this feel like? Your heart rate spikes, your chest tightens, and your cognitive capacity shrinks. Suddenly, you are no longer operating from your adult prefrontal cortex. You are back in the sandbox. Depending on your childhood trauma, you may: Become overly defensive, aggressive in meetings, or desperate to control every variable, the "fight" response. Slam doors, shut down emotionally, avoid critical conversations, or mentally withdraw from the room, the "flight" response. In these moments, you are simply re-enacting the exact survival mechanics you memorized as a child. Logic has stepped back, and negative feelings or chaos prevail. In this moment, assumed healing or failure to heal becomes painfully apparent. The ultimate shift: Standing on your own terms Here lies the profound turning point for personal development, the adult you are today possesses an ability that the child you used to be never had. You are no longer trapped in the past. You can choose to stand, hold your ground, and address the trauma on your own terms. Make no mistake, this is the hardest part of the healing process. Choosing to confront your inner child requires speaking truths that you have spent a lifetime running from. It demands a willingness to face immense emotional and mental discomfort. When you stop running, the unresolved pain and old suffering you buried will inevitably rise back to the surface. It will feel messy, and it will hurt, but there is a radical difference between then and now, your capacity. Understanding the difference is the undiscovered agency that time and experience have gifted you. The inner child (Then) The conscious adult (Now) Lacked the vocabulary to voice boundaries Possesses clear communication tools Lacked physical and financial independence Has full personal agency and autonomy Forced to absorb the emotional chaos of others Capable of walking away and setting limits Dependent on adults for safety and survival Capable of self-soothing and self-protection Taking back the power As a child, you lacked the tools to protect yourself from your environment, but as an adult, you hold the ultimate authority. You possess the innate ability to look your old trauma in the eye, strip away its control, and take back the power it stole from you. The inner child stays with us as a permanent living record of what we survived, but they no longer have to run the meeting. The next time you feel the familiar emotional and mental rush of fight-or-flight, pause and take a deep breath. Look at the situation through the lens of the present. Remind your nervous system who is actually in the room, a capable, resilient adult who is finally ready to write the conclusion to a dark and painful past. Healing is often a lonely place, but never forget what or who put you there and how choosing to live your truth frees you from their power and allows you to embrace and live your truth. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Maya Akai Monet Gavin Maya Akai Monet Gavin, Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor Maya's personal and professional endeavors have endowed her with profound insight and empathy across various social, emotional, and mental dimensions. Engaging in a conversation with Maya offers an honest, salient, and open exchange centered on utilizing mindfulness as a means to inspire and motivate one to actualize the effort and ambition required to live a desired life.

Written by Kellie Winzinowich and Kelly Whelan-Enns, Active Embodiment Coaches Kellie and Kelly founded the Academy of Embodiment Arts and host the Soul Discovery podcast. They combine Qigong with meditation and energy mastery to guide people to embody a new frequency through transmutation and transformation for lasting change. Stillness of the mind can be difficult to achieve without training stillness with the body. The dynamic repetition of conventional training does not reach the same level as training stillness through isometrics. The Greeks called it Stasis, the unbroken stance. The Vedic Sages called it Stirha, steadiness from which all higher states emerge. The Chinese called it Zhan Zhuang. People find it difficult to hold static postures because so much exercise information focuses on dynamic repetition. Walking, running, weight-lifting, and resistance training are all dynamic exercises. However, static posture training has health benefits that dynamic exercises do not. You can find this information in research articles published on PubMed, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and The Mayo Clinic Health System. Stillness builds muscle. This may seem contrary to what people have learned previously. The mechanism involves a class of molecules called myokines, which your body releases during sustained contraction. Here’s how it works: Myokines are chemical messengers produced by muscle tissue under tension during isometric contraction. They travel through the bloodstream, cross into the brain, and rewire cellular function from the inside out. While these compounds can be released with movement, they are also activated with prolonged static overload. Modern fitness protocols often overlook isometrics, but you can build strength with these methods while rewiring the nervous system. Irisin, IL-6 (Interleukin-6), and BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor) are three important myokines. Irisin is a hormone muscles release during exercise. It instructs white fat to convert into metabolically active brown fat. Brown fat, or brown adipose tissue, burns calories to generate heat and regulate your body temperature. IL-6 is a multifunctional protein that acts as both a pro-inflammatory cytokine and an anti-inflammatory signal. It instructs the liver to release stored energy and lower systemic inflammation. This protein simulates a fever and supports the growth of T-cells and B-cells. It signals the liver to produce C-reactive protein, an acute-phase protein, it spikes to fight infection and tissue injury, then declines once the issue is resolved. BDNF protects aging neurons from slow erosion of cognitive decline. It acts like fertilizer for the brain, supporting growth, survival, and neuron maintenance by protecting telomeres. It supports neuroplasticity, key to learning and memory, and helps regulate mood. This means you can train the body and trigger these myokines without stressing it with extensive cardiovascular exercise or joint impact. While these have their place, static postures benefit the body on many levels. Holding static postures requires stillness of mind and body, making you aware of the mind-body connection. When standing still, you are forced to hear how busy your mind is. The willingness to remain motionless when every fibre of your being screams for you to move is as much a physical challenge as a mental one. In our busy society, it is hard for people to be alone with their thoughts. Practices such as Zhan Zhuang level the playing field. If you’re strong in body, try standing still for two minutes and see what your mind does. The myokine cascade activates not at the comfortable threshold, but past it. The threshold is key. When you think you cannot hold it a second longer, see if you can. Zhan Zhuang is a set we practice. It means Standing Still Like a Tree until the body remembers what the bones forgot. It challenges you physically and mentally by holding 8 postures as long as you can. The foundation for this set is the horse stance. A proper horse stance matters because it opens the fascia in the hips and legs. Pictures can't do the posture justice, so we recommend watching this YouTube video on how to perform a proper horse stance. Begin with that before adding arm postures. The first arm posture we recommend while in a horse stance is Big Wuji. Hold your arms in a rounded position like you have grapefruits under your armpits. Your fingertips should lightly touch your outer thighs. This posture opens up the fascia in the abdomen, chest, and neck. Start by holding it for one minute and build up to several minutes over time. We teach the other postures in our private and group classes. Please contact us here to learn more! Our website is under construction, so if you visit here and the link doesn’t work, please be patient. Follow me on Facebook and Instagram for more info! Read more from Kellie Winzinowich and Kelly Whelan-Enns Kellie Winzinowich and Kelly Whelan-Enns, Active Embodiment Coaches Kelly Whelan-Enns is a master of Shaolin Qi Healing, Qigong, and the internal art of Baguazhang. Plagued by asthma and hypoglycemia in his youth, Kelly's journey of healing and self-mastery has spanned over 35 years, training with master teachers and studying Taoist, Zen Buddhist, and Tibetan meditation, teaching many along the way. Kellie Winzinowich is a former elite gymnast whose journey brought her to Qigong and the study of internal alchemy. Now a Certified Hypnotherapist, she helps others navigate personal transformation. Together, Kellie and Kelly guide others to embody lasting change through physical, emotional, and spiritual self-mastery.

Written by Pablo Colella, Cultural Audience Psychology Consultant Pablo Colella is a Cultural Audience Psychology Consultant, founder of Disconnected Bodies, and host of the Disconnected Bodies Podcast. He specialises in behavioural research, cultural strategy and programme evaluation, helping organisations better understand audiences, participation and the psychology behind cultural engagement. The Highlands. Hackney. Cornwall. Camden. Coastal towns. Postindustrial cities. Rural districts. Urban cores. Their cultural strategies should not read the same. But they do. Like a fever dream where every door opens into the same room. Not identical. Not word for word. But similar enough that, after the tenth, the twentieth, something strange happens. A kind of déjà vu creeps in. You start to feel like you have read this strategy before, with a different council logo at the top. Placemaking tells us every place is unique, and increasingly so. Yet the strategies keep sounding the same. That paradox indicates something bigger. Something the culture sector has been sleepwalking through. I call it strategic convergence. It happens when every local authority is incentivised, pressured, and sometimes mandated to frame culture through the same lenses. It is not laziness. It is not incompetence. It is a gravitational pull that draws every document towards the same constellation of approved words and acceptable goals. A growing tendency for independently written cultural strategies to adopt increasingly similar priorities, language, and ambitions, despite representing fundamentally different places, communities, and identities. The documents arrive full of ambition, but culture is shoehorned into every policy box, economic growth, wellbeing, placemaking, tourism, youth opportunity, the creative economy, skills, social value, climate action, regeneration, community wealth, inclusive growth, and levelling up. Noble intentions. Legitimate pressures. But everyone is responding to the same weather system. Arts Council England priorities. Levelling Up agendas. Health and wellbeing mandates. Creative economy strategies. Climate imperatives. Evidence requirements. Partnership demands. Social value measurements. The same datasets, the same consultants, and the same funding criteria moving across the country. This is a political shift that has caused ambition to race ahead of operational capacity. Culture can no longer justify itself through culture alone. It has to prove its worth through other agendas. This is not necessarily good or bad, but it leaves its mark on every document. Strategies promise more. Ambitions grow. Language inflates into grand, flowery prose. But the delivery structures often do not. Operational capacity lags. Audience intelligence remains thin. Behavioural insight is rare. Commercial models stay underdeveloped. The machinery underneath the vision is still the same old machinery. We end up with strategic convergence and operational divergence simultaneously. Places becoming more different on the ground. Strategies sounding more alike on paper. Here is the worst of it. If every strategy focuses on the same priorities, how does any place stay distinctive? The irony is that cultural strategies increasingly celebrate uniqueness through increasingly similar language. Everything becomes a priority. Therefore, nothing is. The way forward This is not a call to reject the big societal goals. But we need to ground ourselves in local placemaking. Stronger strategies begin with place. With people. With behaviour. With the layered, messy, contradictory identities that actually exist on the ground. They use tools like psychosegmentation to listen more deeply. To design programmes that can speak to multiple realities at once, instead of forcing everyone into the same approved narrative. That distinction eventually became the basis for the Strategic Maturity Index™, a diagnostic framework developed to assess organisational readiness alongside strategic ambition. The more deeply I examined the documents during the UK Local Authority Cultural Strategy Review 2026, the more I kept returning to five characteristics that consistently separated stronger strategies from weaker ones. Over time, those observations evolved into what I now describe as the Five Pillars of Modern Cultural Strategy™. The local leaders who will thrive in the coming years are those who understand that an unconscious rewrite is already happening. We are edging towards cultural conformity. Follow me on Instagram and visit my website for more info! Read more from Pablo Colella Pablo Colella, Cultural Audience Psychology Consultant Pablo Colella is a Cultural Audience Psychology Consultant, founder of Disconnected Bodies, and host of the Disconnected Bodies Podcast. For more than twenty years, he has worked with museums, heritage organisations, local authorities and cultural leaders across the UK, helping them better understand audiences through behavioural research, programme evaluation and place-based cultural strategy. He is the developer of Sandbox™, a behavioural audience intelligence methodology, and the author of independent research exploring cultural strategy, participation and public value. Through his writing, Pablo challenges conventional thinking about audience engagement and explores how behavioural psychology can help shape the future of culture.

Written by Soraya Shaw, Applied Organisational Neuroscientist Soraya Shaw MSc is the founder of BrainShaw®, one of the UK's first Applied Organisational Neuroscientists, keynote speaker, author, and co-host of Brainy Podcasts. She also created Authentic Beauty, Brains & Confidence and The Brainy Brains of Mindsville®, extending the BrainShaw® vision from boardrooms to future minds. The meeting went well. You answered the questions, made the decision, and gave everyone a clear direction. People left reassured that somebody knew what came next. Then the door closes, and a rather different conversation begins. Did I miss something? Was that really the right decision? Am I seeing this clearly, or simply seeing what experience has taught me to expect? It is one of the curious contradictions of senior leadership. As responsibility increases, so does ambiguity, yet the freedom to expose uncertainty can decrease. Your team wants confidence. Your board wants judgement. Clients and colleagues want reassurance. So where do you take the thoughts that are not yet ready to be said out loud? Your brain doesn't become more rational because you're senior We often talk about senior decision-making as if it were principally a cognitive activity, gather the information, weigh the evidence, and make the judgement. Applied Organisational Neuroscience gives us a more useful picture. Thinking does not operate separately from emotion, memory, bodily state, or context. What we notice, how we interpret information, and how confident we feel about a decision are influenced by previous experience and by what the brain believes is happening around us. This matters because senior leaders are often rewarded for appearing rational, composed, and certain. Emotion can be treated as something to suppress so that clearer thinking can take over. But emotion is not the opposite of rational thought. It is part of the biological context in which rational thought takes place. A challenge to your position may therefore register as more than new information. It may also affect status, confidence, or professional identity. Previous failure can make a familiar situation feel more threatening. Recent success can create confidence that is not necessarily supported by the current evidence. That does not make leaders irrational. It makes them human. The interesting question is not whether emotion is affecting a decision. It is how. A leader may believe they are assessing a situation objectively while their brain is simultaneously drawing upon memory, emotion, context, and internal signals to construct what feels like the most convincing interpretation. Recognising that can change the quality of critical thinking. Instead of simply asking, “Is this argument right?” we can also ask, “Why am I reacting so strongly to it?” Am I dismissing this because the evidence is weak, or because accepting it would require me to reconsider something in which I am personally invested? Those are not therapeutic questions. They are questions about decision quality. Your status is affecting other brains too There is another complication. A senior leader's status influences not only their own thinking but the thinking of everybody around them. People continually make judgements about social safety. A colleague may spot a weakness in your argument but soften the challenge. Someone may have an alternative explanation but decide this is not the moment to raise it. A team member may spend more cognitive effort anticipating how their contribution will be received than examining the idea itself. Nobody has to say, “Don't disagree with me.” Hierarchy can do some of the work. From an Applied Organisational Neuroscience perspective, this matters because perceived social threat can influence attention, emotional regulation, and cognitive flexibility. If part of someone's mental capacity is being used to manage interpersonal risk, less may be available for curiosity, challenge, and exploratory thinking. The result is a paradox, you can surround yourself with very intelligent people and still receive less of their intelligence than you realise. This is why simply telling leaders to “invite challenge” is not enough. People learn from what actually happens when somebody disagrees. Does the leader become curious or defensive? Does the atmosphere change? Is the person who disrupts consensus treated as useful or difficult? Over time, brains learn the unwritten rules. A better question for leaders might therefore be, "What is my behaviour teaching the people around me about whether it is safe and worthwhile to disagree?" Confidence is not the same as certainty We have also created a rather unhelpful mythology around successful people, that once someone becomes sufficiently senior, doubt should somehow disappear. It doesn't. Nor should it. Doubt can make us revisit evidence and examine assumptions. The problem is not that capable leaders question themselves. It is having nowhere intelligent to examine the question. Under pressure, the brain does not become more sophisticated because the job title has changed. Cognitive load, fatigue, uncertainty, and emotion influence what we notice and how flexibly we think. Experience, normally one of a senior leader's greatest assets, can also make familiar explanations easier to reach for than unfamiliar ones. This is why I think the familiar phrase “loneliness of leadership” is slightly misleading. Senior leaders are often surrounded by people. What they may lack is cognitive freedom, somewhere they can test an unfinished thought, challenge their own assumptions, and reconsider a position before yesterday's certainty becomes tomorrow's organisational direction. Good judgement rarely arrives fully formed. It develops through reflection, contradiction, and exposure to perspectives that disturb our first answer. Protecting the quality of leadership thinking All of this becomes more important as technology gives leaders access to unprecedented amounts of information and increasingly sophisticated answers. More information does not automatically create better judgement. Fluency is not wisdom. Speed is not discernment. The quality of the decision still depends upon the human brain interpreting what it receives, bringing knowledge, experience, emotional awareness, and critical thought to the evidence in front of it. Senior leaders therefore do not always need another person telling them what to do. Sometimes they need conditions in which assumptions can be exposed, emotional responses recognised, alternative interpretations explored, and certainty tested before it becomes action. When one person's judgement can affect hundreds or thousands of others, protecting the quality of that thinking is not an indulgence. It is an organisational asset. Perhaps confidence needs redefining too. Not as always knowing the answer, but as being able to remain open while the answer is still emerging, to recognise what may be colouring our judgement, and to hear challenge without automatically experiencing it as threat. Because when everyone comes to you with their questions, understanding what is shaping your own answers may be one of the most important leadership capabilities you develop. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Soraya Shaw Soraya Shaw, Applied Organisational Neuroscientist Soraya Shaw MSc is the founder of BrainShaw® and one of the UK's first Applied Organisational Neuroscientists. After more than twenty years leading international teams and global brands, she turned to neuroscience to better understand what enables people, organisations and society to flourish. Today, she explores how human capability is becoming the defining competitive advantage of the 21st century through her speaking, strategic thinking partnerships and BrainShaw® ecosystem, including Brainy Podcasts, Authentic Beauty, Brains & Confidence, and The Brainy Brains of Mindsville® children's book series. Her mission is to prepare human intelligence for the next century.

Written by Paul Wakefield, Scale Readiness Advisor I help founders build the business underneath the growth so the company can support its next stage without depending on one person to hold it together. Most founders want growth. Far fewer stop to ask whether their business can actually handle it. After 30 years in business development and two decades advising startups and SMEs, I’ve seen the same pattern repeatedly: revenue starts moving, customers increase, the team grows, and the business becomes harder to run. The problem is rarely ambition. Usually, the business grows faster than its foundations can support. That distinction matters because growth and scale aren't the same. What’s the difference between growth and scaling? Growth means the business is getting bigger. More customers. More revenue. More employees. More activity. Scaling means the business can handle that increase without costs, complexity, risk, and founder involvement rising at the same rate. A business can grow quickly while becoming less scalable. That is the trap. The UK business landscape shows how difficult sustainable growth can be. According to the Office for National Statistics, around 317,000 businesses were born in 2024, while around 280,000 died. Only 38.4% of businesses born in 2019 had survived five years later. In 2024, 14,330 businesses with 10 or more employees were classed as high-growth businesses, just 4.9% of those eligible. The message is not that growth is bad. It is that growth alone isn't proof a business is getting stronger. Seven mistakes founders make when trying to scale Assuming revenue means the business is scalable: Revenue is an outcome. It does not tell you whether your systems, people, cash flow, or processes can cope with what comes next. A business doing £1 million in revenue can be less prepared for scale than one doing £300,000. The better question is, “What has to change operationally if revenue doubles?” Believing more customers will solve the problem: More customers can make an unhealthy business look successful while making its underlying problems much worse. If delivery is already chaotic, doubling demand does not fix delivery. It magnifies it. Before pushing harder on acquisition, understand what happens after the sale. Hiring before fixing the system: People often treat hiring as the answer to overload. Sometimes it is. But if a new employee walks into unclear processes, duplicated work, poor communication, and founder-dependent decisions, you have not removed the problem. You have added another person to it. Build clarity first. Then add people where capacity genuinely needs to increase. Becoming the bottleneck: One of the clearest signs a business is not ready to scale is that too many decisions still have to pass through the founder. The founder approves everything. Solves every problem. Knows every customer. Holds the critical information. Makes the decisions nobody else feels able to make. That may work in the early stages. It becomes dangerous as the business grows. If the business cannot operate without you being everywhere, you do not own a scalable business. You own a business that depends on you. Confusing activity with capability: Busy does not mean scalable. More meetings, more leads, more sales calls, more projects, and more employees can create the appearance of momentum while the underlying business becomes increasingly fragile. I encourage founders to measure capability, not just activity. Can the business deliver consistently? Can people make decisions? Can customers receive the same standard of service? Can the founder step away without everything slowing down? Those are scale questions. Waiting until growth creates the need for systems: One of the most expensive mistakes is building infrastructure after it becomes urgent. By then, the business is moving too quickly for thoughtful implementation. Processes become rushed. Technology gets bolted on. People create workarounds. The founder becomes the escalation point. The best time to build capability is before you desperately need it. Thinking technology automatically creates scale: Technology can remove friction. It can automate repetitive work, improve visibility, and make information easier to manage. But technology doesn't fix a broken process just because you have put software around it. If the process is unclear, technology can simply help you do the wrong thing faster. Scale requires the right technology supporting the right operating model. The five foundations every growing business needs In my work with founders, I look at five fundamental areas of the business: Accounting: Do you understand the numbers, cash position, margins, and financial implications of growth? Systems: Can the business consistently deliver without everything depending on individual knowledge? People: Do you have the right people, responsibilities, leadership, and decision-making structure? Marketing: Can you consistently create demand from the right customers? Sales: Do you have a repeatable way to convert that demand into profitable revenue? These foundations are connected. A marketing problem can become a sales problem. A sales problem can become a cash-flow problem. A people problem can expose a systems problem. That is why scaling shouldn't be viewed as simply “doing more.” It is about strengthening the whole business so that more becomes possible. The question every founder should ask before scaling Here is one of the simplest tests I use: Imagine your business doubles in the next 12 months. What breaks first? Not what goes right. What breaks? Does your cash flow become uncomfortable? Does customer service deteriorate? Do you need to hire immediately? Does the founder become overwhelmed? Do your systems stop working? Does your sales process become inconsistent? Does delivery depend on one or two key people? Your answer tells you where your scale risk is. That's where you should focus before pushing for more growth. Build capability before you need it After 30 years in business, one lesson has become increasingly clear to me. The businesses that scale well are not necessarily the ones with the biggest ambition. They build the capability to support that ambition. Growth should create capacity, not constant pressure. That means asking different questions. Instead of, “How do we get more customers?” Ask, “Can we deliver for twice as many customers?” Instead of, “When should we hire?” Ask, “What work genuinely requires another person, and what should be systemised first?” Instead of, “How quickly can we grow?” Ask, “What needs to be stronger before we grow again?” Those questions change the way you build a business. Scale readiness is not about slowing down Preparing for scale is not about becoming cautious or taking your foot off the accelerator. It is about making sure the accelerator is attached to something capable of handling the speed. Ambition matters. So does infrastructure. If your business is growing, the goal should not simply be to make it bigger. The goal is to make it stronger as it gets bigger. That is the difference between growth that creates pressure and growth that creates leverage. If you are serious about scaling, start by understanding where your business is strong, where it is exposed, and what needs strengthening before the next stage. Take my free Scale Readiness Assessment to find out what is likely to break before you scale. The question is not: “How do I grow faster?” It is: “What would break if my business doubled?” Find the weakness. Fix the foundation. Build the capability. Then scale. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Paul Wakefield Paul Wakefield, Scale Readiness Advisor I've spent more than three decades in real businesses - retail, hospitality, logistics, technology, data, marketplaces, education and professional services. Founder, operator, executive, advisor. That range matters. It means I've seen the same problems arrive in very different clothes: the cash that disappears during a good quarter, the hire that makes everything slower, the process everyone assumes exists and nobody has written down.

Written by Stacey Soans, HR Leader, Golfer, Professional Model and Published Author Stacey Soans is a Toronto, Canada-based published author, Human Resources Business Partner, professional model, and professional golfer. Her work across business, fashion, media, and professional sport has established her as a multifaceted professional with expertise spanning several industries. Toronto professional golfer Stacey Soans views golf as far more than a game of hitting a ball toward a hole. For Stacey Soans, golf is a game of decisions, where strategy, course management, shot selection and performance all play an important role in determining the outcome of a round. As a Toronto-based professional golfer and author, Stacey Soans has developed a strong connection to the game and its culture. Through her experience in professional golf and women's golf, Stacey Soans has become particularly interested in the strategic decisions that take place throughout an 18-hole round. Golf requires a combination of technical ability and strategic thinking. For Stacey Soans, that combination is what makes golf such a challenging and compelling sport. Stacey Soans on the strategy behind golf When Stacey Soans looks at golf strategically, one of the most important lessons is that every shot is connected to the next. A golfer is not simply deciding where to hit the ball. They are also deciding where they want the ball to finish, what type of shot they want to face next and how much risk they are willing to accept. This is where golf strategy and course management become essential. According to Stacey Soans, understanding the course can be just as important as understanding your swing. A golfer who recognizes where the hazards are, understands the shape of the hole and considers the best position for the next shot can make better decisions throughout a round. For Stacey Soans, strong golf performance is therefore not only about how well a golfer hits the ball. It is also about how effectively that golfer manages the course. Why Stacey Soans believes course management matters Course management in golf is about making decisions that maximize opportunities while minimizing unnecessary mistakes. Stacey Soans believes that golfers can sometimes become too focused on distance. While hitting a long drive can certainly create an advantage, distance alone does not determine whether a shot was strategically successful. A well-positioned golf shot can create a much easier approach. Conversely, a technically impressive shot that finishes behind a hazard, in deep rough or in another difficult position can make the next shot significantly harder. For Stacey Soans, this is one of the most fascinating aspects of golf: the best golf decision is not always the most aggressive golf decision. Stacey Soans on making better decisions on the course Every golf hole presents a different set of circumstances. Distance, wind, terrain, hazards, pin position and the golfer's lie can all influence the appropriate strategy. Stacey Soans believes that strong golfers learn to evaluate those factors before committing to a shot. That can mean asking simple but important questions: Where is the safest place to miss? What is the highest-percentage shot? What will the next shot look like? Is the potential reward worth the risk? These decisions may seem small individually, but over 18 holes, they can have a significant impact on golf performance. For Stacey Soans, learning to make these decisions is an important part of becoming a more strategic golfer. Golf strategy is not about playing it safe Strategic golf does not mean avoiding every difficult shot. Stacey Soans emphasizes that there are situations where taking an aggressive line can make sense. The difference is whether the risk is calculated. A golfer may have a favourable lie, the right distance and a good angle toward the green. In that situation, attacking can be a smart decision. The problem comes when aggression becomes automatic. For Stacey Soans, golf strategy is about knowing when to attack and when to manage the course. That balance can separate a thoughtful round from one filled with unnecessary mistakes. Stacey Soans on the importance of adapting to the course One reason Stacey Soans finds golf so challenging is that the game constantly changes. Weather conditions can change. Wind direction can change. Pin positions can change. Course conditions can change. Even when playing the same golf course repeatedly, a golfer can encounter an entirely different challenge. That means successful golf course management requires adaptability. Stacey Soans believes golfers should be willing to adjust their strategy based on the conditions they actually encounter rather than relying entirely on a predetermined plan. The ability to adapt can be particularly important when playing challenging courses or dealing with changing conditions. The mental decisions behind golf performance For Stacey Soans, the strategic side of golf also highlights the mental demands of the sport. Golfers make decisions constantly. After every shot, another decision follows. What happened? Where is the ball? What is the best option? How much risk is appropriate? What club should be selected? Where should the next shot finish? This continuous decision-making process is one reason golf performance cannot be measured solely by physical technique. A golfer may have the ability to hit a difficult shot but still need to determine whether attempting that shot is the right decision. Stacey Soans believes that learning to assess the situation, select a strategy and commit to the shot is an important part of developing as a golfer. Stacey Soans on playing the course, not just the scorecard The final score is obviously an important part of golf, but Stacey Soans believes there is value in examining the decisions that produced that score. A golfer can look back at a round and identify where strategic decisions helped and where unnecessary risks created problems. That type of analysis can help golfers understand their own games more effectively. For Stacey Soans, asking why a particular shot or decision produced a certain result can be more useful than simply looking at the number on the scorecard. Over time, that approach can help develop stronger golf strategy, course management and decision-making skills. Why Stacey Soans continues to be drawn to golf Golf combines athletic ability, technical skill, strategy, patience and decision-making in a way that makes every round different. For Toronto professional golfer Stacey Soans, the strategic element of the game is one of its most compelling qualities. Golf challenges players to think several shots ahead while simultaneously responding to what is happening in the moment. That combination makes golf both challenging and rewarding. Stacey Soans' experience in professional golf and women's golf has also influenced her appreciation for the broader culture and lifestyle surrounding the sport. Her work as an author further reflects that connection through Fairways & Femininity, which explores women's golf, golf culture and lifestyle. Stacey Soans: Golf, strategy and performance For Stacey Soans, becoming a better golfer is not simply about hitting the ball farther or making a technically perfect swing. It is about understanding the course, making informed decisions, managing risk and adapting to the situation. Stacey Soans believes that golf is ultimately a game of decisions. Every shot presents an opportunity to make a strategic choice, and those choices accumulate throughout a round. From golf strategy and course management to shot selection and performance, Stacey Soans continues to explore the many elements that make golf such a challenging and distinctive sport. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Stacey Soans Stacey Soans, HR Leader, Golfer, Professional Model and Published Author Stacey Soans is a Toronto, Canada-based published author, Human Resources Business Partner, professional model, and professional golfer. She works across business, media, fashion, and sport, bringing a multifaceted perspective shaped by diverse professional experience. Her career spans corporate environments and creative industries, with a strong foundation in organizational practice and performance-driven disciplines. She contributes written work informed by her experience across these fields.