Written by Chameleon Skills Coaching, Ecosystemic Team and Organisational Coaches Real organisational change isn't just about strategy, it's about people. Chameleon Skills Coaching partners with organisations to help individuals and teams perform and thrive. Most organisations spend enormous energy pursuing growth. More customers. More revenue. More efficiency. But growth alone doesn't guarantee long-term success. Without evolution, organisations often become bigger versions of the same challenges they already have. The organisations that thrive over time are those that continually evolve, strengthening leadership, culture and capability alongside performance. In this article, we explore the difference between growth and evolution, why it matters more than ever in today's changing world, and five practical ways leaders can create organisations that continue to learn, adapt and flourish. The difference between growing and becoming In our previous Brainz article, we suggested that Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn't replacing the human element, it is making it more important than ever. As technology accelerates, organisations naturally focus on growth: more customers more products more efficiency more automation Yet one question is often overlooked. Is your organisation evolving as quickly as it is growing? Growth and evolution aren't the same. Growth means becoming bigger. Evolution means becoming different. An organisation can double its turnover while still communicating badly, developing poor leaders and carrying outdated assumptions. Growth often magnifies problems that were already present. Evolution addresses them. Why we chose to evolve Recently, we evolved from Chameleon Skills (CS) to Chameleon Skills Coaching (CSC). It wasn't because we wanted to narrow what we do. Quite the opposite. We wanted to reflect how our own understanding of developing organisations, teams and people has evolved, and how coaching enables that evolution. We wanted organisations to understand that coaching is not simply something that happens between two people. Used well, coaching becomes a catalyst for healthier conversations, stronger relationships, better leadership and more adaptive organisational ecosystems. The ecosystem Every organisation operates as an ecosystem. Leadership influences culture, culture influences behaviour, behaviour influences performance, and performance shapes customer experience. Every part affects every other part. When one area changes, everything else adjusts too. Without conscious attention, those changes can create a negative spiral. Evolution requires leaders to notice what is emerging and intentionally create conditions that are positive. Five ways to tell whether your organisation is evolving 1. Observe yourself first: If leaders aren't evolving, neither is the organisation. The team generally reflects the leader. Are you aware of your own strengths and development areas? When did you last do a personal Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis? Use it as an opportunity to recognise how far you've come as a leader, celebrate that progress and identify the capabilities you'll need for the future. 2. Measure awareness, not performance: Ask team members to complete their own SWOT. Notice: where people underestimate themselves where they overestimate themselves where opportunities keep appearing where blind spots are being ignored The purpose isn't criticism. It's to provide constructive feedforward that increases awareness and creates the conditions for growth. 3. Think future back: One of our favourite concepts. Imagine your organisation three years from now. What capabilities will people need that they don't have today? How will they bridge those gaps? What is your plan to close those gaps before they become tomorrow's constraints? 4. Make learning visible: Not training. There is nothing wrong with training. Learning is where training becomes capability. New learning is a challenge. Without support, it is easier to revert to the familiar and comfortable. Coaching and support are essential to speed up implementation. People copy what leaders celebrate. Make sharing and celebrating learning a part of your team culture. A great way to learn something is to teach someone else. Is there another member of the team who would benefit from the shared learning? Growth spreads. One person's learning can accelerate the evolution of an entire team. 5. Replace blame with curiosity: Instead of "What went wrong?" ask "What is the system trying to tell us?" This shifts the conversation from finding scapegoats to understanding the system and creating solutions. Evolution is a leadership choice Technology will continue to evolve. Markets will continue to evolve. Expectations will continue to evolve. The real question is whether our organisations are evolving too. Sustainable success rarely comes from growing faster alone. It comes from creating ecosystems where people continue to learn, adapt and develop together. In the words of Sonali Bendre: "The point of human evolution is adapting to circumstance. Not letting go of the old, but adapting it, is necessary." If this article has prompted you to think differently about growth and evolution, we'd be delighted to send you a complimentary copy of our EAGER for Managers eBook, which explores practical ways leaders can create cultures where growth and evolution happen together. At Chameleon Skills Coaching, we work with the whole organisational ecosystem because lasting evolution never happens in isolation. Follow me on LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Chameleon Skills Coaching Chameleon Skills Coaching, Ecosystemic Team and Organisational Coaches At Chameleon Skills Coaching, we believe that organisations change when people do. Since 2006, we've partnered with leaders and teams to navigate complexity, strengthen relationships, and build workplace cultures where people and performance can thrive. Our ecosystemic approach combines coaching, leadership development, and practical insight into the human dynamics that shape every organisation.

Written by KeKe Chanel, Author, Host, and Certified Life and Book Coach KeKe Chanel is an award-winning author, certified life and book coach, and host of Kickin' It With KeKe Podcast. KeKe is also the owner of KeKe Chanel LLC and Nineteen Lifestyle Magazine. Life has a way of reminding us that no matter how carefully we plan, we cannot predict every turn in the road. One day everything seems to be moving exactly as we imagined, and the next, we're faced with unexpected challenges that force us to rethink our plans, reevaluate our priorities, and redefine what success looks like. While these moments can feel overwhelming, they often become the very experiences that shape us into stronger, wiser, and more resilient individuals. The truth is, pivoting is a part of life. Whether it's a career change, the end of a relationship, an unexpected financial hardship, a health challenge, or simply realizing that the path you've been pursuing no longer aligns with who you're becoming, change is inevitable. What separates those who remain stuck from those who continue to grow isn't the absence of adversity. It's their mindset. When life doesn't go according to plan, our natural response is often to focus on what we've lost. We grieve the opportunities that didn't materialize, the expectations that weren't met, and the future we imagined for ourselves. While those feelings are valid, staying in that place for too long can prevent us from recognizing the opportunities that difficult seasons often create. A mindset shift begins when we stop asking, "Why is this happening to me?" and start asking, "What can I learn from this experience?" That simple change in perspective doesn't erase the difficulty of the situation, but it changes how we move through it. Instead of allowing disappointment to define us, we begin looking for lessons that can strengthen us. We become more intentional about our decisions, more aware of our strengths, and more willing to embrace growth, even when it feels uncomfortable. One of the greatest misconceptions about pivoting is that it signals failure. Society often celebrates consistency, making it easy to believe that changing direction means we've somehow fallen behind. In reality, the ability to pivot demonstrates self-awareness, adaptability, and courage. It takes strength to acknowledge when something is no longer working and even greater strength to pursue a different path despite uncertainty. Many of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, leaders, and creatives didn't arrive at success by following a straight line. They encountered setbacks, changed careers, reinvented themselves, and adjusted their goals along the way. Their willingness to pivot didn't diminish their purpose. It brought them closer to it. The same can be true for each of us. Our mindset also influences how we define progress. Too often, we measure growth by visible accomplishments such as promotions, awards, financial success, or public recognition. While those milestones are worth celebrating, they aren't the only indicators of progress. Sometimes growth looks like choosing peace over chaos, setting healthy boundaries, asking for help, or simply finding the strength to begin again after disappointment. These quieter victories may not receive applause, but they often represent the deepest transformation. They build resilience, increase emotional intelligence, and prepare us for opportunities we may not yet see. Every challenge we overcome adds another layer to our character, reminding us that personal growth often happens long before external success becomes visible. Another important mindset shift involves separating our identity from our circumstances. It's easy to internalize setbacks and begin believing they define who we are. Losing a job does not make someone a failure. Experiencing rejection does not diminish a person's value. Encountering obstacles does not mean we've lost our purpose. Our circumstances are temporary experiences. They are not permanent definitions of our identity. When we recognize this distinction, we become better equipped to navigate life's uncertainties with confidence rather than fear. We begin to understand that our worth isn't determined by the obstacles we face, but by the resilience we demonstrate in overcoming them. Of course, embracing a pivot doesn't mean pretending the journey is easy. Change often requires letting go of familiar routines, comfortable environments, and expectations we've held for years. There is often grief in releasing what once felt certain. However, growth rarely occurs within the boundaries of comfort. Every meaningful transformation requires us to leave something behind in order to make room for something new. As difficult as these seasons can be, they also provide an opportunity to discover strengths we may never have recognized otherwise. They teach patience when answers don't come quickly. They develop perseverance when progress feels slow. They cultivate humility, compassion, and wisdom that can only be gained through lived experience. Looking back, many people realize that the seasons they once wished away ultimately became the moments that redirected their lives for the better. What initially felt like an ending became the beginning of something greater than they had imagined. While it's difficult to recognize that truth in the middle of hardship, hindsight often reveals that every pivot served a purpose. Life isn't about avoiding change. It's about learning how to navigate it with confidence, resilience, and hope. The path forward may not always look like the one we envisioned, but that doesn't mean it's any less meaningful. Sometimes the greatest opportunities emerge only after we've had the courage to release our original plans and embrace new possibilities. If you find yourself in a season of uncertainty, remember that a pivot doesn't erase your purpose. It simply changes the route you take to reach it. Your circumstances may have shifted, but your potential has not. Every challenge carries the possibility of growth, every setback offers an opportunity to learn, and every difficult season has the power to prepare you for what comes next. Rather than resisting the pivot, embrace it. Allow it to teach you, strengthen you, and shape the person you're becoming. Your story isn't ending because life has changed direction. In many ways, it's just beginning. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from KeKe Chanel KeKe Chanel, Author, Host, and Certified Life and Book Coach KeKe Chanel is an award-winning author, certified life and book coach, and host of Kickin’ It With KeKe: Life, Love, and All That Other SH&T Podcast. KeKe is the proud owner and CEO of P.U.S.H. Life Coaching & KeKe Chanel LLC. At PUSH, KeKe helps individuals unpack their mental packages to create a new mindset through positive personal growth. Her hobbies include reading, watching horror movies, and spending time with people who recharge her in a positive way. KeKe recently founded Kickin’ It With KeKe Media and launched her lifestyle magazine, Nineteen, in January of 2024. KeKe resides in Louisiana with her family.

Written by Karmen Fairall, Speech Pathologist & Reflective Practitioner Karmen Fairall is a Speech Pathologist and reflective practitioner exploring sustainable leadership, boundaries, and wellbeing in helping professions. Drawing on lived experience, faith-informed values, and professional insight, she writes to support people who serve others in demanding roles. At the beginning of this writing journey, I thought I was writing about burnout. I thought I was exploring why I felt overwhelmed, why I struggled to slow down, and why serving others sometimes felt heavier than it should. But as I have reflected, researched, and written through these articles, I have realised the deeper question underneath all of it: What kind of life am I intentionally building? Because burnout is rarely just about being busy. Often, it is about misalignment, a life where our actions slowly drift away from what matters most. The quiet drift Most people do not wake up one day and decide they want to build a life that leaves them exhausted. The drift usually happens gradually. A responsibility here. An opportunity there. A commitment that feels too important to decline. A season where pushing harder feels necessary. Before long, we can become very skilled at responding to what is urgent while losing sight of what is important. We become productive. We become dependable. We become needed. But we may also become disconnected from ourselves. Redefining success For much of my life, I have measured success through achievement. Goals reached. Problems solved. People helped. Things completed. There is nothing wrong with these things. Achievement can be meaningful. Contribution matters. Excellence is valuable. But I am learning that achievement alone is too small a definition of success. A successful life is not only measured by what we accomplish. It is also measured by how we show up, how we love, how we lead, and how we make people feel. One of the reflections that has shaped me deeply is the idea that people may not remember everything we said or everything we gave them, but they remember how we made them feel. This has changed the way I think about leadership, motherhood, business, and service. Living from values, not just responsibilities One of the challenges for people who care deeply is that responsibility can become louder than values. Responsibilities tell us what needs to happen. Values remind us why it matters. Research into values-based living suggests that when our behaviours align with our personal values, we experience greater wellbeing, motivation, and life satisfaction. Self-determination theory highlights that people flourish when their lives support core psychological needs, including autonomy, competence, and connection.[1] In simple terms, we thrive when our lives reflect what matters most. Not what we feel pressured to prove. Not what we think will make us acceptable. Not what everyone else appears to be doing. What genuinely matters to us. The legacy we build every day When I think about legacy now, I think differently. I do not only think about professional achievements or milestones. I think about my husband, my children, the people I have supported, the teams I have been part of, and the communities I have served. I want my family to remember that they were more important than my productivity. I want the people I work with to feel seen, supported, and valued. I want my leadership to create space for others to grow. These things may not always appear on a traditional measure of success, but I believe they matter. Faith, purpose, and stewardship My faith continues to shape how I understand purpose. I do not believe we are called simply to achieve more. I believe we are called to steward what we have been given: our time, our relationships, our gifts, and our influence. Stewardship requires intention. It asks questions like, “What am I called to do?” “What am I uniquely able to contribute?” Perhaps just as importantly, “What am I called to release?” Because sometimes the most faithful decision is not taking on more. Sometimes it is creating space for what matters most. Creating a life that holds together The greatest lesson from this season has been that sustainability is not about lowering expectations. It is about alignment. It is about building a life where our work reflects our values, our relationships receive our presence, our strengths are used wisely, and our commitments reflect our capacity. A life that holds together. Not a perfect life. Not a perfectly balanced life. A life that is intentionally built. Two practices for this season 1. Baseline practice: Clarify what matters most. Take time to write down the values that you want your life to reflect. Not your job title. Not your achievements. Not what others expect from you. Your values. Then ask: Does the way I spend my time reflect these values? Where have I drifted away from what matters most? What is one small adjustment I can make? 2. Reaching practice: Make one courageous alignment decision. Identify one area where your current actions and your values are no longer aligned. It may be a commitment you have outgrown, an expectation you have placed on yourself, or a habit that is taking more than it gives. Then ask, “What would change if I trusted my values more than my fears?” A final reflection This series began with recognising that I was carrying too much. It has ended with a different question: What am I choosing to carry? Because not everything important is urgent. Not everything valuable is measurable. Not every meaningful contribution requires exhaustion as proof. The life I want to build is not one where I am remembered for how much I accomplished. It is one where the people closest to me knew they were loved, where those I served felt valued, where my work reflected my purpose, and where I had the courage to live intentionally. Because ultimately, success is not just about what we build. It is about who we become while building it. Continue the conversation Throughout this series, I have been exploring how faith, frameworks, and reflective practice can support more sustainable leadership and service, particularly in helping professions. As I continue writing and developing these ideas, I’d love to stay connected with others who are passionate about sustainable leadership, meaningful service, and creating environments where people can flourish. If these reflections resonate with you, I invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn and continue the conversation there. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Karmen Fairall Karmen Fairall, Speech Pathologist & Reflective Practitioner Karmen Fairall is a Speech Pathologist and business owner with experience across allied health, service-based leadership, and caregiving roles. Her writing explores burnout, cognitive load, boundaries, and sustainable leadership in helping professions. In this season, she is intentionally slowing down to reflect on how faith, frameworks, and systems can support healthier ways of serving others. Through her work, she seeks to help people lead and live with clarity, compassion, and care. References: [1] Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. [2] Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. (1999). Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal wellbeing: The self-concordance model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), 482–497.

Written by Janice Elsley, Leadership Expert, International Author, and Podcast Host Janice Elsley is a leadership strategist, author, and keynote speaker who helps Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and leaders elevate their impact. As founder of Harissa Business Partners, she blends neuroscience, change management, and human design to drive success. Self-care is often reduced to pampering, but protecting your health and energy requires much more. This article reframes self-care as self-preservation and explores the practical choices, boundaries, and habits that make a sustainable life possible. Let's talk about self-care for a second. You know, that thing you're supposed to be doing more of? The bubble baths, the face masks, the Sunday morning yoga classes that you squeeze in between everything else on your to-do list? Yeah, that. Here's my problem with it: we've turned self-care into another task. Another thing to check off the list. Another way to feel like we're failing is if we're not doing it right. Worse, we've made it about pampering instead of what it actually is: survival. So let's stop calling it self-care. Let's start calling it what it really is: self-preservation. The problem with "self-care" The term "self-care" has been co-opted by an industry that wants to sell you products. It's been reduced to candles, bath bombs, and expensive skincare routines. Don't get me wrong, those things are nice. But they're not going to fix the fact that you're running on empty, operating in a constant state of stress, and ignoring every signal your body is sending you that something needs to change. A face mask isn't going to regulate your nervous system. A manicure isn't going to address the fact that you haven't had a full night's sleep in months. A weekend spa day isn't going to solve the deeper issue: you're living in a way that's not sustainable. We've been sold the idea that self-care is something you do when you have time. A luxury. A reward for working hard enough. But that's backward. Self-care, real self-care, isn't a luxury. It's a requirement. It's the foundation that allows you to function at all. What self-preservation actually looks like Self-preservation isn't pretty. It's not Instagram-worthy. It doesn't come with a hashtag. It's saying no to the dinner you don't want to go to because you need to sleep. It's leaving work on time, even when there's more to do, because you know staying late is going to cost you tomorrow. It's having the hard conversation instead of avoiding it because the stress of not addressing it is eating you alive. It's putting your phone on Do Not Disturb and actually resting instead of scrolling until midnight. It's choosing the salad over the takeout, not because you're trying to be "good," but because you know how you feel after eating food that doesn't serve you. It's going to therapy. Setting boundaries. Walking away from relationships that drain you. Asking for help when you need it. Self-preservation is doing the unsexy, uncomfortable things that protect your energy, your health, and your sanity. It's not about feeling good in the moment. It's about making choices that allow you to keep going. Why women struggle with this Here's the truth: women have been conditioned to believe that taking care of themselves is selfish. We're taught that our worth is tied to how much we give. How much we sacrifice. How little we need. So we run ourselves into the ground trying to be everything for everyone, and then we feel guilty for needing a break. We apologize for resting. We justify taking time for ourselves. We wait until we're completely burned out before we even consider slowing down. Even then, we frame it as "self-care" instead of what it actually is: an emergency intervention to keep ourselves from completely falling apart. But here's what no one tells you: you can't pour from an empty cup. You've been running on fumes for way too long. Self-preservation isn't selfish. It's smart. It's strategic. It's the only way you're going to be able to sustain the life you're trying to build. Permission to prioritize yourself So here's what I want you to hear: you don't need to earn the right to take care of yourself. You don't need to wait until you've done enough, given enough, or sacrificed enough. You don't need to justify it, apologize for it, or make it look pretty. You just need to do it. Because the alternative is burning out. Burnout doesn't just mean you're tired. It means your body starts shutting down. Your immune system weakens. Your mental health suffers. Your relationships strain. Your work suffers. Burnout is your body's way of forcing you to stop because you refused to do it voluntarily. So stop waiting for permission. Stop waiting for the "right time." Stop waiting until things calm down, because they won't. Start now. Start small. But start. What self-preservation looks like in practice Here's how to begin: Identify what's draining you. Not just the big things, but the small, everyday things that are quietly siphoning your energy. The toxic relationship. The overcommitted schedule. The lack of boundaries. Make one change. You don't have to overhaul your entire life. Just pick one thing and change it. Say no to one commitment. Set one boundary. Protect one evening for rest. Stop apologizing for it. You don't owe anyone an explanation for taking care of yourself. "No" is a complete sentence. Regulate your nervous system. Learn how to down-regulate. Deep breathing. Time in nature. Movement. Silence. These aren't luxuries. They're tools that keep your body functioning. Make it nonnegotiable. Self-preservation isn't something you do when you have time. It's something you build your life around. The truth about sustainability You can't sustain a life that's built on depletion. You can't keep giving from an empty tank and expect to keep going. At some point, something has to give. It's either going to be the unsustainable pace you're keeping, or it's going to be you. So stop calling it self-care. Stop treating it like something that's nice to have. Start calling it what it is: self-preservation. Start treating it like your life depends on it. Because it does. Let's reframe this together I'm Janice Elsley, an international author, host of the Legacy Leaders podcast, keynote speaker, and award-winning leadership expert. I help women stop running on empty and start building lives that are sustainable, energizing, and aligned with who they actually are. If you're tired of treating self-care like a luxury and are ready to make self-preservation a priority, subscribe to my podcast, Legacy Leaders, and follow me on YouTube at @JaniceElsleyLeadership. If you're ready to build a life that doesn't require you to burn out to be successful, explore my programs here. Self-preservation isn't selfish. It's survival. Let's make it nonnegotiable. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Janice Elsley Janice Elsley, Leadership Expert, International Author, and Podcast Host Janice Elsley is a leadership expert, author, and keynote speaker helping CEOs and executives future-proof their leadership with neuroscience-driven strategies. As founder of Harissa Business Partners, she drives performance, inclusivity, and talent retention. Her book, Leadership Legacy, and programs, Leading Edge Women, The Leading Edge, and First 100 Days of Leadership, equip leaders with the confidence and strategies to make an impact. Whether coaching executives or delivering transformational keynotes, Janice creates real results.

Written by Daryl Henderson, Transformational Facilitator & Creative Visionary Daryl Henderson is a master coach, facilitator, and artist known for blending spiritual traditions, shadow work, and leadership training. He is the co-founder of Odyssey of Man, the creator of True North Coaching, and the founder of One11, a health & wellness brand. There are seventeen men in the room and every single one of them is looking at me. We had been building toward this weekend for months, through the calls and the planning and the logistics and the endless back and forth about what it was going to be and who exactly it was for. Now it's here, and everyone is sitting on the floor in a circle, and the phones are in a box somewhere in another building. We're doing the usual logistics you do at the start of these weekends, going around, saying who we are, and laying out what we're going to cover over the next two days. I'm nervous. It's the kind of nervousness that sits somewhere behind my sternum and makes my voice come out a half step higher and a little shakier than it should. You've probably felt it before. It's when you can hear yourself being nervous and sounding off while you're doing it and still can't stop. Here's what's running in the back of my mind the whole time I'm talking as one of the leaders of this experience. "Oh shit. Here we go. Now they'll get to see that I have no idea what I'm doing." "What if I piss one of them off and I don't know what to do? Then what?" "This was a bad idea... Oh well. I guess we'll see what happens now." There's more, but those are the ones I remember the most. I have been in transformational work since I was twenty-five, and by then I'd sat in more circles than I could count, done trainings galore, put in years of my own inner work through self-inquiry and meditation, and been broken open and put back together enough times that none of what was about to happen in that room should have felt unfamiliar to me. By every measure that matters, I had earned the right to be standing where I was standing. I was certain, right up until the moment that circle opened, that I was about to be found out as a phony. So what gives? Everybody has a fix for this feeling, and I've tried a metric ton of them. Just do a quick search for "imposter syndrome," and you can spend the next five years watching YouTube videos and reading articles about how to solve for it. Fake it till you make it. Stand up straighter. Stick your chest out just "2 mm". Remember your credentials, write down your wins, and notice all the evidence that contradicts the story you're telling yourself. There is an entire industry built on the premise that if you could just believe in yourself a little more, everything would shift and you'd walk into rooms looking and feeling like a man who belongs in them. Someone who's strong, confident, and in control. If you haven't realized this already, then I'm going to break it to you. The world does not need that. It needs you! Anywho, I digress. The simple fact is that some of these techniques do work, for a while or maybe just for an afternoon, and they are not wholly unuseful. But rarely does one of them touch the thing underneath that is causing the issue in the first place. As can happen in modern Western medicine, we've become exceedingly good at finding the symptom and treating it without ever getting to the root cause. The advice and remedies aren't necessarily bad, they just aren't asking the right questions. I've learned that if you want to improve the quality of your life, improve the quality of your questions. In my experience, the imposter feeling many men experience isn't actually a confidence problem, as we've been told over and over again. It's a "not knowing who you are" problem. So instead of asking, "How can I fit in and be accepted more?" the question becomes, "Who am I really, and where do I actually want to be?" Those two things are not the same, and understanding the difference between them matters more than just about anything else I could tell you here. Imagine you're a gray wolf who was raised among gray foxes You look similar. You're in the same family, with roughly the same silhouette, four legs, a tail, and a decent set of teeth. From any distance at all, nobody can tell the difference, aside from your size. But so what?! You're fluffy and enjoy the same foods, and you get along great with your brothers and sisters. But your nature is totally different. You don't look or sound like everyone else around you. The way you hunt and eat is different, and your coat looks different too. Yet you're trying to pretend that it isn't, so you put on a fox costume just to fit in and be more like everyone else. What almost nobody tells you is that the costumes actually work. So you learn to make yourself smaller in a room, because that's what foxes do. You learn to be clever instead of saying the direct thing that's sitting right there in your chest. You go quiet in the exact moment something in you wants to howl, and you learn to move alone and call it independence, because a fox doesn't need a pack and you are supposed to be a fox now. You get good at it too. Good enough that they take you in and accept you. That last point is worthy of stopping and looking at for a second, because a wolf pretending to be a fox will spend his whole life telling everyone he doesn't need anybody. He'll be proud of it. He'll build an entire identity out of not needing anybody, and then wonder at forty-five why there's nobody to call. Nobody has ever caught you at any of this, which most of us read as proof that we're pulling it off and that we've finally arrived, when really all it proves is how much work we've put into the disguise and how convincing we've gotten with it. The whole time, every hour you spend inside the pack, you are translating. Running everything through a conversion layer, checking your output against what a fox would do here, carrying a load nobody else in the room can see you carrying. That is exactly why nobody has ever been able to reassure you out of it. It becomes so automatic that at some point you don't even know you're doing it. But you know, deep down you know, there's something "not quite right" here. You often get great reassurance that the costume you're wearing looks good, and therefore you now have the validation that you're doing a good job and you belong here. The costume doesn't need reassurance... The costume is doing great. The problem is that no matter how hard you try, it's just not you, and you know it. Until you do something about it, it'll eat away at you. What the costume is usually made of I can tell you what mine was made of, because I've had a long time to sit and look at it. For me, it was mostly borrowed vocabulary, language I picked up from teachers I admired and delivered in a cadence that was never actually mine, along with a set of frameworks I'd been taught early in my personal growth journey and never once questioned because questioning them would have meant admitting I had no idea what I'd put in their place. Coupled with the belief systems I grew up with around "being a good boy" and not wanting to disappoint anyone, this was a tricky mix. In high school, I just wanted to be "one of the boys," play football, and go out with the hot cheerleaders. But that wasn't me. I was weird, awkward, and not that good-looking. I liked metal and electronic music and wearing tie-dye T-shirts with Grateful Dead bears on them. I was a walking contradiction, a rebel, and so I went the total opposite direction and got in with the freaks and geeks. Then I got really good at that game. All the while, I was still hiding parts of me that I didn't want anyone to see. Then, in my mid-twenties, I found the "holy grail"... insert angel sounds and trumpeting... I found transformational work. Lo and behold, this was my way to be special. Now I knew something everyone else didn't. So the courses and breakthroughs stacked up, and whilst I learned more and had powerful healing experiences that truly changed my life, I also gained more and more tools that showed me how to be a better person. At least for a few weeks. Then the high of the breakthrough wore off and became more of an ego trip than a lasting change. Fast forward ten years and, underneath all of it, I still had an impression of the man I thought was supposed to be leading from the front of a room like that one. I thought that man needed to be calm, composed, and certain, someone holding the answers, someone who had done the work and come out the other side clear and was now generously handing down what he'd found. I wrote about a version of this once, in a different context, and one of the lines from that piece still stands true. I was a new age conscious man who had it figured out, or so I thought. The trouble is that I was good at all of it. Wear the costume long enough and people start to believe you, and that is the problem This is the source of fake it till you make it. It isn't all bad and actually makes sense some of the time, but only if what you're pursuing is really coming from your heart in the first place. If this feeling were really about competence, then competence would cure it. Get good enough for long enough and the mind would quiet down, and the feeling would eventually go away. That's the promise anyway. Work hard, get results, and one morning you'll wake up and finally feel like the guy everyone already thinks you are. Watch what usually happens instead. A man gets the promotion and often the imposter feeling gets louder. He gets the clients and the room and the platform he's been gunning for, and now there's a great deal more to lose, so the bracing gets worse rather than better. I have sat across from men running entire companies who still had that low static running underneath everything, and it had not moved an inch in twenty years of achievement, awards, and the kind of outside evidence that was supposed to settle it. Despite all their accomplishments, there was still an emptiness, a striving that ran deep in their veins, and a voice that quietly said, "It's not enough. You need to be the best. Then they'll see who you really are." Except no one can see who you really are because you're not showing anyone who you really are. You're still wearing the fox costume, hoping they will finally notice you're a wolf, but they simply can't see past what you're showing them. Because every success you have in the costume becomes evidence that the costume is the thing holding you up. Just look at some of the biggest names in Hollywood and music and you'll see what I'm talking about. These people have made it to the very pinnacle of success, yet they are so chewed up from the inside out that they turn to drugs, or worse, suicide. They're aching to be seen for who they really are, but all they can do is continue to show the facade. It's an all too familiar story. Taking the costume off doesn't get easier as you climb, either. It gets harder, because now the stakes of being wrong about who you are include every single thing you built while you were pretending to be something you're not. That is how a man ends up in his mid-forties, accomplished by any measure somebody on the outside would use, and he's still braced for failure. Not because he failed at anything, but because he succeeded at the wrong thing over and over again, and the succeeding is exactly what kept him from ever having to find out who he actually was underneath it all. This can be one source of what we call a "midlife crisis" in men. I prefer to call it a midlife awakening, but that's a different story. What happened in that circle So there I am, seventeen pairs of eyes, voice half a step high, waiting for someone to notice and call me out. Then something turned, and it was not that I suddenly found my confidence. It was the eye contact. I went around that circle and actually looked at each man one at a time, understanding somewhere in my body that we had all come this far together, that these men had rearranged their lives and driven a long way and put their phones in a box when they arrived, and that they were counting on me to show up. I was on the hook to show up even if it was messy, and even if I had no idea what to say. That got me out of my own way. It wasn't about believing in myself more. It was about looking at who was counting on me. Then I said something I won't forget. "If you came here looking for answers, you came to the wrong place. I don't have them. I'm simply here to help you find your own answers." That line might read like it was coming from wisdom or humility, but it wasn't. It was my costume coming off in front of everyone there. It was me deciding to allow myself to be imperfect and state the one thing I actually knew to be true in that moment. Because I'm no guru, nor do I want to be. I'm just a man who's been through things and is here to help other people get through their things. It's really that simple. My entire facade had been built out of a single unspoken claim, which was that I was the guy with the answers, because that is what a man standing at the front of a room is supposed to be. The moment I said out loud that I wasn't, there was nothing left to protect and the feeling of being a fraud had nothing underneath it to stand on. So it just collapsed. What I noticed after that, which I did not expect at all, was that the room got closer rather than further away. It turns out seventeen men do not actually want a leader at the front of the room who has it all handled. They want somebody with the courage to go first and let them know we're in this together. If you do much research at all, you'll find that some of the greatest and most respected leaders and teachers throughout history have had this same quality, the courage and willingness to step first and say, "We're going to figure this out. I have an idea of where to go, but I need your help to get there." So what do you do with this? I'm not going to hand you a practice list. A practice list is just one more framework to borrow, and if you're anything like me, you've got plenty of those already. But there are a few things I know to be true. You have to be willing to be wrong. Over and over again. I've said this a hundred times and I'll keep saying it until somebody makes me stop, because the most intelligent people I know are the ones who question things and ask what else might be going on here, and a man who cannot be wrong is a man who has to keep wearing his costume permanently. A man who cannot be wrong is a small and weak man. Period. So be willing to look bad, to say the wrong thing, and to take a risk where everyone else is just standing by the wayside. It takes courage to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to be like everyone else. You have to meet your shadows instead of just trying to get rid of them. I know my shadows, I accept my shadows, and every so often I still turn up a new one. But I meet them, and meeting them is a different act than fixing them, and it's a very different act than pretending they were never there in the first place. They have become my friends and allies because my shadows are my greatest teachers. They show me where my work still is and remind me that I'm still an imperfect human in an imperfect world. It takes repetition rather than intensity. My men's group has been running for over four years now, and four years of the same men in the same room watching each other week after week is worth more than any breakthrough weekend I have ever been part of, including the ones I've led myself. You cannot perform a costume for four years in front of people who are actually paying attention. It gets too heavy. Eventually you set it down just to rest your arms, and in my experience, that is usually the moment the real thing finally shows up. The part that took me the longest to understand is that you do not need anyone else to tell you what you are. I don't need other people to call me a leader or teacher or writer, for that matter, and I don't need to call myself any of those things. But underneath it all, I do need to know that this is who and what I am. Nobody hands that to you, and nobody can take it back either, which is the whole point. It's also why no amount of applause or acknowledgement ever settled it for me. It isn't a thing you settle once, either. I choose it in the parking lot before I walk in. I choose it again when somebody in the room asks a question I can't answer, and again when the easy move would be to reach for the voice of a teacher I admired twenty years ago instead of my own voice. Some days I choose wrong and catch it an hour or two later. I'm not perfect. I'm a work in progress, and I always will be, just like everyone else on this planet. Honestly, that is one of the most comforting things ever if you let it be. We're all here trying to figure it out, pretending like we're the ones who figured it out, and hoping everyone else doesn't see that we're trying to figure it out, when in fact they can't because they're too worried about themselves. That's a slice of peace right there. I hope this all makes sense. The question I still get nervous before I open a circle or speak in front of groups. That never fully goes away for me, and somewhere along the line, I stopped waiting for it to. What changed is what I do with it now. I don't try to talk myself into feeling like a fox anymore. I just check whether I'm about to tell these men the truth about what I am, and when the answer is yes, the nervousness turns out to be nothing more than nervousness. It's not a warning or evidence of anything. So here's what I want to leave you with. All those years I spent trying to feel like I deserved the costume were years I could have spent finding out what was under it, and I don't get those back. I'd rather you didn't spend yours the same way. Because the question was never whether you're good enough for the room you're standing in. You already know you can do the work, or you wouldn't be braced about the possibility of losing it, right? The question is who you'd be in that room if you weren't managing everyone's impression of you, what you'd say, what you'd stop pretending not to need, and whether the people around you might actually come closer instead of further away, which is the part I got wrong for twenty years and the part I'd want you to test for yourself before you take my word for it. Nobody is coming to take the costume off of you. It's yours, and you've earned it over your lifetime. Just know that each day you wake and put it on is a choice. Take the costume off and find out what you actually are. I'd love to know what you find. See you on the other side. Follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Daryl Henderson Daryl Henderson, Transformational Facilitator & Creative Visionary Daryl Henderson is a master coach, facilitator, and artist with over two decades of experience blending creativity, men’s work, and spiritual practices. He has photographed top brands and artists worldwide, including Nike and Michael Kors, and documented indigenous and peace gatherings across the globe. Drawing on this experience, Daryl guides high performers, artists, and businesses to express their stories through soul-aligned photography, branding, and personal transformation. He is the co-founder of Odyssey of Man, the creator of True North Coaching, and the founder of One11, a health and wellness brand. His work is playful, transformative, and designed to unlock authentic expression.

Brainz Magazine Exclusive Interview Case Kenny is a writer, podcast host, and thought leader known for his practical, language-driven approach to self-development. Through his podcast, books, and daily reflections, he has built a loyal audience by helping people rethink optimism, self-respect, dating, identity, and the words they use to shape their lives. In this interview, Case shares why optimism is not blind positivity but a trainable method, how language quietly shapes identity, and why small daily shifts often create more lasting change than dramatic reinventions. He also opens up about self-respect, relationships, emotional ownership, and the mindset he believes helps people move forward with more clarity and confidence. Case Kenny You have said before that optimism is not a mood, but a method. What does that actually look like in practice when someone is going through a difficult moment? I think the best way to explain that is by first defining what optimism really is. A lot of people think optimism just means thinking positive thoughts or assuming everything is going to work out. I hope that is where optimism leads, but that is not a practice. That is more of a wish. To me, optimism is the belief that things can change. That is the foundation. If your brain believes something is in progress, that emotions are not permanent, that circumstances are not static, then it becomes much easier to access resilience, motivation, and better decision-making. So when someone is going through something difficult, the method starts with a very simple idea: this can change. This is not permanent. From there, it becomes about using words and language that support movement rather than stuckness. The more you believe things can change, the more your brain starts asking how they can change. Then belief becomes behavior, behavior becomes evidence, and evidence becomes identity. You encourage people to live more boldly. What actually makes someone choose boldness instead of playing it safe? Boldness only makes sense when you believe change is possible. If you do not believe your effort can influence the outcome, then why would you take the risk? There is an order to it. First, you have to believe that things can change. Then you have to believe there is a future version of your life that is better and different from the one you have now. Once those beliefs are in place, action becomes more natural. Without them, boldness feels irrational. What first sparked your interest in self-inquiry, mindset, and understanding how the mind works? I worked in corporate sales for 12 years, and somewhere along the way, I felt disconnected from myself. I was good at my job, ambitious, and driven, but I did not feel like the same person at work and outside of work. The podcast began as a personal effort to understand myself better. I wanted more self-awareness, more perspective, and more consistency in who I was. Through episode after episode of introspection, I realized I was practicing mindfulness, but specifically through words, language, and self-expression. That is really where it all started. I never set out to become a podcaster. It was a personal project that grew into something much bigger. You speak a lot about dating, relationships, and emotional alignment. Why do so many people stay in situations that are clearly no longer right for them? A lot of it comes down to fear and scarcity. Scarcity is practical. We find something that feels right, or that once felt right, and then we look at the dating world and think, I do not want to let this go because I may never find it again. That mindset makes people hold on far longer than they should. Then there is fear. Fear of being alone. Fear of not being loved. Fear of thinking that romantic love is the only meaningful form of love. I think that is a big one. Sometimes the answer is expanding our definition of love. Romantic love is powerful, but it is not the only form of love that matters. There is love in friendship, art, music, community, and even in the way we move through the world. When you expand your relationship to love itself, you stop making one relationship responsible for your entire sense of worth. “Optimism is the belief that things can change.” Your work often focuses on small, practical mindset shifts instead of dramatic reinventions. Why do those smaller changes tend to create more impact? As humans, we love before-and-after moments. We like big transformations because they feel significant and easy to define. But identity does not really work that way. There is a concept called self-perception theory, which says we decide who we are by observing our own behavior, almost as if we are watching someone else. Your brain looks for evidence. If you consistently speak up, take small risks, and act with intention, your brain starts to say, this is the kind of person I am. That is why small, repeated behaviors matter so much. One big moment can be meaningful, but it is the smaller, consistent actions that actually build identity. Those small actions create evidence, and evidence is what changes how you see yourself. What is one narrative people tell themselves that quietly damages self-worth or confidence? A big one is how people describe their emotions. Most people say things like, “I am anxious,” or “I feel broken,” and over time that kind of language becomes identity-level. You are no longer describing an experience. You are describing who you are. A healthier shift is saying, “A part of me feels anxious,” or “A part of me feels unlovable.” It sounds subtle, but it is powerful. It creates distance between you and the emotion. The feeling is real and valid, but it is not the totality of who you are. That self-distancing is one of the most effective tools we have. Otherwise, we take temporary emotional states and turn them into permanent identities. You and I spoke about how some languages separate the person from the emotion more naturally than English does. Why is that so important? It matters because language shapes identity more than people realize. In English, we often fuse ourselves with emotion. We say, “I am sad,” instead of something more spacious like, “I have sadness,” or “Sadness is passing through me.” Other languages do this much more naturally, and I think there is wisdom in that. The way we speak can either make an emotion feel temporary and manageable or make it feel central to who we are. That is why I pay so much attention to language. It is not just semantics. It affects how we process experience. Self-respect is another major theme in your work. Stripped back to everyday life, what does self-respect actually look like? The simplest definition is this: self-respect is keeping the promises you made to yourself in the past. We all go through experiences that teach us something. At some point, we look at ourselves and say, I am not doing that again. Or, this is my new standard. Or, this is the boundary I need moving forward. Self-respect is honoring those lessons in the present. It is not about knowing everything. It is about remembering what you already learned and refusing to abandon yourself in moments that test that clarity. As your audience has grown, how have you stayed grounded in your message and avoided getting pulled too far into trends or platform pressure? It has definitely been a challenge, but I think what helps is that I do not see myself as a content creator first. I see myself as someone who studies language and optimism, and I use platforms to share that work. That framing matters because if your goal is only to get attention, you are constantly competing in an exhausting game. Algorithms change. Trends change. It gets chaotic quickly. For me, the real focus now is on learning, teaching, writing books, doing workshops, and speaking in person. That is where the depth is. I still post online every day, but I have tried to remove some of the emotional dependency from it. “Self-respect is keeping the promises you made to yourself in the past.” Your work often feels more like notes to self than traditional expert advice. Why do you think that more personal, direct tone resonates so strongly right now? I think people are drawn to humility. There are a lot of experts online, and expertise is important, but I think people connect most deeply when someone is speaking from lived experience with honesty and nuance. The more you learn, the more you realize how much you still do not know. That is always a good sign in a teacher. Are they willing to admit what is unclear? Are they speaking with nuance, or pretending everything is binary and simple? I think people are craving more humanity, more honesty, and less performance. For people who constantly feel like they are not “there yet,” how do you help them stop chasing perfection and actually begin? I am a very impatient person, so I understand that mindset well. And honestly, I do not think telling yourself to “just be patient” is very effective, especially if you are ambitious. What has helped me is rebranding patience. Patience is not passivity. Patience is faith in yourself. If you genuinely trust yourself, then you do not need to rush. You can let the process unfold because you know the outcome is being built through your actions. That framing makes patience feel more empowering and less frustrating. The other part is recognizing that people consistently underestimate how much they will change in the future. We can easily look back and see how much we have changed in the past, but we tend to assume we are almost done evolving. That is simply not true. Change continues throughout life. Once you accept that, it becomes easier to trust where you are. A big part of your message is that language does not just describe life, it shapes it. When someone starts becoming more intentional with self-talk, what shifts do they usually notice first? One of the most powerful shifts is moving from the future tense to the present tense. A lot of people say, “I will find love,” or “I will become successful.” There is value in naming what you want, but the brain responds more powerfully when it feels like progress is already underway. So instead of only saying, “I will,” say, “It is happening now.” Or, “I am becoming.” Or, “My person and I are on our way to meeting each other right now.” That grounds the vision in the present. The brain loves progress. It loves movement. When you speak as if something is already in motion, your behavior tends to align with that belief much more effectively. One of the surprising ideas you shared is replacing “I will” with “Will I?” Why does that matter? Because “I will” often comes from pressure, while “Will I?” invites honesty and intrinsic motivation. When you ask yourself, “Will I do this?” the brain does not like to leave the question unanswered. If you are doing the work, your mind starts surfacing the real reasons why the answer is yes. It reminds you of your effort, your values, your discipline, and your progress. So instead of just making a bold declaration, you are creating a dialogue that deepens commitment. It is a small language shift, but it can create a much more grounded kind of motivation. A lot of people misunderstand optimism as denial or avoidance. How do you practice optimism while still being honest about what is difficult? That misunderstanding is really important to address because optimism is not pretending everything is fine. Real optimism lives in the space between reality and vision. It is being honest about what is hard while also believing in movement. You need both. You need to name the future you want, but you also need to name the current reality and the negative emotion clearly. I often say negative emotion is like the wall of a swimming pool. If you want to move forward, you have to kick off something. The negative feeling becomes that surface. But to use it well, you need to describe it accurately. Instead of using broad words like “anxious,” get more specific. Are you overstimulated? Overcommitted? Rushing? Once you name the actual thing, you can work with it. That is where optimism becomes practical. “The most effective optimists live in the balance between reality and the future they want to create.” What belief or mindset do you think helps people create the biggest shift in their lives? That things can change. It sounds simple, but I really believe everything starts there. If you believe that emotions are not fixed, that your identity is not frozen, and that your effort matters, then you begin to act differently. And once you act differently, your life starts to change. That belief is the beginning of everything. Case Kenny’s perspective is a reminder that optimism is not about ignoring life’s difficulties. It is about learning how to name them, move through them, and speak to yourself in a way that creates possibility instead of permanence. Through language, self-respect, and consistent small actions, his work offers a grounded path toward confidence, clarity, and change. For more info, follow Case Kenny on social media and explore his podcast and book.

Written by Michael Donaldson, Nutrition Researcher & Health Coach Dr. Michael Donaldson is a nutrition researcher and health coach specializing in reversing type 2 diabetes. As founder of End Diabetes Now and Research Director at Hallelujah Diet, he empowers people to transform their health through evidence-based, plant-centered nutrition. High blood pressure affects 1.3 billion people worldwide and is known as the "silent killer." It's the single leading risk factor for early death across the globe. The standard answer for high blood pressure is medication for as long as you live, along with the side effects. But three randomized controlled trials show that 30 grams of ground flaxseeds a day produced blood pressure reductions that rival the best pharmaceutical combinations on the market. But flaxseeds come with side benefits, not side effects. Your choice. High blood pressure is not inevitable, even if it feels that way In Western populations, blood pressure increases with chronological age, and nearly everyone develops high blood pressure in their later years. The Framingham Heart Study started with people aged 55 to 65 who had normal blood pressure and found that 90% of them eventually developed hypertension. It seems inevitable. Except that high blood pressure isn't inevitable. A 1929 survey of men from four African tribes in Kenya found no rise in blood pressure with age. Men estimated to be over 60 years old averaged 106/67. A 2012 study of Tsimane forage farmers in Bolivia found that among women over 70 years old, fewer than 30% had hypertension. Among the men, it was less than 10%. Their traditional diet and lifestyle protected them from a condition we think of as inevitable. You probably aren't interested in becoming a hunter-forager, but you can make specific dietary choices that shift your physiology in the same direction. Eating real foods is a great first step. Flaxseeds are one of those real foods with substantial evidence supporting their role in helping keep blood pressure within the normal range. What makes flaxseeds different from every other seed Flaxseeds are not a trend. They've been cultivated for over 6,000 years and have been studied seriously for decades. They have a combination of three active components that set them apart from other seeds such as chia, hemp, and pumpkin seeds. First, there is a high concentration of alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) in flaxseeds. This omega-3 fat accounts for about 57% of flaxseed oil. ALA is anti-inflammatory, promotes vasodilation via nitric oxide production, reduces platelet aggregation, and has been shown to inhibit the enzyme soluble epoxide hydrolase. That enzyme normally breaks down beneficial oxylipins into proinflammatory compounds. When ALA blocks its action, more oxylipins remain intact, supporting healthy blood pressure. ALA is also converted into EPA, which provides the same cardiovascular benefits. Second, there are lignans. Flaxseeds contain more lignans than any other food, about 800 times more than the next closest food source. So flaxseeds are unique in this. Lignans are phytoestrogen compounds with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects. A six-month randomized trial of adults aged 60 to 80, published in Nutrition Research (2017), tested a flaxseed lignan-enriched complex containing 600 mg of secoisolariciresinol diglucoside (SDG) daily, the same amount found in a 30-gram serving of ground flaxseeds. In participants with hypertension, systolic blood pressure dropped from 155 to 140 mm Hg. The lignan effect is independent of omega-3 fat or fiber. The third is the whole-food fiber-and-mineral package. A 30-gram serving of ground flaxseeds provides 8.6 grams of fiber, 123 mg of magnesium, and 256 mg of potassium. Magnesium works through several mechanisms to relax vascular smooth muscle. One prospective study found that an additional 120 mg of dietary magnesium per day reduced the risk of cerebral infarction in women with hypertension by 37%. Flaxseeds provide that amount in a single daily serving. No other common food delivers all three of these mechanisms simultaneously. That's what makes flaxseeds structurally different from a fish oil capsule, a magnesium supplement, or a high-fiber cereal. What three clinical trials actually found The headline claim of a 13 to 15-point drop in blood pressure deserves scrutiny. Here's what the evidence actually says. The strongest trial is the FLAX-PAD study, a randomized controlled trial published by Rodriguez-Leyva and colleagues in Hypertension (2013). Participants had peripheral artery disease (PAD). One group consumed 30 grams of ground flaxseeds daily, embedded in bagels, muffins, biscuits, and pasta. The control group ate identical-looking foods without flaxseed. After six months, participants who began the trial with a systolic blood pressure above 140 mm Hg, the clinical threshold for hypertension, had reduced their systolic pressure by 15 points and their diastolic pressure by 7 points. This degree of reduction from a dietary intervention alone is, as the researchers noted, unprecedented. The second major trial, published in Explore (NY) by Toulabi and colleagues in 2021, randomized participants to 30 grams per day of ground flaxseed, 10 grams per day, or placebo for 12 weeks. The 30-gram group dropped systolic pressure by 13 points. The 10-gram group dropped it by about 10 points. The placebo group's pressure rose by 1.7 points. A baseline imbalance between groups limits the strength of the between-group comparison, but the within-group change in the 30-gram arm is clinically significant and has never been replicated in a placebo group. The lignan trial described above adds a third data point, a 15-point reduction in systolic blood pressure from the lignan fraction alone, suggesting that the full flaxseed delivers benefits through multiple pathways simultaneously. Across all three trials, 30 grams of ground flaxseeds consumed daily for at least 12 weeks produced a 13 to 15-point drop in systolic blood pressure in people with hypertension. How does that compare to drugs? I wanted to know how flaxseeds compare with a pharmaceutical approach for hypertension. What I found was that the most effective pharmaceutical approach for hypertension with the fewest side effects is a combination of three or four drug classes at low doses. A 2023 analysis published in Hypertension found that this polypill strategy produces an 18 mm Hg reduction in systolic blood pressure compared to placebo. Flaxseeds produce 13 to 15 points. The difference between those numbers is statistically small and may not be clinically meaningful for many people. While you can't really say flaxseeds are better than the polypill approach, they certainly do rival it. But each approach comes with more than just a drop in blood pressure. The polypill approach also brings fatigue, dizziness, electrolyte imbalances, impaired kidney function in some patients, and the logistical burden of lifelong daily medication. The flaxseed approach brings reduced inflammation, improved gut health, better cholesterol ratios, and evidence of reduced cancer risk. Those are side benefits, not side effects. If flaxseed were a drug, it would be among the most effective single-agent interventions for hypertension on the market. But it isn't a drug, so you don't need a prescription or a pharmacy. But there's no big marketing campaign either. How to get 30 grams a day without thinking about it When you first look at a quarter cup of flaxseeds (30 grams) and wonder how you are going to eat that every day, you might initially be a bit overwhelmed, but it's not that hard. First, grind the flaxseeds. If you don't grind them up, they will pass through your digestive tract largely intact. A simple coffee grinder works very well. Once ground, you can store them in the refrigerator or freezer for up to a week. The FLAX-PAD participants consumed their 30 grams through everyday baked goods such as bagels, muffins, biscuits, and pasta. They couldn't distinguish the flaxseed-containing versions from the control versions. That's good to know. You can blend them into baked goods already. Flaxseeds have a mild nutty flavor that doesn't dominate the other flavors in foods. The flaxseed oil doesn't go rancid just because you bake it. It's very easy to blend two tablespoons of flaxseeds into a morning smoothie or stir them into your morning oatmeal. Then, two tablespoons later, you can bake them into a muffin or mix them into salad dressing. Make sure you drink adequate water because of your increased fiber load. Just drink an extra glass or two every day. You should see some results within the first few weeks. In the clinical trials, they began seeing results within the first month and continued to improve over six months. If you are already taking blood pressure medication, take note. Flaxseeds can amplify the effects of your medication. So monitor your blood pressure carefully, especially during the first few weeks. Blood pressure is a symptom, do you know what's driving it? As a real food, flaxseeds help with some of the root causes of high blood pressure, but maybe not all of them. When blood pressure is elevated, it's likely that other parts of your metabolism are also out of kilter. Measuring high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) makes sense, so you know if inflammation is part of what you're dealing with. Measuring your omega-3 index will tell you whether you're getting the ALA converted into EPA in amounts that help you, or if you need additional fish oil as well. If you're interested in taking a deeper look at your metabolic health, inflammation, omega-3 status, thyroid function, insulin resistance, and more, you can learn about comprehensive metabolic lab testing and schedule a personal consultation here. A standard annual physical doesn't measure all of these things. It's designed to catch diseases that are already serious, but it won't tell you all the metabolic drivers that lead to the diagnosis, while prevention is fairly simple. Final word High blood pressure is not inevitable, and it is reversible. It's a signal that something in your metabolism needs attention. Three randomized controlled trials show that a daily serving of ground flaxseeds produces blood pressure reductions that rival the best drug combinations available today. Flaxseed comes with additional side benefits rather than side effects. It's real food. Clinical trials show how much you need to take and what results you can expect: 30 grams, ground up, taken consistently every day, yields substantial improvements in blood pressure. The next move is yours. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Michael Donaldson Michael Donaldson, Nutrition Researcher & Health Coach Dr. Michael Donaldson, Ph.D., is a leading voice in plant-based nutrition and lifestyle transformation. With a doctorate from Cornell University and more than two decades of research at Hallelujah Diet, he has helped thousands understand how food can restore health and vitality. Through his coaching platform End Diabetes Now, he guides clients in reversing type 2 diabetes naturally and sustainably. A scientist, entrepreneur, and educator, Dr. Donaldson also founded True Wealth Health Products and formulated Ora-Shield, an organic oral-care blend. His work bridges science, faith, and practical wisdom to help people achieve lasting wellness and purpose.

Written by Ruth Hutchins, Career Awakening Coach Ruth Hutchins is more than a career coach with 30 years of career experience and a unique holistic approach, helping people find clarity and direction. She is the founder of Creating Healthy Careers, author of Career Awakening: How to Align Your Career With Your Soul Purpose, and creator of the Career Awakening methodology. People search for their life path like it’s this hidden path that they need to find, when the truth is, they’re already walking it. The expectation that we should somehow find our life path can be paralysing. Which way should I go? What am I meant to be doing? What if I choose the wrong thing? It creates the belief that the answer is somewhere ahead of us, and that we need complete clarity before we can take the next step. But if you’re looking forward to finding that elusive path, you may be looking in the wrong direction. Life leaves us clues, and often those clues are behind us. So that’s where we need to look, back through our lives. Steve Jobs famously said we can only connect the dots of our lives by looking backward. I’ll give you an example of how I joined the dots in my own life, moving from a 20+ year recruitment career, where I couldn’t imagine what else I could do, to eventually stepping into my coaching business. Life nudges you onto your path I enjoyed being in the recruitment industry, but the time came when I knew I needed to do more, and I felt something was missing. I was applying for jobs but not getting anywhere, and wondered what I was meant to be doing with my life. I always had a feeling that I wanted to start my own business, but not in recruitment, which led me to wonder, what’s next? I’d played around with a business concept for seven years and even developed a website back in the day, when you had to pay a significant amount for one. But I never commercialised the business or fully committed to it. However, when you are not on your path in life, you will get little nudges to help you onto it. The nudges start off small, but if you ignore them, they become a push and then a powerful kick, which is not pleasant. I knew something needed to change, but I repeatedly chose the ‘safer’ option. The pattern kept repeating, and eventually I recognised that life was trying to redirect me. But the fact that I wasn’t taking action to transition my career into the business I had been thinking about was also a sign that my heart wasn’t in it. So I immersed myself in the world of personal development to start getting some clarity. The bus stop conversation In a few of the courses I did, we spent time looking at the key influencers and influential experiences in our lives to see how they’d shaped us, which I’ll run you through shortly. Years later, I read Sue Morter’s book The Energy Codes and was fascinated by her ‘bus stop conversation’ theory, which I’ll briefly touch on here. You don’t need to share the spiritual premise behind it, simply take on the insightful perspective it provides. Imagine that before you entered this world, you were sitting at a bus stop, waiting for your journey to begin. You were thinking about what you’d like to learn or develop this time around and started saying to the others at the bus stop, “This time I want a level 10 experience in acceptance and forgiveness. Who’s going to help me?” Then someone at the bus stop says, “I will.” Off you both go on your journey without knowing how it’s going to happen. Then one day, you experience a challenge in your life, and it’s the person from the bus stop who has come to give you an experience to help you learn how to accept and forgive. Wow, how’s that for a reframe! We can use the bus stop conversation to explore why we might have invited a particular experience into our lives, and what we were being asked to learn or develop through it. This was a profound exercise that helped me see my father, and what he’d brought into my life, from a whole new perspective. How your early experiences can reveal your life path Let me paint a picture of how Creating Healthy Careers came to be. My dad used to be quite high up in the police force in England, and when our family moved to Australia, he couldn’t move across within the force at the same level. He couldn’t afford to support a family of five on a starting salary, so he had to look for a new job. As he was good at accounting, he took a position in an accounts department, which greatly impacted his happiness and our home life. As a young child, I simply used to ask, “Why can’t he be happy at work?” Dad would suppress his frustration at work, but inevitably some of it came home with him. We all experienced that side of him, which ultimately affected our family. So I grew up with a constant reminder of how important it is to be happy in your career. My first dot was Dad's lesson that you need to be happy in your career, no matter what you’re doing. Otherwise, it can negatively affect you, your happiness, your relationships, your family, your health, and your self-worth. All of a sudden, I realised that a person I had always seen through a negative lens had been in my life as a key influencer in shaping my life path and purpose. In that moment, I was able to let go of years of anger towards my father and develop a sense of gratitude for him, understanding that he’d sacrificed having a loving relationship with his daughter in order to provide me with such a strong pathway in life. Reflecting on your life’s experiences and challenges through the lens of “What is the learning that I need to gain from this?” or “Why would I have asked for or invited this experience into my life?” can not only give you a newfound appreciation and sense of gratitude for what you have experienced and help you stop the blame game, but also help you start to paint a picture of the skills, knowledge and wisdom you have to share with the world. When you stop and consider how life has orchestrated all the people and experiences to bring you what you need, you can no longer ignore your path. After all, who are you to get in the way of what you are here to bring into the world? The questions to ask yourself The questions are simple, but finding the answers may take you some time. Reflect on these: Who were the three biggest influencers early in your life, and what did they teach you? What experiences, both painful and positive, shaped the person you became? What patterns or themes have kept repeating throughout your life? What have people consistently come to you for help, advice, or perspective on? What have your hardest experiences taught you that could now be valuable to someone else? Then stand back and look at all of your answers together. Don’t analyse each clue in isolation. Look for the threads running through them. Your life path may not reveal itself as one dramatic moment of clarity. More often, it emerges as you begin recognising the patterns that have been there all along. If you’re at a point in life where you know there’s more for you, but you’re struggling to see what comes next, my Life Path Program helps you uncover the clues, patterns and experiences that can help you understand what life may be showing you about your path. Brainz readers can get 50% off the Self-Paced Life Path Program using the code "Brainz" at checkout. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Ruth Hutchins Ruth Hutchins, Career Awakening Coach Ruth Hutchins is a Career and Life Path Coach with 30 years' experience spanning recruitment, career development and coaching. She helps people make sense of the experiences, turning points and challenges that have shaped them, uncovering the clues that reveal who they are and where they're called next. Ruth believes even our hardest chapters contain gold, pointing us toward our values, strengths and direction. Through her holistic approach, she helps clients reconnect with themselves and build a career and life that feels genuinely their own.

Written by Connie Ng, Holistic Practitioner, Quantum Healing Facilitator, & Transformational Coach Connie Ng is an international speaker helping people overcome chronic pain, mobility issues, and complex health challenges, especially when conventional approaches fall short. Integrating Five Elements philosophy, vibrational medicine, and mind-body coaching, she empowers clients to reclaim their health, reconnect with who they truly are, and create lasting transformation. Biohacking fascinates me. Sleep trackers, glucose monitors, supplements, peptides, fasting protocols, cold plunges, HRV scores and recovery data have given us more ways than ever to measure and optimise ourselves. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting more energy, sharper cognition, better performance or a longer life. But I keep coming back to one slightly inconvenient question, "Do you actually understand the body you are trying to optimise?" The distinction matters, being fit and being healthy are not necessarily the same thing. Someone can lift impressive weights, run marathons and maintain enviable body composition while still being exhausted, inflamed, anxious, hormonally out of balance or sleeping terribly. I see the same pattern outside the gym. High-performing people often get very good at overriding themselves. Fatigue gets pushed through, stress becomes normal, and rest somehow turns into something that has to be earned. Then, when the body starts protesting, we add something else. At some point, I have to wonder, "Are we optimising the body, or simply becoming more efficient at ignoring it?" Before the hack, understand the human No two bodies arrive with exactly the same story. Genetics matter, as do diet, sleep, lifestyle, injuries, environment, emotional patterns, stress load and constitution. What invigorates one person may exhaust another. The latest protocol may look brilliant on paper and be completely wrong for the person trying it. This is where body awareness deserves a seat at the biohacking table. If I wake up already depleted or under the weather, do I really need to prove my resilience with a cold plunge simply because cold exposure is supposed to be good for me? If my body is asking for rest, is another supplement, peptide, or performance protocol genuinely optimisation, or am I overriding the message because somebody told me I should be doing it? Biohacking without body awareness can become just another sophisticated way of overriding ourselves. So I find this question far more useful than “What is the latest hack?”, What does this particular person actually need? That philosophy sits behind my earlier Brainz article, Why I Look Beyond Symptoms to Understand Chronic and Complex Health Conditions. Before I optimise a system, I want to understand the system. This particular “system” happens to have a pulse, a history, emotions, relationships and a personality. If longevity matters, the cells matter Without healthy cellular function, our conversation about longevity becomes rather theoretical. Our tissues and organs depend on cells functioning well, which means the decidedly unsexy basics still matter, nutritious food, adequate sleep, appropriate movement, rest, time in nature and even something as ordinary as dressing sensibly for the climate rather than expecting the body to tolerate everything we throw at it. One framework I use is Biochemic Therapy, commonly known as Tissue Salts. The system traces back to the 19th-century work of German physician Wilhelm Heinrich Schüssler and centres on twelve mineral salts within a therapeutic model of cellular balance. What interests me just as much is the older principle of dose. The historical Arndt–Schulz concept, often discussed today alongside the broader idea of hormesis, reminds us that biological responses can change dramatically depending on dose. A commonly cited historical formulation is that small doses stimulate, moderate doses inhibit, and large doses can be lethal. Modern science would not treat this as a universal law, but the underlying lesson still challenges a very modern assumption, that more must automatically mean better. That is the part I find especially relevant to biohacking. That idea makes me smile when I look at modern health culture. We have developed a curious habit of equating optimisation with addition, another supplement, another measurement, another intervention. Yet the body is already an extraordinarily intelligent regulatory system. Sometimes the wiser question is simply, "What does this body actually need?" The body does not live in separate departments A cell belongs to a tissue. The tissue belongs to an organ. The organ belongs to a body and that body belongs to a human being. This is where Traditional Chinese Medicine and other ancient healing systems continue to influence the way I think. They do not treat mind, body and spirit as though they occupy separate office cubicles. Physical imbalance can affect emotional wellbeing. Emotional distress can influence how we experience the physical body. Our thoughts, memories, relationships and stress patterns are not happening in some completely separate universe from our physiology. I explored this more deeply in When the Body Speaks, Decoding Mental Health with the Five Elements, where I looked at how emotional patterns, organ systems and physical symptoms can influence one another through the Five Elements framework. Modern biohacking can occasionally develop tunnel vision here. We become so busy measuring ourselves that we forget to meet ourselves and feel into what is actually happening within us. Your wearable may accurately tell you that your HRV dropped. Useful information, but it cannot necessarily tell you why one relationship unsettles you for three days, why you keep proving your worth through overwork, or why your mind insists on replaying the same fear at two o’clock in the morning. The number matters, but so does the person generating it. Sometimes, going back to basics also means questioning the latest “super” ingredient. Reishi, lion’s mane and ginseng now appear everywhere in performance and wellness culture, yet these aren’t new discoveries. They come from much older traditions that never assumed one herb or mushroom suited everybody. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, constitution matters. Even ginseng, often marketed as a universal energy booster, is traditionally used with discernment because its warming nature may not suit every person. The better question is not simply, “Is this good for performance?” It is, “Is this actually right for my body?” Don’t biohack harder. Biohack wiser. I respect what biohacking offers, but I think one of its biggest blind spots is that we may be optimising the measurable parts of health while missing half the human being. We are not robots with supplement stacks. A human being is an integrated physical, emotional, mental and, from my perspective, spiritual system. If one aspect is chronically out of balance, I find it difficult to pretend the others are completely unaffected. That is why I prefer to widen the field of enquiry. Sometimes that means returning to basics, spending time in nature, eating fresh food, learning how your constitution responds to stress, seasons and lifestyle, and paying attention to sleep, digestion, energy and the signals your body keeps repeating. In my own practice, Plant Essences offer one way of working with emotional and vibrational patterns, while Biochemic Tissue Salts provide a mineral-oriented lens on the physical side. Then there are approaches further outside the conventional biohacking conversation. My work with Star Magic Healing and 0'Ishiki Healing invites me to consider health through a quantum and energetic lens, including the possibility that there are forms of information and intelligence in the human system that are not captured through ordinary biochemical measurements alone. I explored some of that territory in The Ancient Elixir Powering Quantum Performance, But No One’s Talking About It. I am not suggesting we abandon medicine, throw away technology or romanticise the past. I am suggesting that human intelligence did not begin with the invention of an app. Our ancestors observed plants, seasons, constitutions, emotions and the natural world because they had to. There may be wisdom in bringing some of that older curiosity into conversation with everything modern science and technology can now offer. For me, biohacking wiser means resisting the urge to automatically add more, asking better questions and widening the field of enquiry. Your brain is part of the equation too Purely physical optimisation also feels incomplete because the brain itself remains capable of change. In What Future Has Your Diagnosis Quietly Persuaded You to Stop Imagining?, I explored neuroplasticity alongside repeated thoughts, emotional states and the future we believe is still possible. Someone can build an immaculate supplement stack, collect beautiful biometric data and still wake every morning believing their body is broken or living in chronic fear. At that point, I have to ask whether we are optimising health, or simply optimising the measurable parts of it. True health asks us to look at the human being as a whole. The physical body matters enormously, but so do the psychological, emotional and spiritual experiences moving through it. Otherwise, we risk treating a deeply interconnected person like a collection of separate components. We are far more interesting than that. Longevity is useful. But longevity for what? Of course I want vitality, mobility, mental clarity and a body capable of carrying me well into later life. But I do not want another twenty years merely to become extraordinarily efficient at collecting health data. I want those years because I want the life. I want to love people, travel, create, laugh until my stomach hurts, remain curious and occasionally eat something delicious without asking an app whether I performed well afterwards. There should still be room for mystery, heart and soul. Life is for living. Perhaps true optimisation begins there, knowing your constitution, tending to your cells, understanding your body, noticing your emotional patterns and becoming curious about what repeatedly pulls you away from balance. Use technology when it serves you, choose supplements thoughtfully and stay open to new ideas. By all means, experiment. But do it wisely, because wisdom also means knowing when not to intervene. Before you biohack harder, perhaps it is time to biohack wiser. The body you are trying to optimise is not a machine, it is carrying an entire human life. Surely that life, not the score on the dashboard, is what we were trying to improve in the first place. Follow me on Facebook and Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Connie Ng Connie Ng, Holistic Practitioner, Quantum Healing Facilitator, & Transformational Coach Connie Ng is a Multi-Disciplined Holistic Practitioner and Quantum Healing Facilitator who specialises in helping clients overcome chronic physical and emotional conditions by addressing their root cause at the energetic level. Blending Five Elements wisdom with Star Magic Healing, vibrational medicine, and holistic counselling, she facilitates deep transformation for those who feel stuck despite trying everything. Connie is the founder of The Salt Therapy Clinic & Sanctuary and works with clients both in-person and remotely.

Tamsin Ward is a former music teacher and headteacher, a qualified Personal Trainer, and holds a Master’s in Education. She founded Drums4Health to harness the combined power of movement and rhythm in supporting physical and brain health. With regular classes growing rapidly in popularity, Drums4Health is now expanding across the UK as an innovative and inclusive approach to wellbeing. Tamsin Ward, Founder of Drums4Health What first convinced you that combining rhythm and movement could become something bigger than a fitness class? I came to this from quite an unusual combination of backgrounds. I was a Director of Music in schools for many years before moving into senior leadership roles, including specialist education. Music and the way people respond to rhythm had therefore been part of my professional life for a very long time. Later, I trained as a personal trainer and completed an Exercise Referral Diploma. That was when I really started looking at my experience of music, education and movement together and wondering what could happen if we stopped treating them as completely separate things. Very quickly, I realised I wasn't really just teaching a fitness class. People were moving, but they were also learning, concentrating, laughing and connecting with each other. I started hearing people say, “My brain has had a workout!” Others were surprised by how much they'd moved because they'd been concentrating on getting the rhythm rather than thinking about exercise. Seeing similar responses across very different groups made me realise there was something much bigger to explore. That's now led to working with research partners so that, as Drums4Health grows, we can gather meaningful evidence and impact data alongside the experiences people are sharing with us. How do structured rhythmic patterns make Drums4Health different from conventional cardio drumming? For me, the drum isn't simply a prop to exercise around. The rhythm itself is really important. My background is in music and education, so I actually teach rhythmic patterns. We might work with singles and doubles, alternate hands, repeat and remember patterns, change direction or gradually increase the complexity. As confidence develops, there is always something else we can introduce. That means the brain has a job to do as well as the body. And you absolutely don't have to be a musician! Getting a pattern wrong, laughing and trying it again is all part of it. Nobody is being assessed on their drumming ability. That's what fascinates me about combining the two. Someone might be moving their arms, using their core, gripping and controlling their sticks and raising their heart rate, but at the same time they're listening, processing, remembering and coordinating. It's much more than simply hitting a drum along to music. What did working in specialist education teach you about the connection between movement, regulation and engagement? Probably more than I realised at the time! Working in education for so many years, including specialist education, taught me that people don't all engage or learn in the same way. It also taught me that forcing participation rarely creates meaningful engagement. You have to meet somebody where they are. Regulation, movement, rhythm, repetition and predictable structures can all be incredibly important. I also learned to look beyond what somebody was doing and think about why they might be doing it. That thinking is very much part of Drums4Health today. For me, inclusion isn't simply saying, “Everybody is welcome.” It's designing something so that when people arrive, they can actually participate and feel successful. Somebody might need to sit. Someone else might want a huge amount of movement. Another person may struggle to follow the rhythm but can still drum along and be completely part of the group. They don't all need to do exactly the same thing to belong. Where do you think traditional fitness approaches fall short when it comes to making movement genuinely inclusive? Traditional fitness has enormous value, but it doesn't work for everybody. Some people simply don't identify as someone who “does exercise”. Gyms can feel intimidating and traditional classes aren't always accessible to somebody with reduced mobility, low confidence or a health condition. I wanted to remove some of those barriers. In Drums4Health, one person can be standing and using big movements while the person next to them is seated and doing something much smaller. Neither is doing the lesser version. I think that's really important. People are also distracted from the fact that they're exercising, in a good way! Instead of thinking, “I've got another 15 repetitions to do”, they're thinking, “Can I get this rhythm?” The exercise is still happening. I'm increasingly interested in how we create movement that people actually want to return to. Because we can design the perfect exercise programme on paper, but if somebody doesn't enjoy it and won't come back, how useful is it really? What have your sessions with people living with dementia taught you about rhythm, memory and human connection? These have been some of the sessions that have stayed with me the most. I've seen how familiar music can create an immediate response. People might not necessarily follow every rhythm, but suddenly they're moving, smiling, drumming or connecting with the person beside them. At one Memory Café, retired occupational therapist Heather Manktelow, who has over 16 years' experience and has worked extensively with older adults and people living with dementia, observed the session. She described seeing people moving as well as drumming and said, “The smiles on people's faces, were fantastic.” One participant simply said, “It made me feel good.” Heather also told me about five residents from a neighbouring care home who rarely participated in organised activities. Four engaged with the drumming for the whole session. Sometimes connection matters more than whether somebody remembers the pattern. These observations are incredibly powerful, but I'm conscious of not turning observations into scientific claims. That's why working with research partners is so important. I want to capture what is happening properly and build evidence around where Drums4Health can genuinely make a difference. What changes do participants tend to notice first when they begin Drums4Health? Usually it's how they feel. People talk about feeling happier, energised or surprised by how much they've moved. Others immediately mention the mental challenge and tell me their brain has had as much of a workout as their body. We are beginning to capture some of this more systematically too. At Heather's Memory Café, she used a simple 0–10 mood scale before and after one session. One gentleman living with memory loss had experienced a difficult morning and rated his mood as 4/10 beforehand. Afterwards, it was 10/10. His wife moved from 7/10 to 10/10 and talked about how much she loved seeing him enjoying himself. It's important to say that this was a small real-world evaluation, not a clinical research study. But those experiences give us questions worth investigating. The next stage is measuring impact more formally. I'm working with research partners to look beyond “people enjoyed it” and begin gathering evidence-backed data around physical, cognitive and wellbeing outcomes. How do you adapt a session so people with very different ages, abilities and confidence levels can participate together? My aim isn't for everyone in the room to do exactly the same thing. My aim is for everyone in the room to feel they're part of the same thing. That's probably the simplest way I can describe it. Everything can be adapted. People can participate seated or standing. Our drums are height-adjustable, movement range and intensity can change, rhythms can be simplified and nobody needs previous musical experience. If somebody can't follow a pattern, they can keep drumming. They're still part of the music. This means I can have somebody doing a really energetic standing session alongside someone who needs to remain seated, and both can have a meaningful experience. I've also designed our own Drums4Health equipment to support this. It needed to be robust, portable and adaptable because if we genuinely want activities to be inclusive, the equipment has to work in real community, care and wellbeing settings too. Inclusion has to be built into the activity rather than added afterwards. What does meaningful movement mean to you personally? I've become much less interested in how movement looks and much more interested in what it allows somebody to keep doing in their life. For one person, that might mean maintaining enough strength and mobility to remain independent. For somebody else, meaningful movement might be discovering an activity they can participate in from a chair. For another, it might simply be finding exercise they actually enjoy. I'm particularly interested now in healthy ageing and things like hand and grip strength. During drumming, we're continually holding and controlling sticks and using our hands, wrists and forearms. Grip strength is recognised in wider research as a useful marker associated with physical capability and healthy ageing, and it's an area I'd really like us to investigate properly. But meaningful movement is also about how somebody feels. If you're moving, learning, laughing and connecting with other people at the same time, there is something really powerful in that. Movement should add something to life, not simply tick an exercise box. As Drums4Health grows, what do you hope people will ultimately understand about the relationship between rhythm, movement and wellbeing? I want Drums4Health to sit in that really interesting space between physical activity, creative health and preventative wellbeing. We tend to separate physical health, brain health and social wellbeing into different boxes. What excites me about rhythm and movement is the possibility of bringing those things together. I want Drums4Health to remain joyful and accessible, but I also want substance behind it. Working with research partners and gathering meaningful impact data is a huge part of where we're going. I'm also now training teams within organisations to deliver Drums4Health themselves. That means schools, care and dementia organisations, community services, gyms and wellbeing teams can potentially embed it into what they already do, delivered by people their participants know and trust. Ultimately, I'd love Drums4Health to help change the way we think about exercise. It doesn't always have to look like exercise. Sometimes it can look like people of completely different ages and abilities moving, learning, laughing and drumming together. Move. Drum. Connect. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Tamsin Ward

A brand-new platform built to make starting and growing a UK business easier, more affordable and considerably less lonely has launched nationwide, and for a limited time, new business owners can join completely free. Just Starting Out (JSO) has officially launched across the UK, bringing together the tools, visibility, support and community new business owners need in one affordable platform. Built following years of consumer research and conversations with hundreds of entrepreneurs, Just Starting Out was created around a simple question, "What do people actually need when they’re just starting out?" “Finding those first customers is incredibly difficult when you're competing against businesses with years of reviews, established reputations and much bigger marketing budgets,” says Abi Hill, founder and CEO of Just Starting Out. “We wanted to create somewhere that gives new businesses a genuine chance to be seen, while providing the practical tools and support they need behind the scenes too.” Business owners can create a professional profile and be discovered by consumers searching for local services, while also accessing features including a quote generator, invoice manager, diary and job tracker, digital business card, community forum, business resources, partner discounts, reviews, galleries and opportunities for promotion and recognition. Just Starting Out has deliberately kept affordability at the heart of the platform. Even its highest-level ‘Trailblazer’ plan costs less than the price of a latte per week! For a limited time, however, businesses can sign up completely 'free' as Just Starting Out builds its founding nationwide community. Starting a business? Grab Just Starting Out’s Trailblazer plan now for 'free' (normally £99), including 12 months’ exposure on the platform, sign up here! Co-founder and CTO Richard Windley says the platform has changed significantly during development because of the people it was built for. “We haven't built Just Starting Out and then asked people whether they like it,” says Windley. “Feedback has been part of the development process from the beginning. Features have been added, changed and refined because new business owners have told us what would genuinely make their lives easier. That will continue now that we're live. Our members will have a real voice in what Just Starting Out becomes.” But Just Starting Out isn't only about helping entrepreneurs. The platform has also been designed to help UK households navigate the continuing cost-of-living pressures by making it easier to discover emerging local businesses offering competitive services. “For me, that's where Just Starting Out becomes really exciting,” Hill adds. “On one side you've got talented people who desperately need those first customers. On the other, you've got households looking for good local services at prices they can afford. We're bringing the two together. A consumer could save money while helping somebody else build their business. That's a pretty powerful exchange.” Just Starting Out is also actively looking for new businesses to showcase as its community grows. Want the opportunity for your business to be featured on Just Starting Out’s social media channels, or to be considered for a future blog or member spotlight? Get in touch with your story! Whether you're turning a side hustle into something bigger, have recently taken the leap into self-employment or simply need help finding those all-important first customers, Just Starting Out has been built for you! Head over to Just Starting Out’s website, Facebook and Instagram pages. Media contact Amanda Grant Communications Manager 0203 633 0286 amanda.grant@juststartingout.co.uk

Written by Sarah Veall, Transformational Coach Sarah Veall is a transformational coach, inner child practitioner, and Reiki practitioner. She is the author of "Trust", a story of how she reconnected with her true essence and a state of wholeness and healed holistically, following a cancer diagnosis in 2020. 20 August 2020. It is a date that will forever be etched into my memory. In the morning, my eldest son received his General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) results. It was a moment of pride, celebration and excitement as we watched him take another step into his future. That afternoon, my world changed. I was diagnosed with cancer. I could never have imagined, sitting with that diagnosis six years ago, where the journey would take me. Now, six years on, I find myself looking back at those years and feeling something I hadn't anticipated, closure. My life is almost unrecognisable from the life I was living in 2020. Six years of transformation My cancer diagnosis became the beginning of a profound journey of questioning, listening and learning. Rather than simply accepting that my body had somehow betrayed me, I became curious about what it might be trying to tell me. I began exploring healing differently. I became fascinated by the wisdom of the body and by the connection between our mental, emotional, physical and energetic selves. Most importantly, I began learning to listen to the whispers of my intuition. The journey took me into places I might never have explored without that diagnosis. It challenged beliefs I had held about health, healing and myself. It encouraged me to slow down, become more aware of what was happening within me and start trusting my own inner knowing. Eventually, that journey became my first book, "Trust", my story of learning to trust myself, my body and my intuition as I explored my own holistic healing journey. And now, six years later, I am more well than I've ever been. I've let go of versions of myself that were built around coping, pleasing, performing and trying to be who I thought I needed to be. I've learned to question, I've learned to listen inwardly, and I've learned that sometimes our bodies communicate what our conscious minds haven't yet been willing to acknowledge. I've also learned that healing can be about coming home to yourself. Then there is the date There is something rather extraordinary about the fact that this six-year anniversary coincides with another family milestone. On 20 August 2020, my eldest son received his GCSE results in the morning, and I received my cancer diagnosis in the afternoon. Six years later, my youngest son has just received his GCSE results. Same date, different son, completely different me. It feels almost as though life has brought me back to the same point on the calendar so that I can look at it from an entirely different perspective. What felt like an ending in 2020 now feels like the completion of a chapter. Is there a six-year eclipse cycle in astrology? Technically, there isn't a formal six-year eclipse cycle. But there is a fascinating cyclical quality to eclipses, and when I look at my own life through that lens, the timing feels incredibly significant. From 2020 to 2021, we experienced the Gemini and Sagittarius eclipse cycle, beginning in June 2020 and continuing through December 2021. The current 2026 to 2028 Leo and Aquarius eclipse cycle carries very different symbolism, but perhaps that is precisely what makes it so interesting. Eclipses are often viewed astrologically as accelerators and turning points. They can bring something into consciousness, initiate change or expose something that then takes years to unfold. They don't necessarily create an event that begins and ends at the time of the eclipse. Sometimes they open a door, and then we spend years walking through it. So perhaps what I'm feeling isn't the literal completion of a six-year eclipse cycle, but rather the completion of a chapter that began around 2020. It began with a cancer diagnosis and took me through fear, questioning, healing, awakening and, ultimately, a much deeper relationship with myself. From trust to the heart The current Leo and Aquarius axis feels particularly poignant to me. Leo is associated symbolically with self-expression, heart, identity, creativity and being seen. Aquarius is associated with authenticity, freedom, community and our relationship with the collective. And suddenly, the question feels very different from the one I was asking six years ago. Back then, perhaps the question was, "How am I going to get through this?" Now it feels more like, "Who have I become, and what am I now ready to step into?" That feels like a very different question because I believe growth is about shedding the versions that were never really us in the first place. There's something else coming As I look back at the woman who received that diagnosis six years ago, I feel enormous compassion for her. She couldn't possibly have known what was waiting for her on the other side, and she didn't know that her experience would become Trust. She didn't know that she would discover new ways of understanding healing and that she would learn to trust her intuition in ways she never had before. She certainly didn't know that six years later, she would be preparing to launch another book. Paddy Apollo and Me. A very different book, but one that has emerged from the same journey. It is a book about love, loss, connection and the extraordinary relationship we can have with our animals, and for me, my precious cats. In many ways, it feels like the next expression of everything I've learned about listening, connection and the wisdom that exists beyond what we can rationally explain. Trust came from the beginning of my healing journey. Paddy Apollo and Me feels like it is coming from the other side of it, and maybe that's why this moment feels so significant. Look at that for closure Six years ago, my eldest son received his GCSE results, and I received a cancer diagnosis. Six years later, my youngest son receives his GCSE results, and I am living a life I couldn't have imagined then. I have written and published a book, I am preparing to launch another, I am more well than I've ever been, and I have become much more deeply connected to myself. So I don't know whether the universe works in neat six-year cycles. But I do believe there is something powerful about recognising patterns, thresholds and moments of completion. Sometimes we need to stop and look back to realise just how far we've travelled, and maybe that's what this eclipse energy is inviting me to do, to honour the chapter that began in 2020 and acknowledge everything it taught me, to release the version of myself that belonged to that chapter and to step into what comes next with an open heart. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Sarah Veall Sarah Veall, Transformational Coach Sarah Veall is a transformational coach, inner child practitioner, and Reiki practitioner. She is the author of "Trust", a story of how she reconnected with her true essence and a state of wholeness and healed holistically, following a cancer diagnosis in 2020. Sarah is passionate about empowering others to love their whole 'self' in order to access a state of wellness where the body can heal itself.