Written by Lauren Seeley, Grief & Death Doula, Educator & Artist Lauren Seeley is a Death & Grief Doula for humans and pets, an educator, curator, artist, and facilitator for the Silent Book Club of Death NYC chapter as well as Ahhsweetdeath Book Club that hosts monthly author talks. By now, you’ve probably heard this term many times in the media, from public figures such as Nicole Kidman, Chloé Zhao, and Anderson Cooper to television shows and podcasts, and maybe even in your own daily life. But what is a death doula, and how does one become one? How could we all benefit from learning how to become death doulas? In this article, I will explain what that process looks like, the pros and cons, and the steps it takes to become a death doula. What is a death doula? A death doula is a person who cares for the dying and supports families before and after death. They are usually hired when a person is at the end of life and wants support with planning their last days and aftercare, making sure their affairs are in order, creating legacy work, communicating with family and loved ones about dying, and more. Some death doulas focus more on one type of care or support than others, and some do it all. Death doulas are diverse humans with a large capacity for holding space for grief, difficult situations, and difficult conversations. Death doulas are nonmedical, though they work alongside medical professionals to provide a better end-of-life experience. What qualifications do you need? Education and practical experience are very important to becoming a knowledgeable, experienced, and capable death doula. While caregiving can provide experience in supporting people at the end of life, it does not automatically make someone an expert. Requirements can vary by location, so it is important to check applicable state and local rules. How much do death doulas earn? The income of a death doula varies by location, case, and whether you work independently or with an organization. Hiring a death doula is generally not covered by medical insurance, so it is often an expense paid out of pocket by the dying person or their family. For example, I live in NYC. I am a death doula, and I work on a sliding scale, with fees depending on the budget of my client. I always explain during our intake appointments that they can pay at one end of the scale, the other, or somewhere in between. If they pay my higher rate, they are making it possible for me to say yes to a client who needs me but maybe can’t afford a death doula. It gives people the opportunity to help others, and that makes them feel good. How do you become a death doula? As I’ve stated before, training and certification can be important for becoming a knowledgeable and experienced death doula. You can attend a training program either remotely or in person. These programs typically cover many of the essentials of caring for the dying before, during, and after death. Since there are so many programs these days, it may be hard to decipher the differences between them. There are programs through academic institutions and end-of-life support organizations, as well as courses taught by professionals from different disciplines working in the death space. The important thing to consider, whether you are learning in person or remotely, is where you can gain practical experience. It’s important to put your learning into practice. I recommend working closely with a mentor or hospice organization when you have completed your training. Is it hard to become a death doula? Becoming a death doula can be a very rewarding job, but it is not without its challenges. This is not meant to discourage you, but to acknowledge that you will likely be an independent contractor and primarily responsible for finding clients. Networking is key to your success. Connecting with local hospices, hospitals, death doulas, funeral homes, and other organizations will help you get your name and work out into the world. Being added to listservs and databases for death doulas and end-of-life providers, as well as holding conversations online and in your community to raise awareness and provide education around the importance of end-of-life planning, will also help you connect with potential clients and leads. What jobs can you do as a death doula? There really are a lot of different opportunities for death doulas working in end-of-life care. Depending on where you live and what’s available, you can offer your skills either independently or while working with another organization. Death doulas can offer work involving end-of-life planning and paperwork, aftercare, celebrations of life and home funeral support, spiritual support, holistic support, grief support, community healing services, body care and aftercare ritual support, legacy work, errand running, companioning, virtual support, creative grief processing support, and more. As a death doula, I offer a lot of diverse skills to my clients. I also offer creative grief support through community art workshops, altar work, grief support, Reiki, and funeral personalization. I work in tandem with funeral directors in aftercare. I also offer extensive knowledge of literature and grief resources, personalized care near or far, and more. What is the downside of being a death doula? While it’s true that there are many rewarding aspects and benefits of being a death doula, as I mentioned before, it is not without its challenges. Being a freelancer means that you must be very organized, motivated, able to self-regulate, and resourceful. It can be a big change if you’re used to regular employment and move to working only on demand when a new client comes into your life. You may have several clients at a time, and time management can be tricky. You have to be really careful about setting boundaries, taking on more than you can handle, and taking care of yourself. There will be extremely slow times and extremely busy seasons. You have to be prepared for both, and having emergency savings will help when work is slow. What are the benefits of being a death doula? Being a death doula is very sacred work. It's an honor to serve clients and families during such a tender time in their journey: the end of life. It is incredibly rewarding and fulfilling work and can help us come to terms with our own mortality. As many death doulas work independently, it gives us the advantage of taking on as many clients as we want or as few as we feel comfortable with. This also means that, for the most part, you can set your own schedule, hours, rates, etc. Showing up for the dying is difficult work, but it is worth it if you feel called to it. In turn, having this knowledge can enrich your personal life. You will be able to help the people you love when their time comes as well. Can anyone become a death doula? This is a yes and no question without a truly easy answer. Technically, yes, anyone can become a death doula. Should they? It depends. This is why practical experience and volunteer work in end-of-life care are so important. This is the time when people learn if they have what it takes to do this work. Are they patient? Are they compassionate? Do they have a strong stomach for what the body may do at the end of life? These are important things to consider when deciding if this is the career for you. That being said, I believe that everyone can benefit from having these skills and this knowledge in their own lives. Learning to care for our own at the end of life can be incredibly valuable. Even if it feels like more responsibility than we can handle in our modern, busy lives, it could mean so much to be able to support someone we love in this way when their time comes. 10 tips on how to become a death doula Assess and expand your skill set (never stop learning) What skills do you already possess that may make you a stronger death doula? I think that most people already have useful skills that they can bring into their end-of-life tool belt. For example, I have a design degree and use art and creativity as part of my death and grief work. I suggest making a list of the skills you already have and then making a list of skills you’d like to acquire. We all have unique gifts, and they are all a part of who we are and what we are passionate about. These will help you find the place in this work where you will shine. Read all the books on all the topics that interest you. Attend webinars, panels, workshops, continuing education classes, and listen to podcasts featuring other professionals in the space sharing their expertise. Secure local or remote work opportunities Securing local and remote work opportunities can help you be successful as a death doula. You can find many different ways to connect with folks in your community, as I mentioned earlier. You can do this by connecting with end-of-life and death professionals locally. If you are supporting folks remotely, help connect them with local professionals who align with the care and representation they need. Some of the ways I connect with my community are by hosting events focused on mortality, including a monthly book club about death. Talk about your services on social media when you are ready, of course. Have emergency savings Building an emergency fund is essential for handling unforeseen expenses or financial setbacks while working freelance as a death doula. Aim to save enough money to cover several months’ worth of living expenses, including accommodation, transportation, and healthcare. Having savings set aside for emergencies will provide a financial safety net and peace of mind as you navigate the ebbs and flows of death and end-of-life work. Practice discipline To be a successful entrepreneur or freelancer in general, you must be motivated. You must have or develop time management skills that help you balance your workflow and life. Productivity is key to success when you work independently. If these are not already strong skills that you possess, perhaps add them to the list of skills you wish to acquire. Personal development books and courses are available to strengthen these abilities and help you learn how to prioritize important and time-sensitive tasks over less important or less urgent ones. Volunteer with a hospice Not sure if this is the work for you? Volunteer with a hospice. Finished your online course and now you need practical experience? Volunteer with a hospice. I knew early on that I could handle this kind of work because I was a caregiver for two of my grandmothers as a teen and young adult. Not everyone has had the opportunity to take care of a dying person before, and it’s important to gain some experience before working with your first client. Start out slow Get all of your most essential skills and knowledge in your toolkit before you dive in. I’ve had many conversations with newly trained death doulas asking me how to know when they are ready and when it’s time to start working with clients. I tell them that it is different for everyone, but it’s important to ask: while we may now have the knowledge, do we feel experienced and comfortable enough to support the dying? Take your time getting started. Invest in a death doula kit bag There are many lists available online, in courses, and in books about what should go in your death doula kit. These are pretty standard, but you can adapt them to the needs of each client. Think not only about essentials for the dying, but also about items for accompanying people and for ourselves. Some appointments will be brief, and some will be very long. We need to be prepared for that. Learn to expect the unexpected Speaking of being prepared, learn to expect the unexpected. Sometimes, things don’t go as planned. You may have no clients for a month, or you may have two active deaths at the same time. Mentally preparing for things to go awry or take longer than planned is important in this work. Like birth, death makes its own plans and its own schedule, and it doesn’t always line up with ours. Network with other death doulas It really does take a village to support the dying, much as it does when a birth occurs. Have too many requests for death doula work and not enough time? Don’t feel like you vibe with the client you just interviewed? Not a memory care expert? Don’t have pet end-of-life experience? This is where having other death doulas to call on really helps. Additionally, knowing the death doulas in your area and beyond will not only help support your clients and potential clients; it will also help support you. Many areas have death doula meetups, and if yours doesn’t, start one! There are also virtual meetups if you want to go that route. I have an international Facebook group for death doulas, and it has grown to about 7,500 members since I started it four years ago. This is a great resource for connecting clients with doulas all over the world, as well as sharing information and resources. You don’t have to do this alone, and you’ll be so grateful to have other death doulas you can lean on. Find balance between work and life Maintaining a routine as much as possible is so important for death doulas. This is heavy work and can weigh on our souls long after we’ve called it a day. Have your rituals and take them seriously. Exercise, spiritual practices, nourishment, hydration, rest, play, joy, and grief release are all crucial to your wellbeing and mental wellness. Prioritize yourself when you can, and remember that it can look different for every person. Burnout can be a risk in death care, especially when people take on too much too quickly. Transform your death doula calling into reality Ready to dive deeper into this liminal, tender space? Book a consultation with me today. I can help direct you to the right program and resources, share my experiences and what has worked and what hasn’t, offer book suggestions and networking expertise, and more. Let’s explore the skills that you already have and determine what skills you need to get closer to your career path. If you feel called to the end-of-life field, you may already have many of the qualities needed to support clients and families. Let’s find a way you can shine your light and benefit others when serving the dying. The world needs people like you who aren’t afraid to show up for others. Book a call with me. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Lauren Seeley Lauren Seeley, Grief & Death Doula, Educator & Artist Lauren Seeley's lifelong passion is to provide spaces for those who are often overlooked and carrying their grief in silence and solitude. By creating spaces to connect to others in grief, have open and honest conversations about grief, death, mortality, and educational discussions on death literacy, she is lifting the taboo on end of life and how preparing and acknowledging its inevitability can enrich our lives. She works in the space of grief, bereavement, death, death education, creative grief practice, ceremony & ritual around grief and loss, memorial curation, illustration and brand design, and is currently writing and illustrating her first children's book on grief.

Written by Ari Yuda Laksmana, Sustainability Leadership & Business Coach Ari Yuda Laksmana is an Executive Coach, ICF PCC, and Mentor Coach, a leadership development expert, and author of Coaching-Verse. With 15+ years in human capital and leadership, he helps executives and organizations navigate change, unlock potential, and create sustainable impact. Sustainability has moved firmly into the boardroom. Companies are setting Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) targets, publishing sustainability reports, making climate commitments, and introducing policies intended to demonstrate greater responsibility toward people, society, and the environment. Yet one question receives far less attention: what must leaders actually do differently for those commitments to influence how a business operates? In my work across leadership development, business coaching, and sustainability, I have increasingly come to believe that this is where the real challenge begins. Sustainability does not become real simply because an organization has a strategy. It becomes real when leaders translate that strategy into everyday decisions, conversations, priorities, behaviors, and trade-offs. What sustainability leadership means Sustainability leadership is often discussed through the language of climate commitments, ESG targets, governance requirements, responsible investment, or sustainability reporting. These are all important, but they represent only part of the picture. Leadership begins when we ask what we actually do with all of that information and how it changes the decisions we make. For me, sustainability leadership is the capacity to make business decisions today while remaining accountable for what those decisions create tomorrow. A leader still needs to deliver results, serve customers, develop employees, satisfy investors, manage costs, and remain competitive. At the same time, a decision that appears successful today may create costs that only become visible later, whether through environmental impact, employee burnout, damaged trust, poor governance, reputational risk, or declining organizational capability. This is why sustainability leadership requires us to expand the time horizon of decision-making. Instead of asking only whether a decision will work, leaders also need to consider what that decision will create, who will experience its consequences, and whether it strengthens or weakens the organization’s ability to create value in the future. Closing the leadership gap Organizations undoubtedly need ESG frameworks, reporting standards, targets, data, policies, controls, and people with specialist sustainability expertise. The challenge is that frameworks alone do not change behavior. A company may have a responsible sourcing policy, for example, while procurement leaders continue to face intense pressure to select the lowest-cost supplier. An organization may publicly emphasize employee well-being while managers normalize late-night messages and unsustainable workloads. Governance policies may encourage transparency while employees remain reluctant to question senior leaders. I think of this as the leadership gap between sustainability ambition and business behavior. At one level, the organization communicates what it believes and intends to achieve. At another level, leaders, managers, and employees make thousands of decisions every day. The distance between those two realities determines whether sustainability becomes embedded in the business or remains primarily part of its reporting and communication. This is why I often return to a simple principle: strategy can be written on paper, but transformation happens through people. Sustainability is increasingly connected to mainstream business management. International Financial Reporting Standard S1 (IFRS S1), for example, organizes sustainability-related disclosures around governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets. These are not peripheral activities. They sit at the heart of how organizations are governed and managed. The challenge, therefore, is not simply whether leaders understand ESG, but whether they can translate that understanding into action. 1. Translate ESG clearly One of the fastest ways to disconnect people from sustainability is to make it sound like a language that only specialists can understand. Acronyms multiply, frameworks become more sophisticated, reports become longer, and yet someone working in sales, operations, Human Resources (HR), finance, or procurement may still be wondering what sustainability actually means for their role. Leaders have an important translation responsibility. If environmental responsibility matters, people need to understand what changes in procurement, operations, logistics, product design, energy use, or investment. If social impact matters, the connection should become visible in hiring, employee development, customer treatment, leadership behavior, and community relationships. If governance matters, it should influence accountability, transparency, decision rights, risk conversations, and the willingness to challenge questionable decisions. The objective is not to turn every employee into an ESG specialist. It is to make sustainability understandable enough for people to act on it. If employees can explain the company’s sustainability commitments but cannot identify a single decision they should make differently because of them, the strategy has probably not travelled far enough into the organization. 2. Face hard trade-offs Sustainability leadership sounds relatively straightforward when purpose, profit, stakeholder interests, and short-term performance all point in the same direction. The real test emerges when they do not. A more responsible supplier may initially cost more. Developing employees may require time that could otherwise be spent delivering immediate output. A profitable business opportunity may introduce environmental, social, or reputational risks. A transformation that strengthens long-term resilience may also create short-term discomfort. These are the moments when sustainability becomes a leadership practice rather than a corporate statement. Strong leaders need to be willing to explore the tension rather than pretend it does not exist. They need to understand what the organization is gaining, what it may be risking, who benefits, who carries the cost, and which consequences may not appear on this quarter’s dashboard. Sustainable leadership is therefore not about avoiding difficult choices. It is about making those choices with a broader awareness of their consequences. A sustainable business still needs to remain economically viable, but financial performance should not become an excuse for overlooking costs that appear elsewhere in the system or later in the future. 3. Ask better questions This is where sustainability and coaching come together most naturally for me. Leadership has traditionally rewarded people who know the answer, and there are certainly situations where leaders need to provide direction quickly. However, complex sustainability challenges rarely offer one simple answer. They involve uncertainty, competing stakeholder interests, long time horizons, interconnected systems, and consequences that may be difficult to predict. In those situations, the ability to ask better questions becomes a leadership capability. Through coaching conversations, I have repeatedly seen how the quality of thinking can change when someone is invited to examine an assumption rather than immediately defend a position. A leader might ask what the team is currently treating as fact without sufficient evidence, whose perspective is missing from the conversation, what new risk might emerge if the strategy succeeds at scale, or which stakeholder will eventually carry the consequences of today’s decision. These are coaching questions, but they are also strategic questions because they slow down premature certainty and improve the thinking that precedes action. Research from the International Coaching Federation and Human Capital Institute found that 73% of respondents agreed coaching helps employees understand and implement organizational ESG initiatives. Coaching does not replace sustainability expertise. It serves a different function. Sustainability expertise helps leaders understand what matters, while coaching can help them examine how they think, decide, take ownership, and act on what matters. 4. Build shared ownership A chief executive officer (CEO) cannot personally make every responsible decision inside an organization, and neither can a Chief Sustainability Officer or ESG team. Sustainability begins to scale when people throughout the organization can make sound decisions without constantly waiting for instructions from the top. I describe this as leading through others. As organizations grow, leadership impact is no longer measured only by the quality of decisions a leader personally makes. It is increasingly reflected in the quality of thinking and decision-making that happens when that leader is not in the room. This requires clarity, trust, accountability, and deliberate capability building. A directive leader confronted with a problem may immediately tell someone what to do. A leader using coaching skills might instead begin by asking what the person thinks should be done and what impact the proposed decision could create. The second conversation may take longer, but it develops something the first approach often does not–independent thinking. Over time, that thinking capability becomes organizational capacity. This matters because sustainable transformation cannot remain dependent on a few passionate individuals at the top. If sustainability is expected to influence thousands of everyday choices, ownership has to spread across the organization. 5. Connect purpose and performance One of the most persistent assumptions in business is that leaders eventually need to choose between purpose and profit. I believe that framing is becoming increasingly unhelpful. Purpose without performance eventually becomes difficult to sustain, while performance without responsibility can eventually weaken the conditions that make performance possible. A more useful question is how leaders can create performance that can endure. Viewed through this lens, employee well-being is connected to the organization’s ability to sustain performance. Trust affects collaboration, decision speed, and whether employees are willing to raise risks. Leadership development influences adaptability. Governance shapes decision quality and accountability. Environmental choices increasingly influence resources, costs, reputation, regulation, customers, and long-term resilience. Once these relationships become visible, separating “business” from “sustainability” becomes increasingly artificial. Sustainability ultimately asks whether the way an organization creates value today strengthens or weakens its ability to continue creating value tomorrow. That is clearly a sustainability question, but it is equally a business and leadership question. Where leaders can start The UN Global Compact and Accenture 2025 CEO Study, drawing on insights from nearly 2,000 CEOs across 128 countries, found that 88% of CEOs believe the business case for sustainability is stronger today than it was five years ago, while 99% plan to maintain or increase their sustainability commitments. What interests me most about findings like these is that the challenge appears to be moving beyond commitment and increasingly toward execution. For leaders, this does not necessarily mean starting another initiative. A valuable first step can simply be to observe what already happens inside the organization. Look at where important decisions are made, what happens when targets conflict, which questions leaders ask under pressure, what behavior gets rewarded, and what employees do when senior leaders are not present. Then compare those observations with the sustainability commitments the organization communicates publicly. The gap between those two realities is not something to hide. It is useful information because it shows where leadership development, culture change, or capability building may need to begin. From reporting to leadership Sustainability standards, credible measurement, reporting, governance, and accountability remain essential. Organizations need them, and leadership should not be used as an excuse to lower the rigor of sustainability management. What is important is recognizing that reporting and leadership serve different purposes. A sustainability report can describe targets, risks, commitments, progress, and performance, while leadership determines what happens after that report is published. It influences the next investment, the next difficult trade-off, the next conversation with an employee, the next decision about a supplier, and the next moment when someone must choose between what is expedient and what is responsible. Over time, these seemingly small decisions accumulate and become culture. The organizations making meaningful sustainability progress will therefore need more than sophisticated sustainability language. They will need leaders who can translate commitments into decisions, decisions into behavior, and behavior into culture. Sustainability, after all, is fundamentally about our relationship with the future, and shaping the future has always been one of leadership’s most important responsibilities. Start the conversation At your next leadership meeting, consider asking one question, “What leadership behaviors need to change for our sustainability commitments to become everyday business decisions?” Then avoid the temptation to answer it too quickly. Allow the conversation to reveal where the real gap exists. You may discover that the next step in your sustainability journey is not another framework, dashboard, or policy. It may be developing the people who need to make all of those things work. If you are a business owner or organizational leader exploring how sustainability leadership and coaching can strengthen responsible growth, leadership capability, and long-term business performance, connect with me to continue the conversation. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Ari Yuda Laksmana Ari Yuda Laksmana, Sustainability Leadership & Business Coach Ari Yuda Laksmana is an Executive Coach, ICF PCC, and Mentor Coach, leadership development expert, and author of Coaching-Verse. With over 15 years of experience in human capital, learning, and leadership development, he has held senior roles with multinational organizations and now coaches executives and leaders across industries and cultures. He is the Founder of CoachingYuk, a digital coaching platform created to make professional coaching more accessible, and has pioneered integrating digital and AI-enabled coaching into leadership development. Ari was recognized as CEO of the Year 2024 by APAC Insider. His work centers on one belief: better leaders create better people, organizations, and impact.

Written by Manuel Aragon, Tax Consultant & Advisory Planner Manuel Aragon is a Colorado entrepreneur with a deep background in business, tax preparation, advisory, and planning. He has served as a Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Operations Manager, Finance Director, and Consultant. Look at me today, and you might see a success story. You might see a man who moves with purpose, writes with intention, and earned respect in high-level rooms. But before you can ever understand where I am standing, you have to look down at where I was buried. You have to understand the depth of the dirt, the weight of the pressure, and the suffocating darkness that threatened to squeeze the life out of me long before I ever had a chance to discover who I was meant to be. I grew up at the very back of the line. Where I came from, you didn’t dream about building empires, owning businesses, or sitting in executive seats. You focused on surviving the night. Hope was a luxury we couldn't afford, and long-term planning was a joke. I watched life beat down the people I loved until they broke completely or died. I saw drug addiction strip good men and women of their dignity, turning loving mothers and hard-working fathers into ghosts walking around in broad daylight. I saw how addiction steals the soul long before it stops the heart, leaving empty shells behind to wander streets filled with broken glass and shattered dreams. I learned early that pain was everywhere, and if you didn’t guard yourself with everything you had, it would consume you whole. So, I adapted the only way a child in survival mode knows how. I joined the noise. Street life and violence became a twisted kind of shield. When you feel utterly powerless inside, putting on a tough skin and adopting a dangerous posture makes you feel like you control the room. But that feeling of control is a complete lie. I was just a 14-year-old kid, a freshman in high school, the first time the streets truly claimed me. I picked up a gun and fired six shots, a child playing a deadly game, desperately trying to prove he was dangerous so nobody would see how damaged he really was. That single, split-second choice stamped me with a felony before I was even old enough to drive a car. Before my voice fully deepened, before I even knew who I was, the system wrote me off as a lost cause, locking me away in concrete boxes and deciding my future was already over. The darkness didn't stay outside on the street corners or inside juvenile facilities. It followed me everywhere, seeping into the walls of the place that was supposed to be a sanctuary. I grew up around the raw destruction of domestic violence, watching love turn into a bloody battlefield. I saw how unaddressed trauma, left to rot in the human heart, turns people into monsters who hurt the very ones they claim to protect and love. I learned to read the temperature of a room in a split second, constantly waiting for the next explosion, internalizing the belief that violence was the only language the world truly understood. As I grew older, I thought I could outrun those childhood ghosts, but unhealed wounds don't vanish just because you grow up or grow older. They just put on adult clothes and wait for the right moment to wreck your life all over again. After 19 years together and 14 years of marriage, my relationship collapsed into an agonizing, painful separation. The grief didn't just break my heart. It shattered my entire identity. The pain was unhealthy, overwhelming, and a shock to my existence. Instead of facing the grief, I did what I had learned to do as a kid. I tried to numb it. I drowned myself in the hurt, spiraling out of control, blowing through money sitting at strip clubs, which led to getting two DUIs in a tight six-month span. Driving under the influence wasn't just a severe legal mistake. It was a desperate, reckless cry for help from a man who was unraveling at the seams inside and simply didn't care if he woke up the next morning. I was playing Russian roulette with my life and the lives of others, subconsciously hoping the roads would do what I didn't have the courage to do myself. When you get labeled a felon and a failure, the world writes you off completely. You aren't viewed as a human being who made mistakes or a soul dealing with immense pain. You become a number, a mugshot, a legal file, and a statistic. In the quiet of a cell or behind a steering wheel in the middle of a pitch-black night, all your excuses die. The room gets cold, the noise fades, and you are forced into an environment where lying to yourself is no longer an option. You can’t blame the hood anymore, you can’t blame your ex, you can’t blame your upbringing, and you can’t blame the system. You have to look directly into the mirror and face the brutal, naked truth. Your own choices brought you to your knees. For a long time, I genuinely believed that dark history meant I was finished. I thought the gun, the cell, the failed marriage, and the mugshots were the final, definitive chapters of my story. But sitting at absolute zero teaches you something deeply powerful if you are willing to survive the lesson. The shadow self, the kid with the gun, the broken man bitter over a lost marriage, the reckless driver making terrible choices, isn't a reason to surrender. It is a harsh, uncompromising teacher. My time in the shadows broke my ego into a thousand pieces. It stripped away the fake tough-guy persona, the pride, and the defensive walls I had spent decades building. Those scars aren't pretty, and I will never stand here and make excuses for the harm I caused, the danger I created, or the foolish paths I chose to walk. But those scars are real. They are permanent proof that I survived the absolute worst parts of my own bad choices. You cannot lead anyone else out of the dark until you stop lying to yourself about your own shadows. True self-mastery doesn't come from pretending you never fell. It comes from examining the dirt from the pit you crawled out of, taking responsibility for every single misstep, and using that brutal experience to build an unshakeable foundation. Before you can ever step into the light, you have to own every inch of the shadow. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Manuel Aragon Manuel Aragon, Tax Consultant & Advisory Planner Manuel Aragon has elite expertise in tax preparation, accounting, finance, cash planning, and tax strategy. Manuel has delivered modern, innovative financial solutions, driving growth and efficiency for multiple companies in Colorado. His leadership and approach have solidified a reputation for excellence, onboarding, and overall client satisfaction. Continues to serve in multiple roles across the Front Range as a Tax Preparer, Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Operations Manager, Finance Director, and Consultant.

Written by Mark Durieux, Sociologist and Educator Mark Durieux is a sociologist with over two decades of experience as a university instructor. Lead co-author of Social Entrepreneurship for Dummies, he lectures, researches, writes, and publishes in environmental, economic, urban, and public sociology as well as research methods. Democracy is often discussed as if it lives somewhere far away from ordinary life, in parliaments, courtrooms, and election campaigns. But long before democracy is defended in public institutions, it is either strengthened or weakened in the texture of daily living. By changing how we handle disagreement, share responsibility, and consume information, we can rebuild the social conditions in which democratic life flourishes. Why democracy feels personal Many people sense that something larger than partisan conflict is happening. They feel it in the fatigue of every online argument, in the erosion of trust in news and institutions, and in the fear that public life has become one long performance of outrage. They feel it in the privatization of care, the pressure to manage every risk alone, and the shrinking number of spaces where people can gather across differences without being sorted, sold to, or manipulated. This is one of the most important insights of regenerative democracy: political decline does not begin only in formal institutions. It also grows in the social conditions of everyday life. When households are stretched thin, communities are fragmented, and every major need gets pushed back onto individuals to solve privately, democratic participation becomes harder to sustain. Exhausted people rarely have much energy left for collective life. Democracy as a lifestyle If democracy is going to survive periods of polarization, misinformation, economic precarity, and technological manipulation, it must become more visible in ordinary routines. It has to appear not only as a vote cast every few years, but as a pattern of everyday behavior. This means choosing conversation over contempt, verifying information, and participating in local decision-making. Seen this way, democracy is not merely a structure of rules, it is a lived ethic of participation, reciprocity, accountability, and shared stewardship. Practice slower disagreement Polarization thrives on speed. It rewards instant reaction, moral certainty, and emotional escalation. A democratic lifestyle requires something countercultural: the discipline to pause, listen, and ask better questions before rushing into condemnation. This does not mean accepting cruelty or bad faith. It means refusing to let every disagreement become a rehearsal for social breakdown. In family life, workplaces, and friendships, slower disagreement helps preserve the human connection that democratic culture depends on. Maintain daily information hygiene In a fragmented media environment, misinformation spreads quickly because it is emotionally efficient. False claims often travel farther than boring truths, especially when they flatter our fears or confirm what we already wanted to believe. A democratic lifestyle, therefore, includes media habits: checking the source, reading past the headline, comparing claims, and resisting the urge to share content that has not been verified. These are not minor digital courtesies, they are democratic disciplines. Rebuild neighborhood reciprocity Neoliberal risk culture pushes families to manage social reproduction privately, even when the burdens are clearly collective. Childcare, eldercare, food insecurity, transportation, and emotional support are too often treated as private failures rather than shared responsibilities. Democratic renewal starts when people rebuild reciprocal support close to home: shared meals, childcare swaps, neighbor check-ins, cooperative purchasing, and informal mutual aid. These practices reteach people that survival and dignity are collective achievements. Support power-distributing institutions Many people ask how to help democracy without entering party politics. One answer is to support institutions that let people participate in decisions, not merely receive outcomes. Worker cooperatives, housing cooperatives, community land trusts, mutual aid networks, participatory budgeting initiatives, and citizen assemblies all matter because they distribute voice as well as resources. These models are not utopian abstractions, they already exist as practical pathways with measurable benefits for security, civic participation, and community resilience. Treat care as infrastructure Care is often discussed as a private issue or a sentimental virtue. In reality, care is a political infrastructure. A society that abandons people when they are sick, aging, overwhelmed, disabled, underpaid, or raising children under pressure creates the emotional conditions for resentment, withdrawal, and authoritarian temptation. A democratic lifestyle restores the dignity of care. It recognizes that how a society organizes dependence shapes whether democracy feels possible at all. Learn one local system Democratic decline often hides inside technical processes that most people never see: zoning decisions, school board policies, algorithmic procurement, district boundaries, and budget processes. That invisibility is one reason power becomes so difficult to challenge. A strong democratic habit is to learn one local system well enough to explain it to others. This kind of grounded civic literacy turns passive frustration into informed participation. Choose hopeful action Cynicism can feel intelligent, but it rarely builds anything. Democracy survives through ongoing practice, not through comforting myths that everything will work out on its own. Hope, in this context, is not optimism. It is disciplined participation. It is the decision to keep showing up for local meetings, shared projects, careful conversations, and cooperative experiments, even when public life feels coarse, manipulated, and exhausting. Why everyday habits matter Lifestyle writing is sometimes dismissed as soft, private, or apolitical. But everyday habits shape the moral and social architecture in which political life unfolds. The ways people consume, speak, parent, scroll, commute, care, gather, and solve problems are never merely personal. They either normalize democratic values or erode them. Regenerative democracy invites people to think beyond defending damaged institutions and toward rebuilding the social conditions in which democratic life can flourish again. It emphasizes cooperation over domination, resilience over fragility, and social participation over isolated risk management. The more people participate in meaningful collective life, the more they experience themselves as agents rather than spectators. That may be one of the deepest antidotes to democratic despair. Democracy will not be renewed by rhetoric alone. It will be renewed when more people begin to live as if shared life is worth protecting and practicing every day. If democracy is under siege, then the most powerful response may be to make democratic living visible again. Visit my website for more info! Read more from Mark Durieux Mark Durieux, Sociologist and Educator Mark Durieux is the developer of the increasingly popular Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) app, The Sociological Imagination, and the lead co-author of Social Entrepreneurship For Dummies. He has researched and written extensively on introductory, environmental, economic, urban, and public sociology, as well as on research methods. Mark works with communities and organizations in Canada and abroad to advance social entrepreneurship, equity, and democratic engagement. His mission is to democratize sociological knowledge, thereby inviting the public into critical, hopeful conversations about how society can change for the better.

Written by Eliana Bonaguro, Licensed Mental Health Counselor Eliana Bonaguro, Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC), specializes in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and anxiety disorders. She blends evidence-based therapy with visual storytelling through her illustrated self-help guides to make complex mental health concepts more approachable, engaging, and easier to understand. Worry and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) can both fill your mind with endless “what if?” questions, but just having these thoughts does not show which issue you are facing. The best clue is what you feel you need to do next and whether that action only brings short-term relief. What is the difference between OCD and anxiety? Anxiety is a natural reaction to threats, uncertainty, or serious situations. But when worry becomes too much, lasts a long time, and gets in the way of daily life, it could be part of an anxiety disorder. For example, generalized anxiety disorder often means worrying about many parts of daily life, such as health, work, money, relationships, family, or the future. The focus of worry might change during the day, but feelings like tension, tiredness, irritability, trouble focusing, or poor sleep usually stick around. Obsessive-compulsive disorder can also cause strong anxiety. What sets it apart is not always what you are afraid of, but the repeated cycle of obsessions and compulsions. An obsession may be an intrusive thought, image, urge, sensation, or doubt: What if I harmed someone? What if I am contaminated? What if I do not really love my partner? What if I made a terrible mistake and cannot remember it? The obsession can make you feel anxious, guilty, disgusted, ashamed, or urgent. You might then feel pushed to do something, either physically or in your mind, to ease the distress, stop something bad from happening, or feel sure about something. This action is called a compulsion. According to the National Institute of Mental Health’s overview of OCD, obsessions are recurring, unwanted thoughts, urges, or mental images. At the same time, compulsions are repetitive behaviors a person feels compelled to perform. These behaviors can be easy to see, or they might happen only in your mind. Why the content of an intrusive thought can be misleading People often try to tell OCD and anxiety apart by asking if the worry is realistic. But in practice, this is not a reliable way to tell the difference. A person with generalized anxiety may worry about a health symptom, while a person with OCD may become obsessed with that same symptom. Someone with anxiety may worry about a relationship, while someone with relationship OCD may repeatedly analyze whether they love their partner enough. Both may worry about sending the wrong email, offending someone, making a costly mistake, or becoming ill. The more revealing question is: What happens after the thought appears? Do you recognize the concern, decide whether action is genuinely useful, and eventually redirect your attention? Or do you feel that you must keep reviewing, checking, researching, confessing, comparing, or seeking reassurance until you feel certain? This difference in how you respond is important. A thought might start as anxiety but then lead to a compulsive effort to get rid of uncertainty. How the OCD cycle keeps doubt alive OCD commonly follows this loop: Intrusive doubt – distress – compulsion – temporary relief – renewed doubt. Imagine that you are leaving home and think, What if I left the stove on? You check and see that it is off. For a moment, you feel relieved. Then another thought appears: But did I check the correct burner? You check again, photograph the stove, or try to reconstruct exactly what you saw. Checking might seem to fix the problem, but the relief does not last. Instead, your brain learns that the doubt was important and that checking is needed. This makes the next doubt feel even more urgent. This is why relief can be misleading. A compulsion may help for a short time, but it often makes the bigger problem stronger. Seven clues your overthinking may be a mental compulsion 1. You are trying to reach complete certainty Useful thinking usually aims for a reasonable decision. Compulsive thinking aims for a guarantee. You may feel that you must know with certainty that you did not cause harm, make a mistake, offend someone, choose the wrong partner, misunderstand a memory, or overlook a dangerous symptom. Since it is almost impossible to be completely certain, the analysis never feels finished. You find one answer, but your mind immediately creates an exception: What if I forgot something? What if this situation is different? What if I only believe that answer because I want it to be true? The search keeps going because OCD is not truly looking for facts. It is looking for a feeling of complete certainty, which facts alone cannot give. 2. You keep reopening a question you already answered You decided that the conversation went fine, but replay it again. You concluded that you locked the door, but test your memory again. You received reassurance from your partner, friend, therapist, or doctor, yet a slightly altered version of the question appears. The problem is not that you do not have enough information. The real issue is that the answer does not give you lasting certainty. This is why reassurance often becomes ineffective over time. Each answer may calm the anxiety temporarily, but OCD soon finds a new detail to question. 3. The thinking feels urgent and mandatory Ordinary reflection can usually be postponed. A mental compulsion feels like an assignment you must finish before you can return to work, sleep, enjoy your relationship, or continue your day. Your mind may insist: I need to figure this out now. I cannot focus until I know. I need to review this one more time. That sense of urgency is an important sign, especially if putting off the analysis makes your anxiety rise. The thinking might not feel like a choice. It can feel like something you must do to be responsible or safe. But the more urgently you try to settle the doubt, the less settled you usually feel. 4. You use research or reassurance to neutralize distress Reassurance seeking is not limited to repeatedly asking another person whether everything is okay. It may include searching symptoms online, reading forums or Reddit threads, checking old messages, studying photographs, taking online quizzes, reviewing medical information, asking several people the same question, searching your memories for proof, or comparing your experience with someone else’s. Doing research is not always a bad thing. The important question is whether your search has a clear end and leads to a useful action, or if it just becomes another way to try to get rid of anxiety. If every answer produces another search, the research itself may be functioning as a compulsion. 5. You monitor your thoughts, feelings, or body for evidence Some people repeatedly check how attracted, loving, certain, calm, safe, or “normal” they feel. Others scan their bodies for sensations or test their reactions to intrusive thoughts. Someone with relationship OCD might look at their partner and ask: Do I feel enough love right now? Am I attracted enough? Why did I feel irritated earlier? Would I be happier with someone else? This internal monitoring can make normal shifts in emotion appear highly significant. A moment of irritation, boredom, emotional distance, or reduced attraction may be treated as evidence that the entire relationship is wrong. Similar checking can happen with physical sensations. A person may repeatedly monitor their breathing, heartbeat, nausea, dizziness, or pain to determine whether something dangerous is happening. Sadly, the more you monitor your feelings and body, the more you notice them, which can make you even more anxious. This kind of internal checking is especially common in relationship OCD, where attempts to measure attraction, love, compatibility, or certainty can become compulsive. If these patterns are interfering with your relationships or daily life, specialized OCD therapy in New York City (NYC) can help you understand the cycle and learn how to respond differently to intrusive doubt. 6. Relief arrives, but it does not last After checking, analyzing, confessing, praying, comparing, or seeking reassurance, you may feel better for a moment. Then the doubt returns, sometimes within minutes. You may notice that you need to repeat the behavior, ask the question differently, or find another source of reassurance. That brief relief is a clear sign of a compulsion. If you have to repeat the same action every time anxiety comes back, it is not solving the problem for good. Instead, it keeps you relying on the ritual. The brain begins to learn: I was only safe because I checked. I only calmed down because someone reassured me. I avoided disaster because I analyzed the thought. This learning makes it harder to tolerate the next intrusive doubt without performing another compulsion. 7. The process is taking time away from your life To others, someone with mental compulsions might just seem thoughtful, careful, or very analytical. Internally, they may spend hours replaying conversations, testing memories, arguing with intrusive thoughts, or trying to obtain the “right” feeling. Repetitive thinking may interfere with sleep, work or school, relationships, decision making, concentration, social activities, daily responsibilities, and the ability to be present. Not all overthinking is OCD. Thinking things through can help you make decisions, take action, or understand something better. Compulsive rumination, on the other hand, keeps you stuck on the same question and often makes things more confusing. If repetitive thinking repeatedly pulls you back into the same question without helping you move forward, recognizing that pattern can be an important part of specialized OCD treatment. Common mental compulsions people often miss OCD is still commonly associated with visible rituals such as excessive washing, counting, arranging, or checking locks. Mental compulsions are easier to overlook because no one else can see them. Common mental compulsions include replaying conversations or events, reviewing memories for certainty, mentally checking intentions or emotions, testing attraction, arousal, or physical sensations, arguing with an intrusive thought, trying to prove that a thought is untrue, replacing a “bad” thought with a “good” one, repeating phrases or prayers until they feel right, comparing your reaction with other people’s reactions, trying to determine what a thought “really means,” mentally rehearsing how you would prevent a feared outcome, and checking whether you feel sufficiently guilty, certain, or safe. The same kind of thinking can be helpful in one situation and compulsive in another. What matters is the role it plays. Ask yourself: Am I thinking because this will help me make a workable decision, or because I am trying to remove uncertainty and distress? If you are trying to feel completely certain or make an uncomfortable feeling go away, your thinking might be part of the OCD cycle. OCD vs. Generalized anxiety disorder Generalized anxiety disorder often involves excessive worry across multiple areas of everyday life. A person may worry about finances in the morning, work performance in the afternoon, a family member in the evening, and their health before bed. The worries can be persistent and difficult to control. They may also come with restlessness, fatigue, irritability, muscle tension, difficulty concentrating, or sleep disruption. People with generalized anxiety can also overthink, avoid, or seek reassurance. The distinction is not that people with generalized anxiety worry about “real” problems while people with OCD have irrational thoughts. People’s experiences are more complex than that. OCD tends to involve a more pronounced obsession and compulsion process, with intrusive doubt or distress followed by attempts to neutralize it, prevent a feared outcome, or obtain certainty. The question is not simply, What am I worried about? The more helpful question is: What am I doing in response to the worry, and what is that response teaching my brain? Can you have OCD and another anxiety disorder? Yes. OCD can occur alongside generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety, health anxiety, or other conditions. Someone may worry broadly about work, finances, and family while also experiencing a specific obsession and compulsion cycle around contamination. Another person may experience panic attacks and also compulsively monitor bodily sensations, research symptoms, or seek repeated reassurance that the sensations are not dangerous. This overlap is one reason why diagnosing yourself can be hard. A careful assessment considers the form, frequency, duration, and impact of the symptoms. It also examines the function of the person’s responses: What are you trying to achieve when you check, avoid, analyze, confess, research, or seek reassurance? Sometimes the most accurate answer is that both OCD and another anxiety disorder are present. Why the correct treatment for OCD matters Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be effective for anxiety disorders. Depending on the condition, treatment may involve examining unhelpful predictions, reducing avoidance, developing coping skills, increasing tolerance for uncertainty, and gradually approaching feared situations. For OCD, Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is a specialized form of cognitive behavioral therapy. The International OCD Foundation’s guide to ERP explains that exposure involves gradually confronting thoughts, images, objects, or situations that trigger obsessions. Response prevention involves choosing not to perform the compulsive behavior after the obsession has been triggered. ERP does not revolve around proving that the feared thought is false or supplying perfect reassurance. Instead, it helps you learn that you can handle uncertainty and discomfort without checking, trying to neutralize, avoiding, researching, or solving the obsession. If OCD says, You must figure this out before you can move on, treatment teaches a different response: I may not get certainty, and I can still choose what I do next. The goal is not to get rid of every intrusive thought. All human minds naturally come up with odd, unwanted, or uncomfortable thoughts. The aim is to stop seeing every intrusive thought as a problem that needs to be fixed right away. How do I know whether I should be assessed for OCD? No single question or online test can diagnose OCD. However, an assessment with a clinician trained in OCD may be worth considering if intrusive doubts, images, urges, or sensations repeatedly capture your attention. You feel driven to check, avoid, research, confess, review, compare, or seek reassurance. Your rituals may be mental rather than visible. Relief is brief, and the doubt repeatedly returns. The cycle consumes significant time or interferes with daily life, you avoid situations, people, objects, or decisions that trigger uncertainty, or previous anxiety treatment focused mainly on reassurance or disputing thoughts without addressing compulsions. If your worries are broad, persistent, and spread across many areas of life without a clear obsession and compulsion loop, generalized anxiety or another anxiety disorder may better explain the pattern. Sometimes the answer is both. Stop solving the thought and start examining the cycle When people ask, “Is this OCD or anxiety?” they often search inside the thought for the answer. A more useful place to look is the response that follows it. Do you need to settle the question, feel certain, obtain reassurance, or remove the discomfort before you can continue? Does your strategy provide only temporary relief? If so, the effort to solve the thought may be the very thing keeping it alive. Understanding this cycle does not give you a diagnosis, but it can help guide you toward a better assessment and treatment plan. If you are looking for specialized OCD therapy in New York, visit Ellie Counseling to learn more about evidence-based treatment for intrusive thoughts, compulsions, and chronic uncertainty. You can also follow on Instagram for accessible information about OCD, anxiety, panic, and intrusive thoughts. Follow me on Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Eliana Bonaguro Eliana Bonaguro, Licensed Mental Health Counselor Eliana Bonaguro, LMHC, is a licensed mental health counselor specializing in OCD, anxiety disorders, panic disorder, agoraphobia, and Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy. She is also the author and illustrator of several mental health guides that blend evidence-based psychology with visual storytelling to make complex mental health concepts more approachable and easier to understand. Her insights and contributions have been featured in Forbes, Healthline, Newsweek, and RTOR.

Written by Anika Kumar Vashishth, Positive Psychology Practitioner Anika Kumar Vashishth is a Positive Psychology Practitioner and founder of I Am Enough | Flourish, a community supporting people to cultivate self-awareness, wellbeing, and flourishing. With a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Melbourne, she brings evidence-based psychology into everyday life. Ever since I was a child, I remember being asked the familiar question, "Is the glass half full or half empty?" It always seemed that there had to be a right answer. Half full meant optimism. Half empty meant noticing what was missing. But somewhere along the way, I started answering differently. What if it is both? The glass is half full. It is half empty. Both are true. I have been thinking about this beyond the glass. About how often we do the same thing with ourselves. We want our experiences to fit into one category, one feeling, one version of who we are. We are either doing well or struggling. We are either grateful or wanting more. We are either confident or afraid. But life rarely feels that neat. We can be two things at once. We can even be many things at once. Psychology has given us interesting ways of thinking about this. Our sense of self isn't necessarily one fixed, unchanging entity. Different aspects of who we are can become more visible depending on our roles, relationships and circumstances. The person who feels confident at work may feel uncertain in a relationship. The person who is usually independent may deeply need connection. The person who has handled difficult things before may still have days when something feels difficult to carry. None of these experiences necessarily makes the other untrue. They can belong to the same person. This is where emotions become interesting. We often treat emotions as though one should replace another. If I am afraid, I should become confident. If I am disappointed, I should remind myself to be grateful. If I am hurting, I should find the lesson. Sometimes that helps. But sometimes, in our hurry to feel differently, we may not give ourselves enough space to notice what we are actually experiencing. What if I can be grateful and disappointed? Hopeful and worried? Loving and angry? Afraid and courageous? The presence of one emotion does not necessarily cancel another. Emotional experience is more complex than the categories we often give it. This is where the idea of coexistence becomes useful. Not because every feeling needs to be acted upon. Not because every contradiction needs to be resolved. Simply because two experiences can exist at the same time. There is an important difference between making room for a feeling and surrendering to it. If I feel afraid, I can acknowledge the fear without allowing it to make every decision for me. If I feel angry, I can understand the anger without making anger my behaviour. If I feel uncertain, I can sit amid uncertainty and still choose a direction. Making room is not giving something control. It is allowing ourselves enough space to understand what is there before deciding what to do with it. That is also why acceptance needs to be understood carefully. Acceptance does not necessarily mean approval. It does not mean giving up. It does not mean deciding that something difficult should remain unchanged. Sometimes acceptance means recognising: This is what I am experiencing right now. From there, we can decide what needs to change. That distinction matters because coexistence is not about becoming passive. It may actually give us more room to act with intention. This is particularly relevant to the way we think about wellbeing. Positive psychology has explored what helps people flourish, positive emotions, relationships, strengths, meaning and other resources that support human functioning. Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory, for example, suggests that positive emotions can broaden our momentary patterns of thought and action and build psychological resources over time. But what is most interesting here is not choosing positive emotions over difficult ones. It is recognising that something positive can exist alongside something difficult. We can experience stress and still have instances of connection. We can experience disappointment and still experience gratitude. We can be going through uncertainty and still have hope. The difficult experience does not have to disappear before something nourishing can exist beside it. For me, this is where psychology meets something more personal. There is an Indian Sanskrit word that has stayed with me: Pūrṇa, whole, complete, full. I do not understand wholeness as perfection. Being whole means not being consistently confident, calm, grateful or resilient. Wholeness is simply the recognition that the difficult parts of our experience do not make us incomplete. One part of me can be tired, and another can be hopeful. A part that wants change and another that is grateful for what already exists. A part that is afraid and another that knows I can keep moving. Perhaps none of these parts has to win. They can all offer information. They can all belong. This is also why I find the idea of multiple selves, or different aspects of the self, so interesting. We are not necessarily the same version of ourselves in every situation. We change with context. We grow. We discover parts of ourselves that were less visible before. Sometimes, a difficult period can make us question who we are simply because the version of ourselves that previously felt familiar no longer feels quite the same. Nature as an inspiration to hold opposites together Nature seems to understand this without needing to explain it. A tree does not remain the same throughout the year. There are seasons of growth, fullness, shedding and stillness. We do not look at a tree in winter and decide that it has stopped being a tree. We understand that it is changing. Human beings are, of course, far more complicated. We carry memories, expectations and stories about who we think we should be. But there is still something to learn from the simplicity of a changing season. A difficult season does not erase the seasons that came before it. Being uncertain today does not mean we have lost our capacity for confidence. Feeling tired does not erase our strength. Wanting something different does not make us ungrateful for what we have. We can change without rejecting who we were. We may not have to turn every difficult experience into a lesson immediately. Sometimes it may simply be something we are experiencing. Something we can notice. Something we can understand. Something we can carry while we decide what comes next. That could be the real lesson hidden in the half-full, half-empty glass. Not that we should choose optimism. Not that we should focus on what is missing. But that sometimes both ways of seeing can be true. Perhaps the same is true of us. We can be proud of how far we have come and still wish we were somewhere else. We can love our lives and still want them to change. We can be grateful and still have unmet needs. We can be afraid and still be brave. We can be growing and still find growth difficult. The question may not always be: Which one is true? Perhaps sometimes the better question is, "What else is true at the same time?" We may not always have to choose. Both can belong. Perhaps being whole is not about becoming one consistent version of ourselves. It may be about making enough room for all that is true. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Anika Kumar Vashishth Anika Kumar Vashishth, Positive Psychology Practitioner Anika Kumar Vashishth is a Positive Psychology Practitioner whose work explores mental wellbeing beyond the absence of distress, towards flourishing. Grounded in positive psychology and neuroscience, she is interested in what enables individuals and communities not merely to function, but to live with greater meaning, connection, and wellbeing. She is the founder of I Am Enough | Flourish, a community that brings evidence-based approaches to wellbeing into everyday life. Her work is centred on making the science of flourishing accessible, relevant, and applicable to how we live, learn, and connect.

Written by K. Joia Houheneka, The World's Premier Excellence Coach K. Joia Houheneka is Founder & Chief of Gold Standards Media, Open Horizons Coaching, and Delve Travel-Luxury Travel Services, through which she pioneers a model of mission-first luxury entrepreneurship. Her work demonstrates how excellence, leadership, and freedom can be built together, by design. Every environment you build, including the team that surrounds you, your brand pillars, and even your own daily habits, is already shaping you and any others within, whether you designed it that way or not. Here are the six specific ways environment matters, and why raising your standards has to mean redesigning the room, not just reteaching the lesson. "Remember, an environment doesn’t wait for your permission to shape you. It’s already doing it. The only real choice is whether you’re paying attention to how." – K Joia Houheneka, Environments of Formation My work involves coaching entrepreneurs toward a level of excellence that isn't just about the offer, the launch, or the numbers. I’ve come to call it Worthy Excellence, as it’s about the integration of character, judgment, creative responsibility, and stewardship organized around a challenge (i.e., a mission) worthy of an entire life. It's about what’s really meant by self-actualization, the kind that is synonymous with self-transcendence and the expansion of the self beyond one’s physical limits to a cause and a legacy that is, in essence, limitlessly, eternally infinite in its potential for impact. I’ve found that many people who are sincere about building a business, a team, or a life committed to excellence often get something wrong about how excellence is developed and passed on. Namely, they think, for often quite understandable reasons, that excellence can be taught. They believe that if you just gather the right information, deliver the right training, and hand someone the right framework, then the transformation just follows. I certainly understand the appeal of this model, especially for those of us online trying to build businesses around important ideas. This model is clean, it's scalable, it tracks with the kind of education most of us grew up with, and it puts the responsibility for outcomes entirely on content you can produce once and distribute forever. It's also very, very, very incomplete in a way that unfortunately sabotages a lot of otherwise excellent teaching. "Formation doesn't happen through information alone. It happens most significantly through environments." You can teach a team your standards in an afternoon and watch those standards evaporate within a week if the room they return to doesn't reinforce a single word of it. This is the entire principle behind self-actualizer Maria Montessori's prepared environment, and it's just as true for the adult building a brand as it is for the child in the classroom: the environment does much of the forming. The teacher, the mentor, the coach: we prepare the conditions. But the people who are growing must ultimately grow themselves. I've watched this play out many times in many forms, and I imagine you have too. Picture this: a founder who delivers a beautiful keynote on craftsmanship and care, then goes back to a workplace where speed is the only thing that ever gets rewarded in practice. The keynote was information. The workplace is the environment. Fast forward six months, and craftsmanship is losing out every time, not because the team didn't understand the words, but because nothing around them ever made those words true. So, if environment is doing much of the real work, it's worth knowing exactly what work that is. I've identified six specific channels through which any environment shapes the people who dwell within it. Six environments of formation One: Attention Every environment decides what gets surfaced, repeated, and made impossible to ignore. Watch what gets highlighted in your team's Slack channel or your company's weekly update, and you'll learn what your culture treats as important, regardless of what your values deck says. Two: Admiration There's a real difference between whom your team applauds and whom they try to become. The applause is cheap and easy to hand out. The important signal to look out for is the role models people are trying to live up to when nobody's watching. Three: Action Every environment makes certain behaviors easy and others exhausting. Is it easier, on your team, to ship something imperfect and iterate in public, or to hide behind another round of polish because shipping feels riskier than perfecting? That answer tells you more about your culture than any internal memo could. Four: Feedback Every environment decides how much of reality is allowed to reach the people making decisions. Does your organization tell you a launch underperformed in plain terms, or does it arrive pre-softened by the time it reaches your desk, such that you can’t even see a failed attempt for what it is? Five: Identity Every environment establishes an unwritten answer to, "What do people like us do here?" What gets tolerated. What gets mocked once someone's out of the room. Your team absorbs this faster than any onboarding document, and mostly without even consciously realizing it’s happening. Six: Possibility Every environment expands or contracts what people believe they're capable of building. Some rooms make an ambitious bet feel like the obvious next step. Others make the identical bet feel reckless before the pitch is even finished. How to make real progress Six channels are running constantly on everyone in your orbit, whether you've designed them on purpose or not. Interestingly, most founders will plan an exorbitant retreat or rewrite their mission and values statement before they'll ever audit their actual environment against these six. That's backwards. A retreat is a moment of stepping back into reflection. A mission and values statement is an aspiration. These six are the mechanism, the real machinery translating your standards into what your team, your customers, and you yourself become over time. Excellence is never going to be built by teaching people harder. It's built by preparing rooms, both literal and cultural, where the six channels above are intentionally pointed toward the standard you want. Given all this, here's my challenge to you this week. Pick one environment you're responsible for, whether it’s your team, your household, or even just your own morning. Run it through the six: What's getting surfaced? Who's being imitated? What's easy versus exhausting? How much truth reaches you unfiltered? What do "people like us" do here? What feels challenging yet possible? You may not love everything you find. Good. That means you're making progress to finally fix the actual machinery, not just the pretty mission and values statement hanging above it. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from K. Joia Houheneka K. Joia Houheneka, The World's Premier Excellence Coach K. Joia Houheneka is devoted to advancing mission-first luxury entrepreneurship as a lived philosophy, not just a positioning strategy. She views excellence as dynamic and wholistic, an ongoing refinement of craft, character, and vision that one grows over time. Her approach to leadership centers self-direction and the freedom to move beyond inherited scripts, external validation, and false trade-offs. Luxury business building, thus, becomes a path toward self-actualization, where premium offerings and philanthropic commitment strengthen each other. She asks, "What might change, for a leader, for a life, for a legacy, if ambition and mission were cultivated together to be one?"

Multi-award-winning holistic healing specialist and author Aiga Smite is the founder of Healing with Gaia, where her work challenges the idea that true wellbeing begins and ends with treating symptoms. In this deeply personal interview, she explores the philosophy behind Beyond Symptoms, the connection between mind, body, emotions and energy, and how her daughter’s extraordinary health journey led her into holistic healing, conscious parenting and profound inner transformation. She also reveals why intuition, personal autonomy and looking beneath the surface have become central to her approach to healing. Aiga Smite, Holistic Healing & Wellbeing Expert What does looking “beyond symptoms” mean to you when you work with someone’s wellbeing? Looking “beyond symptoms” means recognising that a symptom is not necessarily the whole story. Our bodies communicate with us, and rather than focusing solely on making a symptom disappear, I believe we can become curious about what may be happening beneath it. This is the philosophy at the heart of my book, “Beyond Symptoms”. I look at wellbeing through interconnected layers: physical and nutritional health, emotional experiences, lifestyle, environment, energetic wellbeing and, for those who resonate with it, metaphysical or spiritual aspects. Every person is unique. Two people experiencing the same symptom may have completely different underlying factors. I therefore encourage people to observe their individual patterns. What was happening when something began? How are they nourishing themselves? What stresses are present? What does their environment look like? Are certain emotional or behavioural patterns continually repeating? For me, holistic healing means seeing the human being as a whole rather than reducing someone to a symptom, diagnosis or individual part of the body. It is about becoming curious enough to look deeper and developing a more conscious relationship with yourself. How do you explore the connection between physical symptoms, emotions, lifestyle, and energetic wellbeing without assuming they all have the same root cause? I begin with curiosity rather than deciding beforehand what something means. In “Beyond Symptoms”, I explore several layers that I believe can influence our wellbeing: nutrition, emotional stress, lifestyle, environmental exposures and energetic or metaphysical factors. Their significance can be very different for each individual, and sometimes several layers may be involved. Self-reflection therefore plays an important role in my approach. When did something change? What was happening emotionally? How are you sleeping and nourishing yourself? What continually drains you? What brings you back into balance? Are there repeating patterns you haven't previously considered? I also believe deeply in personal autonomy. In my own family's journey, we eventually chose not to continue within a cycle of ongoing medical checkups and interventions and instead followed the path that felt right for us. That was our personal decision, not an instruction for anybody else. Every individual and family has the right to make their own informed choices about healthcare and support. Holistic wellbeing, to me, is about asking deeper questions and becoming an active, conscious participant in your own wellbeing. What have Reiki, Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), and mind and body awareness taught you about where different healing approaches can complement one another? My journey has taught me that healing can have many layers and that no single modality needs to hold every answer. Reiki profoundly changed my understanding of energy and presence. EFT gave me another way of exploring emotional experiences and patterns, while mind and body awareness taught me to notice the relationship between thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and our responses to life. My journey has also included meditation, mindfulness, nutrition, natural living, nature, spiritual development and different forms of holistic therapy. But perhaps one of the most transformative aspects has been my own deep inner work. I began examining emotional wounds, inherited patterns, beliefs and the energy I was carrying. This naturally led me towards conscious parenting and considering how my own healing could influence the environment I created around my daughter. Rather than continually asking, “What needs fixing?”, I began asking, “What needs understanding, nurturing, releasing or changing?” For me, holistic healing isn't one therapy or technique. It is a way of understanding the whole human experience and recognising how deeply interconnected its different aspects can be. Why do you think learning to listen to the body is often difficult, even when people know something feels out of balance? I think many of us have been conditioned to override ourselves. We push through exhaustion, ignore stress, suppress emotions and sometimes remain in environments or relationships that don't feel right because we believe we should cope. Eventually, being disconnected from ourselves can begin to feel normal. Listening can also be uncomfortable because sometimes we already sense what needs to change. Our body might be asking for rest while our mind demands productivity. Our intuition might be telling us something isn't right while fear tells us to keep everything exactly as it is. My own journey taught me to question, observe and listen more deeply rather than automatically handing my inner authority away. Listening to the body doesn't mean assigning a predetermined spiritual explanation to every sensation. It means developing awareness. What keeps repeating? When do I feel depleted? What creates tension? What makes me feel alive? What am I tolerating that no longer feels aligned? When we reduce some of the external noise, we create room to hear ourselves again. For me, that reconnection is fundamental to holistic wellbeing. Where do you think holistic wellbeing is most often misunderstood or oversimplified today? Holistic wellbeing is often reduced to individual practices: Reiki, crystals, supplements, meditation, organic food or whatever happens to be the latest wellness trend. I value many of these things, but none of them alone represents holistic living. To me, it means looking at the entire ecosystem of a person's life: nourishment, thoughts, emotions, stress, movement, rest, relationships, environment, energy, spirituality and the relationship we have with ourselves. My own life has become an ongoing exploration of this philosophy. I'm 37, yet people regularly estimate my age as somewhere around 22 to 26. I find that fascinating, not because looking younger is the purpose of holistic living, but because it makes me reflect on vitality and how nutrition, stress, emotional wellbeing, lifestyle and our inner world may influence how vibrant we feel and appear. Holistic living isn't about perfection or never experiencing difficulties. For me, it is about consciously creating conditions in which we can thrive physically, emotionally, energetically and spiritually while remaining curious about how interconnected these different aspects of ourselves really are. What are some practical signs that the body may be asking someone to slow down, reflect, or make a change? The signs can be very individual. Sometimes we notice tiredness, tension, changes in sleep, digestive discomfort or simply the feeling that our body is struggling to keep up with our lifestyle. At other times, the signs may feel emotional or energetic: irritability, overwhelm, feeling continually depleted or losing our sense of joy and connection. Rather than immediately deciding what a particular sign means, I encourage observation. When did this begin? What was happening in my life? How am I nourishing myself? How am I sleeping? Which environments am I spending time in? Which relationships leave me energised and which leave me depleted? What emotions have I been avoiding? Environment is another important part of my philosophy. In “Beyond Symptoms”, I explore becoming more conscious of our food, water, household products and everyday surroundings. We don't necessarily need to transform everything overnight. Sometimes change begins with something simple: more rest, better nourishment, a stronger boundary, time in nature or addressing an emotional pattern. Awareness comes before change, and learning to notice these patterns can be a powerful starting point. How can someone learn to distinguish genuine intuition from fear, habitual thinking, or wishful thinking? For me, developing intuition has been closely connected with clearing away the noise surrounding it. Fear can be loud. It creates urgency and presents us with worst-case scenarios. Habitual thinking often sounds like conditioning, everything we've been taught we “should” believe. Wishful thinking can tell us exactly what we desperately want to hear. Intuition feels different to me. There is often a quieter knowing beneath it. Meditation, mindfulness, Reiki, breathing practices, nature and deep inner healing have helped me strengthen that connection. This became particularly significant during my daughter's health journey. We were given frightening predictions about her future, yet something deep within me never fully accepted that those predictions would become her reality. Following that inner knowing changed the direction of my life. I believe discernment grows alongside self-awareness. When we understand our wounds, triggers and habitual fears, it becomes easier to recognise when they are speaking. Nobody else can dictate another person's intuition. It is an intensely personal relationship that develops as we become more connected with ourselves. Sometimes the quietest voice within us becomes the one that changes everything. Your own healing journey began during a deeply challenging time involving your daughter’s health, so how did that experience shape the way you understand healing today? My daughter's health journey completely changed the direction of my life. She was diagnosed with serious chronic health conditions when she was very young, and we were given frightening prognoses about her future. Something within me couldn't accept that those predictions had to define her life. I immersed myself in holistic healing, nutrition, Reiki, natural living, emotional healing and energetic work. But one of my greatest realisations was that I couldn't focus solely on my child. I needed to look deeply at myself. I believe children can mirror their parents emotionally and energetically. This led me into profound inner healing and conscious parenting. I explored my wounds, generational patterns, beliefs and energy, asking myself: “What can I heal within myself, and what kind of environment am I creating around my child?” We embraced nourishing food, holistic therapies, home education, freedom of self-expression, nature, travel and reduced stress. We also eventually chose to step away from continual medical checkups and follow our own path. From my perspective as her mother, I believe this entire holistic journey, including my own inner healing, contributed tremendously to her recovery and saved my child's life. This is our lived experience; every family must make their own informed choices. If readers could change one thing about the way they approach their own wellbeing, what would you encourage them to start with? I would encourage people to reclaim their relationship with themselves. We live surrounded by voices telling us what health should look like, what we should fear, what we should buy and how we should live. Somewhere within all that noise, it is incredibly easy to stop hearing our own voice. Begin with awareness. Notice what gives you energy and what takes it away. Look at your nourishment, environment, relationships, stress, emotional patterns and beliefs. Ask whether the life you are creating genuinely supports the person you want to become. Don't be afraid to look inward. One of the greatest lessons of my journey has been that sometimes, when we desperately want circumstances around us to change, the deepest transformation begins within ourselves. Heal what you carry. Question inherited patterns. Become conscious of the environment you create around yourself and your children. Spend time in nature, nourish yourself, create space for joy and learn to recognise your intuition. Most importantly, remember that your wellbeing journey belongs to you. You don't need to change everything today. Start by listening. When awareness changes, choices change, and small choices can transform the direction of an entire life. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Aiga Smite

Written by Diogenes Muse-Cleveland, CEO and Founder Diogenes Muse-Cleveland is no stranger to adversity and business. As the CEO and Founder of Muse Management Services, a work-from-home job platform created in 2024, and a member of the disabled community, he has a long-standing commitment to assisting those with mobility-related disabilities gain independence through auxiliary income. On July 4th, 2025, Donald Trump and the Republican Party cut Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act programs, which helped millions of Americans with and without disabilities, by $1 trillion. Then, on June 18, 2026, the Department of Justice issued a legal opinion saying that the Olmstead Act, which concerns the right of those with disabilities to receive medical care at home in their own communities instead of in institutions, did not need to be enforced in the same way. Shortly after that, within the same month, Tennessee Republicans created a new state law forcing terminally ill children off healthcare based solely on their immigration status. On top of all this, the Trump administration plans on cutting the Medicare subsidy program that helps keep the price of medications low for millions of older and disabled Americans. It is becoming increasingly clear that there is an agenda among those currently in government to chip away at the rights and healthcare of the most vulnerable in this country until there is nothing left. Therefore, relying on government assistance programs like Social Security or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is no longer sound. Those in power have proven that they can no longer be trusted to protect the best interests of those with disabilities. It is not far-fetched to wonder how long before the government begins cutting Social Security and SSI as well. They have already been talking about making these cuts, and as much as those in opposition to this have been talking about blocking it, they have not been able to do much to stop everything else they have cut. So, I would not wait around to find out what they are going to do with Social Security. Those who are most vulnerable and can do so must find another means of income for themselves so that if these programs are stripped away, they are not left with no options other than living in an institution. Why not Muse Management Services? Muse Management Services gives access to entry-level jobs that you can work from the comfort of your home and helps cut costs on gas for your car, taxes, electricity bills, and more. This was all explained in one of my prior articles, "The Benefits of Working as an Agent of Muse Management Services". Furthermore, you can work for Muse Management Services even while you are receiving Social Security Income, with no threat of it being cut if you do not earn over a certain amount. This is detailed in question 2 on the FAQ page of my website. This way, if the unthinkable does happen and Social Security is cut, your biggest question will be, "How can I work more hours?" Not, "How am I going to survive?" On top of that, I have detailed in a different article, "How Muse Management Services Is Creating New Paths: An Interview With Diogenes Muse Cleveland," how it is possible to secure grants that you can receive without endangering your Social Security income at all while still earning income from my company. I have even given you the names of some organizations where you can begin your search. If you are on Social Security, watching as rights and healthcare access are being slowly chipped away for people like you, do something about it now. Do not wait until the bottom falls out and you have to scramble for any resource you can grab hold of. With the prices of everything rising as they are, if you decide to wait until later, you might be forced into an institution before you complete the hiring process. Follow me on Instagram and visit my website for more info! Read more from Diogenes Muse-Cleveland Diogenes Muse-Cleveland, CEO and Founder Diogenes Muse-Cleveland is a pioneer in his field. Raised in Flint, Michigan, he suffered a catastrophic injury at the age of 21, leaving him with tetraplegia. Despite the difficulties that came along with his condition, Diogenes has always strived to forge a path forward through intense willpower and determination. Through the establishment of Muse Management Services, Diogenes hopes to improve his life and the lives of all those like him for generations to come.

Written by Ekaterina Leonova, Change Coach Ekaterina Leonova is a Change Coach with a background in psychology, life sciences, and engineering. She blends psychological depth with systems thinking and an evidence-based approach to help accomplished professionals move past feeling stuck or overwhelmed and create the change they need. If only our careers were predictable and followed a clear path based on skills, ratings, and so on. If our only reference points were skills and knowledge, all careers would look pretty predictable and linear, moving from junior to expert levels in a chosen profession, learning more skills and acquiring more knowledge as we go. Top companies would hire those with the highest grades in their field, just like top universities do in many countries. It's not easy to get that top grade, of course, but our career expectations would be clear, and the world would function in a predictable, although somewhat robotic, way. But the world does not work like that. Quite often, who we are as human beings contributes a lot. This includes personality traits, core values, culture, and lived experiences. All of that informs how we interact with the world. The numbers back this up. LinkedIn data from 2020 to 2023 shows that people who listed both hard and soft skills on their profiles got promoted 8% faster than those who listed only hard skills. A more recent Harvard Business Review analysis, looking at over 70 million job transitions, found that things like teamwork, problem-solving, and communication were linked to promotions 11% faster. Leadership skills alone got people there 10% faster. People with broad human skills didn't just move up faster, they earned more and stayed resilient throughout their careers. So this isn't a hunch or a nice story I tell myself. Academic mastery on its own was never the whole story. For a long time, what we now call soft skills have sometimes determined what job we get, whether we are chosen for a particular role, or whether we become a people manager or leader. You might relate. You are most certainly the smartest person in the room, and you have outstanding academic achievements. Yet, your colleague gets more recognition because they are more outgoing, chatty, and noticeable. They are not better at analyzing or at careful, thoughtful execution, but they are much better at being visible than you are. I have a lot of personal experience related to this. I was choosing to be quiet. There is a whole layer of family beliefs, culture, and personal traits in the background, of course. But the point is, I didn't take space to talk about my achievements. I was not the most outgoing person either. I would not do small talk over coffee. A waste of time, I thought. I didn't even like small talk. I still don't, to be honest. I connected only with the people who were most relevant. So I got feedback once: "Why don't you talk to people more?" Yes, I saw that outgoing colleagues were getting exciting projects, even though I was good in my niche. I didn't understand why that was important at the time. Now my approach has changed a lot. Even this article, sharing my knowledge and experiences publicly, is one step towards the visibility that I know I need to build trust as a coach. There's actually a name for this, and it's been studied. The Center for Talent Innovation looked at close to 4,000 professionals, including 268 senior executives, and found that what they call "executive presence" accounts for 26% of what gets someone promoted. Break that down further, and two-thirds of it comes from gravitas alone: how confident you seem, how decisive you are, and whether you can read a room. Two-thirds of the executives in that study said gravitas was the single biggest factor in who they chose to promote, essentially, how you come across. It doesn't stop at promotion decisions. It shapes how your everyday work gets judged too. There's a well-documented "likability bias" in performance reviews: being liked pushes your evaluation up regardless of what you actually delivered, and being disliked pulls it down the same way, independent of your output. From my coaching experience, I see that blocks, issues, and difficulties at work and in a career path don't happen because people lack skills. There's a personal story behind them that makes certain things more difficult. Saying no, setting clear boundaries, making your achievements known and very visible, and how outgoing and social you are will all impact what kind of manager or leader you are, whether or not you are next up for promotion, and whether you get recognition for your contributions. There's a common myth that saying "no" damages your reputation. In my experience, it's usually the opposite. Clear boundaries tell people you know your worth, and they free you up to focus on the work that actually matters instead of drowning in everything that lands on your plate. What looks like a "soft skill" gap here is really a belief underneath it, such as fear of disappointing someone or fear of being seen as difficult. It's not a competence gap at all. I have quite a few clients who are overworked, overwhelmed, and still not really recognized because saying no to their manager isn't even an option in their world. One particular example comes to mind. One of my clients started a new job in a new area, and the volume of work, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and evaluation in this company's culture and way of working depended heavily on being visible, being able to talk about yourself, and saying what you are good at. This client is quite introverted, and it didn't come naturally to them. So our main focus was just that: self-trust, self-esteem, and confidence. We reached a point where the client was more engaged and got more consultancy gigs. The managers noticed them. It all led to higher life satisfaction and increased confidence in other areas, such as finding a supportive, warm partner. I recognize that today, things change so fast, especially in technology, that one needs to upskill constantly. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. The chances that you are being overlooked, not appreciated, or not respected mostly have to do with a very human side of you, with your traits, beliefs, traumas, and behavioral patterns. One of my clients was in the process of changing jobs. Although he was invited to interviews and was passing the intro rounds, his main focus was upskilling and learning new technologies. When we discussed what went wrong in the skills interviews with stakeholders, there was always one thing: he gave short answers and couldn't present his technical expertise clearly. Sometimes, his values wouldn't match the company's, and then he would just say something vague instead of being assertive about his values and views. He tried to stay safe this way, but it led nowhere. The reasons for this often lie in imposter syndrome, a pattern I see constantly among the most skilled people I work with. It's more common than most people think. Up to 70% of professionals experience it at some point, and it doesn't spare the top of the ladder either. In fact, 71% of United States (US) Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) report it, and 75% of executive women say the same. It's not just an uncomfortable feeling either. It quietly holds people back from opportunities or pushes them into overcompensating until they burn out. Whatever patterns we have, they don't have to stay that way. You can choose to change your behaviors, address fears, and build your self-esteem. The same goes for the beliefs underneath them: that talking about your work is bragging, that saying no makes you difficult, or that you need every answer before you're allowed to open your mouth. Those beliefs were learned somewhere and can be changed. All the effort to change behaviors and beliefs is often called personal growth or development. That's a completely different task from "get better at your job." Somehow, it is not considered necessary. However, I keep seeing things that prove the exact opposite. It will be the most important thing you will do for yourself. The clients I work with usually start in the same place, convinced they need one more certification, one more skill, or one more year of experience before they're finally "ready." They arrive at a very different place, able to name their own work in a room without shrinking, able to say no without spiraling into guilt, and trusting that what they already know is enough. Their Curriculum Vitae (CV) doesn't change much, but they do. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Ekaterina Leonova Ekaterina Leonova, Change Coach Ekaterina Leonova is a Change Coach and founder of Leonova Consulting. Her background spans psychology, life sciences, and entrepreneurship, giving her a rare ability to work with both the emotional and the analytical sides of change. She works with accomplished professionals, managers, executives, founders, and high performers who look successful on the outside but feel stuck, overwhelmed, or disconnected underneath. Rather than offering generic advice, she helps clients identify exactly what's keeping them stuck and helps build a system to implement the change that would actually move them forward.

Written by Annette Densham, Chief Storyteller Annette Densham is a multi-award-winning Public Relations (PR) specialist and is considered the go-to for business storytelling, award submission writing, and helping business leaders establish themselves as authorities in their field. In a near-future Los Angeles, Judge Maddox sits in judgement of those accused. In a court run by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) judge, a detective accused of murdering his wife has 90 minutes to prove his innocence or be executed. With a high probability of guilt before he opens his mouth, the race is on. Judge Maddox has zero mercy. This AI judge rules on the numbers it has access to and what it is fed. That’s it. It doesn’t fall for sob stories or read between the lines. It never questions what’s missing, distorted or hyperbole. That’s the problem with AI. We treat what it spits out as the final word when it’s the first step. Handing high-stakes calls to a machine designed to process what it’s given, not what’s missing, is how you get a confident answer to the wrong question. The awards world is facing this conundrum. What is the role of AI in awards? Should it be used to streamline what can be the onerous judging process? If it is used, can it tell the difference in an entry between something true and something well written? AI strategist and educator Inbal Rodnay, who helps accounting, legal and advisory teams understand the tools, mindset and support they need to make AI work for them, said, “One of the toughest challenges with AI is there’s no textbook or clear guidelines for its use. Everything changes so quickly.” “If awards are using AI for judging, they assume AI removes bias. It doesn’t. It just standardises it. If you start with a system that’s already 97% certain, the outcome isn’t really being judged anymore. It’s being confirmed. That’s the risk when we overtrust AI in any decision that matters.” “What AI gives is speed and structure. What it can’t give you is judgement and nuance. AI can tell you what fits the criteria.” Current state of awards judging Before the awards industry gets precious about protecting the integrity of human judging, it might want to look at what that means in practice. I've been writing award submissions for almost 15 years. I've written thousands of entries across the A to Z of industries. Most programs don’t brief their judges properly, if at all. There's almost zero transparency about the judging process. Criteria are so vague and generic that two judges scoring the same entry can come to two very different decisions. That’s not because one is wrong, but because what right looks like isn’t made clear. Judges fill the gaps with personal opinions and biases. If you don’t win, you have no explanation why. Ninety-nine percent of awards programs give zero feedback. When judging an award, I pointed out to the other judge how Caucasian her top five picks for finalists were. The interesting thing was that two-thirds of the entries were from other cultures. I suggested she had an unconscious bias. We received no training. Here are the entries. Off you go. When there’s no training, guidance, rules or explanation of the criteria, the process becomes subjective rather than objective, like a Rorschach test. Every judge looks at the same entry but sees something different, shaped by their own experiences, assumptions and preferences. Not exactly fair. Entrants want and need to know that the judging process has rigour. They need to trust that every entry is assessed against the same standards by judges who understand the criteria and recognise the biases they may bring into the room. So maybe the idea of introducing AI is a solution. The algorithm has the gavel Human judges aren’t as objective as we’d like to believe or assume. Human brains have this little room where their preconceived view of the world is locked away. Logically and consciously, we believe we’re being fair, but our brains are constantly making shortcuts, filling gaps and favouring what feels familiar without asking our permission. Like the ink in Mrs Marsh’s chalk test, “Ooohh, it does get in.” That doesn’t make judges bad people. It makes them human. AI tools can help judges process large amounts of information more quickly, especially in complex entries. With hundreds of entries across multiple categories, that isn’t a trivial advantage. Speed, consistency and the absence of biased decision-making are appealing. AI doesn’t care whether the submitter is well known, well connected or has their fair share of challenges. It can’t be charmed or swayed by a good sob story. It doesn’t score one entry more generously because the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) once sat on the same panel. If the criterion says “evidence of measurable impact” and the entry doesn’t have it, that’s that. Awards bodies don’t need AI to be better than human judges. They need it to be good enough to clear a backlog of entries without chasing volunteers, managing conflicting scores or delaying the finalist announcement. The argument for a hybrid option The argument against AI in awards judging sounds reasonable until you sit inside the judging process. What do you do if two judges pull out at the last minute? You’re left with a stack of submissions needing hours of careful reading, scoring and written feedback. Judging is often a full marathon that many don’t have the time or energy for. Maybe it’s not one or the other. Perhaps AI isn’t the threat to awards integrity. It might be a chance to enforce it. Karen Perks, CEO of Mikare Health and Meeka Technologies, built an AI awards judging tool after living this scenario. She found AI could process and review a submission in two minutes, freeing human judges to spend 20 focused minutes digging deeper into the answers rather than decoding them. “The knowledge embedded in the tool mirrors the same rubric matrix methodology used in tenders and grant assessments, where evidence against criteria is the basis of the decision. This AI is doing the reading so humans can do the thinking,” – Karen said. Karen’s AI judging model takes the first pass, reads every submission against the criteria and produces a structured assessment. That initial pass flags where entries meet the evidence threshold, scores them against the rubric and gives written feedback to every submitter, regardless of whether they progress. Human judges then receive a shortlist, not a mountain of entries. “The attention goes to the entries where the scores are high, where two submissions are separated by a fraction, or where something in the AI assessment warrants a closer look. The human brings contextual understanding, industry experience and the ability to see original thinking.” “The AI handles volume and consistency. The human handles interpretation and final verdict.” It’s not AI versus humans. It’s a division of labour where AI filters, structures and stress tests, and humans decide the winner. The case against Before handing entries over to Maddox, award platforms need to answer this: what’s the judging process there to do? Is it there to clear 500 entries before the finalist announcement or identify the entrant whose work genuinely deserves to win? Those two goals can coexist, but when speed is driving the decision, Houston, we have a problem. AI can process evidence in seconds, assess against criteria and pump out a verdict. What it can’t do is wonder whether it’s been told the whole story. Awards judging has the same problem. Business awards aren’t marking a multiple-choice exam. Judges are tasked with deciding what excellence looks like across businesses of different sizes, sectors, locations, resources and stages of growth. A 20% increase in revenue can mean one thing in a startup and something different in a business that’s been around for 10 years. Saving five jobs in a regional town may have more impact than creating 50 roles in a capital city. A smaller result achieved with the odds stacked against you can say far more about leadership than a bigger one backed by a hefty budget. The numbers matter, but there has to be meaning attached. A good judge looks at what happened, how it happened, and the challenges faced and overcome. “We introduced monthly team meetings to improve communication” may sound like a leadership initiative, but unless those meetings solved a specific problem and produced a measurable change, it’s routine business as usual, dressed in a fancy frock to sound impressive. A judge can tell when an entrant has buried something remarkable under three paragraphs of clunky writing. AI judges the version of excellence it’s been instructed to look for. Tell it to reward measurable impact and it may favour the entry with the most percentages. Tell it to prioritise innovation and it may reward the biggest idea. Tell it to assess storytelling and the best written submission has an advantage. At that point, who is really judging the award? The AI, the person who wrote the prompt or the company that built the model? CommsHero Awards’ 2025 experiment is a glimpse into this problem. A human and an AI judged four anonymous entries. The judging brief and criteria were fed into ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. While all three came up with the same winners, how they got there exposed noticeably different lenses. Gemini was generous towards ambition, scale and cultural change, even when detailed results were thin. Claude placed more weight on structure, purpose and ethical framing. ChatGPT was stricter and favoured hard metrics, replicable processes and technical logic. That’s a consistency trap. An AI model can be completely consistent with itself while consistently applying an interpretation the awards body didn’t anticipate. We give AI the keys to the mansion and trust what it spits out. AI can get the same thing wrong in every entry, and because it does it consistently, no one may realise the scoring is flawed. AI doesn’t remove bias. It can standardise it. Research into Large Language Models (LLMs) used as judges has found that their decisions can be influenced by factors such as where information appears, how the scoring prompt is worded and the fluency or apparent quality of the response. In other words, the machine can be nudged while appearing to make a purely evidence-based decision. A polished entry may be easier for AI to process than one written by someone whose first language isn’t English. A long answer may appear more substantial than a concise one. A business using familiar corporate language may fit the model’s idea of leadership better than an entrant describing the same achievement in plain English. An entrant who understands how to write for AI may score better than one who did the better work. We could end up rewarding the submission most compatible with the machine rather than the achievement most worthy of recognition. Human judges have blind spots too. The difference is, in a well-thought-out judging process, another judge can challenge the score. The panel can debate an interpretation, revisit the evidence and ask why one entrant has been marked more harshly than another. You can say to a human judge, “You’ve given this entry 62 and everyone else has given it 85. Talk us through why you marked it this way.” What do you ask AI? It’ll give you a beautifully structured explanation, a table and a score out of 100. That doesn’t mean the explanation reflects sound judgement. An 87.5 can still be a subjective opinion. The ethics question The ethical concerns relating to AI use in awards judging need to factor in fairness, transparency, accountability, reliability, privacy and trust. Who trains the model? On what data? Whose definition of excellence gets encoded? If AI is trained on past winning entries, it’ll replicate what’s already been rewarded, which is a good way to lock in bias. The innovative, unconventional, and first-of-its-kind entry would most likely be scored lower by an algorithm that has no prior pattern to match it to. Which version of AI is being used to judge? Was it ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or a purpose-built system? Which version? What prompt was used? Were the entries assessed individually or against one another? Did the order change? Was the process tested before live entries were uploaded? Could the same score be reproduced six months later after the model had been updated? Unless an awards body can answer those questions, it doesn’t have a transparent judging system. It has outsourced judgement and is no better than judging being done by humans with no transparent process. Awards submissions can contain revenue figures, profit margins, client outcomes, intellectual property, staff information and deeply personal stories. Entrants deserve to know whether their material is being uploaded to a third-party AI system, how it’s being stored and who has access to it. “We used AI to make judging easier” isn’t a rock-solid data policy. There’s also the accountability gap. In a legal setting, decisions need to be explained. The Judicial Commission of New South Wales argues that giving reasons helps make a decision transparent, accountable and easier to trust. Awards shouldn’t pretend they’re exempt from the same basic principle. If AI marks an entry down, who explains why? Can the entrant or judging panel question how the criteria were interpreted? Can anyone see which evidence the system ignored or misunderstood? That’s the black box problem. A score comes out, but the reasoning behind it may be impossible to properly examine. If no one can explain or challenge the decision, can the decision be called fair? A bad call is still a bad call. AI is still in test tube mode In awards, experiments are happening, but they’re exactly that: experiments. The technology is moving fast, but fast isn’t the same as ready, and ready isn’t the same as right. Inbal said the problem isn’t that AI is useless or wildly overhyped. “AI is still an emerging technology. A lot of what’s on the market right now is still being tested, tweaked and adapted. Yet, it’s being positioned as a shortcut.” “AI is powerful in pockets and fragile in others. While it’s impressive, it’s far less integrated than many people expect. It's an emerging capability that still needs judgement, literacy, integration and clear ownership.” Inbal said AI isn’t ready for us to outsource accountability to a tool. “There’s the AI literacy gap that has to be factored in. It's not just mastering prompts or using the latest model. It’s understanding what AI is good at, where it’s risky, and when human judgement still matters.” The movie Mercy shows, amidst the action scenes and ticking clock, the danger of confusing speed with judgement. We humans have little patience, and using AI to judge gives judges a reason not to spend more time assessing, digging, reflecting and analysing. What could go wrong? What’s the answer? AI has a legitimate role in awards judging. It can help with shortlisting at volume, flagging entries that fail to meet minimum evidence requirements, identifying inconsistencies in scoring across a judging panel and checking criteria compliance. AI can make the process more rigorous, but it shouldn't make it less human. If an awards program is going to hand over its credibility to an algorithm still in its infancy, it has to factor all this in. Otherwise, it's in danger of becoming a scoring system. Who wants a photo with a scoring system? Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Annette Densham Annette Densham, Chief Storyteller Multi-award-winning PR specialist Annette Densham is considered the go-to for all things business storytelling, award submission writing, and helping business leaders establish themselves as authorities in their field. She has shared her insights into storytelling, media, and business across Australia, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US), speaking for the Professional Speakers Association, Stevie Awards, Queensland Government, and many more. Three-time winner of the Grand Stevie Award for Women in Business, gold Stevie International Business Award, and a finalist in Australian Small Business Champion awards, Annette audaciously challenges anyone in small business to cast aside modesty, embrace their genius, and share their stories.

Written by April Michelle Ratchford, Occupational Therapist & Podcast Host April Ratchford, an autistic occupational therapist and the voice behind Adulting with Autism, is a registered/licensed occupational therapist. She supports neurodivergent adults across the world with relatable storytelling, lived wisdom, and empowering strategies for real-life challenges. Getting accepted was one thing. Paying for it was another. But now your parents have bought enough university gear to personally fund the athletic department, your extra-long twin sheets are packed, and everybody is excited. You are probably excited too, along with terrified, overwhelmed, and wondering what the hell you just signed yourself up for. For autistic and other neurodivergent young adults, college requires an enormous amount of executive functioning that nobody puts on the admissions brochure. So let's talk about dorms, roommates, money, accommodations, routines, hygiene, grades, and what happens when Mom is no longer standing behind you with a clipboard. First, get the stuff you actually need If you're attending vocational school, your program will usually be pretty structured. They'll tell you what supplies, books, uniforms, equipment, or materials you need. If you're working with Vocational Rehabilitation, ask whether they can help with books, supplies, tuition, transportation, or other education-related expenses. Community college students, same idea. Check your syllabus. Figure out whether you actually need the physical textbook, an online access code, or something else before spending $300 on a book you're going to open twice. Four-year college students living on campus? Oh, baby. Now we've entered a whole different level of chaos. You need bedding, toiletries, clothes, medications, chargers, laundry supplies, basic cleaning supplies, and whatever else you genuinely use. You do not need to recreate your entire childhood bedroom inside a dorm. Remember, everything you drag into that building eventually has to come back out. Check your mattress size before buying bedding. Many residence halls use Twin XL mattresses, which are just similar enough to a regular twin that you'll confidently buy the wrong damn sheets. Your roommate is not a non-player character (NPC) Dorm shopping has somehow become an industry. You don't need seventeen decorative pillows, a neon sign, six storage contraptions, and an entire Target home collection. Be realistic. A mini fridge and microwave can be useful if your residence hall permits them, but talk to your roommate first. Two people bringing two refrigerators, two microwaves, and everything else into one tiny room is how you end up living inside a very expensive storage closet. My son, Z, already had a refrigerator and microwave when his roommate moved in, so they communicated. "Hey, I already have these. You can use them." Problem solved. Z's roommate was also autistic and was older than him. That didn't mean they automatically had identical needs. They had to learn how to navigate one another. Talk about sleep. Lights. Noise. Visitors. Cleaning. Food. Shared appliances. Temperature. Studying. Personal space. You don't have to become best friends, but you do have to remember that it's not the You Show. Be considerate. Be clear. Don't assume somebody else automatically knows your boundaries. For the love of God, keep the room reasonably clean Your dorm isn't your bedroom at home. Nobody is coming behind you to pick everything up. Residence halls have rules. There may be health and safety inspections. Fire hazards matter. Prohibited appliances matter. Trash piled everywhere matters. Your roommate is also allowed to become irritated if your half of the room becomes a biological experiment. Which brings me to another subject nobody apparently wants to discuss with college students. You still have to wash your ass Yes, we're discussing activities of daily living. You are responsible for showering. Deodorant. Brushing your teeth. Washing your hair. Laundry. Changing your sheets. Eating. Taking prescribed medication. Getting enough sleep. Keeping track of toiletries. Cleaning your room. All of it. Executive dysfunction can make supposedly simple tasks surprisingly difficult. That doesn't make the tasks disappear. If you need a routine, make one. Set alarms. Put things where you'll see them. Make a checklist. Attach showering to another part of your morning routine. Pick a laundry day. Have a medication system that works for you. College independence doesn't mean magically acquiring executive functioning. It means learning how to build systems around the executive functioning you actually have. Please wear deodorant. Nobody likes a stinky roommate. Commuters, I'm looking at you too Living at home doesn't exempt you from learning independence. If your parents are still waking you up, reminding you about every assignment, packing your lunch, washing all your clothes, tracking every appointment, and making sure you leave the house on time, college is an excellent opportunity to start taking on pieces of that responsibility. Not everything tomorrow. Start with something, then something else. Your parents and caregivers won't always be able to manage your life for you. The goal is not to rip away every support you have. The goal is to distinguish support from dependence. Those are not the same thing. Find student accessibility before you need it If you're autistic, have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), are dyslexic, chronically ill, physically disabled, or otherwise qualify for accommodations, find your school's disability or accessibility office, preferably before classes begin. If you're one of my Last Second Sams and Sallies and classes are already starting, go now. Depending on your documented needs and your school's policies, accommodations might include extended testing time, reduced distraction testing environments, note-taking supports, accessible materials, or other appropriate accommodations. But here's the important part: you have to participate in this process. College isn't high school. Your parents aren't automatically handling your educational accommodations anymore. Learn what your school requires. Learn how accommodation notifications work at your particular school. Learn what you need to communicate to professors. This is self-advocacy practice in real time. Tell somebody before you're completely drowning This is where I see young adults make a huge mistake. They struggle quietly. Then struggle some more. Then stop going to class. Then stop opening Canvas, Blackboard, or whatever technological hellscape their university uses. Then suddenly it's November, and they're sitting on six missing assignments thinking, "Well, fuck." Don't wait that long. Your advisor exists for a reason. Tutoring exists for a reason. Student health exists for a reason. Counseling services exist for a reason. Professors have office hours for a reason. People cannot help with a problem they don't know exists. I learned this myself. I attended Spalding University as a single parent. During college, I lost my housing. I missed a final because my life had completely gone sideways. I communicated what was happening. My professor allowed me to take the final late, and the university helped me access assistance while I got back into housing. That experience stayed with me. Asking for help isn't somebody else doing college for you. Asking for help is a college skill. Your brain needs an external hard drive College involves an absolutely ridiculous number of dates: assignments, exams, registration, advising, tuition, housing, financial aid, withdrawal deadlines, meetings, and projects. If you have executive functioning challenges, don't depend on your brain to magically remember all of that. I still use a paper agenda. Yes, in the year of our Lord 2026. People ask why I don't just put everything in my phone. Because it doesn't fucking work for me. I need to physically write things down, preferably in colors. My sister is a total tech person. Great for her. That is not my brain. Use whatever works for your brain: a paper planner, digital calendar, alarms, sticky notes, a whiteboard, color coding, apps, or a giant calendar taped to the wall like you're coordinating a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launch. I don't care. The correct organizational system is the one you will actually use. School comes before gaming I know. I know. But somebody has to say it. If gaming is your special interest, your social outlet, your decompression activity, or simply your favorite thing in the world, you don't have to stop gaming. You do have to learn when to stop gaming. My son loves gaming. He's studying computer science because he wants to work in video game development. But even he had to learn that the game has to wait when assignments need to be done. You cannot spend six hours gaming and then become shocked that the paper you haven't started is still due at midnight. Do the shit first. Then game. Your emergency credit card is not a DoorDash scholarship Now we're going to discuss money. Some of you have checking accounts. Some have credit cards. Some of you are about to discover that a credit limit looks suspiciously like free money when you're young. It isn't. I gave Z a credit card for emergencies, and I was very clear about what I meant: medical supplies, medication, or something genuinely necessary when another source of money isn't available. An emergency. At one point when he was at Western Kentucky University (WKU), that motherfucker ran the card up to around $500. I lost my ever-loving mind because apparently we needed to clarify that an emergency credit card was not for DoorDashing your ass off and having a pizza party. Credit cards are borrowed money. If you carry a balance, interest can make whatever you bought substantially more expensive. Parents and caregivers, define "emergency" before handing over the card. Students, if someone gives you an emergency card, ask what you're allowed to use it for. Everybody will be much happier. Watch those dining dollars too A meal plan can feel unlimited in August. Then October arrives. Oops. Know the difference between meal swipes and dining dollars, flex dollars, or whatever terminology your school uses. Know where each can be used. Check your balance periodically. Don't blow through your flexible dining money in the first six weeks because Chick-fil-A was calling your name every afternoon. Some families can replenish that account. Some cannot. Budget accordingly. That's part of adulting too. Protect your routine, especially during breaks Routine can be incredibly important for neurodivergent students. Once you've finally figured out when you wake up, when you eat, when you study, when you shower, where you sit, how you get to class, and how your week operates, disrupting all of it can be exhausting. School breaks can therefore be more complicated than people realize. Residence hall policies vary considerably. Some campuses or residence halls stay open during certain breaks, while others close or offer limited break housing. Don't assume anything. Check your university's housing calendar and policies ahead of time. Pay attention to your own nervous system. Going home for every available break isn't automatically restorative. Some students love it. For others, traveling home, changing environments, losing their routine for several days, and then returning to campus is harder than staying near school. Learn what works for you. Please do something besides go to class College is education, but it isn't only education. Join a club. Go to an event. Meet somebody who likes the same bizarre thing you like. Try something you've never done. Eat somewhere new. Go to a game even if you don't understand what the hell is happening. Community college students can look for campus organizations too. Vocational students may have fewer formal campus activities, but the larger point still applies: don't let your entire life become school and your bedroom. This is your opportunity to meet different people, experience different things, and figure out who you are outside the environment you grew up in. Use it. Parents, your new job is to sit your ass back This one is hard. I know. You spent eighteen years keeping this person alive, and suddenly everybody expects you to throw them onto a college campus and cheerfully drive away. You don't have to disappear. But your role has changed. I have access to some of Z's information with his permission because financial aid and administrative nonsense can be overwhelming. I'll remind him to check something. I'll ask about assignments. I'll occasionally ask, "Have you looked at your grades?" Because sometimes this child is simply going to class and doing assignments without ever checking the damn grade. But I don't do his homework. I don't earn his grades. I already graduated. Those degrees are mine. This one is his. Parents can scaffold independence without taking it away. The goal is not abandonment. The goal is supported independence. One bad semester does not mean you're done I want students and parents to remember this one. Z's first semester at Marshall was a mess. He was dealing with housing and safety issues. He moved during the semester. His organization wasn't where it needed to be, and he struggled academically. His Marshall Grade Point Average (GPA) ended up around 1.14. That could have become the end of the story. It wasn't. He advocated for himself. He explained what had happened. He used resources. He learned how to navigate campus. He learned the bus system. He made friends. He found tutors. He learned what wasn't working. Then he came back. He retook a class he had failed. He brought his Marshall GPA up to around 2.85, and during the following term, his GPA was around 3.3, close enough to the Dean's List to be thoroughly pissed off that he missed it. That's growth. One disastrous semester is data. It is not a prophecy. Maybe you overloaded yourself. Maybe you didn't understand how much executive functioning college required. Maybe your mental or physical health went sideways. Maybe your housing was a disaster. Maybe you discovered that your course load was simply too damn much. Figure out what happened. Use the information. Change the system and try again. Welcome to college, now go build a life You're going to get some A's. You'll probably get some B's. You may get a C. Hell, I got a D in religion and still passed that bitch. We're not looking for perfection. We're looking for progress. College is one enormous experiment in figuring out who you are when nobody else is running your life. So learn. Advocate for yourself. Ask for help before everything catches fire. Make friends. Build routines. Manage your money. Do your assignments. Call your parents when you need them. For the love of everything holy, wash your ass. Have a fantastic fall semester. Go build yourself a life. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from April Michelle Ratchford April Michelle Ratchford, Occupational Therapist & Podcast Host April Ratchford, an autistic occupational therapist, writer, and global advocate for neurodivergent adults, is a registered/licensed occupational therapist. As the creator and host of Adulting with Autism, an internationally ranked podcast with over two million downloads, she blends clinical expertise with real-life lived experience. April specializes in supporting autistic young adults as they transition into independence, higher education, and adult identity. She is known for her clear, empowering approach that makes complex neurodivergent challenges accessible and manageable. April is currently advancing her studies in neuroscience through King’s College London to further elevate her work in autistic well-being and adult development.