Written by Kellie Warne, Diet and Lifestyle Advisor Kellie Warne is a certified Diet and Lifestyle Advisor, trained at the Institute of Optimum Nutrition, and a full member of the FHT. She supports busy individuals and families to improve energy, digestion, and resiliency through simple, sustainable food and lifestyle habits. How marketing, convenience, and our modern food environment have quietly reshaped our relationship with food, and why it’s time to stop blaming individuals for a system that makes healthy choices harder. Most of us don’t think about health when we’re thinking about happiness. We think about time with the people we love, experiences we enjoy, freedom to do the things that matter to us, and having the energy to actually enjoy them. But there’s an important distinction between pleasure and happiness. Pleasure is immediate. It’s the chocolate bar after a difficult day, the takeaway when we’re too tired to cook, or the glass of wine at the end of a stressful week. These things can make us feel good in the moment. Happiness is something deeper. It comes from feeling well enough to participate in our lives, to play with our children, nurture relationships, pursue the things we care about, and look forward to the years ahead. Underneath so much of that is something we often take for granted: our health. Yet the food environment we’ve created increasingly blurs the line between the two. It sells us pleasure as though it were happiness and surrounds us with products designed to make that pleasure convenient, accessible, and repeatable. So perhaps the question isn’t simply, “What are we choosing to eat?” Perhaps we should also be asking, “What are we being encouraged to choose, and what is that environment ultimately costing us?” We have more nutritional knowledge, technology, and access to food than at almost any point in human history. Yet, diet-related ill health remains one of the defining public health challenges of our time. Obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other metabolic conditions affect millions of people. If people don’t choose these diseases, why are so many people developing them? Perhaps it’s time we stopped asking what’s wrong with people and started asking what’s wrong with the environment we’ve created around them. What has happened to our relationship with food? Walk into almost any supermarket, and you’re surrounded by colour, clever packaging, promotions, and products designed to catch your attention. Food isn’t simply being sold to us. An idea is being sold alongside it. The idea that a chocolate bar can make a difficult day better. That a takeaway is something we’ve earned. That sweets are a reward. That dessert is an expected part of dinner. That sharing food, celebrating, and even relaxing somehow require a particular product. The message is subtle but relentless, "Buy this, and you’ll feel better." Of course, food can make us feel good. Eating is pleasurable. Sharing food is social. Certain foods can evoke memories, comfort, and connection. But pleasure isn’t the same thing as happiness. When highly palatable, heavily marketed foods become a routine part of everyday life, something important can get lost: the distinction between food we occasionally enjoy and food we consume by default. When did treats become everyday foods? Many of us grew up understanding that sweets, crisps, fizzy drinks, and desserts were treats. Birthday parties. Christmas. Holidays. Special occasions. They weren’t necessarily forbidden. They simply weren’t everywhere, all the time. Today, many of these foods have become woven into the fabric of everyday eating. Multipacks sit in kitchen cupboards. Snacks are carried everywhere. Sugary drinks are commonplace. Desserts are routinely expected after meals. Food is offered as entertainment, reward, comfort, and distraction. The shift has been gradual enough that many of us barely noticed it happening. But our environment has changed dramatically. When the exceptional becomes ordinary, our perception of what constitutes a normal diet changes with it. Convenience has become king We’re busy. Parents are juggling work and childcare. Professionals are dealing with long hours and constant connectivity. Many households are simply exhausted. So convenience matters. When we’re stressed and exhausted, food choices can become even harder. I explored the relationship between stress, nutrition, and the body’s ability to use food effectively in How Stress Blocks Your Body From Using Food and How Nervous System Nutrition Can Change Everything. The problem isn’t that convenience exists. The problem is that our food environment has made the most convenient options disproportionately likely to be highly processed, heavily marketed, and designed for immediate consumption. A meal that requires no planning, chopping, or washing up is understandably attractive after a long day. But when the quickest option is also the most aggressively promoted option, the choice isn’t quite as straightforward as “just eat better.” Affordability matters too. UK government data acknowledges that healthier diets can cost more, while the Food Foundation has reported that healthier foods are more than twice as expensive per calorie as less healthy foods. For a family trying to make every pound stretch, this isn’t simply a question of nutritional knowledge. It’s economics. We are not making choices in a vacuum We often talk about food as though every meal begins with a completely rational individual standing in front of an infinite number of equally accessible choices. It doesn’t. Our choices are influenced by price, availability, time, habit, stress, culture, advertising, social expectations, and what happens to be within reach when we’re hungry. Increasingly, we are surrounded by products deliberately formulated to be highly palatable and easy to consume. Blood sugar regulation is another piece of the puzzle when we think about food, energy, mood, and appetite. I explored this connection in How Blood Sugar Shapes Mood, Focus and Emotional Regulation. This doesn’t mean that everyone who eats ultra-processed food will become unwell. Nor does it mean that every processed food is inherently harmful. The science is more nuanced than that. But the evidence linking higher consumption of ultra-processed foods with poorer health outcomes is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. A large 2024 BMJ umbrella review, covering almost 9.9 million people across pooled analyses, found associations between greater exposure to ultra-processed foods and a range of adverse health outcomes, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and mortality. The authors also acknowledged important limitations in the quality of the underlying evidence. The point isn’t that a packet of biscuits is poisonous. The point is that the overall food environment matters. The hidden pressure to fit in Food is about far more than nutrition. It’s culture. It’s celebration. It’s connection. This is precisely why changing our eating habits can be difficult. Decline the office cake, and you’re “being good.” Skip the alcohol, and you’re “boring.” Pass on the takeaway, and you’re “no fun.” Choose a salad, and someone may joke that you’re dieting. Somehow, choosing not to consume something has become something we often feel compelled to explain. We’ve normalised overconsumption while sometimes treating moderation as unusual. Children are growing up inside this culture too. They don’t simply learn about food from their parents. They learn from television, social media, influencers, packaging, supermarkets, restaurants, and the people around them. I explored how dramatically this food environment has changed childhood in my article How 40 Years of Food Changed Childhood and Why Our Children Deserve Better. The UK government’s decision to introduce restrictions on advertising less healthy food and drink on television before 9 p.m. and on paid online advertising from January 2026 reflects evidence that exposure to this advertising can influence what and when children eat and shape food preferences from a young age. That tells us something important. If advertising didn’t influence behaviour, there would be little reason for companies to spend billions trying to influence it. Are we really free to choose? Personal responsibility matters. Of course it does. We all have choices to make, and learning how to nourish ourselves well is enormously empowering. But personal responsibility and personal blame are not the same thing. We can encourage people to make healthier choices while simultaneously acknowledging that those choices are shaped by the world around them. A person who walks into a supermarket hungry, tired, and stressed isn’t making choices in the same environment as someone with unlimited time, money, cooking facilities, and nutritional knowledge. A parent working two jobs doesn’t have the same resources as a family with a flexible schedule. A teenager surrounded by social media advertising doesn’t have the same decision-making capacity as an adult. Context matters. So when we reduce complex dietary patterns to “people just need more willpower,” we miss much of the picture. Willpower was never designed to compete with an environment engineered to maximise attention, convenience, and consumption. Follow the money This isn’t about demonising every food company. Businesses exist to make money. That’s how markets work. Many companies produce perfectly legitimate foods that can form part of a healthy diet. But we shouldn’t confuse commercial success with public health. The food industry is also enormously important to the UK economy. In 2024, the UK agriculture and food sector contributed £162.3 billion to the economy, equivalent to 6.2% of national Gross Value Added. The sector employed 4.1 million people in Great Britain in 2025. So what would happen if we genuinely changed the food environment? There would inevitably be winners and losers. Companies whose business models depend heavily on selling highly processed, highly profitable products might need to adapt. They could face pressure to reformulate products, change marketing strategies, or develop new ranges that better support public health. That could be disruptive. But disruption isn’t necessarily the same as economic damage. The money people spend on food doesn’t simply disappear when their diets change. It moves. It could move towards healthier convenience foods, higher quality ingredients, fresh produce, reformulated products, and businesses that make nutritious food easier and more affordable. There is another economic consideration we rarely include in this conversation: the cost of poor health. A food system can generate enormous commercial activity while simultaneously contributing to conditions that place pressure on the National Health Service, reduce healthy working years, and increase sickness absence. The question, then, isn’t whether food should be profitable. It’s whether we can create a food economy that is both commercially successful and aligned with long-term public health. A company’s responsibility is to its customers and shareholders. Public health is the responsibility of governments, policymakers, and society as a whole. When a business model rewards selling more products more frequently, there is an obvious tension between commercial incentives and long-term health. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s economics. When those incentives operate across supermarkets, advertising, online platforms, restaurants, and food delivery services, they create an environment that can make overconsumption feel normal. Meanwhile, when people’s health suffers, the conversation can still quickly become: Why didn’t they make better choices? Perhaps that’s the wrong first question. No one chooses chronic disease. I’ve never met anyone who wanted to develop obesity. No one wakes up hoping for a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. No one chooses fatty liver disease, cardiovascular disease, or declining metabolic health. Yet these conditions have become increasingly common. That doesn’t mean individual choices are irrelevant. It means they’re only part of the story. Health is shaped by biology, behaviour, socioeconomic circumstances, environment, culture, and the systems in which we live. If we genuinely want to change population health, we have to look beyond the individual. We have to look at the environment that surrounds the individual. What would a healthier food system look like? Imagine if healthy food was marketed with the same creativity and excitement as confectionery. Imagine if children’s environments were designed to support healthy habits rather than constantly challenge them. Imagine if nutritious convenience foods were affordable, accessible, and genuinely convenient. Imagine if supermarkets made the healthier choice the easy choice rather than relying on consumers to navigate an endless sea of promotions. Imagine if a parent could feed their family well without needing extraordinary amounts of time, money, planning, and nutritional knowledge. Imagine if we stopped measuring success purely by whether an individual had enough discipline to resist temptation. We don’t need to remove choice. We need to improve the choices people are surrounded by because choice doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A genuinely healthy food environment would still allow us to enjoy chocolate, birthday cake, crisps, takeaway meals, and a glass of wine. The difference would be that these foods could return to being what they were always meant to be: enjoyable parts of life rather than the foundation of everyday eating. It’s time to change the conversation Perhaps the question shouldn’t be, “Why can’t people just eat better?” Perhaps it should be, “Why have we created an environment in which eating well requires so much effort?” Until meaningful changes happen at a societal level, individuals still have to navigate the food environment that exists today. This is where individual support can matter. We can’t redesign the food system overnight. But we can help people understand their own nutritional needs, recognise the influences shaping their choices, and find realistic ways to nourish themselves within the lives they actually lead. Perhaps the answer isn’t choosing between personal responsibility and systemic change. Perhaps we need both. We can teach people about nutrition. We can encourage movement. We can support healthier habits. But if we want meaningful change, we also have to address the environment in which those behaviours take place. Because people don’t live in nutritional textbooks. They live in the real world. A world of busy mornings, packed lunchboxes, supermarket promotions, birthday parties, office biscuits, takeaway apps, social media, stress, tiredness, and limited time. That’s the world we need to design for. We don’t need a food system that removes pleasure. We need one that makes nourishing ourselves easier while leaving room for the foods we enjoy. Because health isn’t the reward we receive at the end of life. It’s the foundation that allows us to live it. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Kellie Warne Kellie Warne, Diet and Lifestyle Advisor Kellie Warne is a certified Diet and Lifestyle Advisor (ION) and FHT member who helps busy people and families feel calmer, more energised, and confident in themselves. She believes sustainable health begins with self-compassion, not restriction. Through practical nutrition advice and supportive lifestyle coaching, Kellie empowers clients to build habits that nourish both body and mind. Her mission is to help people thrive, not by chasing perfection, but by creating balance.

Written by Gordon McNaught, CDC Certified Divorce Coach Gordon McNaught, the founder of Resingled, understands relationships from start to end and all that comes in between. Gordon uses a blend of compassion, logic, humour, and faith to guide people through emotional transitions and build the life they aspire to. Many people view divorce as the finish line. The property settlement is complete. The legal documents are signed. The court decree has been issued. Legally, the marriage is over. In reality, that is often when the most important work begins. The legal process can resolve financial matters, establish parenting arrangements, and formally end a marriage. What it cannot do is rebuild identity, restore confidence, heal emotional wounds, or create a renewed sense of purpose. Life after divorce is not simply about recovery. It is about growth, transformation, and creating a meaningful future. The hidden challenge of starting over Many people assume that once the legal process is complete, life will naturally return to normal. Instead, they often find themselves facing a new set of emotional challenges. Feelings of rejection, anger, loneliness, uncertainty, and self-doubt are common. Questions begin to surface: Who am I now? What does my future look like? Will I find love again? Can I trust again? Am I enough? These questions cannot be resolved through legal agreements or court orders. They require reflection, healing, personal growth, and the courage to embrace a new chapter. The value of an objective perspective As a divorce coach, I am occasionally asked whether I have experienced divorce myself. The answer is no. While some people believe personal divorce experience is essential to helping others, my role provides a different advantage: objectivity. Because I am not navigating my own divorce story through the experiences of my clients, I can bring an independent perspective. This allows me to identify patterns, challenge assumptions, and help clients focus on practical, constructive next steps. Objectivity, however, does not mean a lack of empathy. Every client's experience is unique, and the emotions involved are real. Effective coaching requires balancing empathy with pragmatism, creating a safe space for people to feel heard while helping them move forward with clarity and purpose. Sustainable growth occurs when emotional healing and practical action receive equal attention. The difference between the love we want and the love we need One of the most important lessons I have learned through faith and my work with clients is the distinction between the love we want and the love we need. Most people naturally desire romantic love. Companionship, intimacy, partnership, and shared experiences are valuable parts of life. The challenge arises when we expect another person to provide our identity, value, or sense of worth. My faith has taught me that the love we need has already been given. Knowing we are loved by our Creator provides a foundation that no human relationship can fully replace. When our sense of worth is secure, we stop looking for someone to complete us and begin looking for someone with whom we can share an already meaningful life. That shift changes relationships profoundly. Relationships become partnerships rather than rescue missions. They become opportunities to give and receive love, rather than attempts to fill an emotional void. Appreciating the season of singleness One of the greatest challenges after divorce is impatience. Many people wonder when they will meet someone new. They compare themselves with others who appear to have moved on. They question whether their opportunity for love has passed. These feelings are understandable, but there is another way to view this season. Rather than seeing singleness as a period of waiting, it can be viewed as a period of preparation. It is an opportunity to: Heal old wounds Rediscover passions and interests Strengthen friendships Deepen faith Build emotional resilience Become the healthiest version of yourself This season can be one of the most valuable periods of personal development a person will ever experience. I look forward to one day meeting a wonderful woman and getting married. I have faith that this will happen in God's timing. Until then, I choose not to put life on hold. Life is happening now, and that is a mindset I encourage my clients to embrace as well. Understanding the foundations of healthy relationships A significant part of my coaching focuses on helping people understand how healthy relationships function. While every relationship is unique, the core foundations are remarkably consistent: Trust Respect Communication Shared values Personal responsibility Emotional maturity These qualities contribute far more to long-term relationship success than chemistry alone. Many people focus on finding the right partner before investing in becoming one. Divorce provides an opportunity to change that. The lessons gained through self-reflection and personal growth can become the foundation for healthier future relationships, whether they are romantic relationships, friendships, or family connections. What 1 Corinthians teaches us about love One of the most enduring relationship guides is found in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8. The passage describes love as patient, kind, humble, forgiving, and selfless. When we examine these qualities closely, a powerful truth emerges: love is fundamentally focused on others. Patience benefits others. Kindness benefits others. Humility benefits others. Forgiveness benefits others. In a culture that often defines love primarily by feelings, this passage presents love as a series of intentional choices and actions. Love is not only something we feel. It is something we do. Understanding this principle can transform relationships after divorce. Instead of asking, "Who will make me happy?" a more powerful question emerges: "How can I become someone who loves well?" That question often leads to healthier, stronger, and more lasting relationships. Divorce is not the end of the story Divorce may mark the end of a marriage, but it does not define a person's future. It is not the end of hope. It is not the end of growth. It is not the end of love. For many people, it becomes the beginning of deeper self-awareness, stronger faith, healthier relationships, and a greater appreciation of life's possibilities. A court decree ends the legal process. It does not end personal growth. Those who embrace the next chapter often discover that life after divorce is not defined by what was lost, but by what can still be built. Sometimes the most meaningful chapters of life begin only after the previous one has ended. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Gordon McNaught Gordon McNaught, CDC Certified Divorce Coach Gordon is a leader in pragmatic thinking during emotional times. Watching his mum raise two sons single-handedly, Gordon saw how people like his mum often went through highly emotional transitions alone and wanted to use his experience and expertise to show others they can and will thrive into the future.

Written by Shantana Telise, Quantum Channel & Multidimensional Healer Shantana Telise is a quantum channel and multidimensional healer specializing in divine channeling and soul remembrance. She is the creator of The Art of Divine Channeling Masterclass, the founder of The Portal of the Gods, and the host of The Goddess Evolution Summit. Your business can outgrow its strategy, audience, offers, and systems, but it can also outgrow the identity of the person leading it. When entrepreneurs become overly focused on fixing old wounds, scarcity patterns, and what is not working, they can unknowingly keep building from the very identity they are trying to leave behind. Here is how to recognize when self-awareness is supporting your business growth and when it is quietly keeping you stuck in the past. What is entrepreneur identity, and how does it affect business growth? Entrepreneur identity is more than the way you describe yourself as a business owner. It is the collection of beliefs, expectations, behaviours, standards, and patterns that influence how you lead, make decisions, respond to uncertainty, sell, receive support, and approach growth. The identity that helped you build one stage of your business may not be the identity capable of leading the next one. This becomes especially noticeable when a business begins to scale. In the beginning, doing everything yourself, moving quickly, staying close to every decision, and solving every problem can be useful. As the business grows, those same behaviours can become limitations. This transition is explored from a leadership perspective in Brainz Magazine's article on the Founder Ceiling and why the strengths that built a company can eventually limit its scale. But identity can create another, less obvious ceiling. Sometimes we intellectually know that we have changed while continuing to orient our attention around the person we used to be. I experienced this recently after several years of consistency in my business and a year focused heavily on expansion. I had moved into a bigger home, grown my team, launched a podcast, expanded my visibility, and continued building the next version of my business. Then, unexpectedly, things contracted. Sales slowed. Offers were not moving the way I expected. Accounts that had comfortably supported a growing business began draining until I was genuinely questioning how I was going to keep everything going. My instinct was to investigate. I reviewed sales pages, rewrote emails, examined positioning, looked at my relationship with visibility and receiving, assessed my offers, and questioned where I might still be holding myself back. Some of that examination was necessary. I discovered genuine gaps and made changes that will continue to serve the business as it grows. Once things began moving again, however, I recognized another pattern. I had become exceptionally good at looking for the wound. My attention had gradually shifted from building what was next to continually investigating what might be wrong. That distinction changed the way I understood the entire experience. When does self-awareness become a business limitation? Self-awareness allows us to recognize a problem. Orientation determines what we repeatedly look for. You can become aware of a scarcity pattern without organizing your entire business around scarcity. You can recognize that an offer is underperforming without deciding you have suddenly become incapable of selling. You can discover discomfort around greater visibility without making that discomfort the defining story of your next stage of growth. The problem begins when examination becomes our default state. We continually ask what is blocked, what needs healing, what we are doing wrong, and what belief is preventing the next level. These questions can uncover valuable information, but when they become the primary way we relate to ourselves, they can influence what we notice, how we communicate, what we expect, and how we operate. There is also a psychological reason to be aware of what repeatedly captures our attention. The American Psychological Association describes attentional bias as a tendency to focus more readily on certain types of information, influenced by factors such as emotional states, internal needs, and previous experience. In practical terms, when an entrepreneur becomes highly focused on evidence of scarcity, rejection, or failure, that information can begin occupying a disproportionate amount of her attention. Opportunities, progress, and evidence of expansion have not necessarily disappeared, but they may no longer receive the same focus. This is where a temporary business problem can quietly become an identity problem. Why business problems should be treated as information, not identity There is an enormous difference between asking, “Something isn’t working, so what is wrong with me?” and asking, “Something isn’t working, so what is out of alignment and what needs to change?” The first question makes the circumstance personal. The second treats the circumstance as information. A slow month is information. An offer that does not convert is information. A bank balance is information. A marketing strategy that once performed well and suddenly stops working is information. Information may require immediate action, but it does not automatically define who you are or what your business is capable of becoming. This distinction is particularly important for entrepreneurs because business constantly gives us feedback. Revenue changes. Campaigns fail. Clients leave. Platforms evolve. Markets change. Something that worked brilliantly six months ago may stop producing the same result. Brainz contributor Monique Farmer explores a similar leadership distinction in A Founder’s Guide to Mindset Transformation, where business challenges are reframed as information rather than identity. When every disappointing result becomes evidence about our worth, capability, or future, we stop responding only to the business problem. We begin responding to what we have decided the problem means about us. That can affect decisions very quickly. Instead of changing a strategy because the data tells us to, we change everything because we are afraid. Instead of evaluating an opportunity based on alignment, we say yes because we fear another one will not come. Instead of selling from confidence in the transformation we provide, we sell from urgency because we need the sale to prove that everything is still okay. The goal is not to become emotionally detached from your business. It is to become capable of receiving feedback without turning every piece of feedback into an identity crisis. Your physical reality still requires action Mindset, manifestation, and identity should never become excuses to ignore practical reality. If sales are down, look at your sales process. If your messaging is not connecting, examine it. If your expenses require attention, review them. If your offer no longer matches what your audience wants, change it. If you need support, ask for it. During my own contraction, I continued working on the physical business. I reviewed what was converting and what was not. I rewrote emails and sales pages, created new offers, changed parts of my positioning, examined how I was using the support inside my business, and eventually acknowledged that trying to solve everything alone was not serving me. The shift was not pretending everything was fine. It was not fine. There were moments when I was genuinely terrified by how quickly my financial reality had changed. The work was learning to respond to that reality without allowing it to tell me who I was. That is the distinction I believe matters most: handle the physical reality without allowing the physical reality to become your identity. Sometimes something is simply asking to be changed. Are you marketing to an identity your ideal client has already outgrown? This experience exposed another problem in my business that I believe many entrepreneurs encounter as their work evolves: our ideal clients can grow while our messaging continues speaking to an earlier version of them. Traditional marketing advice often tells us to identify the customer's pain. Understand the problem, speak directly to the struggle, and demonstrate that you understand what keeps your potential client awake at night. There is value in understanding pain. People want to feel understood. But pain is not the only reason people buy. An established entrepreneur may not be searching because everything is broken. She may already have clients, results, expertise, self-awareness, and evidence that her business works. She may be looking because she is ready to scale, become more visible, increase her wealth, strengthen her leadership, or create a larger impact. This requires a different conversation. The question becomes: Are you speaking primarily to the person your ideal client is trying to leave behind, or are you also speaking to the person she is ready to become? I realized that although my work had evolved, parts of my messaging were still heavily oriented toward the wound. I understood survival because I had lived it. I understood scarcity, overfunctioning, and the patterns that keep people small. Those experiences gave me valuable expertise. But the woman I wanted to support next was not necessarily looking for someone to explain everything that was wrong with her. She was ready for expansion. If all of my messaging required her to identify with struggle before she could recognize herself in my work, I was speaking to an earlier version of her. That realization changed my positioning. Instead of asking only what pain my ideal client experiences, I began asking what she is ready for. What does she desire now? What capacity is she building? What decision is she ready to make? What version of herself is she trying to embody? Pain can help someone recognize a problem. Possibility can help someone recognize her next identity. A business that is evolving needs to know how to speak to both. How the healing trap can keep entrepreneurs stuck There is another version of this pattern that appears frequently in highly self-aware entrepreneurs. Healing becomes the destination rather than the bridge. There is always another belief to uncover, another block to clear, another pattern to analyze, another wound to understand, or another reason we might not be ready. There will always be more we can examine. That does not mean everything needs to be examined before we move. Healing is valuable when it creates greater freedom, choice, and capacity. It becomes a trap when searching for what needs healing prevents us from taking the physical actions our next identity requires. An entrepreneur can spend months examining her fear of visibility instead of becoming visible. She can analyze her relationship with selling instead of making the offer. She can investigate her capacity to receive more clients without building the systems required to support those clients. She can become so focused on discovering why she is not expanding that she avoids the decisions expansion actually requires. At some point, awareness has to become embodiment, and embodiment requires action. Sometimes the next breakthrough is not another realization. Sometimes it is sending the email, making the offer, hiring support, changing the positioning, asking for help, releasing control, or allowing yourself to become visible at the level you say you want. This is especially relevant as a business grows because scaling often demands a different relationship with support, leadership, structure, and identity. Brainz Magazine's article on why many coaches and holistic practitioners struggle to scale explores this relationship between business structure, identity, support, and expansion. We cannot say we want expansion while repeatedly choosing the behaviours that keep our current identity comfortable. Why expansion requires us to notice different evidence When a business is contracting, our questions naturally become diagnostic. We want to know what happened, what is wrong, what we missed, and what needs to change. Those questions are useful when something genuinely needs investigation. They simply cannot be the only questions we ask. Expansion requires another set of questions. What is working? What opportunities are opening? Where is there already movement? What relationships are expanding? What have you created that an earlier version of you desperately wanted? What have you normalized so completely that you have forgotten it was once evidence of extraordinary growth? This became confronting for me when I looked at my own life. Things I would have considered enormous not long ago had become completely normal. Having a team was normal. Hosting a podcast was normal. Receiving invitations and collaboration opportunities was normal. Growing my visibility was normal. An earlier version of me would have looked at some of those things and thought, “I cannot believe we built this.” The current version of me had already moved the goalpost. Normalizing growth is part of expansion. What once felt enormous eventually needs to feel safe enough to become ordinary. But there is a difference between normalizing expansion and becoming blind to it. If we only register what is missing, every achievement disappears the moment it becomes familiar, while every problem receives our full attention. Becoming expansion-oriented does not mean ignoring problems. It means becoming capable of seeing the entire picture. Five questions to identify the identity behind your business If your business feels as though it no longer matches the person you are becoming, these five questions can help you identify whether an old identity is still influencing how you build. 1. What receives most of your attention? Pay attention to the questions running through your mind during an ordinary business day. Are you primarily searching for what is broken, missing, blocked, or failing? Or are you equally capable of recognizing progress, opportunity, demand, ideas, relationships, and evidence that something is working? This is not about forcing positivity. It is about noticing whether your attention has become disproportionately organized around one version of reality. 2. Is your marketing speaking to your ideal client's current identity? Review your website, content, emails, sales pages, and offers. Who has to identify with your language to believe your work is for them? If the client you want is already successful and ready for expansion while your messaging continually speaks to complete survival, there may be a disconnect between the audience you want and the audience your language is calling forward. 3. Are you examining a problem to change it, or simply out of habit? Useful awareness eventually creates movement. If you have analyzed the same issue repeatedly without making a decision, changing your behaviour, testing something new, or taking action, ask whether the investigation is still serving you. Sometimes searching feels productive because movement feels more vulnerable. 4. What evidence of expansion have you already normalized? Look beyond revenue. Consider your confidence, skills, relationships, team, support, visibility, audience, opportunities, boundaries, capacity, and the quality of decisions you now make. What exists in your current reality that a previous version of you once wanted? Recognizing that evidence does not mean settling for your current level. It reminds you that expansion has already happened before you ask yourself to create more of it. 5. What would you do next if you stopped assuming you needed to fix yourself first? This question can expose the gap between awareness and embodiment very quickly. You may already know what the next move is. You may need to make the offer, raise the standard, delegate the responsibility, ask for support, change your message, become more visible, or finally build for the audience you actually want to serve. The challenge may not be discovering another thing to heal. The challenge may be allowing yourself to move. How to build your business from your next identity There will always be another level of awareness available to us, and there will always be difficult seasons in business. Growth does not make entrepreneurs immune to contraction, uncertainty, fear, changing markets, unsuccessful launches, or strategies that stop working. The goal is not to reach a level where nothing challenges you again. The goal is to become capable of meeting the challenge without immediately surrendering your identity to it. Sometimes something is not working because it needs to change. Sometimes an old pattern genuinely needs attention. Sometimes the next stage requires healing, strategy, support, or all three. But there also comes a point when the dominant question can no longer be, “What is wrong with me?” It has to become, “What is available to me now?” What wants to be built? What is already opening? What are you capable of holding now that you could not hold before? What does your ideal client want next? What decisions does the next version of your business require? What would you create if you stopped using an old identity as the blueprint? You can respect the identity that got you here. You can understand why she learned to survive the way she did. You can heal the parts of her that still require your attention without continuing to build your future around her. At some point, expansion asks you to stop building for the person you needed to be and start building for the person you have become. Ready to build from your next identity? If you recognize that your business has outgrown the identity, messaging, or way of operating that brought you this far, your next level may not require more fixing. It may require a different way of leading, creating, selling, and allowing yourself to expand. This is the work I support entrepreneurs with: moving beyond survival-led business and into the identity, strategy, capacity, and leadership required for their next level of expansion. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Shantana Telise Shantana Telise, Quantum Channel & Multidimensional Healer Shantana Telise is a quantum channel and multidimensional healer specializing in divine channeling and soul remembrance. She is the creator of The Art of Divine Channeling Masterclass, where she teaches safe, embodied channeling practices. Shantana is also the founder of The Portal of the Gods, a high-level multidimensional initiation into divine love, wealth, and leadership. She hosts The Goddess Evolution Summit, bringing together spiritual leaders to explore ascension and embodied living.

Written by Rosie Hewat, Founder & CEO of Rosie’s People Rosie Hewat is a Board and Executive Advisor and the Founder & CEO of Rosie’s People, a leadership and organisational advisory platform. She works with founders, boards, and senior leaders navigating complexity, scale, and high-stakes decision-making across global and regulated environments. There is a strange contradiction at the heart of many organisations. Someone becomes exceptionally good at their job. They develop years of specialist knowledge. They become the person colleagues approach when something difficult needs solving. They understand the nuances, exceptions, and problems that are not written in the manual. Then, eventually, we tell them that if they want more money, greater status, or another promotion, they need to start managing people. The excellent engineer becomes an engineering manager. The outstanding salesperson becomes a sales manager. The brilliant technical specialist acquires a team. The experienced practitioner gradually spends less time practising and more time conducting one-to-one meetings, approving leave, completing performance reviews, resolving conflicts, and managing other people’s careers. We call this progression. But sometimes, what the organisation has actually done is remove an excellent specialist from the work they were exceptional at and create a reluctant manager in their place. As organisations reconsider how work should be structured for the next decade, I think we also need to reconsider one of our oldest assumptions about careers: Why does progression so often require people management? Being excellent at your job does not mean you will be excellent at managing people This is not simply anecdotal. Research by Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue examined promotion decisions across 214 firms and found evidence consistent with what is commonly called the Peter Principle: organisations frequently prioritised performance in an employee’s existing role when making promotion decisions, despite other characteristics being better predictors of managerial performance. The finding matters because the capabilities are different. Being an exceptional salesperson requires one set of capabilities. Managing ten salespeople requires another. Writing exceptional software is different from managing software engineers. Designing brilliant products is different from managing the performance, development, and careers of a product team. We should therefore stop treating people management as the inevitable next level of proficiency in another profession. People management is a different profession! That distinction matters. Someone can manage a product, programme, technical discipline, system, or complex body of work without becoming responsible for another person’s performance, development, and career. We have allowed the word manager to become unnecessarily synonymous with people manager, when they are not the same thing. I have seen this repeatedly during my own career. I have worked with people who were promoted into managerial positions despite having very little desire to manage people. They were technically excellent. They were willing to help colleagues. They would happily mentor someone more junior, share knowledge, or show another person how something should be done. But they did not want responsibility for another person’s career. Those are not the same thing. When the organisation subsequently complained that the individual was not a particularly good manager, the conversation often became, “Perhaps they need management training.” Sometimes they did. But training cannot manufacture desire. You can teach someone how to conduct a performance conversation. You can explain employment processes, delegation, coaching techniques, and feedback models. What training cannot necessarily do is make someone want the responsibility that comes with managing other human beings. Willingness matters. People management asks somebody to take responsibility not only for their own performance, but for the working experience, development, and, at times, difficult moments in somebody else’s career. That responsibility should never be assigned simply because nobody else was available to take it. Mentorship is not management I think this distinction is frequently overlooked. A senior specialist can be an extraordinary mentor without becoming somebody’s line manager. They can teach. They can challenge. They can review work. They can share twenty years of hard-earned knowledge. They can help a younger colleague understand why the textbook answer will not work in a particular situation. They can set technical standards and provide intellectual leadership. None of this requires them to approve someone’s annual leave, manage an absence, conduct a disciplinary conversation, or decide whether that individual deserves a promotion. Yet our career structures frequently bundle all of those responsibilities together. People management carries a significant emotional load that job descriptions rarely acknowledge. People do not stop being human when they arrive at work. Sometimes they tell their manager about bereavement, financial problems, relationship breakdowns, health concerns, or difficulties at home. A good manager has to know how to listen without becoming a therapist, how to support without overstepping, when to involve HR, and when an employee simply needs somebody to hear them. Then there are the difficult conversations. Underperformance does not become emotionally effortless because somebody attended management training. Neither does telling someone they are not receiving the promotion they wanted, addressing problematic behaviour, managing conflict between colleagues, or explaining decisions you know somebody will find upsetting. Managers can finish those conversations emotionally exhausted and then have to walk into their next meeting as though nothing happened. That is work. Organisations need to recognise it as such. The hidden problem of the accidental manager The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) describes people promoted into management without formal management or leadership training as “accidental managers.” Its research reports that 82% of managers entering management positions have received no formal management and leadership training. CMI also found that employees who rated their manager as ineffective were considerably more likely to say they intended to leave their organisation. Training therefore matters enormously. But I would go one step further. Before asking whether someone has been trained to manage, organisations should ask whether they actually want to manage. There are arguably two different problems: the untrained manager and the unwilling manager. Training can help solve the first. It cannot automatically solve the second. That distinction is something we encounter in our own management development work at Rosie’s People. Before delivering management training, we assess the people who are actually being asked to manage. Sometimes that process reveals a training need. But sometimes it reveals something more fundamental: the person never particularly wanted to become a people manager in the first place. They may have accepted the role because it was presented as the next stage of progression, because the salary increase depended on taking responsibility for a team, or simply because somebody needed to manage the function and they were the obvious person available. In those circumstances, immediately prescribing management training risks treating the symptom rather than examining the appointment itself. The consequences matter far beyond the individual manager. Gallup has estimated that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. That should make management selection a strategic decision rather than the automatic reward for technical performance. That means assessment should come before appointment, and appointment should come before training. Organisations should assess not only whether someone could manage people, but whether they understand what people management involves and genuinely want the responsibility. Capability can be developed. Motivation should not simply be assumed. We have confused progression with hierarchy In my previous article on the Capability Centred Organisation, I argued that organisations need to become less obsessed with jobs and headcount and more deliberate about the capabilities they need to build, retain, and deploy. The Expertise Penalty is one of the clearest examples of why that shift matters. If an organisation genuinely values capability, it makes little sense to tell someone, "You are exceptionally valuable because of the expertise you have accumulated. Therefore, the only way we will allow you to progress is by spending considerably less time using it." Yet that is essentially how many career structures operate. The higher someone climbs, the more people they acquire. Headcount becomes a proxy for seniority. The person managing 50 people appears more senior than the person whose expertise influences the work of 500. But organisational value does not work that neatly. Some people lead through people. Others lead through expertise. Some lead through intellectual authority, standards, systems, innovation, or professional judgment. Leadership and people management overlap, but they are not synonymous. The specialist track cannot be a consolation prize Dual career paths are not new. Technology, engineering, science, and research organisations have experimented with specialist and managerial pathways for decades. But creating a few new titles does not solve the underlying problem. A specialist pathway only becomes a genuine alternative when progression brings meaningful increases in pay, status, influence, and decision-making authority. Otherwise, employees quickly learn which hierarchy actually matters. If the managerial track leads to executive compensation, strategic meetings, and organisational influence while the specialist track leads to increasingly impressive job titles but limited authority, there are not really two tracks. There is one career ladder and one waiting room. We therefore need to rethink what seniority means. A Principal Engineer, Senior Scientist, Chief Architect, or equivalent domain expert should be capable of reaching levels of compensation and organisational influence comparable with a senior manager where the value they create justifies it. That does not mean the roles are identical. It means one form of contribution should not automatically be considered more valuable simply because it contains direct reports. There are contemporary examples of this becoming more concrete. Princeton University recently documented a research software engineering career framework spanning Associate through Principal levels, alongside team lead and management routes, recognising that technical mastery, leadership, and people management do not have to be the same career. The terminology will vary between organisations. The principle should not. People management is also more work There is another part of this conversation organisations sometimes avoid. If you add responsibility for people to somebody’s existing role, you have added another job. Managing even a small team creates work: one-to-one meetings, performance and development conversations, absence, recruitment, conflict, salary and promotion decisions, administration, and escalation. Alongside those visible responsibilities sits the less visible emotional labour that accompanies responsibility for other people. Technology can remove some administrative burden, but it cannot remove accountability. Yet organisations sometimes add two, three, or five direct reports to somebody’s role and treat the change almost as though they have simply amended their job title. Perhaps there is a small salary adjustment. Perhaps there isn’t. But responsibility has fundamentally changed. Reward should reflect that change. People management should not be treated as a minor addition to an existing role simply because the individual continues to retain their technical responsibilities. If an organisation wants someone to carry accountability for other people’s performance, development, and working experience, that additional responsibility should be recognised in workload, expectations, and reward. This is particularly important where someone is expected to remain a full-time practitioner while simultaneously becoming a people manager. We should stop pretending those responsibilities occupy no time. If someone is expected to manage people properly, organisations need to create capacity for them to do it properly. Expertise should be allowed to become leadership This does not mean senior specialists should work in isolation. Quite the opposite. I would expect senior specialists to have increasing responsibility for the capability around them. But that responsibility can take different forms. They might mentor early career employees. They might establish professional standards. They might own a technical architecture. They might lead complex projects. They might review high-risk decisions. They might teach. They might represent the organisation externally. They might develop intellectual property or institutional knowledge. They might have authority over a particular professional domain without having administrative responsibility for every person working within it. This also connects directly to another argument I made in What Happens When AI Removes the Work That Teaches Us How to Work? In that article, I explored the risk of removing the developmental experiences through which junior employees acquire judgment. If we are serious about addressing that Apprenticing Gap, senior experts become even more important. But we don’t necessarily need to turn every expert into a line manager to access their knowledge. In fact, forcing them to spend large portions of their time on administration and performance management may reduce the time available for exactly the mentoring and knowledge transfer organisations increasingly need. The answer is not less responsibility for senior specialists. It is different responsibility. Alternative routes into work require alternative routes through work Governments, education systems, and employers are increasingly debating alternative routes into employment: apprenticeships, technical education, vocational pathways, and skills-based hiring. But it is not enough to create alternative routes into work. We also need credible alternative routes through work. Imagine encouraging a young person to become an exceptional engineer, scientist, cybersecurity specialist, designer, or technician. They spend 15 years mastering that discipline. Then, eventually, the organisation tells them, “You’ve become so good at this that we’d now like you to stop doing most of it and manage the people who do.” There is something structurally odd about that. Career progression should allow mastery to compound rather than eventually penalising it. Select people managers before you train them Management development should therefore begin earlier than the training room. In our work at Rosie’s People, we encourage organisations to look at management selection as part of organisational design rather than simply learning and development. Before appointing someone to people management, I would want to understand three things: Do they want to manage people? Do they demonstrate the behaviours and judgement required to do it well? And does the organisation have the capacity to support and develop them once they take responsibility for others? That assessment may identify someone who is enthusiastic but inexperienced, an excellent candidate for management development. It may identify someone who is unsure and needs greater exposure before deciding. Sometimes it will identify an exceptional specialist who simply does not want to manage people. That should not be interpreted as a lack of ambition. The organisational answer should not always be to persuade the third person into management. Sometimes the better answer is to build them a credible route to progress without it. Six questions organisations should ask For CEOs, CHROs, COOs, and people leaders reviewing career architecture, I would start with six questions: Can our best specialists reach senior levels of compensation without becoming people managers? Do we assess whether someone genuinely wants to manage people before offering them a people management role? Do we assess managerial aptitude separately from technical performance? Can someone exercise meaningful organisational leadership without acquiring direct reports? Are our specialist career paths equal in influence as well as title? Are managers given the time, development, support, and reward required to manage people properly, or are we simply adding people management to an already full-time job? The answers will reveal whether an organisation genuinely values expertise or merely values it until the next management vacancy appears. Conclusion: Progression should increase contribution, not redirect it None of this is an argument against people management. Quite the opposite, it is an argument for taking people management more seriously. Good managers are extraordinarily valuable and can make a huge difference within an organisation. They create clarity. They develop people. They resolve ambiguity. They protect teams during difficult periods. They make hard decisions. They create environments in which other people can perform. That work deserves people who genuinely want to do it and organisations willing to invest in preparing and supporting them to do it well. At the same time, great specialists deserve careers that do not eventually punish them for wanting to remain specialists. Perhaps the future of career progression is therefore not a ladder at all. It is a choice between different forms of increasing contribution. One person may choose to lead people. Another may lead a discipline. Another may lead products, systems, research, or professional standards. All can be leadership. Because people management should not be the reward for being excellent at another profession. It should be treated as a profession in its own right. If capability really is becoming the organising principle of the modern enterprise, our career structures need to start reflecting it. Progression should increase a person’s contribution, not require them to abandon the capability that made them valuable in the first place in order to be rewarded, recognised, or compensated fairly. Follow me on LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Rosie Hewat Rosie Hewat, Founder & CEO of Rosie’s People Rosie Hewat is a Board and Executive Advisor and Founder & CEO of Rosie’s People, a leadership and organisational advisory platform. A former Group Chief People Officer and Non-Executive Director, she has supported leadership teams and boards operating in high-growth and regulated environments. Rosie is also a trustee and an Executive Contributor to Brainz Magazine, where she writes on leadership, governance, power, and organisational risk. Sources and further reading: National Bureau of Economic Research: Promotions and the Peter Principle – Benson, Li and Shue’s empirical study of promotion and subsequent managerial performance. Chartered Management Institute (CMI): Better Management Report – Research on accidental managers, management training and employee outcomes. Chartered Management Institute (CMI): Don't leave young workers' futures to accidental managers – CMI’s January 2026 discussion of management capability and development. Gallup: Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement – Research on the relationship between management and employee engagement. Princeton research: Designing and Implementing a Comprehensive Research Software Engineer Career Ladder – 2026 case study describing parallel technical, team-lead, and managerial progression pathways.

Written by Dr. Taylor Bryant, Forensic Psychology Consultant & Expert Dr. Taylor Bryant is a Forensic Psychology Consultant/Expert & Professor of forensics and criminology, specializing in the impacts of trauma on identity, delinquency, and interpersonal relationships. With extensive experience in trauma-focused treatment, Dr. Bryant provides clinical insight into behaviors, emotional functioning, and resilience. You meet someone new, and something in you quietly says no. You’re offered an opportunity that checks every box on paper, but your stomach tightens the moment you consider saying yes. You pull back from a friend who hasn’t done anything wrong, but you can’t explain why. Is it your intuition protecting you, or is it an old wound reacting to something that resembles danger? This is one of the trickiest questions in self-trust work because both intuition and trauma responses live in the same place: the body. They arrive before language and feel completely convincing. Learning to tell them apart isn’t about ignoring your gut. It often involves learning to listen to it more accurately and unlearning unhealthy messages from earlier years in your life. What intuition actually is Intuition is often described as a mystery, but it is more mechanical than that. Pattern recognition is involved as your brain synthesizes years of lived experience, subtle cues, and prior outcomes faster than your conscious mind can articulate. When you “just know” a decision is right or sense that someone isn’t trustworthy before they’ve shown you why, you’re not receiving a message from nowhere. You are running a very fast, very quiet calculation built from everything you’ve already lived through. Intuition tends to have a particular texture: Calm, not frantic. It doesn’t typically spike your heart rate. Clear. It points to something specific, even if you can’t fully explain it yet. Steady under scrutiny. The more you sit with it, the more it holds. It doesn’t need you to act right away. What a trauma response actually is A trauma response is your nervous system doing its main job: protecting you from danger. The complication is that it is often responding to the past, using present cues that merely resemble an old threat. Some of these cues include a tone of voice, a facial expression, or a specific kind of silence, even when the current situation isn’t actually dangerous. Trauma responses tend to feel different in the body: Urgent and activating. Through fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, something in you wants to respond immediately. Disproportionate. The intensity of the reaction does not match the size of the actual situation. Diffuse. Instead of pointing to one clear thing, like intuition, it can flood you with generalised panic, shame, or dread. Why they get confused Both intuition and trauma responses can arrive in the body before your thinking brain catches up. Both feel absolutely true in the moment, and both can be right some of the time. This can make it even harder to build a reliable filter. The cultural shorthand of “trust your gut” can be well-meaning but incomplete advice. It assumes that every gut feeling is intuition, when some of them are actually your nervous system replaying an old tape. Key differences: A quick comparison Intuition Trauma response Speed & intensity Calm, quiet knowing Sudden spike, alarm-like Specificity Points to something concrete Often broad, flooding Body sensation Grounded, settled Constricting, racing, braced Under pause Holds steady, doesn’t escalate May spike further or fade with safety cues Orientation About this situation Cues are from the past Questions to ask yourself in the moment When you notice a strong “no” or “yes” rising up, try asking: Is this about the present, or does it remind me of something specific from my past? Can I stay with this feeling without spiralling, or does it demand immediate action? What happens if I wait ten minutes, take a few breaths, or talk it through with someone I trust? Is my body tense and bracing, or calm and certain? None of these questions will give you a perfect answer every time, but together, they build a habit of pausing long enough to check rather than reflexively obeying or dismissing the feeling. Why this distinction matters Getting this wrong in either direction has real costs. If you mistake a trauma response for intuition, you can end up reinforcing avoidance by steering away from safe people, opportunities, or situations because they happen to echo an old threat. Over time, this can shrink your life in ways that have nothing to do with actual danger. If you mistake intuition for “just trauma,” you risk overriding a genuinely valid instinct by talking yourself out of the very signal that was trying to protect you. This is especially common for people who have done a lot of work on themselves and become, understandably, suspicious of their own reactions. The goal isn’t to trust yourself less. It is to become more precise about what you are trusting. Building the skill over time This kind of discernment isn’t something that happens instantaneously. It is a skill, and like any skill, it develops with practice. Through the following practices, you can build self-trust and become better able to discern the key differences: Body awareness. Notice physical sensations without immediately acting on them. Where do you feel the reaction? What does it actually feel like, specifically? Pattern tracking. Journaling about recurring triggers can reveal whether a certain “gut feeling” shows up around a particular type of person or situation. This can be a sign that it is connected to trauma. Somatic or trauma-informed therapy. Working with a therapist trained in nervous system regulation can help recalibrate responses that have been stuck on high alert. Testing before fully committing. Give yourself permission to sit with a feeling, take a pause, and gather more information before treating it as the final word. Closing thought Intuition and trauma responses are not opposites to be sorted into neat boxes. Rather, they are both parts of a nervous system trying to keep you safe using different information. The work isn’t in learning to silence your gut. The majority of the work is in learning its language well enough to know when it is speaking from wisdom and when it is speaking from an old wound that deserves care, not obedience. The next time a strong feeling rises, try pausing just long enough to ask: Is this about today, or is this a response triggered by my past? That single question can change everything about how you respond. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Dr. Taylor Bryant Dr. Taylor Bryant, Forensic Psychology Consultant & Expert Dr. Taylor Bryant is a professor, forensic psychology consultant, and trauma expert with extensive experience in trauma-focused treatment and behavioral health. Her work specializes in examining how trauma impacts self-worth, delinquency, emotional regulation, and interpersonal relationships, particularly among female sex offenders, adolescents, and families. Dr. Bryant has worked extensively with justice-involved youth and individuals navigating complex trauma, family conflict, and maladaptive behavioral patterns. Through her clinical, academic, and consulting work, she provides insight into the long-term psychological effects of trauma and the pathways toward healing and resilience.

Written by Dr. Lonna Gordon, The KNOBS LLC Dr. Lonna Gordon is a board-certified adolescent medicine physician and Enneagram-informed coach who believes every teen is navigating a threshold moment. She blends clinical expertise with the Enneagram to help young people and the adults who love them know their voice matters, and they're enough to become who they're meant to be. Youth-serving professionals rarely get the luxury of long, unhurried conversations. The most meaningful moments of connection happen in the margins: a hallway pass, a locker room, two minutes before a session or visit starts, the walk from the waiting room to the office. Here is the great news: connection doesn't need forty-five minutes. It needs intention! That's an important distinction, because "I don't have time to connect" is one of the most common things I hear from professionals who care deeply about the teens they work with. The truth is usually not a time problem; it's the feeling that you cannot have the depth you want in the time allotted. You are seeking to have that moment that the teen can reflect on even after you are apart. Most of us default to the same handful of interaction scripts, on autopilot, because they're fast and familiar. Swapping those defaults for slightly different ones costs no extra time. It just requires noticing the moment and choosing differently inside it. Here are five microconnections that fit inside 90 seconds, each pulled from my Pause, Connect, Open, Secure framework. 1. The name plus notice Use a teen's name, then name one specific thing you noticed, not generic praise, but something true and particular: "Hey Jordan, you were the first one back from break today." This specificity signals you're seeing the teen as an individual, not just as part of the group. 2. The one breath pause before redirecting Before you correct a behavior, take one breath. That single second changes your tone from command to invitation, and teens can hear the difference. 3. The "what's one word" check-in Instead of "how are you," which invites "fine," ask for one word. For example, at the beginning of a session, “What is one word that describes school today?” It's fast, low pressure, and often more honest because it asks for less. 4. The open door, not the open file Rather than referencing a teen's history, record, or last incident, meet them as they are today. "What's today like for you?" keeps the interaction current instead of retrospective. I love to start each visit by saying, “Tell me what is new and improved?” or “What is something that you are proud of that has happened between now and the last time I saw you?” 5. The clean close End every short interaction with something that doesn't hinge on compliance, not "make good choices," but "Glad I got to see you" or “Thanks for meeting with me.” Teens do not always hear adults express gratitude to them or suggest that the interactions they have with adults are a choice. These lines secure the relationship regardless of how the interaction went. None of these requires extra time in your day. They require swapping your default script for a slightly different one and doing it enough times that it becomes automatic. This is where most well-intentioned training falls short: it gives professionals concepts and explains neuroscience without giving real-world tools. A staff development day can teach the theory of connection beautifully and still leave every professional in the room without a single new behavior to try on Monday morning. Microconnections work because they're small enough to practice in real time, on a real caseload, without waiting for the "right" moment to try. There is no ideal moment, only the next ninety seconds you have. Try picking just one of the five this week. Not all five, just one. Use it in every short interaction you have one day, on purpose, until it stops feeling deliberate and starts feeling like you. That's the difference between knowing a technique and adopting it as your own. If you want these moves built into muscle memory for your whole team, this is exactly what team workshops through Connection Compass are designed to do. Individual coaching is also available for professionals who want their own default responses rebuilt from the ground up. Learn more here. Follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Dr. Lonna Gordon Dr. Lonna Gordon, The KNOBS LLC Dr. Lonna Gordon is a board-certified adolescent medicine physician with 15 years of clinical experience and leadership roles across academic institutions. She is also the founder of The KNOBS LLC, a coaching, speaking, and workshop practice for parents, teens, and the professionals who support them. Drawing on the Enneagram and her clinical background, she helps young people and the adults who love them navigate the threshold moments of growing up. She also hosts Tweens, Teens & Everything Between, a podcast exploring identity and connection during the teen years. Her mission is simple: to help every young person know their voice matters, their experience makes sense, and they are enough to become who they're meant to be.

Written by Julie Farnsworth, Trauma-Informed Grief Coach Julie Farnsworth has spent her life helping others to live better lives. After 30 years working as a social worker, she founded "One Free Soul Grief Journey, LLC" in honor of her sister, Erica, who lost her life to cancer at the age of 40. I want to talk about something that we have been led to believe, the idea that we need to have some kind of timeline for grief and loss. After this timeline is complete, we will simply carry on with our lives and head off into the proverbial sunset for the next phase, essentially “moving on and letting go.” I want to debunk this myth and challenge this “stage” of grief and loss once and for all. This myth has caused many of us to feel like there is something wrong with us if we cannot move on with our lives and let go of our loved ones. If we think about it on a deeper level, we can start to see the flaw in this logic. Why would we, or why should we, expect that, if we have loved someone and had a deep connection to them, we would actually want to let that go? I think it should really be just the opposite. What if we reframe this into something that sounds and feels like this, I loved this person dearly, and I lost them. I need to accept that they are gone, but I do not have to forget about them and move on with my life, acting as if they did not exist or the connection was not important enough to continue to “carry” the love forward. I can still have room in my heart to accept new love and new people, but I do not have to let go of my loved one, I just need to look at it as a changed connection with them. What might this new connection look like? It will be different for everyone, but it could include honoring shared traditions and the things that mattered to our loved one. A favorite song, experience, or place can remain alive in our hearts, memories, and minds. What we shared with them can continue to matter. We can also honor them on special days, such as birthdays and anniversaries. Their favorite foods and recipes can still be part of our lives, recreated and shared with others as we talk about them and the memories connected to them. This leads me to the next part of this new process and something that we can think more about. What if we honored our loved ones by carrying them and their love forward in ways that could also help others? This could look like making a donation in their name, planting flowers and vegetables in their honor to give to others, performing a random act of kindness, hosting a meal to share with others and serving all their favorite foods, starting a charity in their name, or writing about them. Think about the things that were important to them. Did they love children, animals, art, science, reading, writing, or nature? The possibilities start to present themselves when we find organizations that connect to the things they enjoyed or were passionate about. When we start to shift our focus to integrating the loss into our lives through continuing bonds, rather than forcing false closure, we can start to view it through a different lens. We realize that it has changed us in different ways, especially if our identities were closely tied to the person we lost. However, if we look at the ways these changes could lead us to something positive, we can experience a mindset shift. We start to see that we might have a newfound appreciation for things if we know how to tune into them. For example, after the loss of my sister, I started to realize that I was seeing a lot of birds and noticing different feathers on the ground. There was a recurring theme that started to present itself to me. By paying attention to nature and my surroundings, I began to feel a connection to her and a sense of peace in my heart. Discovering the joy of noticing these small things made me think about this positive shift. I began to intentionally pay closer attention to the things in my surroundings. My focus became one of gratitude for this new awareness and the realization that it was actually a gift. When we realize that our loss can put us in a position to receive some gifts, we can pay attention to new qualities that we now have, such as resilience and strength, or a newfound understanding and empathy for others who have also experienced loss. We might appreciate the people in our lives more than ever and treat ourselves with more care and compassion. We can see that life is fleeting, but this is a reminder to live our lives in ways that reflect the love of the person who left and to find joy in ways that honor them. Let us all strive to change the myth of “moving on and letting go” and instead think of it as moving forward by carrying their love with us into the future and making room for the newfound gifts and joys in our lives. You don’t have to carry the weight of your grief alone. Book a discovery call to learn more about my 12-week 1:1 signature healing journey. Visit my website for more info! Read more from Julie Farnsworth Julie Farnsworth, Trauma-Informed Grief Coach Julie Farnsworth is a Certified Trauma-Informed Grief Coach, Neuro-Change and Mind-Body Medicine Practitioner, Social Worker, and Mental Health Therapist. Since the age of 12, as a volunteer with the Red Cross, Julie has been called to help as many people as she can. She is the founder of "One Free Soul Grief Journey," which provides 1:1 healing journeys for anyone who needs help navigating the intricacies of grief and loss. Julie brings her years of experience walking alongside fellow grievers, as well as her own personal experience with grief and loss, to ignite her passion to help others to go from surviving to thriving.

Marcy Elizabeth is a Strategic Growth, Alignment, and Transformation Expert, Speaker, Thought Leader, and Executive Contributor at Brainz Magazine whose work sits at the intersection of leadership, pattern recognition, performance optimization, and personal transformation. Drawing from her background in leadership, marketing, business development, psychology, neuroscience, holistic practices, and lived experience, she helps individuals and organizations optimize performance, create sustainable growth, and build lives and businesses aligned with their highest potential. Known for helping people shift perspective, challenge limitations, and unlock greater clarity, Marcy brings together insights from business, human behavior, self-awareness, and conscious leadership to create meaningful and lasting change. In this interview, she shares the lessons that shaped her philosophy on alignment, the hidden reasons many high achievers feel disconnected despite outward success, and why the future of leadership requires greater self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and personal responsibility of ultimate alignment. Marcy Elizabeth Granger, Quantum Alignment Architect| Perspective Activator What first made you realize that alignment was more important than achievement alone? For much of my life, I believed what many people are taught to believe: that achievement was the destination. If I could accomplish enough, build enough, earn enough, or become enough, then fulfillment would naturally follow. What I discovered through my own experiences was that achievement without alignment often creates a very different outcome. You can achieve goals, earn recognition, build businesses, and still feel disconnected from yourself. This not only creates perpetual unfulfillment but also often leads to major health issues, loss of relationships, loss of material possessions, and more. Some of my greatest growth came during seasons when life forced me to stop, to reset, and to rebuild. Those experiences taught me that success is not simply about what you accomplish externally. It's about who you become in the process. Alignment is the connection between your values, identity, purpose, decisions, and actions. When those things are out of sync, no amount of achievement feels sustainable. When they are aligned, life and business begin to flow differently. Achievement became more meaningful when it became an expression of who I truly am rather than an attempt to prove my worth. How did your background in marketing and leadership shape the way you understand identity and human behavior today? Marketing taught me that people rarely buy products; they buy stories, emotions, beliefs, and perceived identities. Leadership taught me that people rarely struggle because they lack information or even capability. More often, they struggle because of fear, uncertainty, limiting beliefs, and internal conflict. After spending years in leadership, marketing, business development, and personal growth, I began noticing a fascinating pattern. Human behavior drives almost everything. The way people feel influences how they think. The way people think influences the way they communicate. The way they communicate influences their relationships. Their relationships influence opportunities. Their opportunities influence outcomes. The more I studied psychology, behavior, leadership, performance, and personal development, the more I realized that identity sits at the center of it all. People rarely outperform the stories they hold about themselves. If someone believes they are capable, resourceful, and resilient, they tend to create very different results than someone operating from self-doubt or fear. Understanding identity and getting to the root of each individual or corporation's origin essence became the foundation of understanding growth itself. You describe yourself as a “Perspective Activator.” What usually shifts for someone when their perspective finally changes? Perspective is one of the most powerful forces shaping human potential. Psychology teaches us that perception influences behavior. Neuroscience shows that our brains filter reality through our expectations, beliefs, and experiences. Even science continues to reveal that observation plays a fundamental role in how we understand the world around us. The moment perspective shifts, new opportunities, solutions, and possibilities emerge. Change your perspective, and you change your decisions. Change your decisions, and over time, you change the trajectory of your life. In many ways, transformation begins not when reality changes, but when the lens through which we see it does. Many people spend years trying to change their circumstances without first changing how they see themselves, their challenges, or their opportunities. The moment perspective shifts, new possibilities emerge that were previously invisible. I often tell people that transformation doesn't begin when your circumstances change. It begins when your interpretation changes. A setback becomes a lesson. A failure becomes feedback. A challenge becomes preparation. The external situation may remain exactly the same, but the way someone experiences it becomes completely different. That is why I also say “Every Obstacle is an opportunity.” What I see most often is that people stop viewing themselves as victims of circumstance and begin seeing themselves as active participants in creating their future. They move from reacting to leading. From surviving to creating. From waiting for permission to taking ownership. That shift alone can completely alter the trajectory of a life or business. Why do you think so many high performers feel disconnected even when they appear successful on the outside? Because success and fulfillment are not the same thing. Many high performers become incredibly skilled at achieving goals. They know how to execute, produce results, solve problems, and continue moving forward. What often gets neglected is the relationship they have with themselves. In today's world, achievement is celebrated publicly while alignment is rarely discussed. People can spend years climbing ladders they never stopped to question. They become successful by external standards while feeling disconnected internally. Creating stress, chaos, internal conflict, and disassociation. I believe many high performers aren't suffering from a lack of success. They're suffering from a lack of congruence. Their daily lives may no longer reflect who they truly are or what they genuinely value. That's why I believe personal growth isn't just about becoming more productive. It's about becoming more honest, more aligned, and more harmonious. The goal isn't simply to build a successful life. It's to build a life that actually brings you peace and feels meaningful when no one else is watching. What's missing from most conversations around leadership and personal growth right now? We're spending too much time talking about tactics and not enough time talking about the person using them. The future of leadership is not just strategy. It's self-awareness. It's emotional intelligence. It's adaptability. It's understanding human behavior and nervous system regulation. It's understanding how our beliefs, fears, experiences, and identities influence the way we lead. Technology is advancing rapidly. Artificial intelligence is transforming industries. Information has never been more accessible. Yet many people are more overwhelmed and disconnected than ever. That tells me the challenge isn't access to information. It's integration and connection. Leadership today requires an ability to navigate uncertainty while remaining grounded in values and purpose. It’s keeping our humanity. The leaders who will thrive in the future are not necessarily those with the loudest voices or best technology. They are those with the greatest clarity, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and ability to bring people together around a shared vision. What are the earliest signs that someone is living out of alignment with themselves? One of the earliest signs is chronic frustration or fatigue. People often assume they're burnt out because they're working too much. Sometimes that's true. But often, they're exhausted because they're investing energy into a life, role, business, or identity that no longer fits. Other signs include indecision, procrastination, feeling disconnected from your purpose, constantly seeking external validation, and a persistent feeling that something is missing despite apparent success. These can later lead to physical health issues such as stroke, autoimmune disease, heart attack, and many others. Alignment isn't always about making dramatic changes. Sometimes it's about paying attention to what your life is already trying to tell you. Discontent can be a signal. Restlessness can be a signal. Repeated patterns can be a signal. The sooner we learn to listen to those signals, the sooner we can make adjustments before dissatisfaction becomes a crisis. When someone wants to reinvent their life or business, where should they start before making external changes? Pause, evaluate, and then start with identity. Most people begin with goals, strategies, or action plans. While those things matter, they are built upon something deeper: who you believe yourself to be. I encourage people to ask themselves questions such as: How have I been operating? Have I been living in alignment? Who am I becoming? What values do I want to live by? What kind of life am I trying to create? What no longer aligns with that vision? Clarity creates direction. Direction creates momentum. When people skip this step, they often build new versions of old problems. They change businesses, careers, relationships, or environments without addressing the underlying patterns driving their decisions. Reinvention isn't about becoming someone else. It's about removing what is no longer authentic so you can become more fully yourself. How do you personally define conscious leadership in today's world? Conscious leadership begins with responsibility and intention. It is the willingness to lead yourself before attempting to lead others. It requires self-awareness, emotional intelligence, integrity, humility, and the courage to continually evolve. One of my own mantras I remind myself daily is “to be a master to many, you must first become a master of one”. To me, conscious leadership is not about power over people. It's about stewardship. It's about recognizing that influence carries responsibility. Leaders shape cultures, teams, families, communities, and futures through their words, actions, and decisions. You are the example. The leaders we need most today are those who can balance performance with humanity, ambition with integrity, and success with service. They understand that leadership is not measured solely by what they build for themselves but by the impact they create for others. If there's one mindset shift you hope readers take away from this conversation, what would it be? You are not limited by your circumstances nearly as much as you are limited by the story you believe about your circumstances. The most powerful transformations I've witnessed didn't begin with a new opportunity. They began with a new perspective. Because “Every obstacle is an opportunity.” Life changes when we stop asking, "Why is this happening to me?" and begin asking, "What is this preparing me for?" Growth becomes possible when we stop trying to become someone else and start becoming more of who we truly are. The goal isn't perfection. It isn't a constant achievement. It isn't chasing success for the sake of appearances. The goal is alignment, which leads to fulfillment. Because when who you are, what you value, and how you live become congruent, extraordinary results often follow naturally. Perspective creates possibility. Possibility creates action. Action creates reality. – The Marcy Elizabeth Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Marcy Elizabeth

Written by Marcy Elizabeth Granger, Perspective, Alignment & Transformation Expert Marcy Elizabeth is a Perspective, Alignment & Transformation Expert, thought leader, speaker, and entrepreneur exploring how perspective shapes identity, leadership, business, and the realities we create. Her work bridges human potential, connection, and conscious growth to inspire greater possibility, purpose, and harmony. What if the most powerful force shaping your life isn't what happens to you, but the perspective through which you experience it? From neuroscience and psychology to philosophy, spirituality, leadership, and even questions raised by modern physics, perspective influences what we notice, what we believe, how we respond, and ultimately what we create. Change the lens, and you may change far more than the view. The same reality, a different experience Two people can walk into the same room, hear the same words, experience the same setback, receive the same opportunity, and leave with entirely different realities. One sees rejection, the other sees redirection. One sees failure, the other sees information. One sees uncertainty, the other sees possibility. One sees an ending, the other recognizes an invitation to become someone new. The event may be identical. The experience is not. Why? Perspective. Perspective is far more than positive thinking. It is the lens through which we assign meaning to ourselves, other people, circumstances, opportunities, adversity, and even what we believe is possible. Once meaning is assigned, a chain reaction begins. Perspective influences perception, perception influences belief, belief influences emotion, emotion influences reaction, reaction influences behavior, behavior influences decisions, and decisions influence outcomes. Repeated outcomes eventually help construct what we experience as our life. You don't experience life completely objectively Human beings like to believe we simply observe reality and respond accordingly, but our experience is more complicated. The brain receives enormous amounts of sensory information and cannot consciously process every detail equally, so it filters, predicts, interprets, compares, and prioritizes. Previous experiences, expectations, emotional states, beliefs, environment, and even the questions we ask ourselves can influence what receives our attention. Think about buying a particular car and suddenly noticing that model everywhere. The cars didn't suddenly materialize, your attention changed. The same principle appears throughout life. If you believe people cannot be trusted, you may become particularly sensitive to evidence of betrayal. If you believe opportunity is everywhere, you may notice connections that someone else overlooks. If you believe you aren't qualified, an intimidating opportunity may look like proof you shouldn't enter the room. Someone else sees the same opportunity and thinks, “I can learn.” The objective facts may not have changed. What happens next can. Perspective also affects the body. Research has shown that how we interpret physiological arousal can influence our response to stressful situations. A racing heart before stepping onto a stage could mean, “I'm anxious, I'm going to fail,” or, “My body is preparing me, I'm energized because this matters.” The activation may be similar, but the meaning changes the experience. This is why perspective cannot be reduced to “think positively.” Someone experiencing exhaustion, fear, unresolved pain, or chronic stress may perceive the same situation differently when rested, regulated, supported, and secure. Sometimes, transformation isn't about forcing yourself to believe something better. Sometimes it begins by creating enough internal space to see something differently. The meaning can become more powerful than the event One of the most important distinctions I've learned is that an event and the meaning we assign to it are not necessarily the same. A business fails. That's an event. “I'm incapable of succeeding” is an interpretation. A relationship ends. That's an event. “Nobody will ever choose me” is an interpretation. An opportunity disappears. That's an event. “I'm behind everyone else” is an interpretation. We frequently suffer not only from circumstances themselves, but from the stories we build around them. Those stories can become beliefs. Beliefs can become identities. Identities can quietly influence what we allow ourselves to attempt next. You may not be able to change what happened, but you can examine the meaning you've attached to it. Changing that meaning can change what the experience is allowed to become. I've had to live this, not just study it Perspective became important to me because life repeatedly gave me opportunities to test it. I've experienced dramatic changes in my body, health, career, relationships, finances, geography, identity, and the direction I thought my life was supposed to take. Viewed through one lens, some chapters could have become evidence that everything had gone wrong. Sometimes, initially, they did. With distance, I began recognizing something else. Experiences I once wanted to escape became catalysts for reinvention. Things I thought were breaking me were also revealing me. Endings forced questions I might never otherwise have asked. Who am I without the identities I've outgrown? What actually matters to me? What am I capable of? What if this isn't simply happening to me, but becoming material I can build with? That perspective didn't erase difficult circumstances. It changed my relationship with them. As that relationship changed, my choices changed too. Today I don't ask only, “What is happening?” I also ask, “From what perspective am I interpreting what is happening?” That second question has changed my life. Perspective is a business and leadership advantage Markets change. Deals fall through. Employees make mistakes. Campaigns underperform. Competitors emerge. Technology disrupts industries. Effective leaders aren't necessarily those who avoid problems. Often, they're the ones capable of examining a problem from more than one angle. Where one company sees disruption, another sees an emerging market. Where one leader sees an underperforming employee, another examines the system, incentives, communication, training, or role alignment. Where one entrepreneur sees competition, another sees validation that demand exists. Perspective also changes negotiation. Enter believing the other party must lose for you to win, and you search for leverage. Enter believing there may be a structure where both sides gain value, and you search for alignment. Different lens. Different questions. Different possibilities. The ability to consciously shift perspective isn't merely a personal development skill. It is a leadership competency. Spirituality, philosophy, and the possibility of more Humans have wrestled with the meaning of experience for thousands of years. Faith can radically change perspective without changing circumstances. Someone who believes life has purpose may experience adversity differently from someone who believes suffering is entirely meaningless. For me, spirituality doesn't mean denying reality. It means considering that the reality immediately visible to me may not be the entirety of the story. Rejection may become protection. Delay may create preparation. An ending may create space. We rarely possess enough information in the middle of an experience to know everything it will eventually mean. Philosophy has long explored similar questions. How much of reality do we perceive directly? How much is interpreted? How do consciousness, memory, culture, language, and belief influence experience? Different traditions reach different conclusions, but a recurring insight remains. Human experience is inseparable from interpretation. Even seeing is an act of interpretation We don't simply see with our eyes, we see with our brains. Our eyes detect light and convert it into neural signals, which the brain interprets using context, memory, expectation, and attention. Even vision isn't a perfect recording of objective reality. Each eye has a natural blind spot, yet we don't experience a permanent hole in our visual field because the brain compensates for missing information. Optical illusions offer another reminder that what is physically present and what we consciously perceive are not always identical. This doesn't mean objective reality doesn't exist or that we can imagine it away. It means our conscious experience is filtered through biological and psychological systems. Our eyes receive. Our brains interpret. Our beliefs contextualize. Our emotions color. Our perspective gives meaning. Perhaps “seeing is believing” sometimes works in reverse. Believing can influence what we're capable of seeing. What about quantum physics? This is where conversations about “creating your reality” become fascinating, and where precision matters. Quantum physics demonstrates that reality at microscopic scales behaves in ways that challenge ordinary intuition. Measurement matters in quantum experiments, and concepts such as superposition transformed our understanding of matter and probability. But quantum mechanics should not be reduced to the claim that our thoughts literally create whatever reality we want. That goes beyond what the science establishes. For me, the more interesting lesson is intellectual humility. Modern physics reminds us that reality is stranger and more complex than everyday perception suggests. What appears obvious isn't always scientifically correct, and there may always be more happening than the limited perspective available from where we currently stand. Perspective can become a self-reinforcing reality There is also a practical way perspective helps “create” reality. Imagine believing, “Nobody takes me seriously.” You enter meetings guarded, hesitate to contribute, interpret neutral reactions as dismissive, and avoid visibility. People encounter that quieter version of you, and eventually you conclude, “See? Nobody takes me seriously.” Now consider, “My perspective has value, and I belong in this conversation.” You prepare differently, communicate differently, ask questions, tolerate visibility, initiate conversations, and notice opportunities. This isn't magic. It's a feedback loop. Your internal reality influences how you interact with the external world. The external world responds to that behavior, providing new information that reinforces or challenges your internal reality. Perspective becomes participation. Perspective isn't pretending everything is good Changing perspective does not mean denying grief, injustice, disappointment, anger, fear, or objective problems. Sometimes something genuinely is wrong. Sometimes anger provides information. Sometimes, leaving is wisdom. Sometimes failure needs to be acknowledged rather than spiritually reframed. Sometimes accountability matters more than optimism. There is an enormous difference between toxic positivity and expanded perspective. Toxic positivity says, “Nothing is wrong.” Expanded perspective says, “This is difficult, and difficulty may not be the only truth available here.” One of the simplest ways to expand perspective is to change the question. Instead of “Why is this happening to me?” ask, “What is this showing me?” Instead of “What if I fail?” ask, “What becomes possible if I succeed?” Instead of “Who am I to do this?” ask, “Who do I need to become to do this well?” Perhaps the most powerful question of all: "What else could be true?" That question doesn't require immediately replacing one belief with another. It simply creates space. Sometimes, space is enough to reveal an entirely different path. Your perspective is your reality We cannot control every event. We cannot think our way out of every circumstance, nor pretend that mindset eliminates biology, economics, systemic realities, chance, or other people's choices. But within those realities exists an extraordinary human capacity. We can examine the lens through which we're looking. That lens influences what we notice, believe, feel, question, recognize, tolerate, pursue, and ultimately do next. Maybe changing your life doesn't always begin with changing your circumstances. Sometimes it begins with standing in the same place and learning to see it differently. Because when perspective changes, possibility changes. When the possibility changes, everything that follows can change with it. The question I invite you to carry is simple: "What else could be true?" The next time you encounter a setback, disagreement, fear, opportunity, or moment that challenges what you thought you knew, examine not only what you're seeing, but the perspective you're seeing it through. Sometimes the breakthrough isn't found in changing the situation. It's found in discovering another way to see it. If you're ready to explore how perspective, alignment, and self-awareness can transform the way you lead, grow, and navigate what's next, connect with me here and explore more of my work. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Marcy Elizabeth Marcy Elizabeth Granger, Perspective, Alignment & Transformation Expert Marcy Elizabeth is a Perspective, Alignment & Transformation Expert, thought leader, speaker, and entrepreneur. Her work explores how perspective shapes identity, leadership, and the realities we create, bridging human potential and conscious growth to inspire greater possibility, connection, purpose, and harmony.

Healing can be more than managing symptoms or improving how we function, it can be a return to the body, authenticity, and a deeper sense of self. In this interview, Selden explores the connection between nervous system healing, somatic intelligence, and intuition, sharing how greater safety in the body can create space for self trust, transformation, and new possibilities. Selden Beylouni, Somatic Practitioner & Intuitive Development Coach Your work brings together nervous system healing and intuitive development through the Somatic Intuitive Method. What inspired you to create this approach? The Somatic Intuitive Method really came from my own journey of trying to understand what had happened to me. I spent much of my life disconnected from my body, living with dissociation, chronic fatigue, and eventually an autoimmune diagnosis. For a long time, I was trying to fix the symptoms without fully understanding the patterns underneath them and where they came from. As I began healing my nervous system, something unexpected started happening. It was not just that I felt better physically. But yes, that was extremely important. I started to come back into myself. I could feel my body again, connect to the world around me, and slowly begin trusting what I felt. This was such an interesting process because until then, I really didn’t understand that I had not been embodied previously or what that even meant. With that came something else. My intuition became clearer. That made me realize that nervous system healing and intuitive development were not separate things. When we are living in survival, so much of our energy is directed toward protection. As we build safety, capacity, and connection to the body, we create more space to access our own inner knowing. The Somatic Intuitive Method was born from that realization. Healing is not just about functioning again. It is about remembering who we really are underneath survival. You describe symptoms as intelligent survival adaptations rather than dysfunctions. How does that perspective change the way people approach healing? This perspective changes almost everything because instead of asking, “What is wrong with me?” we can begin asking, “What happened to me, and why might my body be responding this way?” It shifts us out of fix it mode, “I am the problem,” and into a much deeper relationship with the body, “How is my body trying to protect me?” which is essential for healing anything. For much of my own life, I believed my body was failing me. I had chronic fatigue, dissociation, and eventually an autoimmune diagnosis, and I was constantly trying to figure out how to fix myself. But the deeper I went into nervous system work from a somatic perspective, the more I began to see that many of the things I was fighting against had actually developed for a reason. Our bodies adapt. They protect us. Sometimes that protection looks like anxiety, numbness, exhaustion, chronic tension, or shutting down. That does not mean symptoms should be accepted or that we should dismiss them. This is a deeper language. When we stop seeing the body as the enemy, we can become curious about what it may be communicating. For me, healing began when I stopped asking my body to behave differently and started learning how to listen to it. You often say intuition becomes clearer when the body feels safe. What has convinced you that biology and intuition are so closely connected? Honestly, my own experience convinced me first. For most of my life, I was so disconnected from my body that I did not realize how much I had stopped feeling. As I began healing, building safety, and slowly reconnecting to sensation, something unexpected happened. I did not just become more aware of my physical body. I began to trust what I felt again. We call the ability to sense and interpret signals from within the body interoception. As I began reconnecting with that internal sense, I slowly started trusting it. It became something of a compass, an instinctual way of receiving information that is deeply primal to being human. My intuition sharpened immensely. I think we often separate biology and intuition, as if one belongs to science and the other belongs somewhere outside of us, or somewhere decidedly woo woo. But we receive information through the body constantly. We sense changes in our internal state, and we may also pick up on subtle cues in people, environments, patterns, danger, and connection before we can consciously explain them. When survival is constantly driving the system, it can become difficult to know the difference between fear, trauma, instinct, and intuition. As we build safety and capacity, we may have more space for discernment within all of that information. For me, intuition is not separate from the body. It is something I learned to hear more clearly as my protective parts softened and I became present enough to listen. Why do you think so many people stay stuck even after years of therapy, coaching, or personal development? I think many people are still working primarily with the mind, and that can only take us so far. Understanding something and experiencing something are not always the same thing. Cognitive processes often do not integrate lower than the head, and our whole body is affected by stress and trauma. You can know exactly why you behave a certain way. You can understand your childhood, recognize your patterns, read every self-help book, drink a million green smoothies, and still find yourself doing the same things when your nervous system is under stress. That was certainly true for me. I could explain myself before I could actually feel myself. Somatic work offers another way in. Through deep listening, sensing, expression, and working with the body's responses, we can begin creating new experiences rather than simply understanding old ones. If slowing down, resting, expressing anger, receiving support, or simply being present does not feel safe to the nervous system, insight alone often does not change that response. This is why I focus on building safety through small, titrated experiences. We do not always need another breakthrough. Sometimes we need to slowly create something new that the body can recognize, hold, and integrate. Healing is becoming a fast-growing industry with countless methods and promises. What do you believe is still widely misunderstood about lasting transformation? I think one of the things we misunderstand about transformation is the idea that it ever truly ends. We often approach healing with a destination in mind. When my symptoms are gone, I’ll be better. When my blood work improves, I’ll finally feel well. When I make more money, find the right relationship, or quit my job, then I’ll be happy. We spend a ton of money and time outsourcing our power to empty promises about healing. But healing is within you. It always has been. Transformation does not end when we get well or reach a goal. There is always another layer of becoming. Healing may begin with wanting relief from suffering, but if we stay with the process, it can become something much larger. It can fundamentally change how we experience ourselves, our bodies, our relationships, and the world around us. I believe we are capable of far more than we currently understand about human potential. We are only beginning to understand what becomes possible when so much of our energy is no longer being used simply to survive. Perhaps that is the most honest thing I can say about lasting transformation. We may not fully understand it yet. We don't know what we don't know. Maybe transformation is simply our willingness to keep discovering what lies beyond who we once believed ourselves to be. For someone living in survival mode, what is one simple practice that can begin restoring a sense of safety in the body? Start noticing yourself and your body in daily life and function. Before trying to fix or change your nervous system, become curious about what it is already doing. Notice your patterns, movements, tensions, bracing, and behaviors. If you are always on the go, slow your physical body down long enough to notice it. What are your hands doing? Your shoulders? Your neck? Can you recognize the constant performance? If you are shut down, exhausted, or burned out, get curious about what came before it. What were you asking of your body in the days, months, or even years before it finally said, “Enough”? Can you allow yourself to be tired without immediately adding shame or guilt? We all have our own unique mixture of nervous system states playing out through our bodies and behaviors. The first step is simply asking, “What can I notice? What can I safely be with? What feels like too much? What does my body need right now? How long have I been overriding these needs?” Awareness is where the relationship with yourself begins. Your upcoming book introduces the idea of Somatic Intelligence. How can people start recognizing this intelligence in their everyday lives? I think Somatic Intelligence begins with recognizing that your body is already communicating with you all day long. You may notice that you speed up around certain people. That you become exhausted after saying yes when you wanted to say no. Maybe your stomach tightens before your mind has figured out why. Maybe you feel yourself disappear during certain conversations, or suddenly become very busy when stillness arrives. These are not always problems to fix. They are information. Somatic Intelligence starts by understanding how important these conversations are with your body. What is happening in me right now? Where did I go? What changed? What feels different when I am with this person or in this environment? That is the beginning, but this intelligence grows into somatic intuition. That is spiritual and deep and profoundly changes how we do everything, realigning us to purpose. The goal is to develop a relationship with yourself. To start to build safety in a body that may have never known it. The kind of somatic and extraordinary intelligence I write about grows only from this place. Over time, these small observations help us recognize our patterns, build discernment, and begin to feel the difference between a reaction driven by survival and the deeper intelligence that becomes available when we are present enough to truly feel ourselves, and then develop the inner trust to follow that call. You often describe healing as a return to authenticity rather than self-improvement. How has that philosophy changed the way you live? Healing is a process of peeling back the layers of protection, the parts of us that stepped forward when survival became the priority. Many of these patterns were formed very early in life, perhaps even through generations before us. They are old, but they are not the enemy. They have been doing their job. The problem is that protective parts often respond to the present as though the past is still happening. Healing is slowly creating enough safety for those parts to recognize that they do not always have to be in charge. They can step back. When they do, something deeper has room to emerge. For me, that is where authenticity begins, and it does not end there. With greater safety comes much more space for creativity, intuition, trust, purpose, and possibilities we may not have been able to access while survival was running the show. Healing is about creating enough safety for more of who we are underneath survival and protection, and more of what we are capable of, to step forward. If readers could leave this interview with one new understanding about their body and its capacity to heal, what would you hope it would be? There was a time after my lupus diagnosis when I wondered if I would ever get better. Then, as I did, I wondered if my emotional patterns could change too. They did. Later, I wondered if I was capable of calling in an aligned partnership. Now that has happened, and I realize I have been wondering all along. What else might be possible? The amazing thing is, once we recognize how powerful our bodies are and that they are self healing, that self healing only speeds up and gets more efficient in response to that realization. That is the beautiful thing about healing. We may begin with a specific goal, but transformation does not end when we reach it. Along the way, a new language develops between the body and psyche, making space for so much more self healing and depth in self-trust, intuition, authenticity, and possibilities beyond what we once believed were available to us. We do not even know yet how deep this goes. I personally cannot wait to find out. Our bodies are far more sacred than we’ve given them credit for. They are the place where life is experienced, challenges are met, capacities are discovered, and perhaps, we become more than we ever imagined possible. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Selden Beylouni

Written by Thomas Patrick McNulty, CEO of Success Stories, Inc. Tom McNulty, M.S., is a healthcare consultant with a vast array of experiences in behavioral health, neurology, healthcare hospitality, and health talk podcasting, "MindSet with Tom McNulty, M.S." He is a professional photographer, screenwriter, and public speaker. Lives lost to suicide, overdoses, mass shootings, human trafficking, eating disorders, and trauma are rising despite several questionable government reports seeking to minimize the nation’s growing mental illness and addiction problems. The flawed belief is that these painful realities happen to someone else's family, in someone else's neighborhood, in some other community, or in some other country. It is happening everywhere. We all know someone who has died because help was denied. Frontline people such as campus security, urgent care facilities, spiritual leaders, teachers and professors, ambulance personnel, law enforcement, caregivers, primary care physicians, military officers, parents, human resources directors, emergency room staff, and friends do not fully understand what to do when someone is in a life-threatening episode. Behind the statistics are parents who don't know how to help their children. Families are watching someone they love disappear into addiction. Teenagers are fighting depression in silence. People with serious mental illness are cycling through emergency rooms, hospitals, shelters, and jails. Our prisons are housing more mentally ill individuals than psychiatric hospitals and addiction programs. Spouses who become caregivers do not know the warning signs. Children who grow up wondering whether Mom or Dad will survive another night live in fear of impending danger. While “breaking news” may cover celebrity deaths from suicide and drug or alcohol overdoses, practically nothing with a behavioral health reference is mentioned after mass shootings leave communities in a state of unresolved trauma. Add human trafficking (Epstein was not alone), high school and college hazing, gambling with drugs laced with fentanyl, incest, workplace bullying, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) trauma and burnout, the impact of racism, military suicides, internet sites, teens gambling online, and seniors aged 65 and older dying from drug and alcohol mixtures. It’s no longer impactful to claim that stigma is the problem. To do nothing is to put children born today at severe risk of an ongoing fear of impending danger. As we know, America has more guns than people. How many mass shooters were discovered to have had serious mental illness, but treatment was ignored or failed the individual? Sometimes, there is no next morning. But trauma, we now know, takes years off our lives. Face the facts that it’s serious, and we need a solution The newest federal data show the size of the crisis with uncomfortable clarity. In 2025, an estimated 54.6 million American adults, 20.6% of the adult population, experienced a mental illness during the previous year. Of those, 18.2 million adults, 6.9%, experienced serious mental illness, a category involving conditions that substantially interfere with major life activities. That means roughly one out of every five American adults was living with a mental illness during 2025. But the crisis does not stop at adulthood. Do you have children? Among America's adolescents ages 12 to 17, 3.7 million experienced a major depressive episode in 2025, 15.1% of the nation's teenagers. About 2.7 million experienced an episode with severe impairment. Approximately 4.6 million adolescents, 18.0%, had moderate or severe symptoms of generalized anxiety during the two weeks preceding the 2025 survey. Addiction is another front in the same war In 2025, 44.6 million Americans aged 12 and older, 15.3% of the population, met the criteria for a substance use disorder during the previous year. Among those known to authorities and providers: 26.0 million had a drug use disorder. 25.7 million had an alcohol use disorder. 19.3 million had a marijuana use disorder. 4.5 million had a central nervous system stimulant use disorder. 4.0 million had an opioid use disorder. 7.1 million had both an alcohol use disorder and a drug use disorder. The numbers overlap because a person can have more than one drug use disorder. The opioid number is particularly sobering. Fentanyl adds to the sudden death rate. It only takes the equivalent of a pencil tip of fentanyl to cause an overdose. Approximately 4 million Americans had a reported opioid use disorder in 2025. Many users are not known or recorded as users, even those saved by Narcan. Addiction does not exist in a vacuum. It’s rampant at every socioeconomic level of life, from Wall Street to those living in poverty. In 2025, 33.9% of adults with any mental illness, 18.5 million people, also had a substance use disorder. This is one of the most important facts in the entire behavioral health story. You cannot fully address addiction while ignoring mental health, and you cannot fully address serious mental illness while ignoring addiction. This is just one of the blatant failures of the treatment systems and insurance payers. They are diseases that often intersect but are not treated with a holistic assessment and treatment plan. The treatment gap is one of the greatest horrors Perhaps the most disturbing part of the statistics isn't how many Americans are suffering. It is how many are suffering without treatment. Why? Poor assessment and referral procedures and a lack of appropriate and timely access. Among adults with mental illness in 2025, 54.6 million were affected. Yet only 27.8 million, 50.9%, received mental health treatment. That means approximately 26.9 million adults with a mental illness did not receive mental health treatment. For substance use, the gap is even more stark. Among people aged 12 and older who needed drug or alcohol use treatment in 2025, only 16.0%, 7.6 million people, received treatment. That means roughly 84% did not. The treatment gap was particularly severe among young adults, only 9.6% of 18-to 25-year-olds who needed substance use treatment received it. Think about what that means. Millions of Americans are experiencing a condition serious enough to meet the criteria for treatment, and most are not receiving it. Why? The most tragic number: The people who die The behavioral health crisis ultimately becomes a mortality crisis, but these are lives that could have been saved. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provisional mortality report estimates that 48,789 Americans died by suicide in 2025. Suicide was the nation's 11th leading cause of death that year. That is approximately 134 deaths every day. More than 4,000 every month. Every one represents a person whose absence permanently changes other people's lives. The mother who never gets another phone call. The father who never gets to see another birthday. The child who grows up without a parent or sibling. The friend who keeps asking, What could I have done? The coworker whose empty chair becomes a permanent reminder. Suicide is therefore not simply a statistic about an individual. Family and friends are traumatized for life. It is a trauma ripple that moves through families, workplaces, schools, and entire communities and lingers for years. The overdose numbers might be falling, but the crisis is still enormous There is, importantly, some good news. Or is there? America's overdose death rate has been falling in a few states. Typically, overdose rates do not include alcohol, and there’s a category that comes from many coroners’ offices, “Suspected but not confirmed.” This category includes the driver who crashes off a road or into a wall at a very high speed. Was it suicide or an accident? Intoxication? Too often, it’s reported as an accident. The CDC estimates that approximately 69,973 people died from drug overdoses in 2025, down nearly 14% from an estimated 81,313 deaths in 2024. For perspective, there were 58,200 U.S. military personnel killed in the entire Vietnam War. That CDC-reported decline represents thousands of lives saved or deaths families never reported. It should be examined in more detail, but it should never be confused with victory. More than 70,000 Americans still died from drug overdoses in one year. That is approximately 192 people every day. Eight people every hour. Roughly one American every five minutes. The story has continued into 2026. The latest CDC provisional national data, covering the 12 months ending February 2026, predict 68,641 drug overdose deaths, a further 12.1% decline from the preceding 12-month period. That is encouraging to some. That number represents a rolling 12-month period from March 2025 through February 2026. The honest conclusion is therefore simple, we do not yet have the final national first-half 2026 mortality numbers or a totally accurate account of deaths. But the damage extends far beyond death Death is only the most visible measure. There are millions of people who survive an overdose but are left with medical complications, neurological injuries, trauma, disability, or another trip to the emergency department. There are families financially devastated by addiction. There are children living with the unpredictability of a parent's substance use. There are marriages destroyed. There are jobs lost. There are businesses dealing with absenteeism, impaired performance, and employee behavioral health problems. These costs stretch into the billions of dollars every year. There are police officers repeatedly responding to the same behavioral health emergencies. There are emergency departments functioning as the nation's de facto mental health safety net. There are hospitals treating the consequences of conditions that often should have been identified and addressed much earlier in primary care, but do mentally ill and addicted individuals have regular checkups? There are communities trying to manage homelessness, public disorder, addiction, and serious mental illness without enough resources to address the underlying causes. This is why behavioral health cannot be viewed solely as a medical specialty. It is a community issue. It is an education issue. It is a public safety issue. It is an economic issue. It is a family issue. It is a workforce issue. Ultimately, it is a human issue. A solution-based answer exists: The Episodes Project The Episodes Project is a three-component, interactive learning program utilizing customized interactive theater. It contains a full-length feature film, a community training program (Spotlight on the Community) for frontliners, and a 50-episode streaming series to keep the momentum going. It is supported by a detailed website with archived shows, trainings, skills and tools, and resources. Professional actors, with behavioral health therapist facilitators, take the audience, frontliners, into their own world and coach them using more effective ways of handling a troubled citizen and saving lives. To learn more about The Episodes Project, contact the author of this article here. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Thomas Patrick McNulty Thomas Patrick McNulty, CEO of Success Stories, Inc. Tom McNulty, M.S., developed his interest in psychology and the brain in high school while attending college at the same time. His interests grew, and he received his master's degree. After graduation, he worked in a psychiatric hospital as a family therapist, and then he was offered a management position to work with troubled adolescents. Tom took his passion to the airwaves and hosted a weekly health talk radio program for 18 years. He is the founding partner of HHPartners (healthcare hospitality consulting) and co-creator of The Episodes Project (behavioral health). His mission: "Creating Enduring Impact". Primary sources: SAMHSA: 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The newest national survey of mental health, substance use, addiction, and treatment. CDC/NCHS: Mortality in the United States: Provisional Data, 2025. Provisional national mortality data, including the 2025 suicide count. CDC: Provisional Drug Overdose Data. Current national overdose estimates and methodology.* CDC: 2026 Statistical Release Schedule. Shows when national provisional overdose data covering June 2026 are scheduled to become available. The Episodes Project 2026: Behavioral Health. A three-component, solution- and data-driven global program designed to “Create Enduring Impact.” * The overdose report covering January–June 2026 is not scheduled to be released until November 2026.

Written by Barbara Suigo, HR Consultant, Author & Independent Researcher in Organisational Behaviour Barbara Suigo is an Italian-French author, HR consultant, and independent researcher specialising in power dynamics and organisational behaviour. She is the author of five books and explores topics including charisma, organisational psychology, and the abuse of power in the workplace through articles, podcasts, and books. How far can a company’s power over the people who work within it actually go? When we talk about organizational abuse, our thoughts almost automatically turn to toxic leadership, intimidation, retaliation, workplace bullying, or all those environments in which fear gradually becomes part of the corporate culture. These dynamics can have very serious consequences for people’s lives, but there are historical cases in which the relationship between corporate power and the individual crossed a far more extreme threshold. One of them is the Ford Argentina case. In December 2018, more than forty years after the beginning of Argentina’s military dictatorship, two former Ford Motor Argentina executives, Pedro Müller and Héctor Francisco Sibilla, were convicted of crimes against humanity for their contribution to the repression of workers at the General Pacheco plant. Yet the case is not only about the responsibility of two men who were already very old by the time they stood trial. It raises a broader and, in some ways, even more disturbing question, "What happens when an organization stops being simply a place where economic power is exercised and becomes part of a system of repression?" This article is adapted from my forthcoming book, Charismatic Psychopaths: Manipulation, Fascination and Corporate Power, in which I explore the darker side of leadership, organizational power, and the systems that can enable abuse. A factory inside a dictatorship On March 24, 1976, a military coup overthrew the Argentine government and marked the beginning of one of the most violent periods in the country’s recent history. During the dictatorship, thousands of people were abducted, tortured, killed, or forcibly disappeared, and the workplace also became one of the arenas in which repression was carried out. At Ford’s General Pacheco plant, twenty-four workers were abducted and tortured, many of them were union representatives or employees involved in organizing workers inside the factory. This detail matters because these were not people chosen at random. They were visible workers, capable of representing others, negotiating, challenging decisions, and transforming a collection of individuals into a collective voice. In a democratic context, this function is part of the normal dynamics of working life. Under an authoritarian regime, however, that same role can be reinterpreted as a threat. When organizational knowledge becomes vulnerability This is precisely where the Ford case takes on a meaning that goes beyond its historical context. Every organization knows a great deal about the people who work within it, who occupies certain roles, who exerts influence, and who comes into conflict with management. Under ordinary circumstances, this information simply helps the organization function. But when political, legal, and ethical boundaries collapse, that same knowledge can become a source of vulnerability. According to evidence that emerged during the trial, some workers were held inside the plant itself before being transferred to police stations and detention centers, while some were beaten and tortured in the factory’s recreational area. At that point, General Pacheco was no longer simply a place of production, the space people entered every day to earn a living had also become a place of repression, and this transformation is perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of the entire case. The gray area between economic and political power Dictatorships are generally remembered through their most recognizable images, the military, the police, prisons, detention centers, the desaparecidos. But systems of repression do not operate only through institutions officially designed to exercise violence. They need information, people who know whom to identify, and structures capable of making certain individuals visible and placing them within networks of relationships, roles, and responsibilities. The Ford Argentina case therefore forces us to widen our perspective and look at the gray area where economic power meets political power. Pedro Müller was the plant’s production manager, while Héctor Sibilla was head of security. Outside their historical context, these roles appear entirely ordinary, and perhaps this is precisely what makes the case so unsettling. Organizational power does not necessarily express itself through dramatic gestures or spectacular orders, very often, it operates through hierarchies, information, and procedures. In other words, the most dangerous side of power is not always the one that shouts. Sometimes it retains the perfectly orderly appearance of a procedure and continues to operate within an apparently normal environment, even while that normality is already producing irreversible consequences. When dissent becomes a threat The Ford case also allows us to observe another crucial shift in the dynamics of power, the transformation of dissent into danger. A union representative is not simply an employee, because that person represents other workers. The role involves bringing forward demands, negotiating, and, when necessary, making conflict visible. As long as an organization accepts this function, conflict remains part of normal working life. But when those in power begin to interpret any form of opposition as a threat that must be neutralized, the nature of the relationship changes completely. In the Ford Argentina case, this process naturally reached an extreme level because we are not talking about blocked careers or organizational retaliation. We are talking about workers who were abducted and tortured during a military dictatorship. For this very reason, it would be wrong to equate this case with ordinary forms of toxic leadership. Its significance lies elsewhere, it represents an extreme case, and extreme cases often have the ability to make visible mechanisms that, under ordinary circumstances, may appear much more blurred. Obedience, role and responsibility One of those mechanisms concerns the relationship between obedience and personal responsibility. Companies normally function through hierarchies. People receive instructions, occupy roles, carry out decisions made by others, and operate within structures that may be much larger than themselves. Yet there is always a point at which organizational obedience meets individual responsibility. Being part of a structure does not automatically remove responsibility for one’s actions, and a professional role cannot become a suspension of individual conscience. This is also part of the deeper meaning of the judgment delivered in Argentina in December 2018. More than forty years after the events, the Argentine justice system determined that the executives involved could not be regarded simply as passive spectators of a terrible historical period but had contributed to the machinery of repression. The word “machinery” is particularly important because it describes very well how power can operate within an organization, not necessarily through a single omnipotent individual, but through different people occupying different positions who, by providing information, structures, or decisions, contribute to the functioning of something much larger than themselves. The weight of time Time is also a central element in this story. More than forty years passed between the abductions of 1976 and the 2018 judgment. In the meantime, the surviving workers grew old, while some died before they could see the legal process come to an end. Yet the consequences of violence did not remain confined to the moment in which it was inflicted. They entered people’s biographies, their families, their professional lives, and the fears that can continue to exist even when the system that created them seems to belong to history. This is one of the deepest characteristics of abuse of power, those who exercise it may regard it as an episode, while those who suffer it may carry its consequences for decades. Why this case still speaks to organizations today It would be entirely wrong to draw any equivalence between a contemporary company and a factory operating under a military dictatorship because the historical context is radically different. Nevertheless, the Ford Argentina case continues to raise questions that apply to any organization, who controls information about people, how that information is used, what happens when someone is labelled “problematic,” what happens when dissent stops being regarded as a legitimate part of organizational life and begins to be treated as a threat, and, above all, how far can a person obey a hierarchy before becoming responsible for what that hierarchy is doing? Organizations possess enormous power because they organize resources, information, roles, and opportunities, and this is precisely why organizational power needs limits, legal limits, of course, but also cultural, professional, and moral ones. The Ford Argentina case represents one of the most extreme examples of what can happen when those limits disappear. An organization does not possess an autonomous conscience. It is the people occupying its roles who make decisions, use information, obey, resist, or choose not to see and simply carry on as if nothing were happening. It is through individual decisions, often apparently small and embedded in the normal functioning of a structure, that the boundary between obedience and responsibility is ultimately defined. The Ford Argentina case stands as a warning of what can happen when that boundary is erased. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Barbara Suigo Barbara Suigo, HR Consultant, Author & Independent Researcher in Organisational Behaviour Barbara Suigo is an Italian-French author, HR consultant, and independent researcher specialising in power dynamics and organisational behaviour. She is the author of five books. Her work explores charisma, organisational psychology, manipulation, and the abuse of power in the workplace, making complex international research accessible through books, articles, interviews, and podcasts. Sources: Reuters. “Ex-Ford Argentina Executives Convicted in Torture Case.” December 11, 2018. The Guardian. “Argentina: Two Ex-Ford Executives Convicted in Torture Case.” December 11, 2018. Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. “Ford Lawsuit (re Argentina).” Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS). “Ford.” Case overview, December 19, 2017. Basualdo, Victoria, Tomás Ojea Quintana and Carolina Varsky. “The Cases of Ford and Mercedes Benz.” In The Economic Accomplices to the Argentine Dictatorship: Outstanding Debts. Cambridge University Press, 2015.