Written by Linda Lee Smith, Transformational Wellness Services LLC Linda Lee Smith and Richard Schmelke are authors and transformational coaches who believe the most meaningful chapter of life can begin at any age. Through their writing and teaching, they empower others to reconnect with themselves, embrace new possibilities, and live with greater purpose and vitality. Life transitions can leave us wondering who we are beyond our roles, responsibilities, and expectations. Linda Lee Smith explores how reconnecting with our inner wisdom, trusting ourselves, and making small intentional choices can guide us back toward a life of greater purpose, authenticity, and fulfillment. When we begin to feel disconnected There comes a point in many people's lives when they begin to wonder how they became so disconnected from themselves. It often happens quietly. Perhaps the children have grown, a career has come to an end, retirement has arrived, a relationship has changed, or a health challenge has shifted life's priorities. On the surface, life may appear successful, yet beneath that success is a lingering feeling that something is missing. Many people describe it as feeling lost, disconnected, or uncertain about what comes next. The question that begins to emerge is both simple and profound: How do I find my way back to myself? The answer is not found by becoming someone new. Instead, it comes from rediscovering the person you have always been beneath the layers of responsibilities, expectations, disappointments, and habits that have accumulated over the years. In many ways, the journey back to yourself is less about searching and more about remembering. It is an invitation to reconnect with the wisdom, purpose, and authentic self that has patiently waited beneath the surface all along. As a holistic nurse, transformational life coach, and author, I have spent decades helping people navigate life's transitions. Whether someone is facing retirement, chronic illness, the loss of a loved one, or simply questioning the direction of their life, I have noticed a common thread. Most people have not truly lost themselves. They have simply become so focused on caring for others and meeting life's demands that they have forgotten to care for the person within. Over time, they become experts at fulfilling roles while gradually losing touch with the unique individual they were created to be. Listening to the wisdom within One of the first places this journey begins is by learning to listen differently to your body. Our culture often encourages us to ignore discomfort, push through fatigue, and silence the signals our bodies are sending. Yet the body possesses an extraordinary wisdom. Long before our minds acknowledge that something is out of alignment, the body may begin communicating through tension, exhaustion, anxiety, disrupted sleep, or a general sense that something simply does not feel right. During my years in healthcare, I came to appreciate that these physical experiences are not always problems to eliminate as quickly as possible. Sometimes, they can be invitations to become curious. Physical experiences can sometimes be connected with emotions that have not been fully acknowledged, grief that has not been processed, or stress that has become so familiar it no longer seems unusual. When we begin approaching our bodies with compassion instead of frustration, we may discover valuable insights about what needs healing, not only physically but emotionally and spiritually as well. As we begin listening inward, we also discover the importance of creating space for reflection. Modern life celebrates productivity and constant activity, leaving very little room for stillness. Yet it is often during quiet moments that we begin hearing the gentle voice of our own inner wisdom. Whether through prayer, meditation, journaling, spending time in nature, or simply sitting quietly with a cup of tea, these moments of reflection allow us to reconnect with the deeper parts of ourselves that have been overshadowed by the busyness of everyday life. Learning to trust your inner knowing For many people, one of the greatest challenges on this journey is learning to trust themselves again. Throughout life, we become accustomed to seeking advice from experts, family members, friends, and social media. While outside perspectives certainly have value, they can never replace our own inner knowing. Developing confidence in our intuition is not about rejecting wisdom from others. It is about recognizing that we each possess an inner compass capable of guiding us when we become quiet enough to listen. One question that has profoundly influenced both my coaching practice and my own life comes from my mentor, Mary Morrissey: What would you love for your life? It is a deceptively simple question, yet many people struggle to answer it because they have spent years responding to everyone else's expectations rather than exploring their own desires. Giving ourselves permission to answer honestly often becomes the first step toward creating a life that feels deeply meaningful rather than merely busy. Fortunately, returning to yourself rarely requires dramatic life changes. More often, transformation unfolds through a series of small, intentional choices made consistently over time. Choosing to rest when your body needs restoration, establishing healthier boundaries, pursuing a forgotten passion, reconnecting with supportive relationships, or simply making time each day for quiet reflection can gradually restore a sense of balance and purpose. These seemingly ordinary decisions accumulate, creating profound change that often surprises us when we look back and see how far we have come. Walking through the doorway One of the greatest misconceptions about personal growth is that we must somehow erase our past in order to move forward. In reality, every experience we have lived through contributes to the person we are becoming. Our disappointments cultivate compassion. Our losses deepen our appreciation for life's precious moments. Our mistakes become valuable teachers. Even our greatest struggles often reveal strengths we never knew we possessed. Rather than wishing away difficult chapters, we can begin viewing them as essential parts of the story that has shaped our resilience and wisdom. This perspective became the foundation for my newest book, The Doorway Back to Yourself. I chose the image of a doorway because I believe every person eventually stands before one. On one side is the familiar life we have always known, shaped by old beliefs, routines, and the expectations of others. On the other side is the possibility of living with greater authenticity, peace, confidence, and purpose. Crossing that threshold does not require perfection. It simply requires the willingness to take one small step toward becoming more fully ourselves. The beautiful truth is that this doorway has always been there. We do not need to become someone different in order to walk through it. We simply need the courage to reconnect with who we have always been beneath the noise, the responsibilities, and the distractions that life inevitably brings. If you have been sensing that something is calling you toward a more authentic life, I encourage you to trust that feeling. It may be the quiet invitation your soul has been extending for years. The journey back to yourself is not a race, nor is it a destination that can be reached overnight. It is a lifelong process of remembering, growing, healing, and choosing each day to live in greater alignment with the person you were created to be. When you begin that journey, you may discover that what you have been searching for has never been outside of you at all. It has simply been waiting patiently for you to come home. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Linda Lee Smith and Richard Schmelke Linda Lee Smith and Richard Schmelke, Transformational Wellness Services LLC Linda Lee Smith and Richard Schmelke are authors, coaches, and TEDx speakers dedicated to helping people rediscover purpose, vitality, and joy. Linda brings decades of experience in holistic healing and has trained thousands worldwide in integrative practices. Rich’s background in leadership and personal development inspires others to think bigger and live more intentionally. Together, they create transformational programs that blend inner healing with practical life guidance. Their work is grounded in both professional expertise and their own experience of creating a vibrant new chapter later in life.

Written by Robyn Gie, Holistic Health Coach Robyn Gie is a Holistic Health Coach, TRE® Provider, and founder of WHY Holistic Health, known for her intuitive, grounded, and spiritually informed approach. She helps clients reconnect with their “Why,” integrating movement, nutrition, and nervous system regulation to create lasting health We book the appointments, run the assessments, and ask what's wrong with our children. We pour everything we have into finding answers for them. Very rarely, almost never, do we stop to turn the same curiosity inward. To ask what our own nervous system might be carrying and what our children might be quietly absorbing from it. My father made every person in our family feel like they were his favourite. But everyone secretly knew who really held that title. It was my son. They had something between them that didn't need explaining, the kind of bond that just exists, easy and unspoken, built over years of shared jokes and quiet moments and the way my father watched him with a pride only a grandfather could feel. When my father died, our whole family lost something irreplaceable. But my son lost his person. I lost my father while trying to perform the version of myself that looked like she was holding everything together for two boys who were watching me more closely than I knew. In hindsight, knowing what I know now, what happened with my son at school the following week is not actually surprising. I was disappointed to be called into the headmistress's office. Words like "expelled" were thrown around. I remember very little of the detail, only that my son and I were both in tears the entire time, and that we were both terrified. Later that day, I fetched him from school. I shouted. I'm not proud of how far my words went that day, directed at my son, who was ten years old and drowning in the same grief I was. I screamed until I lost my voice, about behaviour and the very long list of consequences that would follow. Only now can I make sense of what was happening in that moment, not to defend myself or soften my guilt at how I spoke to my little boy, but to understand it. My nervous system had tipped fully into fight. The part of the brain responsible for reason, empathy, and measured response had gone offline. What remained was pure survival instinct, escalating, louder, harder, because that's what a flooded nervous system does when it feels out of control. It tries to force safety through volume. The cruellest part? The more he shut down, the louder I got. Because silence, to a nervous system already past its limit, can feel like a threat. He said, “It's over, Mom,” and went quiet. I didn't recognise it then as shutdown. I didn't have that lens yet. I just knew something in him had closed, and I didn't know how to reach it. So I kept shouting at a door that had already shut. Two people. Same grief. Same car. Neither one of us held. What nobody asks The focus, in that meeting, was always going to be the same: the child. That makes sense. He was the reason we were there. But the question I was never asking myself, and perhaps the most important one, was this: “What is going on in me right now that might be showing up in him?” Not as blame. Not as another thing to add to the list of ways I am always feeling like I'm failing. But as honest curiosity about a system I didn't yet understand. Because the truth is, and this is the part that is uncomfortable to sit with, our children are not unaffected by our nervous systems. They live inside the emotional climate we create. They can feel the grief we think we're hiding. They can absorb the instability we're certain we're managing. They don't always need us to explain what's happening. They may already sense it. One of the most powerful things a parent can do, alongside the school, the therapist, and the next appointment, is turn the lens inward too. Not “what is wrong with my child?” but “what might be happening in me that they might be responding to?” What we don't talk about There is something else I want to say here, and I want to say it carefully. Every family has a pattern. Not because anyone intended it. Not because anyone failed. But because nervous systems learn from the environments they grow up inside, and they can carry what they learn long after the original experience has passed. Sometimes that pattern is grief or trauma that never got tended to. Without realising it, I was passing on the weight of that, not in words, not in anything I could point to, but in the atmosphere of our home. Nervous systems don't just borrow regulation in the moment. Over time, patterns within families can influence how we respond to one another. When we own up to those patterns, without blame and without shame, we can build the awareness needed to break cycles so that our children don't have to carry them. The turn I can tell you the exact year things began to shift. I didn't wake up one day and choose differently. It was a slow stirring, months, maybe years, of no longer recognising the person looking back at me. Until eventually, I had lost enough, the relationships, the energy, the motivation, my true self and the version of myself I had been performing for years, that there was nothing left to do but stop. In that stopping, something unexpected happened. I started coming back to myself, slowly, imperfectly, with a lot of false starts and old patterns pulling at me from every direction. But I started learning the language of the nervous system. I started understanding what my body had been trying to tell me for years, in the exhaustion, in the reaching for intensity, in the inability to sit still in calm. As I began to understand myself, something shifted in how I saw my son. Not his behaviour. Him. The grief he had carried. The ways he had adapted to a mother who was doing her best from a nervous system that had been running on override for years. Divine timing gifted us two weeks in Bali, just the two of us, unrushed, without the pressure of daily life, a chance to step off and simply be present with each other and unpack some hard truths. Those conversations were only possible because I had started tending to myself first. Why this matters beyond my story We pour enormous energy into identifying what is wrong with our children. Assessments. Diagnoses. Behavioural interventions. Medication. Therapy. All of which have their place, and none of which I dismiss. But we almost never begin with ourselves. What are the nervous systems of the parents expressing? What is the emotional climate of the home? What patterns has this child been absorbing, not through any failure of love, but through the ways our emotional states influence one another every single day? In schools, what is the teacher carrying into the room? What support exists for the adult who is expected to hold thirty children while their own system is running on override? The answer, in many cases, may be very little. We focus on the performance. The behaviour. The results of the children. But we can leave the adults largely untended and then wonder why the children are struggling. What tending actually looks like This is not a call for perfection. I want to be clear about that. I've said it a million times, and I'll say it a million more. I am not a perfect parent. I have raised my voice when I should have lowered it. I have been absent when I should have been present. I have chosen my own needs at the wrong moments and ignored them at others. What I am is someone who finally started asking a different question. Not “what is wrong with my child?” but “what is happening in me, right now, that my child might be responding to?” That question changes everything. It doesn't remove the hard moments. It doesn't make the grief smaller or the bills easier or the relationships less complicated. But it puts responsibility on the adult too, rather than asking the child to manage themselves in an environment that may not feel safe enough for regulation. It asks the adult to name what's happening with their own nervous system first. So that the children in the room, whether that room is a classroom or a kitchen or the back seat of a car after a terrible day, have something steady to borrow from. Because they will be influenced by us either way. The only question is what we are offering them. Follow me on Facebook and Instagram for more info! Read more from Robyn Gie Robyn Gie, Holistic Health Coach Robyn Gie is a Holistic Health Coach, TRE Provider, and Personal Trainer with over a decade of experience in movement, nervous system regulation, and nutrition guidance. She is the founder of WHY Holistic Health, a practice rooted in the belief that lasting change begins when people reconnect with their deeper why. With a background in the Film and Events industries, Robyn brings creativity and authentic storytelling into her coaching and writing. Her work integrates strength training, nervous system-informed movement, and practical nutrition support to help people build sustainable health and resilience. Through lived experience and embodied practice, she supports individuals in moving out of survival mode and back into connection with themselves.

Written by: Julia Steiner After Andrej Karpathy sketched a vision for AI memory, Safi Shamsi recognized a different opportunity. His open-source tool replaced embeddings with knowledge graphs for code and is now becoming part of the infrastructure behind AI coding assistants. It was Easter break, and Safi Shamsi was home in London, part way through a book. The one he was writing. The Memory Layer circles a problem he had chased for two years. How to give an AI a durable, trustworthy memory using knowledge graphs, the structured webs of facts and relationships computer science has leaned on for decades. Then, on the third of April, Andrej Karpathy posted. Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and Tesla’s former AI director, thinks out loud in a way the whole industry reads, and what he was turning over that week landed on the page Shamsi had open. Karpathy described using large language models to build personal knowledge bases, “manipulating knowledge stored as markdown and images” instead of endlessly manipulating code. Shamsi, a knowledge-graph researcher by training, saw something in it Karpathy had not spelled out. Karpathy wanted a personal wiki. Shamsi saw a way to cut the tokens an assistant burns every time it re-reads a codebase, and he aimed the same idea at code rather than notes. Work was closed for four days. He shipped it in two. He already knew the architecture, since the thesis he had just finished rested on the same idea, so the weekend ran on reflex rather than invention. “Notes are what one person knows,” he says. “A codebase is what a whole team knows, and the teams were the ones drowning.” He works like a researcher rather than a founder. He had read the knowledge-graph literature for two years before the weekend that made his name, and he still opens the same laptop first thing in the morning and closes it last thing at night. He says he does not take days off. Ask him which design choice he is proudest of and he does not hesitate. “I’d draw the knowledge graph of the whole codebase,” he says. “I’m a knowledge-graph researcher. That’s the part I love.” The design turns on a choice most of his peers would have made the other way. The fashionable route to AI memory runs through embeddings, which turn text into long lists of numbers and fetch whatever sits closest in meaning. Shamsi refused them. Graphify uses no embeddings and no vector database. It reads code the way a compiler does, parsing the syntax tree with an open library called Tree-sitter and lifting the relationships already sitting there, across 36 languages, entirely offline. “A codebase is deterministic,” he says. “It’s almost like the alphabet. You know what connects to what, so you don’t need an LLM or embeddings to see it. The syntax tree gives it to you for free.” That is what let it spread. Because it never calls a language model to read code, Graphify costs nothing to run and keeps a company’s source on its own machines. The best-known design in the space, Microsoft’s GraphRAG, builds its graphs through many expensive model calls and rebuilds much of the structure to add a single document. Shamsi cut the assumption underneath it, that pulling out the structure requires a model to understand it first. The syntax tree already holds the relationships. The trick is keeping them instead of throwing them away. A git hook rebuilds the map on every commit as the code changes, still without a single model call. Every relationship in the graph carries a tag showing where it came from: extracted for a fact read straight out of the code, inferred for one Graphify resolved on its own. A developer can see at a glance which claims the tool stands behind and which it worked out for itself, without reading the code that produced either. It is the kind of detail a spec sheet buries, and it gives the tool away as the work of someone who has watched AI be confidently wrong. What a syntax tree cannot see, the behavior that surfaces only while a program runs, is the gap he wants to close next, with a formal verification layer for the enterprise version. He also ships the test, not just the score. Graphify comes with a benchmark anyone can rerun. On a trial of memory across long conversations, its retrieval recall outruns the widely used mem0 by roughly ten to one. On the harder end-to-end task it still trails supermemory, a rival with a year’s head start, and Shamsi volunteers the loss before anyone asks. “We beat mem0. We lagged a little behind supermemory, and I knew we would,” he says. “It’s beatable.” The numbers are his own, run in-house, but Augment Code, a company that makes its own AI coding tools, published them, and the commands to reproduce them sit in the repository. It moved faster than he expected. He posted about it on X, a few developer influencers amplified it, and within two or three days Graphify had cleared 10,000 stars. A mentor of his, a veteran engineer at the Indian IT firm Wipro who had guided him for years, told him it was a major breakthrough and to put up a waitlist and see who turned up. People did, by the thousands. The idea was in the air by then. Two weeks after Karpathy’s post, Elon Musk, replying to a thread about the knowledge-graph approach, told his followers, “I super agree with Karpathy.” Shamsi could not help himself. “How about you agree with the creator of that product, Elon? Haha,” he replied. He had built the thing the field was asking for, and he had built it to admit what it does not know.

Written by Rosalba De La Rosa-Ruiz, Spiritual Wellness Practitioner As a Reiki Practitioner, channeler, yoga teacher, and sound healer, Rosie weaves together energy work, movement, and sacred sound to create deeply transformative healing experiences. Through the circles she hosts, she guides others on their healing journeys, holding intentional space for alignment, release, and reconnection to their inner wisdom. Where is your safe and sacred place? Where do you find growth? Is it in nature, with friends, at home, or maybe in another country while on vacation? Where do you feel most like yourself? For me, it happens when I am away. When I have time to sit quietly without worrying about what's next or where I have to be. When you strip away all of the titles: wife, mom, daughter, sister, what are you left with? Who are you, and how do you build from there? For the past several years, I have worked at a sleepaway summer camp. For me, it's not necessarily about the work I do for camp. Instead, it's about the work I pour into myself while I'm there. Camp has become one of my sacred places. Stepping away to come back to myself Every summer, I step away from my normal routine and enter this little bubble in the mountains. Almost immediately, something begins to shift. Maybe it's the mountain air. Maybe it's waking up surrounded by green instead of concrete. Maybe it's the cooler temperatures that allow me to spend so much more time outside. Whatever it is, I can feel myself reset. I currently live in Florida, where the heat and humidity can limit how much time I spend outdoors. But at camp, nature becomes part of my everyday life again. I walk, sometimes 15,000 steps or more a day. I wake up and meditate. I hydrate. I stretch. At night, I journal. These aren't necessarily things I don't do at home. I do. But at home, they have to coexist with all of my other roles and responsibilities. At camp, I have space. Space to breathe, think, heal, and simply be Rosalba. Something about that mountain air feels cleansing to me. It's almost as though with every deep breath, I'm clearing out some of the heaviness I've been carrying. My mind becomes quieter. My body feels different. My spirit feels lighter. I am cleansing and nourishing more than my physical body. I am tending to my spirit and soul. Sometimes healing looks like stillness I've realized that I don't need much to feel grounded. Give me nature, quiet, a journal, and a little space to hear myself again. I enjoy the stillness, meditating, journaling, and simply sitting with myself. But being at camp has also taught me that healing isn't always about being alone. Sometimes healing comes through connection. Over the span of a summer, you are thrown into this bubble with people from different countries, cultures, and walks of life. You live together. You work together. You eat together. You laugh together. Yes, sometimes you have to figure out how to coexist when personalities, habits, and perspectives are completely different. In this environment, you learn so much about yourself and others. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, beautiful relationships begin to form. Over the years, I have made friendships at camp that I know will last far beyond a summer. People who entered my life because we happened to be in the same place at the same time and became part of my story. Those bonds have become part of what makes this place sacred to me too. Learning to recognize what I need Camp has also helped me understand how important it is for me to regulate my nervous system. Living and working closely with so many different people can teach you a lot about your own triggers, boundaries, and needs. I've learned to recognize when I need a break, mentally, physically, or sometimes both. That lesson doesn't end when summer does. Whether you're at college living with a roommate, at work navigating different personalities, raising a family, or simply moving through everyday life, we all encounter situations that challenge our sense of stability. The question is, do you recognize when your body, mind, and spirit are asking you to stop? I'm learning to listen. I'm learning that taking a break isn't always about escaping. Sometimes it's about regulating, restoring, and giving yourself what you need so you can return differently. Coming home different Some people may look at spending this much time away each summer and think it's too much. But I have been fortunate to experience it alongside my two boys and with a supportive husband waiting for us at home. Every year, I come home a little different. A little clearer, lighter, and a little more connected to myself. The interesting thing is that my sacred place isn't sacred simply because it's in the mountains. Camp has shown me what I need to begin creating more of that feeling wherever I am. Nature. Movement. Stillness. Reflection. Connection. Space. Maybe that's the real gift of finding a sacred place. We think we're looking for somewhere to escape to, when perhaps what we're really looking for is a place that reminds us how to come home to ourselves. So I'll leave you with the same question I started with: Where is your sacred place? Where do you go to reset, recharge, and grow? When you leave that place, what version of you comes home? Follow me on Instagram for more info! Read more from Rosalba De La Rosa-Ruiz Rosalba De La Rosa-Ruiz, Spiritual Wellness Practitioner Rosalba “Rosie” De La Rosa-Ruiz is a Reiki Practitioner, channeler, yoga teacher, and sound healer devoted to guiding others through transformative healing experiences. Blending energy work, intuitive guidance, movement, and sacred sound, she creates heart-centered spaces that support deep release and reconnection. Through her circles, classes, and one-on-one sessions, Rosie empowers others to align with their inner wisdom and step into greater balance and authenticity. Her writing carries the same intention, offering insight, inspiration, and practical tools for the healing journey. Connect with Rosie to explore more of her work and upcoming offerings.

For Quentin Fischer, growth has rarely come from having everything figured out. More often, it has come from putting himself in situations where he has no choice but to learn. The South Riding, Virginia entrepreneur is still early in his professional journey, but the experiences he has gained through sports, customer-facing jobs, automotive sales, and now entrepreneurship have already shaped how he thinks about progress. Rather than waiting for confidence to arrive before taking action, Fischer has learned to see action itself as one way confidence is built. “In the past, my biggest obstacle felt like it was me holding myself back,” Fischer says. “When I started doing more things and learning more, I truly felt more success.” That realization continues to influence the standards he sets for himself today. Learning to get out of his own way Fischer grew up in South Riding, Virginia, where sports were a regular part of his younger years. He played Little League baseball, soccer, and Dulles Youth Football, experiences that introduced him early to competition, teamwork, and the importance of consistently showing up. At Freedom High School, his interests began shifting toward business. He took numerous business courses before graduating in 2022 and later studied Business Administration at Northern Virginia Community College. But some of Fischer’s most valuable lessons would eventually come outside the classroom. His early work experience included a job at Manhattan Pizza, where he worked as both a delivery driver and an in-store employee. It may not have been a traditional introduction to entrepreneurship, but interacting with customers gave Fischer practical experience that would become increasingly valuable as his career developed. His next move into automotive sales challenged him in a different way. As a sales consultant at Chevrolet, Fischer helped customers identify vehicles that matched their needs. The job required more than knowing about cars. He had to learn how to communicate with different personalities, listen to what customers were actually looking for, handle rejection, and adjust his approach in real time. Those experiences began changing how he thought about personal growth. Fischer describes himself as hardworking, adaptable, and “always learning.” He also recognizes that confidence can sometimes become ego if it prevents someone from recognizing where they still need to improve. For him, becoming more capable has meant being willing to examine both. When a failed sale became a lesson One experience from Fischer’s time in automotive sales still stands out. After losing a sale, he could have dismissed the interaction and moved on. Instead, he replayed what happened and considered where the conversation went wrong. “I walked myself through everything that happened and why it happened,” he recalls. When another customer arrived, Fischer had an opportunity to put those observations into practice. This time, he made the sale. The outcome mattered, but the process behind it mattered more. The experience reinforced an idea that Fischer now carries into entrepreneurship: a setback becomes much more useful when you are willing to study it. From that perspective, failure does not automatically produce growth. Reflection does. Circumstances outside someone's control will always exist, particularly in sales and business. Fischer has become more focused on what he can influence: how he responds. That mindset is reflected in one of the beliefs that motivates him most: “No one else will do it but me.” For Fischer, the phrase is not about refusing help. His parents are two of the most influential people in his life, and he is now working closely with his father to build a business. Instead, it represents personal responsibility. Support can come from other people. Responsibility for taking action ultimately remains with the individual. Choosing unfamiliar situations One of Fischer's approaches to continued growth is intentionally simple: put himself in environments he would not typically enter. “I try to always learn and throw myself into environments that I don't typically do,” he says. This approach is built around discomfort rather than avoiding it. Staying within familiar situations can feel safe, but it also limits the number of new problems a person has to solve. Fischer sees unfamiliar environments as opportunities to observe, ask questions, and discover where his abilities still need development. That willingness to learn has become especially important as he enters entrepreneurship. Fischer is currently working alongside his father to develop a new business. They are researching manufacturers and working through the early decisions involved in turning an idea into an operating company. Unlike selling an established product for someone else's organization, entrepreneurship introduces a different kind of uncertainty. No existing roadmap guarantees the right decision. For Fischer, that is part of the appeal. He does not expect to know every answer at this stage. Instead, he focuses on getting better at finding those answers. Holding himself to his own standards The internet has made it easier than ever for young entrepreneurs to compare themselves with people who appear further ahead. Fischer tries to resist that temptation. When asked whose expectations matter most to him, his answer is straightforward: his own. That does not mean outside advice has no value. Quite the opposite. Fischer considers continuous learning one of the qualities he wants to maintain throughout his career. But there is a difference between learning from others and allowing someone else's timeline to define your progress. For a young entrepreneur, that distinction can be particularly important. Business success is often presented through milestones: launching a company, reaching a revenue target, gaining recognition, or achieving rapid growth. What receives less attention is the period before those milestones, when much of the work consists of learning, experimenting, making mistakes, and developing judgment. Fischer is currently living in that stage, and he is not trying to disguise it. He is building experience while building the business. The influence of family Although Fischer places significant emphasis on personal responsibility, his outlook has also been shaped by his family. When considering the people who have influenced him most, he points immediately to his mother and father. His community involvement has also included volunteering alongside his mother at food drives, including helping host one themselves. Now, his relationship with his father is entering another chapter as the two work together on their business. Building a company with a family member introduces its own learning curve. Ideas have to move beyond conversation and become decisions. Manufacturers have to be researched. Opportunities have to be evaluated. Long-term ambitions have to be balanced against practical realities. For Fischer, those experiences provide another opportunity to learn by doing. Rather than presenting entrepreneurship as a solo pursuit, his experience illustrates the balance between accepting guidance from people you trust and remaining accountable for your own development. Why being ready may be overrated One of the challenges of starting anything new is believing there will eventually be a moment when everything aligns. Sometimes there is. More often, preparation and uncertainty exist at the same time. Fischer's early career has begun teaching him that waiting for complete confidence can easily become another way of avoiding action. His own progress accelerated when he began doing more, entering unfamiliar situations, and accepting that some lessons could only be learned through experience. That philosophy does not mean acting without preparation. It means recognizing that preparation eventually has to become participation. It is a lesson he learned in sales and one he is now carrying into business ownership. Fischer is still early in that journey. He does not claim to have decades of entrepreneurial experience or a perfect formula for success. Instead, he is focused on building the habits he believes will give him the best chance of creating something meaningful: adaptability, self-reflection, consistency, and an openness to learning. He also recognizes that ambition has another side. “I think it can take a mental toll,” Fischer says of pursuing success. “But when a person feels success, you'll never want to stop.” Learning how to manage that drive may ultimately become another part of his development. For now, Fischer is less interested in appearing as though he has reached the destination than he is in continuing to move forward. His approach can be reduced to a straightforward idea: do more, learn from what happens, and adjust. Sometimes growth does not begin when everything aligns. Sometimes it begins when you decide to start anyway.

A job change is usually discussed in terms of responsibilities, relationships and performance. Yet many first-week frustrations are administrative: a payroll detail is wrong, a legal name does not match a record, an emergency contact is outdated, or an important document cannot be found when HR asks for it. That is why career preparation should include a short personal-records audit. Instead of waiting for onboarding requests to reveal gaps, set aside time before your start date to check the information that connects your identity, finances, benefits, and professional life. The goal is not to create more paperwork. It is to remove small sources of friction before they become distracting problems. For professionals working in the United States, identity records deserve particular attention. Someone who has never previously been issued one may need to prepare an application for a new social security card, while other employees may need to deal with changes or inconsistencies in their existing records through the appropriate channels. Whatever your circumstances, check requirements early rather than discovering a missing document during onboarding. 1. Make your identity details consistent Start with the information that appears repeatedly across employment and financial records: your legal name, current address and other identifying details. A recent marriage, divorce, relocation or immigration milestone can leave different systems showing different information. Even a minor variation in a name can create unnecessary back-and-forth when several records need to be matched. Create one authoritative personal reference sheet for yourself. Record the exact spelling and format you use on your current identity documents, along with your address and key contact information. Do not send this sheet casually by email; its purpose is to help you check records consistently. HR teams also have their own preparation work. Reviewing a reputable new-hire onboarding checklist can help employees understand how much coordination may be happening before their first day. 2. Verify payroll and banking information Few administrative errors attract attention faster than a problem with your first paycheck. If your employer offers direct deposit, confirm the account and routing details you intend to provide rather than copying them from an old form. This is especially important if you recently changed banks, closed an account or reorganized your finances. It is also worth reviewing the name associated with the receiving account. The onboarding period is a good moment to retire outdated payment instructions instead of carrying them into another job. For entrepreneurs moving between employment and self-employment, keep business and personal payment records clearly separated. Good record management becomes increasingly valuable as income sources multiply. If your new job involves relocating, housing paperwork should also be part of your preparation. Keep documents such as proof of income, employment details, identification, and a rental application form readily available so you can respond quickly when applying for a new home. Having these records organized can make the transition smoother, especially when your move and start date are close together. 3. Review benefits and emergency contacts Administrative records are not only about getting paid. A new role may trigger fresh decisions about insurance, retirement contributions, beneficiaries and emergency contacts. Before completing benefit forms, check whether the people listed in your existing records still reflect your intentions. Major life changes can make old information surprisingly easy to overlook. Do the same with emergency contacts. Confirm current phone numbers, relationships and addresses. These fields are often completed quickly during onboarding and then ignored for years, so deliberate review is more useful than simply copying whatever you entered at your last company. Employers can make this transition easier too. Gallup's guidance on building a better onboarding process emphasizes that onboarding extends beyond paperwork to the people, learning and processes that help someone settle into a role. 4. Align your professional identity Your administrative identity and your professional identity should evolve together. Review your résumé, professional biography, portfolio and networking profiles. Update the details that have genuinely changed, but avoid rushing to rewrite everything on your first day. Your understanding of a new position will become more precise after you have spent time in it. If the new job represents a larger pivot, Brainz Magazine's guidance on planning a career transition offers a useful framework for thinking about goals, transferable skills and professional positioning. The practical principle is simple: make sure the version of your career story that people find online still matches the direction you are actually taking. 5. Create a secure home for important records Finding documents quickly is useful. Protecting them is more important. Avoid leaving identity records scattered across email attachments, unprotected cloud folders and phone photos. Decide which documents genuinely need digital copies, give files clear names, and use secure storage with strong access controls. Apply the same discipline to paper records. Experian's identity-theft prevention guidance highlights the importance of protecting documents containing sensitive personal and financial information. A simple system works better than an elaborate one you will not maintain. Separate identity, employment, banking, insurance and career records, then schedule a brief review whenever a major life or work change occurs. Turn career transitions into administrative reset points A new role already demands attention. Your records should support that transition rather than compete with it. Before day one, check identity details, payment information, benefits, emergency contacts and professional profiles. Then organize the documents behind those records securely. A short administrative reset can prevent avoidable interruptions later and give you more space to focus on the work, relationships and opportunities that actually define the next stage of your career.

Written by Tonya Walley, SVP Field Operations and Vendor Management Tonya Walley is an executive leader, keynote speaker, and author of Built to Climb: Claiming Your Voice, Power, and Path. Known for her rare journey from frontline field technician to Senior Vice President, she helps leaders navigate growth, resilience, and transformational leadership with confidence and purpose. In my last Brainz article, I wrote about how I used artificial intelligence to free up time to lead. I shared how AI was helping me summarize information, analyze operational data, prepare for meetings, draft communications, and spend less of my day managing information. But something interesting happened along the way. I started asking myself: "Why am I only using this at work?" Like many executives, my life doesn’t become less complicated when I leave the office. I’m an executive. I’m an author. I’m a wife and a mother. I’m a sister. Right now, I’m also helping someone I love navigate one of the most difficult chapters of her life. I’ve started using artificial intelligence (AI) to manage some of the complexity of my personal life, too. I may be finding even more value there. When life becomes the bigger project My sister was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2024. She lives in California, thousands of miles away from our family in New Jersey. As her circumstances changed, we decided to relocate her to New Jersey so she could be closer to family and have a stronger support system around her. When we first started talking about it, it sounded relatively straightforward. Move my sister from California to New Jersey. Then I started making the list. We needed to pack and move the contents of her apartment, coordinate movers, arrange my travel to California, find temporary accommodations while I packed, disconnect utilities, plan accessible air travel home, and think through transportation in New Jersey. Moving her belongings was only one workstream. Questions came up about medical care, insurance, benefits, prescriptions, doctors, housing, in-home support, and how we would build an entirely new infrastructure around her life. All while continuing to run my own. I am an operations executive. Complex planning is literally part of what I do. But this was different. When the person at the center of the plan is your sister, and she is battling brain cancer, you’re not approaching the problem with the emotional distance you might have at work. That’s where AI became unexpectedly valuable. I treated the move like an operating plan I started putting the pieces into AI. Here is what has to happen. Here are the dates. Here are the constraints. What am I missing? Then I kept going. Build me a transition plan. Sequence the activities. What needs to happen before I arrive in California? What needs to happen while I’m there? What needs to be completed before we get on the plane? What needs to be waiting for her in New Jersey? What questions should I be asking about health insurance? What services might a disabled adult need when relocating between states? What could go wrong? What am I forgetting? Suddenly, this enormous emotional undertaking became a series of manageable workstreams. AI didn’t take responsibility for the move. I did. It didn’t make decisions about my sister’s care. Our family and her medical team did. I verified information before acting on it, particularly anything involving healthcare, benefits, travel, or finances. What AI did was help me organize the complexity. That reduced something executives don’t talk about enough–cognitive load. The invisible work follows us home Many high-performing people are carrying an enormous amount of invisible work. We remember the doctor’s appointment, the school deadline, the prescription that needs to be refilled, the trip that needs to be booked, the parent who needs help, the bill that needs attention, the birthday we can’t forget, the work presentation due Monday, and sometimes, the sister who needs to be moved across the country while navigating cancer. All of those open loops take up mental space. We talk a lot about AI improving workplace productivity. I think there is another conversation worth having. Can AI help us reduce the administrative burden of life? I’m beginning to believe it can. My personal AI workflows look different At work, I may ask AI to analyze performance data or prepare an executive briefing. At home, the questions are very different. Help me build a packing plan. Compare these travel options. Create a checklist. Organize these appointments. Build a family schedule. Research questions I should ask. Create a grocery list from this meal plan. Help me think through everything required for this trip. Take this enormous project and break it into something I can actually execute. None of these tasks individually seems overwhelming. Collectively, they can consume hours. More importantly, they consume attention. Then I asked AI to help me plan something completely different. After my sister’s move, I have another trip planned. Sedona. This time the assignment wasn’t, Help me manage a crisis. It was, Help me restore. I wanted the trip to feel intentional, not like another itinerary I had to manage. So I used AI to help think through the experience I wanted rather than simply searching for hotels and activities. Wellness. Space. Nature. Time to decompress. Spa experiences that aligned with the kind of restoration I was seeking, including chakra work and a Four Hands Abhyanga Shirodhara treatment. An itinerary with enough structure that I wouldn’t have to figure everything out once I arrived, but enough open space that I wouldn’t return home needing a vacation from my vacation. AI helped me compare options, think through the experience, sequence the days, and create something that felt less like a trip and more like an intentional reset. That may sound like a small thing compared with moving someone across the country. I don’t think it is. Restoration belongs on the plan too Executives are very good at planning for outcomes. We create operating plans, transformation plans, succession plans, strategic plans, and development plans. What many of us aren’t nearly as disciplined about is planning for restoration. We wait until we’re exhausted. Then we take a vacation. Sometimes we bring the same pace that exhausted us along for the trip. I am learning to think differently about that. AI helped me plan the difficult thing, moving my sister. But it also helped me plan what comes afterward. Rest. Reflection. Recovery. Space to think. There is something powerful about using the same technology that helps us move faster to intentionally help us slow down. The goal isn’t to fill the time AI gives back This may be my biggest lesson so far. When we talk about productivity, we assume any time we save should immediately be reinvested into producing more. If AI saves an hour, we schedule another meeting. If it makes a task faster, we add another task. If it creates capacity, we fill it. I’m trying not to do that. Some of the capacity AI gives me absolutely goes back into my work. It gives me more time for strategic thinking, developing leaders, solving complex problems, writing, and building the next chapter of my career and business. But some of it belongs somewhere else. With my family. With my sister. With myself. Sometimes the highest-value use of an hour isn’t another deliverable. Sometimes it’s dinner without your phone. A conversation with your child. Sitting beside someone you love. Reading a book. Walking through Sedona. Or doing absolutely nothing. AI still requires human judgment The same caution I shared in my previous article applies even more when AI crosses into our personal lives. AI can be wrong. It can hallucinate information. It can misunderstand context. Verify information involving healthcare, government benefits, travel requirements, financial decisions, or other high-impact matters with authoritative sources and qualified professionals when appropriate. I don’t outsource judgment to AI. I use it to organize information, identify questions, explore possibilities, and create a starting point. AI does the organizing. I still do the deciding. That distinction matters. Maybe we need a different definition of productivity For much of my career, productivity meant getting more done. I’m beginning to think about it differently. Maybe productivity isn’t just about output. Maybe it is also about creating enough capacity to be present in the parts of our lives that don’t appear on a performance scorecard. My sister’s journey has taught me a lot about that. There will always be another email, another meeting, another presentation, another business problem waiting to be solved. But some moments don’t come back. AI cannot sit beside my sister. It cannot be a mother to my children. It cannot be a partner to my wife. It cannot restore me. But if it can take some of the planning, searching, organizing, comparing, and administrative work off my plate, it can give me something incredibly valuable–more capacity to do those things myself. I’m still early in figuring out how AI fits into my life. But I’m increasingly convinced that its greatest value may not be helping us do more. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Tonya Walley Tonya Walley, SVP Field Operations and Vendor Management Tonya Walley is Senior Vice President, keynote speaker, and author of Built to Climb: Claiming Your Voice, Power, and Path. A first-generation college graduate, she built her career from the frontline of the telecommunications industry to executive leadership, leading large-scale operations, business transformation, and high-performing teams. With more than three decades of leadership experience across telecommunications, technology, and nonprofit sectors, she is recognized for connecting operational excellence with people-centered leadership. Tonya is a recipient of the Most Powerful Women Award and the Luminary Award, and is recognised among influential women leaders.

Written by Tamsin Ward, Founder of Drums4Health Drums4Health exists to move the body and wake up the brain through rhythm-based movement that supports physical wellbeing, brain health and community connection. What if one of the clues to how well we are ageing is sitting quite literally in our hands? Handgrip strength is increasingly recognised in research as a simple marker associated with overall physical function, healthy ageing and mortality risk. It is also an area that has made me look at Drums4Health, the rhythm and movement programme I founded, through an entirely new lens. Because when we drum, we aren't only making music. Our hands, wrists, arms, brains and bodies are working together repeatedly. That has led me to an important question, "Could the simple act of drumming and moving also help us maintain some of the physical capabilities that become increasingly important as we age?" Why does grip strength matter? Grip strength sounds like a very specific measure. In reality, it can tell us something much broader about physical capability. It is normally measured using a handheld dynamometer, which records how much force someone can generate when they squeeze it. Research has repeatedly found associations between lower grip strength and poorer health outcomes. A major systematic review and meta-analysis published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) examined physical capability and subsequent mortality across tens of thousands of participants. Higher grip strength was associated with lower subsequent mortality. That does not mean having a strong handshake will make you live longer. Grip strength is better thought of as a useful marker, one small measurement that can provide information about wider muscular strength and physical resilience. That distinction matters. Rather than chasing longevity as simply “living for longer”, I am far more interested in how we help people remain capable, independent, socially connected and engaged in life for as long as possible. The Drums4Health connection When I first developed Drums4Health, grip strength wasn't at the front of my mind. My background spans music, education and fitness, and I was fascinated by what happens when we bring rhythmic learning and physical movement together. Drums4Health combines repeated drumming patterns with movement in an inclusive session that can be completed standing or seated. Participants aren't expected to be musicians, and they don't need to think of themselves as particularly fit. They simply move, drum, learn and connect. But the more sessions I delivered, particularly with older participants, the more I started looking beyond the obvious cardiovascular and wellbeing elements. Think about what the hands are doing during a drumming session. They are holding and controlling the sticks, repeatedly striking the drum, adjusting force and direction, coordinating left and right hands, changing rhythmic patterns and responding to movement and music. The wrists and forearms are continually involved too. That doesn't mean I can currently claim that Drums4Health increases grip strength. We haven't completed that research yet, but it gives us a very interesting question to investigate. Why everyday hand strength matters The importance of our hands becomes very obvious when we think about daily life, opening a jar, carrying shopping, preparing food, holding a handrail, gardening, turning a key, picking something up and getting dressed. These aren't athletic achievements. They're ordinary actions that contribute to independence and perhaps that's one of the problems with the way we sometimes talk about fitness and ageing. Exercise can become associated with gyms, sportswear, weights and structured workouts. For some people, particularly those who haven't exercised for years or who live with mobility limitations, that can feel like a world they don't belong in. I wanted Drums4Health to feel different. People can participate seated or standing. Movements can be adapted. Intensity can change from person to person. Instead of concentrating on completing repetitions, participants are concentrating on rhythm, learning a pattern and joining in with everyone around them. The exercise is still happening. It just doesn't necessarily feel like exercise. Movement plus rhythm gives the brain something to do too The hands are only one part of this story. One of the reasons I became so fascinated with drumming and movement was the cognitive challenge involved. Learning a rhythmic pattern requires attention, timing, coordination and memory. Add movement, and you are asking the brain and body to work together. Research into rhythmic movement in older adults is encouraging. A systematic review and meta-analysis involving 44 randomised controlled trials across 20 countries examined activities including music-based exercise, dance and drumming. The researchers reported improvements in physical function, global cognition and quality of life. That combination is particularly interesting to me. Why should we always separate physical health, brain health and social wellbeing into different activities? Perhaps some of the most useful approaches to healthy ageing are the ones that allow us to work on several things at once. There is another ingredient we shouldn't overlook: Connection There is something very powerful about a group of people drumming together. People look at one another. They laugh when a pattern goes wrong. They concentrate together. They hear themselves contributing to something bigger than their individual sound. I've watched people arrive at sessions unsure of themselves and gradually become part of the group. For me, that matters just as much as the movement. If we want people to remain active throughout their lives, we have to create activities they actually want to return to. The theoretically “perfect” exercise isn't much use if somebody hates doing it. Enjoyment, belonging and connection aren't optional extras. They can be part of what keeps people coming back. Now I want to measure what is happening This is where the next stage of Drums4Health becomes particularly exciting for me. As we grow and work increasingly with older adults, dementia organisations, community groups, schools and research partners, I don't simply want to say something works because people tell me they feel better. Their experiences matter enormously, but I also want evidence. Grip strength is one of the measures I am particularly interested in exploring. Could we measure participants' grip strength before and after a period of regular Drums4Health sessions? Could we look at changes alongside measures of mobility, coordination, wellbeing or cognitive engagement? Could the benefits differ between people participating seated and standing? And could we identify which elements of rhythmic movement create the greatest benefit? These are questions, not claims, but they are questions worth asking. Healthy ageing shouldn't start when we're old Perhaps the biggest lesson for me is that healthy ageing shouldn't suddenly become important when somebody reaches 70 or 80. The capabilities we want later in life are worth supporting much earlier. Strength, mobility, coordination, cognitive challenge and social connection. These things matter across generations. That is why I am increasingly passionate about creating something that isn't labelled an “older person's activity”. At Drums4Health sessions, people of different ages and physical abilities can participate alongside each other. Someone may drum seated while the person next to them completes a much larger range of movement. Both are part of the same experience. That inclusivity is fundamental to what I want Drums4Health to become. Perhaps longevity isn't really about adding years When people talk about longevity, the conversation can quickly become dominated by supplements, technology, expensive treatments and ways to extend lifespan. I'm interested in something much simpler. How do we help people keep doing the things that make life feel like life? How do we maintain enough strength to remain independent? How do we keep challenging our brains? How do we keep moving? How do we make sure we're still connecting with other people while we do it? I don't believe drumming is a magic answer to longevity. But perhaps the future of healthy ageing doesn't always have to look clinical or complicated. Sometimes it might look like a room full of people holding drumsticks, learning something new, moving their bodies, challenging their brains and laughing together while they do it. That is what I want Drums4Health to continue exploring. Move, drum, connect Drums4Health is an inclusive rhythm and movement wellbeing programme created by Tamsin Ward, combining physical movement, rhythmic learning and social connection. Sessions can be adapted for seated or standing participation and are being developed across community, education and wellbeing settings. As Drums4Health grows, we are particularly interested in partnerships with organisations and researchers who want to explore measurable outcomes around healthy ageing, physical function, brain health and wellbeing. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Tamsin Ward Tamsin Ward, Founder of Drums4Health 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. You can contact her directly here.

Written by Luannah Victoria Arana, Mentor, Author, Healing Facilitator, and Visionary Luannah Victoria Arana is a transformational mentor, international #1 bestselling author, and founder of the SoulSpectives Institute and Serenity By The Sea. Drawing on over three decades of study and practice, she explores trauma, resilience, emotional mastery, embodiment, and what it means to truly come alive. Something profound happened for me recently, and it continues to reveal deeper layers of insight and understanding. Interestingly, the doorway was technology. Technology has probably been one of the greatest activators of expansion in my life, even though I actually used to avoid it like the plague. Fun fact: there was a time when I was afraid of computers. I wanted nothing to do with them or the internet. AI? Forget it. Now here I am building apps, creating courses, working with AI, learning new programs, running businesses and doing things I genuinely could not have imagined myself doing even five or ten years ago. In many ways, technology has become one of the places where I get to witness our extraordinary human capacity to expand beyond what once overwhelmed us. I think this matters enormously in entrepreneurship and leadership because building something asks us to continually enter territory we don't yet know how to navigate. We solve one problem and meet another. We master one skill and discover the next. We make decisions without guarantees. We adapt. We stretch. We fail. We learn. We try again. At some point, every entrepreneur meets an outer wall that touches an inner one. Sometimes the wall we're facing in our business isn't only a business problem. Sometimes it touches something much older. When the problem in front of us activates the story behind us Recently, while I was working on something new, I hit one of those technological walls. You know the ones. You've followed all the instructions. You're doing what you're supposed to be doing. Still, it isn't working. I kept trying and trying. Eventually, I could feel something happening inside me that was much bigger than the technology in front of me. My nervous system was becoming overwhelmed. In my mind, I knew I would eventually find a solution. But my biology was moving in the opposite direction of that knowing. I could feel the surge of activation in my body. Anxiety was rising. My ability to think clearly was beginning to disappear. It was a perfect lived reminder of something I teach: Knowing something cognitively is not always enough to help our biology shift. Underneath the activation, I could feel an old, familiar message beginning to rise: I can't do this. Why can't I do this? As the overwhelm rose, I did what I have spent years learning and practicing. The more I've healed my own nervous system, the greater my capacity has become to land in the moment when I'm activated and to become present enough to recognize what is happening inside me rather than simply being carried away by it. This is the work I teach, and it is also the work I continue to live. Healing doesn't mean there are no more layers. It means that when another layer reveals itself, we have greater capacity to meet it. So instead of forcing myself through the overwhelm, I became curious about it because this feeling had a history. What if avoidance isn't where the story begins? Over the years, as I've unlocked more of my own trauma patterns, I have thought of avoidance as one of the things I've had to overcome. Yes, I can avoid things. Give me paperwork that needs completing, invoices to send, emails to answer, forms, fine print or too many tiny steps, and there's a pretty good chance they'll find their way into the I'll do that later pile. I've even given that part of myself a nickname: Last Minute Lucy. I've become vastly better at this over the years, yet the pattern can still appear. But as I stayed with the experience this time, I saw something I hadn't seen quite this clearly before. Avoidance wasn't the first movement. Overwhelm was. My nervous system had learned to protect me from overwhelm through avoidance. That distinction may sound small. Inside of me, it changed everything. I followed the felt sense in my body deeper, back toward its roots. I found myself connecting with the little girl I had been after my mother left, after my sister's accident, while I was also being bullied at school. At seven years old, I had lost the life I knew. My nervous system was overwhelmed. In those days, we didn't have the trauma-informed understanding we have today. Nobody was looking at this little girl and asking, What happened to her? What is her nervous system trying to cope with? Instead, people looked at what I could and couldn't do. I couldn't focus properly. I couldn't retain information. I struggled to learn. Teachers became frustrated with me. I was teased. I was called stupid. Eventually, I was placed in a special education class. During this experience, I didn't simply remember those things. I felt her. I accessed a deep, guttural emotional pain that had been held in my body from that time, the pain of a little girl who had already lost so much, whose inner world had been turned upside down, and who was then being told, directly and indirectly, that something was wrong with her because she couldn't function the way everyone expected her to. Because I have spent years building the capacity to stay present with myself, I could sit with her there. I could witness what was emerging. I could use EFT tapping. I could let my body feel what it needed to feel. I could be with the pain she couldn't possibly have known how to be with then. She didn't fail to learn Then another memory came. I remembered being about fifteen years old and desperately trying to study for a test. I would read a sentence and try to remember just three words. Three words. By the time I reached for the pen to write them down, they were gone. I couldn't hold them. I remember what that felt like. I can see something now that I couldn't possibly have understood then: That little girl didn't fail to learn. Her available capacity had been consumed by survival. Nobody around me understood that. Because they didn't understand it, neither did I. So I interpreted the consequences of trauma as evidence about my worth and intelligence: I can't. I'm not smart. I'm stupid. I'm not enough. That's where “I can't” became more than a thought. It became embodied. Those beliefs didn't appear out of nowhere. They were conclusions a young nervous system formed while trying to make sense of experiences it didn't yet have the context to understand. This is where I think the layers of healing are extraordinary. What happened that day wasn't some magical moment in which I suddenly overcame something I had carried all my life. Quite the opposite. It was the fruit of all the capacity I've been building for years. Years of learning how to become present when my nervous system is activated. Years of learning to listen rather than override. Years of healing the ripple effects of those early experiences. Years of practicing what I now teach and share with others. Because that capacity exists now, I could descend another layer. I could witness what was there. I could feel what had been waiting to be felt. Then I could return to my life differently. Capacity changes what becomes possible Decades after those childhood experiences, I was sitting in front of a computer feeling the echo of that same response. Except something was different. I was different. The overwhelm came, but I didn't leave myself in it. I noticed. I breathed. I did my EFT tapping. I reassured the part of me that was becoming frightened. I felt my biology begin to move back toward regulation. Eventually, I lay down for a few minutes and allowed my body to settle. Then I got back up. I returned to the computer, and I did the thing. That's when I saw the two pathways so clearly. The old pathway had been trigger, overwhelm, then escape. Through years of healing and repeated practice, another pathway has gradually become available: trigger, overwhelm, awareness, regulation, rest, then return. What struck me most was this: Overwhelm exists in both. Healing didn't remove overwhelm from the human experience. It expanded my capacity to meet it. Ohhhh. There it was. Perhaps this is what expansion really requires We talk so much about healing as releasing the past, resolving trauma, regulating the nervous system and changing beliefs. Yes. It is all of those things. But what are we doing all of that for? To become more available to life. To expand beyond the places where our biology once had to say, Too much. Not safe. I can't. Get me out of here. Discover that today, another possibility may exist. For entrepreneurs, creators and leaders, I believe this matters profoundly. We often talk about expanding a business as though expansion were primarily strategic: better systems, better marketing, more visibility, more revenue, a larger audience. But every outer expansion asks something of the person creating it. Can I tolerate greater uncertainty? Can I remain present when something doesn't work? Can I learn what I don't yet know without turning temporary incompetence into an identity? Can I stay in relationship with myself while solving the problem in front of me? Can I meet complexity without immediately interpreting discomfort as evidence that I'm incapable? Our businesses can only expand sustainably to the degree that we develop the capacity to remain present inside the expansion they require of us. This is why I don't believe capacity is built by forcing ourselves beyond overwhelm. Capacity is built by repeatedly returning from overwhelm without abandoning ourselves. Every time we do that, we expand the possibilities of how we can meet the next moment. The circumstances that once defined the edge of our world can eventually become the very places where new capacity grows. I know that intimately. I didn't learn this territory only through books or trainings, although I've spent decades studying healing and transformation. I've lived it. I've walked the miles. Nature has been one of my teachers. Creativity has been one of my medicines. Movement, spirituality, sound, relationship, the body, the soul, and an almost relentless curiosity about why we are the way we are and what actually allows us to change have all shaped this journey. I've fallen down and gotten back up more times than I could possibly count. Gradually, the life available to me became larger. Not because life stopped activating me. Not because I became some perfectly regulated human being who never gets overwhelmed. God, no. But because fewer and fewer moments require me to abandon myself in order to survive them. That, to me, is freedom. Leadership from the inside out Perhaps this is also one of the most overlooked dimensions of leadership. Before we lead companies, teams, communities or movements, we are continually being asked to steward what happens within ourselves. Not control it. Not suppress it. Not pretend fear doesn't exist. But develop enough awareness and capacity that an activated nervous system doesn't automatically become the author of our next decision. I have often said that being an entrepreneur has been one of the deepest spiritual schools of my life because business doesn't only ask us what we can create. It reveals us to ourselves. Our businesses, our relationships, our challenges, even the things that frustrate us, can become remarkably accurate mirrors of our inner world. Where do I become intolerant? Where does fear surface? Where do I doubt myself? Where do I become defensive, impatient, controlling or overwhelmed? Where am I afraid to be seen? Where do I want to leave when something becomes difficult? We can deal with each of those experiences only at the level where it appears: solve the problem, manage the conflict, fix the technology, change the strategy, push through the frustration. Sometimes, of course, that's exactly what needs to happen. But I've discovered that every trigger can also become a doorway to know ourselves more deeply, if we choose to open it. That technological wall could have remained a technological wall. Instead, it became a doorway. This has happened again and again throughout my entrepreneurial journey. Every doorway I've been willing to open, every trigger I've become curious about, every inner limitation I've learned to meet differently has expanded more than my capacity to handle that particular situation. It has expanded my business. It has expanded my creativity. It has expanded my capacity to take risks, solve problems, communicate, navigate uncertainty, remain in relationship and meet the moment in front of me. Perhaps this is why entrepreneurship can be such a profound spiritual unfolding. When we create something of our own and bring it into the world, we are making ourselves vulnerable. We're bringing our ideas, our creativity, our values, our vision, some expression of who we are, out of the safety of our inner world and into relationship with other people and with life itself. There will be feedback. There will be uncertainty. There will be rejection. There will be things that don't work. There will be moments when our vision exceeds our current capacity and asks us to grow into the person capable of carrying it. Business gives us endless opportunities to discover where we are still protecting, contracting, doubting, controlling or leaving ourselves. But it also gives us endless opportunities to expand. That's the spiritual school. Not because business itself is inherently spiritual, but because anything that continually brings us into relationship with ourselves, other people, uncertainty, vulnerability, creativity, and life can become a place of profound self-discovery. Sometimes we need tools. Sometimes we need practices. Sometimes we need support to understand what our biology is doing instead of judging ourselves for it. Life has shown me that it is absolutely possible, even when we have spent years believing that our nervous system defines the limits of our lives, to gradually discover that those limits are not necessarily fixed. With presence, compassion, awareness and repeated practice, we can build new capacity. We can learn to remain where we once had to leave. We can meet differently what once overwhelmed us. The places that once seemed to mark the edge of what was possible can become the very places through which our possibilities expand. That's where the magic is. So if you recognize yourself somewhere in this, if overwhelm becomes avoidance, shutdown, procrastination, reactivity, perfectionism or simply that familiar “I can't,” perhaps there is another question available. Not “Why am I like this?” but “What became too much for me once, and what would allow me to meet it differently now?” That's a very different doorway. Perhaps the next time business or life brings us to one of those seemingly immovable walls, alongside asking “How do I solve this?” we might also ask, “What is this moment showing me about myself?” Healing for me isn't about becoming someone else. It is about becoming increasingly available to ourselves, to our purpose, to our leadership and to the life that was always waiting for us beyond the places we once had to leave. Trigger to overwhelm to awareness to regulation to rest to return. Then, possibilities open beyond our wildest dreams. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Luannah Victoria Arana Luannah Victoria Arana, Mentor, Author, Healing Facilitator, and Visionary Luannah Victoria Arana is a transformational mentor, international #1 bestselling author, and founder of the SoulSpectives Institute for Personal Transformation and Serenity By The Sea Healing Retreats. For more than three decades, she has studied and practiced approaches to trauma healing, emotional resilience, embodiment, and personal transformation. Her work bridges lived experience, therapeutic and somatic practices, traditional wisdom, and contemporary understandings of the nervous system. Through her writing, retreats, mentoring, and courses, Luannah helps people move beyond survival, reclaim trust in themselves, and come fully alive.

Written by Kylie Gallaher, Clinical Hypnotherapist & Strategic Psychotherapist Blending innovation with compassion, Kylie Gallaher brings cutting-edge expertise in clinical hypnotherapy to empower lasting change. Grounded in evidence-based practice, her professional journey is dedicated to helping clients overcome challenges and thrive with confidence. Over the past year, I have written about Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) as it deserves to be understood, not as picky eating or a passing phase, but as a complex, trauma-informed, neurologically rooted experience organised around safety and threat. I have written about why awareness alone has not been enough, and why recognition without meaningful change leaves families and adults suspended in a difficult in-between. This article is where that conversation opens outward, because everything ARFID has taught me about the nervous system, about safety, and about how a single relationship with food can quietly reshape a whole life does not stop at ARFID. It reaches into how I have come to understand eating disorders more broadly, the inseparability of mind and body, and why an approach so often dismissed as “alternative” may, in fact, be one of the most logical places to begin. This is the natural continuation and expansion of the work I have shared so far, and I’d like to share it here. What ARFID taught me that applies to every eating disorder ARFID is distinct in its primary drivers. For people with ARFID, food avoidance is not about weight, shape, or control. It is about threat, a nervous system that has learned, often early and implicitly, that eating, swallowing, certain textures, sensations, or internal bodily cues are dangerous. But the deeper principle ARFID exposes is not unique to ARFID at all. What ARFID reveals with unusual clarity is that eating disorders are rarely, if ever, really about food. They are about what food has come to represent, which can be almost anything, safety or danger, control or predictability, comfort or punishment, a sense of worth or of identity itself. The behaviours we see on the surface, the restriction, avoidance, bingeing, purging, or rigid rules, are not the disorder itself. They are the visible expression of a nervous system and a mind that have quietly organised themselves around survival. Once you understand ARFID as a safety-seeking response rather than a behavioural problem, it becomes very difficult to look at any eating disorder the same way again. Eating disorders were never only about food When we widen the lens from ARFID to anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, or orthorexia, the surface presentations look strikingly different. The drivers differ too. Body image, weight, and control feature far more centrally in some presentations than in others, and those distinctions matter and should never be flattened. Yet, beneath the differences, a familiar architecture appears. In each, food and eating become the arena in which something far larger is being managed, a threat to be contained, an internal state to be regulated, a sense of control to be reclaimed in a life that feels uncontrollable, or a way of coping with distress that has no other outlet. The specific meaning varies enormously from person to person, but the underlying pattern is consistent, the relationship with food is doing work that has very little to do with nutrition. This is why approaches that focus only on the behaviour fall short. You can change what someone eats without touching why eating became so loaded in the first place. When the underlying drivers remain, the behaviour tends to return, migrate, or simply go underground, adapting rather than resolving. This is also why I tend to reach for a different word than “recovery.” Not because recovery does not matter, it matters deeply, but because, for me, the goal is not simply returning someone to a previous baseline or managing a condition indefinitely. It is freedom. Freedom to eat, to connect, to move through life without fear quietly running the show. There is a quieter shift underway that speaks to exactly this, even the field's own definitions of severity are moving beyond the scale. For a long time, how ill someone was assumed to be could be read, more or less, off the scale. That assumption has been loosening for years, and the field’s own language has moved with it. More than a decade ago, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) let go of anorexia’s rigid numeric weight cutoff in favour of the more qualitative “significantly low weight” and dropped the amenorrhea requirement altogether. The direction of travel has only continued. The body mass index (BMI) based severity bands still written into the manual are increasingly questioned, with cross-cultural research showing that thresholds drawn from Western norms travel poorly and wrongly cast a disproportionate share of patients as “extreme.” Atypical anorexia, the presentation in which someone can be seriously unwell while sitting at a normal, or even higher, weight, is now understood to be every bit as serious. Systematic reviews find eating disorder distress as high as, or higher than, in classic anorexia, and adolescent studies find that a substantial share need hospitalising for medical instability despite never being underweight. In 2026, a proposal led by eating disorder researcher Timothy Walsh went a step further again, setting out dedicated diagnostic criteria for atypical anorexia so that it is no longer treated as a lesser cousin of the “real” thing. Running through all of it is a single, quietly radical idea, that danger lives in the trajectory, not the number. The body responds to how far and how fast it has fallen, not to where it has landed. The picture itself does not stand still. Tracking three decades of presentations, longitudinal data from Japan has found people with restricting anorexia arriving progressively more unwell, lower in weight and higher in distress than those a generation before. These conditions, and the thresholds we reach for to measure them, are moving targets. In other words, the profession is arriving, in its own language, at something many people with lived experience have long known, stability on the surface is not the same as safety underneath. A living model: How eating disorders shape the whole person One of the most important things I have come to understand, first through ARFID and then across eating disorders more broadly, is that these are not conditions confined to the plate. They are whole-person, whole-life experiences. They behave less like a single problem with a list of side effects and more like a living, interconnected system. Consider how far the effects actually reach. An eating disorder shapes cognitive function because the brain, deprived of consistent, adequate nourishment, struggles with concentration, memory, flexibility, and emotional regulation, and because chronic threat narrows thinking toward vigilance and away from possibility. It shapes immune function, as nutritional compromise and sustained stress quietly erode the body’s capacity to protect itself. It disrupts sleep, which, in turn, worsens mood, cognition, and physiological regulation the very next day. It reshapes psychosocial engagement, as meals, celebrations, travel, dating, and everyday spontaneity become negotiated, narrowed, or avoided. It strains relationships, as those closest reorganise themselves around food, safety, and worry, often without recognising how much they are carrying. It profoundly affects the digestive system, where stress, restriction, and fear alter the gut directly, producing nausea, bloating, discomfort, and unpredictability. Crucially, these effects do not occur in isolation. They interact, reinforce, and compound one another over time. Nutritional deficiency affects the brain. Cognitive strain increases psychological stress. Chronic stress disrupts sleep, immunity, and digestion. Gut discomfort intensifies anxiety and avoidance. Social withdrawal deepens isolation, which feeds the very distress the eating disorder was attempting to manage. An eating disorder, in other words, is not a single problem with multiple consequences. It is a dynamic system that shapes how a person thinks, feels, heals, relates, and functions in the world. It does not simply affect what someone eats. It affects how they live, often in ways that remain unseen until the costs are significant. Once you see it as a living system rather than a discrete behaviour, one question becomes unavoidable. If the disorder lives everywhere in the body and the mind at once, why do we so often try to treat it in only one of those places? The mind and body were never separate We inherited a way of thinking that treats the mind and the body as different territories, cared for by different sets of professionals in different rooms. The psychologist attends to thoughts. The physician attends to the body. The dietitian attends to intake. Each offers something genuinely valuable. But when a person is treated in silos, the parts of their experience that most need to be understood together are the very parts that fall through the cracks. I know that gap intimately. My own journey into this field began when my son was falling through exactly those cracks, seen by specialist after specialist, each treating a piece, none holding the whole. Watching his world shrink because food was unsafe, I came to understand something I have not since been able to un-know. The mind and the body are not two systems that influence one another. They are one system, in constant conversation. For a long time, that conversation was understood mainly through the nervous system. But there is something prior to it and even more fundamental, the limbic brain’s appraisal, its rapid, largely subconscious assessment of safety and its vigilance for threat. This appraisal is a distinct neurological process. It precedes the state of the nervous system and sets it in motion, and it is, in turn, shaped by the signals the nervous system sends back. The two are intimately related, but they are not the same thing. One is the assessment of danger. The other is the bodily state that follows from it. Every fear, every memory, every sense of threat or safety is not only a thought. It is a physiological event, unfolding in the body, shaping heart rate, digestion, muscle tension, and the release of stress chemistry. This is why an eating disorder can begin as an emotional experience and end up written into the gut, and why a physical experience, such as illness, choking, or pain, can reorganise the mind around fear. At the centre of all of it sits the limbic brain, and within it the amygdala, the deeper structure that appraises, faster than conscious thought and largely independent of it, whether we are safe or in danger. That appraisal is then translated into a state of the nervous system, the body’s shift into mobilisation and vigilance, or into settling and ease. Emerging neurobiological work points the same way, implicating the brain regions involved in interoception, our sense of the body’s internal state, and in sensory integration, the very channels through which appraisal and bodily state continually inform one another. This is the part of the story most treatment models quietly leave out, and not because the science is unknown. Leading eating disorder clinicians, Carolyn Costin among them, have long recognised the amygdala’s central role in these conditions. The recognition is not the gap. The gap is what follows from it. The amygdala does not take instruction from the top down. It cannot be reasoned or willed into standing down because it responds to safety rather than to argument. So a model built on conscious, top-down change can name the amygdala accurately and still have no means to reach it. If safety and threat are appraised at the limbic level, beneath language and reasoning, and the nervous system takes its cue from that appraisal, then approaches that work only from the top down, through conscious thought and willpower, are speaking to the wrong floor of the building. They can be genuinely helpful, but they are often addressing the presenting issue more than the place where the pattern actually lives. The gut-brain axis: Where mind and body become undeniable If you want to see the mind-body connection at its most vivid, look at the gut. Digestive symptoms that once earned normal test results were long dismissed as “functional,” “stress-related,” or simply “in your head.” We understand them very differently now. Many are recognised as disorders of gut-brain interaction, conditions driven by altered communication between the gut, the brain, and the autonomic nervous system. The symptoms are real. They have biological and neurological foundations. Tellingly, they respond to approaches that support the nervous system, not only the digestive tract. I came to specialise in gut-directed hypnotherapy not as a separate interest, but as a direct consequence of working with Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) and eating disorders. Again and again, woven through presentations of anxiety, restrictive eating, trauma, and burnout, were the same quiet companions, nausea, bloating, pain, urgency, appetite changes, and an ongoing sense of internal unease. The body was speaking, even when the gut was not the reason someone had come to see me. This overlap is now being mapped in the research itself, with a 2025 scoping review documenting just how frequently ARFID and disorders of gut-brain interaction travel together. What makes gut-directed hypnotherapy so significant is not only that it works, but why it works. It is now recognised in clinical guidelines, including those of the American Gastroenterological Association, as part of the gold-standard behavioural treatment pathway for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and related gut-brain conditions. In the United Kingdom, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) similarly recommends hypnotherapy as an option for IBS that has not responded to first-line treatment. In Australia, researchers at Monash University have been central to the evidence, with a landmark trial finding gut-directed hypnotherapy as effective as the low-fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols (FODMAP) diet for IBS, and later work extending access through app-delivered programs. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis by Adler and colleagues reinforced this, finding that gut-directed hypnotherapy meaningfully improves symptoms, with around six in ten people achieving a substantial reduction in symptom severity. It directly influences visceral sensitivity, interoceptive awareness, autonomic activation, and conditioned fear responses, the very machinery of the gut-brain axis. In other words, one of the most evidence-based psychological treatments for a physical digestive condition is a form of hypnotherapy. Sit with that for a moment. A treatment addressed to the mind is a leading, guideline-recognised approach for a disorder of the body. The gut-brain axis does not simply hint that mind and body are connected. It demonstrates that they were never separate to begin with. The gut is the most vivid example, but not the only one. The same principle runs through psychoneuroimmunology, the study of how psychological states, the nervous system, and immunity continually shape one another. It is why the immune strand of the living model is not a side effect sitting off to one side, but part of the same integrated system, and why hypnosis, which has been shown to help protect immune function from the effects of stress, belongs in a genuinely whole-person approach. Why hypnotherapy is not alternative, but almost obvious Here is where the whole thread draws together. If eating disorders are organised around threat and safety, if that threat is appraised at the limbic level beneath conscious thought, and if the mind and body are a single system in constant conversation, then a treatment that can speak directly to the limbic brain’s appraisal, and through it to the nervous system state and the subconscious patterns that maintain fear, is not a fringe curiosity. It is a logical response to how the problem is actually built. This is what clinical hypnotherapy, at its best, is. Not mind control, and not a magic wand, but a deeply collaborative process that works from the bottom up as well as the top down, engaging directly with the subconscious, where patterns are stored and where the sense of threat is held. It allows change to happen at deeper, more integrated, and more sustainable levels than working with conscious thought alone. It is not about overriding the nervous system. It is about helping the limbic brain reappraise safety so that the nervous system can settle and new possibilities can open from the inside out. Positioned this way, hypnotherapy stops looking like an “alternative” to “real” treatment and starts looking like an obvious partner to it. It works alongside medical monitoring and nutritional support. Rather than sitting apart from psychological therapy, it is delivered within it. In my own practice, clinical hypnosis is integrated with evidence-based psychotherapy for eating disorders, principally Specialist Supportive Clinical Management (SSCM), carried with a cognitive behavioural scaffolding. SSCM is worth knowing about. It began as the comparison condition in a landmark trial by McIntosh and colleagues and went on to outperform both cognitive behavioural therapy and interpersonal therapy for anorexia nervosa, which is precisely why I chose to train in it. It has since become an established treatment in its own right, recommended in current clinical guidelines for anorexia nervosa in adults. Holding the psychological, physiological, and subconscious layers together, rather than parcelling them out to separate rooms, is what allows the work to reach the limbic and nervous system level where eating disorders are quietly maintained. For a condition that lives in the whole body and the whole life at once, this is not exotic. It is close to essential. Freedom as the point I keep returning to one word, and I return to it deliberately, freedom. Not management. Not compliance. Not a lifetime of shrinking carefully around threat. Let me be careful here, so this is not misread. It is not a case against recovery, and not a suggestion that recovery is anything less than worth every effort. It is that I have come to hold a different goal, one I believe reaches further. Recovery is often constructed as a return to a threshold, measured by whether someone can eat enough or tolerate enough to satisfy an external benchmark. Freedom is a different thing. It is not a line to cross, but a way of living no longer organised around fear. Real change, the kind that lasts, begins where the appraisal does. It happens when the limbic brain relearns safety so that the nervous system can finally settle into a different state. When that shift occurs, the effects are not confined to food. They ripple outward through the same living system the eating disorder once occupied, into cognition, sleep, immunity, relationships, digestion, and a person’s sense of themselves. I have watched this happen. I watched it first in my own home, where a world once built around three safe foods slowly, unforcedly, expanded into curiosity and confidence. I see it in clients whose lives have been quietly limited for years by food, by fear, by patterns running beneath awareness. When the limbic brain reappraises safety and the nervous system can follow, people do not simply eat differently. They live differently. They move from survival to safety, and from fear to the freedom to thrive. That is the thread running through everything I have written this year and everything I hope to keep exploring. ARFID opened the door. Eating disorders more broadly widened it. The mind-body connection, seen most clearly in the gut, explains why. Freedom, the real, embodied, whole-life kind, is what becomes possible when we finally treat the whole person at the level where change truly begins. A thoughtful next step If this article has shifted how you think about eating disorders, or about the relationship between your mind and your body, consider sharing it with someone who might need to see themselves in it, a partner, a family member, or a clinician walking alongside you. If you are living with an eating disorder, ARFID, or persistent gut symptoms, seek out practitioners who understand nervous system safety, the mind-body connection, and survival-based patterns, rather than behaviour change alone. If this way of working speaks to you, and you would like to see how it translates into care, reach out whenever you feel ready to take a first step. You can explore more of my writing, including the companion article to this piece and its full reference list, on the Newcastle Clinical Hypnotherapy blog. There is more to come, and every piece points toward the same possibility, that a calmer relationship with your body, your mind, and your food is achievable, and that you do not have to navigate it alone. Freedom to live, connect, and move through life without fear running the show. That is what this work is really about. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Kylie Gallaher Kylie Gallaher, Clinical Hypnotherapist, Strategic Psychotherapist Kylie Gallaher leads Newcastle Clinical Hypnotherapy, the region’s only specialised hypnotherapy team, offering comprehensive support in all areas where hypnotherapy is beneficial. With advanced qualifications and a focus on evidence-based methods, she has established herself as a leader in the field. Kylie specialises in ARFID, eating disorders, trauma, anxiety, and related conditions including gastrointestinal disorders, and is committed to reshaping treatment approaches in Australia. Her professional journey reflects a dedication to blending science with compassion, delivering measurable results and raising the standard of clinical hypnotherapy nationwide.

Written by Dr. Louise Hurst, Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach Dr. Louise Hurst is a Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach and Narcissistic Abuse Specialist whose work sits at the intersection of neuroscience, embodiment, and lived experience. With a PhD in Neuroscience and 16 years in healthcare communications, she brings scientific depth and emotional attunement to her coaching sessions. Have you ended a relationship with a partner who appeared kind, funny, and attentive in the beginning, only for the dynamic to shift into betrayal, abandonment, or emotional withdrawal? If so, you may have been targeted by a covert narcissist, one of the most dangerous forms of narcissism to encounter. Covert narcissists hide behind a façade of niceness and humility in public but devalue and control their partners in private. Their victims often do not realise what is happening until significant psychological harm has occurred. In this article, you will see how covert narcissists operate, who they target, and the psychological injuries they leave behind. What is narcissism? The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR) describes narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) as a collection of nine traits, including lack of empathy, fantasies of success and power, a sense of uniqueness, grandiosity, arrogance, entitlement, exploitation, envy, and a need for excessive admiration. To meet the diagnostic criteria for NPD, you must have five of the nine traits. Some people display narcissistic tendencies, while others meet the full diagnostic criteria for NPD. There are several narcissism subtypes, including overt, covert, malignant, vulnerable, somatic, cognitive, and communal forms. In the US, prevalence rates of NPD are 0.5% to 6.2%, however, many people with NPD never seek psychological support, suggesting real prevalence rates are actually much higher. Victims, not perpetrators, are usually the ones who seek help. People experiencing narcissistic abuse often present with symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), including anxiety, depression, panic attacks, emotional dysregulation, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. Related article: How to Spot a Narcissist on the First Date What is covert narcissism? Covert narcissists are among the most difficult personality types to identify because they operate behind two distinct masks. Their outward persona is often gentle, helpful, insecure, or self-effacing, the “nice guy” who appears caring, supportive, or vulnerable. This is not genuine humility but a strategic presentation designed to lower defenses and build trust. Beneath this surface lies a very different identity. The covert narcissist’s hidden self is marked by entitlement, arrogance, emotional coldness, and a deep need for control and validation. This inner persona drives manipulation, subtle cruelty, and psychological domination, all delivered in ways that are difficult to detect and even harder to prove. The target, the empath Covert narcissists frequently target people who are emotionally intelligent, empathic, competent, and high-achieving. Many targets share similar developmental histories. They may have grown up in environments where love was conditional, boundaries were punished, or emotional chaos was normal. In these families, the child was often the one who was scapegoated and forced to abandon their own needs to maintain any form of connection. A crumb of affection was a lifeline, and this pattern carries into adult relationships. Covert narcissists recognise this pattern instantly, they sense who will over-give, who will tolerate emotional inconsistency, and who will work harder to “fix” the relationship. Related article: How to Heal From Family Scapegoating The emotional abuse playbook 1. Superficial charm and love bombing We often let our guard down around people who seem charming. Charisma itself isn’t harmful. Many people are naturally warm and engaging, but covert narcissists use charm strategically in a process called love bombing. Their goal is to lower your defenses, create a positive image of themselves, and establish a psychological contrast that becomes deeply confusing once the abuse begins. Covert narcissists are very subtle when love bombing, using techniques that involve attention, validation, praise, or intense eye contact, all of which trigger dopamine and oxytocin, creating a biochemical surge that feels like connection. This is the beginning of a trauma bond. Related article: Could You Be Falling For A Love Bomber? – Discover The Warning Signs 2. Trauma bonding and intermittent reinforcement Once the connection is secured, the narcissist can begin to trauma bond through intermittent reinforcement, a cycle of unpredictable reward and withdrawal that mirrors the neurological impact of gambling. Between the moments of reward, the narcissist withdraws, triggering anxiety and fear and increasing levels of adrenaline and cortisol. As the relationship progresses, the time between rewards grows longer. The victim becomes neurologically conditioned to chase connection, soothe anxiety, and hope for the return of the person they met at the beginning, a person who never truly existed. Covert narcissists often use subtle tactics rather than overt cycles to trauma bond. Instead of explosive arguments or dramatic reconciliations, they rely on stonewalling, withdrawal of warmth, quiet sabotage, or emotional ambiguity. Related article: Trauma Bonds and the Addictive Cycle of an Abuser’s Control 3. Gaslighting Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation that makes the victim doubt their own thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. The term originates from the 1938 play Gas Light and its later film adaptations, in which a husband manipulates his wife into believing she is losing her sanity. At its core, gaslighting is about power and control. Gaslighting affects every part of a victim’s life. When someone is repeatedly told that their emotions are irrational, their memory is faulty, or their perceptions are wrong, they begin to question their reality. These tactics keep the victim anxious, confused, and seeking reassurance from the very person who is destabilising them. Covert narcissists use a variety of tools to control, including withholding information, circular arguments, word salad, manufactured drama, and strategic ambiguity. 4. Triangulation Triangulation is a manipulation tactic used by narcissists to control narratives, destabilise relationships, and maintain power. It is closely related to the Karpman Drama Triangle, a psychological model first described by Stephen Karpman in 1968. In the drama triangle, someone is always the victim, rescuer, or perpetrator. These roles can shift between people, but covert narcissists are always either the victim or the rescuer. They never take up the position of the perpetrator because they use blame as a defence mechanism to protect their ego. Essentially, the covert narcissist needs a scapegoat in their life to maintain their psychological system, hence why the empath is targeted. Triangulation is one of the most destabilising tactics used by covert narcissists. They may create jealousy in the relationship to erode your self-worth, or they might paint you as the “bad guy” to their friends, family, and colleagues. When real-world triangulation isn’t possible, covert narcissists may use work, drinking, gaming, or pornography instead. 5. Hoovering Hoovering is the narcissist’s attempt to pull a victim back into the relationship after the victim begins to see through the manipulation or sets a boundary. When the victim withdraws, the narcissist experiences a profound threat to their sense of control. Rather than tolerate this loss, the narcissist attempts to re-enter the victim’s life. Hoovering may involve messages of longing, promises of change, or declarations of love, but these gestures are not genuine repair. They are a power play designed to restore control and prevent the victim from leaving on their own terms. For the survivor, hoovering is one of the most confusing stages. It blends longing, fear, hope, and trauma bonding. Understanding the mechanism behind hoovering can help victims recognise that the narcissist’s return is not an act of love, it is an act of control. 6. The smear campaign Smear campaigns are often already underway long before the relationship ends. But when the relationship does end, the covert narcissist will set out on a campaign to ruin and destroy the victim’s life through gossip, rumours, and manufactured concern. The smear campaign has two core objectives: To destroy the victim’s character and reputation To control the narrative so the narcissist is seen as the injured party For them, relationships are competitions, and they must “win.” Winning means maintaining admiration, avoiding accountability, and ensuring the victim is discredited before they can disclose what happened to them in the relationship. 7. Discard, or grand finale The discard phase is when the narcissist’s mask finally falls away. The charming, attentive, “nice” persona disappears, and the victim is confronted with the abuser’s true emotional landscape: coldness, indifference, and a complete withdrawal of the connection that once felt real. In romantic relationships, the discard can be deeply traumatic for the victim. Cognitive dissonance has often protected the victim for months or years, allowing them to hold onto the belief that the relationship was genuine. When the mask comes off, the victim must confront the devastating truth that the life they built was a façade for the narcissist. This sudden realisation can trigger intense grief, despair, and symptoms aligned with C-PTSD. Start your journey today Healing from covert narcissistic abuse is rarely straightforward. Victims often experience cognitive dissonance, struggling to reconcile the charming, attentive persona they first encountered with the manipulative behaviour they later endured. Many people also feel isolated because they may be one of the few who ever saw behind the narcissist’s mask. The psychological impact can be significant, many survivors experience symptoms aligned with C-PTSD. With the right support from a trauma-informed practitioner who understands narcissism, survivors can begin to rebuild their sense of self, restore emotional stability, and reclaim their identity. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Dr. Louise Hurst Dr. Louise Hurst, Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach Dr. Louise Hurst is a Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach and Narcissistic Abuse Specialist. With a PhD in Neuroscience and 16 years in healthcare communications, she brings scientific depth and emotional attunement to her work. Her lived experiences of narcissistic abuse - both professionally and privately - led her to become a coach dedicated to helping others heal. Through her own therapeutic journey, she learned that trauma can't be processed effectively without including the body. She is the founder of Beauty for Ashes Coaching and Henka Medical Communications Ltd. Her mission: Helping survivors thrive after abuse. Further reading: Carnes, P. J. 1997. The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitative Relationships. Health Communications, Inc. MacKenzie, J. 2015. Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships with Narcissists, Sociopaths and Other Toxic People. Penguin Random House LLC. McMillan, D. L. 2007. But He Says He Loves Me: How to Avoid Being Trapped in a Manipulative Relationship. Allen & Unwin. Thomas, S. 2016. Healing from Hidden Abuse. MAST Publishing House.

Mamta Pranjivan is an Ayurveda practitioner and co-founder of MANJULA Essentials, a wellness and beauty brand rooted in the timeless principles of Ayurveda. She studied Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Toronto and built an early career in pharmaceuticals and clinical research before pursuing formal studies in Ayurveda at Middlesex University, London. With over eight years of clinical practice, Mamta integrates Ayurvedic wisdom with modern scientific understanding to educate and empower others in cultivating balance and resilience in everyday life. Mamta Pranjivan, Ayurveda Practitioner, Co-founder What first inspired you to bring Ayurveda into modern life through both your clinical practice and MANJULA Essentials? I grew up in a culture where Ayurveda was not simply a healing system but a way of life. Its knowledge and wisdom were passed down through generations in my family, making it a natural part of my upbringing. As I went on to study pharmacology and toxicology and later build a career in the pharmaceutical industry as a clinical research associate, I continued to embrace Ayurvedic lifestyle practices in my daily life. My scientific curiosity about the healing properties of kitchen spices, herbs, and traditional Ayurvedic formulations inspired me to pursue professional studies in Ayurveda. Alongside my understanding of herbal pharmacology, I developed a deeper appreciation for Ayurveda's holistic approach to health and well-being, particularly its emphasis on maintaining health and preventing disease through daily and seasonal self-care routines. This reinforced my belief that many of Ayurveda's timeless practices are remarkably relevant to the health challenges we face today. In clinical practice, I have seen firsthand how Ayurvedic self-care wisdom empowers people to take an active role in their well-being. Co-founding MANJULA Essentials with my daughter was a natural extension of that vision. It has allowed us to share authentic Ayurvedic knowledge and self-care rituals with a wider audience. Rooted in traditional Ayurvedic principles, MANJULA Essentials thoughtfully blends science, nature, and heritage to bring enduring wellness practices into everyday life. Our goal is to inspire curiosity and make these authentic traditions accessible in ways that fit seamlessly into modern lifestyles while remaining true to their origins. It brings me immense satisfaction to help people reconnect with these practices and experience their benefits in a meaningful way. Your products are inspired by generations of family traditions while being developed with modern cosmetic science, so how do you decide what should be preserved and what should evolve? Respect for heritage, guided by scientific inquiry, is the foundation of MANJULA Essentials. Our hair oil is a perfect example. It began as my mother's family recipe, passed down from her grandmother and rooted in generations of Ayurvedic wisdom. Our role has been to honour its essence while refining it through modern pharmacology and formulation science. We preserve the core Ayurvedic herbs that provide the oil's therapeutic benefits while thoughtfully incorporating complementary botanicals and nourishing oils to enhance texture, stability, and bioavailability. Every ingredient is chosen with intention, ensuring it aligns with Ayurvedic therapeutic principles while meeting contemporary standards for quality, safety, and efficacy. The same philosophy guides our face and body oils, where Eastern and Western botanical knowledge come together to create formulations that meet the skincare needs of today’s diverse global community. This thoughtful balance of tradition and innovation allows my daughter and me to evolve our family heritage while preserving its authenticity, therapeutic integrity, and enduring wisdom. How has your background in pharmacology and clinical research shaped the way you practice and explain Ayurveda today? My background in pharmacology and clinical research has profoundly shaped the way I practice and communicate Ayurveda. It has given me the ability to bridge Ayurvedic knowledge and modern clinical perspectives, drawing on the strengths of both healthcare systems. Rather than viewing them as opposing approaches, I see them as complementary, each offering valuable insights into health and healing. My research background guides me to evaluate evidence critically while remaining deeply respectful of Ayurveda's centuries of empirical knowledge. I continue to expand and enrich my knowledge base by following the evolving discourse and scientific literature in modern clinical and integrative medicine alongside traditional Ayurvedic texts. This enables me to explain Ayurvedic principles in a way that is authentic, scientifically sound, and accessible to contemporary audiences. What have you found is the biggest misconception people have about Ayurveda when they encounter it for the first time? One of the biggest misconceptions people have when they first encounter Ayurveda is that it is about herbal medicine and an Indian diet, a detox protocol, or a spa treatment. While these all have a place within the Ayurvedic healing modality, they represent only a part of a much more comprehensive and intelligent healthcare system. Ayurveda is fundamentally a way of understanding health and longevity that recognizes the unique constitution and context of each individual and seeks to restore balance through personalized nutrition, lifestyle, daily and seasonal self-care, herbal medicines, and therapies. With the growing interest in holistic health, herbal supplements, and natural therapies, it is increasingly important that people receive personalized guidance from qualified Ayurvedic practitioners. I hope that people come to see Ayurveda not as another wellness trend but as a traditional and practical knowledge system for living a healthier, more nuanced, and balanced life. What has practicing Ayurveda taught you about living well that extends far beyond physical health? Ayurveda, which translates as "the knowledge of life," embraces every dimension and stage of human existence. It teaches that our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being are deeply interconnected and cannot be viewed in isolation. Through nearly six decades of learning and living Ayurveda's practical wisdom, I have come to understand that the true art of living extends far beyond physical health. It lies in cultivating self-awareness, living in harmony with nature, and nurturing every aspect of our being with balance, purpose, and intention. When we care for ourselves in this holistic way, we build the foundation for greater resilience, a healthier lifespan, and a deeper connection with ourselves, others, and the natural world. For me, Ayurveda is not simply a system of healthcare but a timeless philosophy for living well, one that inspires us to care for ourselves so that we can, in turn, contribute more meaningfully to the well-being of others. You often speak about rituals instead of routines, so what simple daily practice has the greatest long-term impact in your experience? Beyond self-care routines, rituals are a way to celebrate life, honour tradition, and bring joy to the ordinary. They transform everyday actions into moments of awareness, stillness, and connection, helping us remain grounded in a world that often feels fast-paced and overstimulating. In an age of constant sensory input and cognitive overload, I treasure simple daily rituals such as spending quiet time in nature, cooking with wholesome ingredients, self-massage with herbal oils, yoga, music, and dance. These activities nourish not only my body but also my senses, mind, and spirit, and reconnect me with my natural rhythm. Over time, simple personal rituals cultivate inner calm, clarity, resilience, and balance, qualities that ground us and naturally ripple into every aspect of our lives. Why do you think preventive wellness is becoming more relevant in today's healthcare conversations? Preventive wellness is becoming increasingly relevant because, while people are living longer than ever before, many are spending those additional years managing chronic health conditions that are often influenced by poor lifestyle and nutrition choices, chronic stress, and socioeconomic and environmental factors. As a result, the healthcare conversation is gradually evolving from a model focused primarily on sickness care to one that includes improving healthspan and enhancing quality of life, beyond simply treating diseases to increase life expectancy. I believe there is tremendous value in educating both the general public and healthcare professionals about evidence-informed complementary wellness approaches, including Ayurveda. Preventive wellness empowers individuals to take an active role in their health by cultivating self-awareness and supporting overall long-term well-being. In many ways, this renewed emphasis on prevention and health preservation reflects principles that Ayurveda has offered for thousands of years, principles that remain remarkably relevant in addressing the healthcare challenges of modern life. If you could leave readers with one mindset shift that would transform how they approach their wellbeing, what would it be? I would invite people to stop looking outside themselves for the perfect formula for health and begin listening more deeply to themselves. Ayurveda reminds us that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to wellbeing. We are all unique, and our needs naturally change with the seasons, our stage of life, and the circumstances we are moving through. In a world filled with constant wellness advice, I believe one of the most powerful things we can do is simply pause. Take regular digital breaks. Create moments of stillness. Step away from the noise and ask yourself, "What do I truly need right now? What would genuinely nourish me, body, mind, and spirit?" Often, the answer brings us back to the simplest things, nourishing food, restorative sleep, mindful movement, meaningful connection, time in nature, and small rituals of self-care that make us feel grounded and cared for. True wellbeing is not about doing everything perfectly or attaining some ideal of perfect health and beauty. It is about developing a deeper relationship with yourself, learning to recognize your body’s signals, honouring what you need, and making conscious, informed choices in response. When we learn to listen inwardly, we stop chasing wellness as something we need to attain and instead begin to experience the joy of truly living. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Mamta Pranjivan