Rachel Simms, RGD, is the founder of Broadbent Studio, a strategic brand and web design studio in Hamilton, Ontario. She holds the RGD designation, the highest professional credential in graphic design in Canada, and she's spent over ten years building brands for health and wellness practitioners and professional services firms who are exceptional at their work and ready to show up online like it. Her signature methodology, the Diamond Blueprint, is a strategic discovery process that happens before a single design element is touched. It's the reason her clients are still on their original brand five to ten years after launch. In this interview, Rachel talks about why strategy has to come before aesthetics, what it actually feels like to find the right practitioner when you're the one searching, and why she believes visibility is one of the most important equity issues nobody in her industry is talking about. Rachel Simms, RGD, Creative Director Rachel, your work emphasizes "strategy before aesthetics." How did you develop this approach, and why is it essential for professionals who rely on trust? Honestly, it came from watching what happened when I skipped it. Early on, I took projects where we'd jump straight to visuals because that's what the client was excited about. What I ended up with were beautiful things that didn't work. They looked polished and fell flat in the real world. The problem was never the design. We'd built a solution without understanding the problem. For health and wellness practitioners, especially, that gap is costly. These are regulated professionals who can't use patient testimonials in many cases. So everything the brand does must build trust, which is essential for long-term relationships. The logo, the website, the words. They are the testimonial. That responsibility demands that we understand the person behind the practice before we touch a single design element. The Diamond Blueprint came out of that need. A way to slow down before we accelerate. Can you walk us through your Diamond Blueprint methodology and how it has transformed your clients' branding processes? It starts with a conversation that most designers don't have. Not 'what colours do you like' or 'send me websites you admire.' Before any of that, I want to know your origin story-what inspired you to choose this work, and what kind of client brings out your best? I also ask about your vision for the practice in ten years, so we can build a brand that aligns with your long-term goals and values. From there, we map the ideal client as a real person, what she's carrying when she finds you, and what she needs to feel before she'll trust you enough to reach out. Then we look at the competitive landscape and compliance considerations. Only after all of that do we design. What I see consistently is that the process changes how practitioners talk about their work. They come in knowing they need a new logo and leave with greater clarity about their practice than they had before. That clarity is what makes the brand work. The design just makes it visible, giving practitioners a sense of control and confidence in their branding. You specialize in branding for health and wellness practitioners. How does effective branding influence the way clients perceive their expertise and trustworthiness? I want to answer this from a place most designers don't come from – the perspective of the person searching. I've been in therapy for a significant part of my adult life. Before I found the therapist who genuinely changed things for me, I tried a few who weren't the right fit. Every time I sat across from someone who was almost right but not quite, I felt it. I kept going because I needed to find the one where it felt easy. Where something in my gut said: this is her. That feeling isn't magic. It's communication. It's a practitioner whose whole way of showing up says clearly: I understand what you're carrying, and you're in the right place. For regulated professionals who can't rely on testimonials, the brand carries that entire weight. When I build a brand, I think about the woman who lands on that website at eleven o'clock at night, finally ready to ask for help. She deserves to feel she's found exactly the right person. What trends are you currently seeing in the branding space for health and wellness professionals, and how can they stay ahead in a competitive market? The most significant shift I'm seeing is practitioners moving away from the generic wellness aesthetic – sage green, minimalist template, soft script font, stock photo of someone meditating. It's been the default for years because it feels safe. But when every practitioner in a city looks identical, none of them are actually saying anything. The ones breaking through right now aren't afraid to be specific about who they help and what makes them different. I'm also watching accessibility become a genuine differentiator rather than a compliance checkbox. A website that's easy to navigate and doesn't overwhelm someone who's already overwhelmed isn't just the ethical choice. It's the smart one. For professional services firms, there's real movement toward brands that communicate both authority and warmth. The old model was all credentials and gravitas. What works better now is specificity paired with approachability – expert enough to trust, human enough to call. In your opinion, how can professional service firms, like lawyers or accountants, communicate their deep expertise through branding? The first thing I tell professional services clients is that credentials are the floor, not the ceiling. By the time someone's looking for a lawyer or accountant, they're assuming a baseline of competence. What they're actually trying to figure out from your brand is something harder to quantify: do you understand my situation, and can I trust you with something that matters? That means communicating specialization clearly. A family law firm shouldn't look identical to a corporate litigation firm. Your brand should signal the specific problems you solve and the people you solve them for. When it does, the right clients recognize themselves. When it doesn't, you spend the first ten minutes of every meeting establishing credibility your brand should've built before you walked in. I build what I call the expert's expert positioning. The brand of the person whom other professionals refer their complicated cases to. That takes both authority and warmth to pull off. Your work emphasizes building long-term relationships through branding. How do you ensure your designs foster trust and lasting client connections? The short answer is that I build for truth, not trends. Trends change. What's visually current in 2026 will feel dated by 2029. But a brand rooted in who the practitioner genuinely is doesn't age the same way. The majority of my clients are using their original brand five to ten years later. Every design decision I make serves a specific psychological need of the client's client. The page structure, the white space, and the first thing you read on the homepage. All of it is answering one question: what does she need to feel to trust you enough to reach out? I also built compliance and ethical standards into the brand foundation from the start. For practitioners, knowing their messaging is already built around what they can and can't say removes a layer of anxiety. That confidence becomes part of the brand, too. As someone dedicated to equity in design, how do you believe branding can be used as a tool for social change and visibility in the community? I've experienced firsthand what the right professional in your corner can do. And I've watched what happens when someone doesn't have access to that. A few years ago, I was in a work situation that was genuinely damaging my well-being. I reached out to an employment lawyer – someone I wasn't sure I could afford. She translated my contract into plain language, told me what I could and couldn't do, and helped me find the door out. Within a month, I was free. What came after wouldn't have happened if I'd stayed. I've also watched what it looks like when someone doesn't have access to the right support. The difference between having the right advocate and not having one isn't small. It can mean years of your life. The barrier is so often just a matter of visibility. Someone doesn't know the right practitioner exists, or finds her and doesn't feel confident enough to reach out. Branding that's clear and specific closes that gap. Visibility is access, and access changes things. That's why I do this work. What role do you think design plays in shaping the legacy of a business, and how do you approach creating a legacy-driven brand for your clients? I think of a brand as the artifact that outlives the day-to-day. Long after a practitioner has retired or passed her practice on, the brand continues to communicate who she was, what she valued, and the standard she held herself to. When I'm working on a legacy-driven brand, I'm asking different questions than I do in a typical design brief. Not just what do you want it to look like, but what do you want to be known for in ten years? What'll clients say about you after five years of working together? What won't you compromise on? Those answers are why two practices in the same specialty end up with completely different brands, even if their service lists look similar. The brand isn't the services. It's the person. A therapy practice owner told me after we worked together that she finally felt like she was running a real business, not a side project, but something she could grow into and eventually hand off. That's the shift I'm building toward. You've had a profound impact on the next generation of designers. What's your personal philosophy on the intersection of design and business, and how do you pass that on to your students? The thing I say to my students that lands hardest is this: design without business understanding is just craft. And craft alone won't sustain a career or create real change. I see young designers who've been taught that caring about the commercial side of their work compromises their integrity. That's a false choice. Understanding a client's revenue model and what success looks like for their business isn't selling out. It's what makes you a strategic partner instead of someone executing someone else's vision. I teach using StoryBrand and Human Design frameworks, always grounded in the RGD code of ethics – professionalism, accountability, and genuine respect for the public good. I'm deliberate about showing students that financial sustainability and values-driven work aren't in conflict. I also want them to see where the real work is. Designing for a therapist who helps survivors, building brands for minority-led firms, creating accessible spaces for people who're often excluded, that's where design actually changes things. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Rachel Simms, RGD

Written by Nadija Bajrami, Strategic Hypnotherapist, Mind Coach Nadija is a multi-award-winning trauma and empowerment specialist with a double diploma in hypnotherapy, mind coaching, and online therapy. She is also a Reiki Master and a grief educator, and she has been trained by an international grief specialist and best-selling author, David Kessler. Nadija is also an end-of-life doula. Have you ever reacted in a way that surprised even you? Perhaps you sabotage love when it finally feels safe. Perhaps you overwork to prove your worth. Perhaps anxiety follows you even when life seems “fine.” Or maybe you carry an unexplainable heaviness, guilt, fear, or emotional burden that does not entirely feel like your own. What if I told you that some of the struggles you carry did not begin with you? For generations, humanity has understood that family stories, wounds, beliefs, and emotional pain are passed down. Today, science and psychology confirm what many ancient traditions already knew: trauma can travel through generations. This is called transgenerational trauma. Understanding it can completely transform the way we see ourselves, our families, and our healing journey. We inherit more than eye colour We inherit behaviours, emotional patterns, and survival strategies. When our ancestors experienced war, abandonment, poverty, abuse, oppression, betrayal, grief, or emotional neglect, many of them never had the opportunity to process those experiences. Survival became more important than healing. When pain is not healed, it is often unconsciously passed on. A grandmother who never felt emotionally safe may raise a daughter who struggles to express emotions. A grandfather who lived through scarcity may pass down deep fears around money and security. A lineage shaped by silence may produce generations who struggle to speak their truth. Without realising it, we can begin living from inherited fear instead of authentic truth. This does not mean we are broken. It means we are carrying stories that were never fully resolved. The body remembers what the mind forgets Many people believe trauma only exists when we consciously remember painful experiences. But trauma is not only memory. It is energy stored within the nervous system. Sometimes we become the emotional continuation of what our ancestors could not express. This can show up as chronic anxiety, people pleasing, fear of success, fear of intimacy, hyper-independence, emotional numbness, self-sabotage, perfectionism, feeling responsible for everyone else, or a deep sense of “not being enough.” These patterns are often survival responses that once protected someone in our lineage. Here is the powerful truth: what once helped our ancestors survive may now be preventing us from fully living. You are not meant to carry everything One of the most healing realisations we can have is this: we can honour our ancestors without carrying their pain. Many people unconsciously believe that healing means betraying their family. Especially in cultures where suffering has become normalised, joy can feel unfamiliar. Freedom can feel unsafe. Success can even trigger guilt. But healing is not rejection. Healing is evolution. When you choose awareness, boundaries, emotional healing, and self-love, you are not abandoning your lineage. You are becoming the one who transforms it. You are the bridge between survival and liberation. Breaking generational patterns requires courage Healing generational trauma is not simply about “thinking positively.” It requires radical self-awareness. It asks us to gently observe what patterns repeat in our family, what emotional roles we learned growing up, what fears we carry that may not even belong to us, what beliefs about love, money, success, safety, or self-worth were inherited, and what part of us is still trying to survive instead of thrive. This work can feel emotional because it touches deeply rooted identity and conditioning. But awareness is where freedom begins. The moment we become conscious of a pattern, we stop being unconsciously controlled by it. Honouring our ancestors in a healthy way Our ancestors deserve compassion. Many of them did the best they could with the awareness and resources they had. They survived unimaginable hardships so that we could exist today. We honour them not by repeating their suffering, but by creating a new reality. We honour them when we choose emotional healing, learn healthy boundaries, create conscious relationships, speak openly about mental health, allow ourselves joy and rest, break cycles of silence, raise emotionally aware children, and live authentically instead of fearfully. True ancestral healing is not about staying loyal to pain. It is about becoming loyal to the truth. Releasing what does not belong to you One of the most empowering questions you can ask yourself is: “Is this truly mine?” Is the fear yours? Is the guilt yours? Is the shame yours? Is the constant need to prove yourself yours? Or have you simply inherited emotional patterns that were never questioned? Healing begins when we stop identifying with inherited wounds and start reconnecting with our authentic selves. This may involve therapy, somatic healing, journaling, meditation, breathwork, energy healing, nervous system regulation, or spiritual practices that reconnect us to ourselves. The goal is not to blame the past. The goal is to free the future. You are the turning point Perhaps you are the first in your family to choose healing. The first to speak openly. The first to feel deeply. The first to set boundaries. The first to choose peace over chaos. The first to break toxic cycles. If so, understand this: your healing matters far beyond you. When one person heals, generations begin to shift. Although this journey is not always easy, it is deeply sacred. Because every time you choose awareness over unconsciousness, every time you choose self-love over self-abandonment, and every time you choose healing over survival, you rewrite the story of your lineage. Final thoughts You are not here to endlessly carry the emotional weight of the past. You are here to transform it. Your ancestors may have given you survival skills. But you now have the opportunity to create freedom. Honour where you come from. Respect the journey that came before you. But remember: you do not have to inherit suffering to belong. You are allowed to heal. You are allowed to thrive. You are allowed to become the healthiest expression of your lineage. Perhaps that is the greatest gift you can offer both your ancestors and yourself. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit her website for more info. Read more from Nadija Bajrami Nadija Bajrami, Strategic Hypnotherapist, Mind Coach French by birth, Nadija lived in Scotland for 7 years and travelled the world. After recovering from some serious health issues, Nadija had a wake-up call and came to Ireland to find her path. She has been living in Dublin since 2017. Nadija is working mostly online worldwide and shares her time between Ireland, France, and Switzerland. Nadija is a multi-award-winning trauma and empowerment specialist with a double diploma in hypnotherapy, mind coaching, and online therapy. She is also a Reiki Master and a grief educator, and she has been trained by an international grief specialist and best-selling author, David Kessler. Nadija is also an end-of-life doula. She is dedicated to helping her clients get empowered, supercharge their confidence and self-esteem, overcome their limiting beliefs, and manage anxiety and trauma responses. She also helps people on their grief and healing journey through her therapy, coaching, grief education and support programmes, and spiritual work.

Written by Miriam Garcia-den Boer, Brain-Based Vitality Coach Miriam Garcia-den Boer is a passionate brain-based vitality coach and founder of Wellbrain.nl. She empowers people to understand their brain, transform their behaviour and create lasting vitality through science-backed awareness and practical tools. What if the change you’ve been searching for isn’t somewhere out there, but already within you, waiting to be activated? In a world that constantly pushes us to do more, achieve more, and become more, it’s easy to believe that transformation is something we must chase. Yet, real and lasting well-being doesn’t come from adding more to your life. It begins by understanding the inner patterns quietly shaping it. Your thoughts, emotions, and behaviours aren’t random. They are the result of deeply ingrained patterns your brain has learned over time. Rewire your life through six powerful pillars: connect deeply, move daily, learn continuously, embrace nature, nourish your brain, and rest fully. You are not alone in this journey. As a brain-based coach, I guide you step by step through real, lasting change. Together, we turn small shifts into powerful transformations. This is where the six brain-based pillars come in. These are not quick fixes or surface-level strategies. They are foundational shifts, rooted in both science and self-awareness, that help you reconnect with your natural state of balance, resilience, and purpose. Six brain-based powerful pillars 1. Love and social connection Your brain is wired for connection. It feels safest when you feel seen and supported. Simple moments of genuine connection can calm your nervous system instantly. A heartfelt conversation can shift your entire emotional state. Even small acts like a smile, a message, or eye contact matter deeply. Connection releases feel-good chemicals that reduce stress and increase resilience. Isolation, on the other hand, keeps the brain in survival mode. Reach out, share, and listen. Connection is not a luxury, it’s a biological need. 2. Move your body Movement is one of the fastest ways to change your state and energy. Your brain thrives when your body moves. It increases blood flow and clarity. You don’t need intense workouts, consistency matters more than intensity. A 10-minute walk can reset your mood and reduce stress. Stretching, dancing, or even standing up more often makes a difference. Movement signals to your brain that you are alive, active, and capable. When you move your body, you shift your mind. 3. Novelty and learning Your brain loves new experiences. It grows when challenged. Trying something new creates fresh neural connections. It can be as simple as taking a different route or learning a new skill. Curiosity keeps your mind flexible and engaged. Repeating only what you know keeps you stuck in the same patterns. Growth begins when you step into the unfamiliar. Stay curious. Your brain expands with every new experience. 4. Time in nature Nature has a calming effect on your brain and nervous system. It helps reduce stress, anxiety, and mental fatigue. Even a short walk outside can improve focus and clarity. Natural light supports your mood and sleep rhythms. Listening to birds, feeling the wind, or touching the ground reconnects you. Nature reminds your brain that you are safe and grounded. Step outside, and your mind will follow. 5. Omega-3 nourishes your brain Your brain needs the right fuel to function at its best. Omega-3 fatty acids support memory, focus, and emotional balance. They are essential for healthy brain cell communication. You can find them in foods like fatty fish, walnuts, and flaxseeds. What you eat directly impacts how you think and feel. Poor nutrition can increase brain fog and low energy. Nourish your brain, and it will support you in return. 6. Pause and sleep Rest is not a weakness, it’s where transformation happens. Your brain resets, repairs, and integrates during sleep. Without rest, everything feels harder: focus, emotions, and decisions. Pausing during the day helps regulate stress and restore balance. Even a few deep breaths can shift your nervous system. Quality sleep strengthens memory and emotional resilience. Slow down and rest deeply. Your brain needs it to thrive. Through awareness and intentional shifts, you have the ability to reshape your inner world and, with it, your entire experience of life. When you begin to work with your brain instead of against it, subtle but powerful changes start to unfold. Clarity replaces confusion, energy flows where there was once resistance, and a deeper sense of alignment begins to emerge. How your brain impacts your behaviour Before you can transform your life, it helps to understand one powerful truth: your brain’s main job isn’t to make you happy, it’s to keep you safe and conserve energy. Every day, your brain is scanning your environment, asking one simple question: Is this safe? If the answer feels uncertain, it will guide you toward familiar patterns, thoughts, habits, and reactions it already knows. Not because they are the best for you, but because they are efficient. Your brain loves efficiency. It builds shortcuts based on what you repeat most. This is where a simple but powerful principle comes in: neurons that fire together, wire together. In other words, the more you think a thought, feel an emotion, or act in a certain way, the stronger that pattern becomes. Your brain doesn’t judge, it just reinforces What you focus on, you strengthen. What you repeat, you become better at. Over time, these patterns turn into automatic behaviours, your default way of responding to life. Whether supportive or limiting, your brain doesn’t judge. It simply reinforces what is used most. Here’s another important rule: use it or lose it. The connections you don’t activate begin to weaken, and the ones you practice grow stronger. This means your current patterns are not fixed, they are trained. Anything that has been trained can be retrained. Once you understand this, something shifts. You’re no longer “stuck” in your habits or reactions. You begin to see that your brain is not working against you, it’s working exactly as it was designed to. The question is, are you consciously guiding it? This is where the six brain-based pillars become essential, helping you move from autopilot to awareness and from survival mode to intentional living. Start your journey today You can rewire your brain at any age. Your habits are not fixed, they are patterns that can be reshaped with awareness and repetition. The truth is simple: a calm brain is a productive, focused, and resilient brain. You don’t need to change everything at once. Start small. Choose one pillar. Take one step. Consistency, not perfection, is what creates lasting transformation. Notice your progress. Track it. Celebrate even the smallest shifts, because those small changes are exactly how your brain rewires. This is your moment to begin. If this resonates and you’re looking for a space to explore this more deeply, this is your invitation to begin with support. As a brain-based coach, I walk this journey with you. Book your free Discovery Vitality call with me and take the first step toward a more aligned, energised, and empowered life. Follow me on LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Miriam Garcia-den Boer Miriam Garcia-den Boer, Brain-Based Vitality Coach Miriam Garcia-den Boer is a brain-based vitality coach. Life changer at the end of 2023, she was diagnosed with MS (Multiple Sclerosis). After that, she transformed her life by learning how the brain works. This turning point led her to build a sustainable, vitality-driven lifestyle rooted in brain awareness and behavioural change. Today, she helps individuals and corporations in understanding their brains, boosting vitality, and creating lasting energy. Her mission: Make your brain your best friend.

Written by: Nadija Bajrami, Senior Level Executive Contributor Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise. Let’s explain hypnosis, what it can be used for and debunk the myths about it. "You're the only one who can unlock your true potential & hypnosis is the key." – Juliet C. Obodo When talking about hypnosis and hypnotherapy, we use the words conscious and subconscious, and before going any further, let’s explain these different levels of consciousness and what they represent. The levels of consciousness are conscious, and subconscious. Explaining the conscious mind The conscious mind is what we operate with during our daily activities and waking hours. It represents only a small portion of our consciousness and awareness. 5% approximately. The conscious mind, or thinking mind, or critical and rational mind, contains all the thoughts, memories, feelings, and wishes of which we are aware at any given moment. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think about and talk about rationally. It has no memory, and it can only hold one thought at a time. The conscious mind works on the principle of reality. Our conscious mind accepts or rejects data when making choices and decisions. It can deal with only one thought or idea at a time, like positive or negative, "yes" or "no." It is continually sorting impressions, deciding which are relevant to you and which are not. Explaining the subconscious mind The subconscious mind lies below the level of conscious awareness. Its physical seat in the body is the lower brain and the spine. It records everything we do: every activity we engage in, our thoughts about those activities, and our likes and dislikes about what we encounter each day. Although nothing is forgotten by the subconscious mind, for the most part, this part of our consciousness remains hidden from our everyday awareness. The subconscious has a tremendous influence on how we think, feel, and act when in the conscious state, and approximately 95% of our life is ruled by the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is like a huge memory bank. It permanently stores everything that ever happens to you, and its capacity is virtually unlimited. The subconscious mind stores your beliefs, your previous experience, your memories, and your skills. Everything that you have seen, done, or thought is also there. It is also your guidance system. By the time you reach the age of 21, you will have already permanently stored more than one hundred times the contents of the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. The subconscious mind defines all reactions and automatic actions we can become aware of if we think about them. For example, our ability to drive a car: once we get skilled, we stop thinking about which gears to use, which pedals to press, or which mirror to look at, yet we can always become aware of what was done once we think about it. The subconscious mind does not know the difference between reality and fiction and considers everything it hears as the truth, hence the importance of being mindful of how you talk to and about yourself! What is hypnosis? Hypnosis is a safe and natural state of relaxation with increased awareness during which you are not asleep and are fully in control. You will experience a pleasant state of mind with increased attention and focus. The hypnotic state is similar to some moments in your life when you are daydreaming or fully absorbed in a specific activity, like reading, for example. Hypnosis is a shift in consciousness that enables you to tap into your core thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and beliefs and, with the guidance of a trained hypnotherapist, change your thinking pattern to make sustainable changes in your life. There is absolutely nothing to fear, as therapeutic and clinical hypnosis is different from stage and entertainment hypnosis, and as you remain in control, you will never be asked to do anything foolish or against your will. For the hypnotherapy session to be successful, the hypnotherapist must have your consent, collaboration, and full commitment, as the purpose is to help you reach a feeling of being more in charge and in control of your life. While in a relaxed state of mind, new information can make its way into the subconscious, which transforms old beliefs and thought patterns. Hypnosis delves into your subconscious mind to plant positive thoughts and suggestions, which can create meaningful and lasting changes in your thought process. Hypnosis replaces the old with the new. Changing your thinking will change your beliefs, fears, desires, habits, and anything else that creates resistance when achieving new things. Guided by a fully trained and certified hypnotherapist, hypnosis allows you to be more open to suggestions for making healthy changes in your perceptions, sensations, emotions, memories, thoughts, or behaviours. What is hypnotherapy? Hypnotherapy is the application of psychological therapy during a state of hypnosis, to change or modify behaviour patterns. Hypnotherapy can deal with psychosomatic problems, that is, problems that are rooted in and controlled by the subconscious mind. Hypnotherapy can bypass the conscious mind, allowing positive, life-affirming suggestions for change to be fed directly to the subconscious mind and acted upon. Hypnotic suggestions have a cumulative effect; over time, there is a buildup of reinforcement in the subconscious that will be acted upon by the conscious mind. The word hypnotherapy comes from the Greek: Hupnos meaning ‘sleep.’ Therapeia ‘healing’ So, putting those two Greek words together, hypnotherapy could be summarized as ‘healing through a sleep state.' Hypnotherapy is not a real sleep state but a state of heightened awareness, as previously mentioned. As a hypnotherapist, I believe I work in a profession that is fantastically placed to help people align with what they really desire in life, appreciate themselves, and see their true potential. The memories of any trying events and experiences we went through can be extremely painful to deal with and can be debilitating. Our brain tends to work as a coping mechanism and store these difficult moments deep within our subconscious. What your mind does as its form of coping mechanism is it takes your negative, emotionally charged memories, and pushes them into your subconscious as a means of protecting you from re-experiencing the pain. This is what is commonly known as repression. As we may know from experience, the emotions from these memories can be resurfaced by a trigger, which often causes a rollercoaster of emotions and can also create complete paralysis in our minds. And while hypnosis cannot erase memories, it can reframe them to make them less painful, and will help manage those memories in a more productive and healthier way. Memories, with their associated thoughts and emotions, are adaptable and flexible, making us open to suggestions and more able to accept small changes to some of their original meaning. You can change what a particular memory means to you, how you feel about it, and how you respond to it when you create and attach new pairs, associations, and narratives to that memory. Hypnosis is your reframing tool to change and "re-edit" the memories in your mind and your negative pairs and associations with a memory. Hypnosis will help you change how you remember rather than the "raw" memory itself. By releasing the emotional response to the memory, you release the symptom. Using hypnosis, we plant new seeds in your subconscious mind, which will then take root and grow. When that happens, you can take pleasure in knowing that your subconscious mind is working for you. And once those changes are completed and have become part of your mental processes, they will emerge into consciousness in the form of a new feeling of confidence, belief, and acceptance that you are becoming the best that you can be. This is when you become the driver of your life, move towards your goals with confidence and optimism, and take care of the vehicle that your mind is. What hypnosis can help with: Hypnosis is a powerful modality that can help with a wide range of issues. I have listed some of them below. Confidence and self-esteem boost Phobias, Fears, Anxieties management (social phobia/anxiety, fear of flying, fear of driving, fear of water, fear of public speaking, insomnia and sleep issues...) Easing symptoms of traumatic experiences Past Life Regression and Future Life Progression Breaking bad habits Panic attacks Grief and loss management Relationship issues Increasing your motivation and overcoming procrastination Stress management Anger management Pain management Performance-related issues (exam nerves, improving your performance at work...) Grief and loss management Inner child, attachment, and core wounds healing Fertility and IVF Weight management and weight loss Reduce / Quit smoking Let’s debunk the nine most common myths about hypnosis. Myth 1: Hypnosis is the same as sleep. Fact: The hypnotized person is an active participant who remains responsive and aware of their surroundings. Myth 2: Hypnosis is the same as meditation. Fact: There are similarities between the two, but the main distinction is how focused hypnosis is on changing and updating your thoughts, unlike meditation which is generally about noticing, observing, and accepting your thoughts. Myth 3: A hypnotherapist might pull some embarrassing tricks on you or make you act against your will. Fact: A fully trained clinical hypnotherapist would never do this. People often confuse a stage hypnotist with a therapeutic or clinical hypnotherapist. A stage hypnotist will do this because that is what is expected of them. You agree to this by stepping on stage and joining the show. However, you will easily return to your normal state at the end of the performance. In a clinical setting, you only agree to the therapeutic goals for the session, so that is all that will occur. It is important to remember that Stage and Clinical hypnosis are two very different disciplines. The hypnotherapist is merely a guide or facilitator. They cannot "make" you do anything against your will. Myth 4: Hypnosis can be dangerous in the event of an emergency. Fact: A person in a hypnotic trance is just as aware, if not more so, of any potential danger. Should an emergency happen during a session, a person would easily come out of the trance state and deal with the situation immediately, and in an appropriate way. Myth 5: Some people can’t be hypnotized. Fact: The hypnotic state is not unusual or rare. It is similar to the naturally occurring shifts in awareness that happen as we fall asleep and awaken each day. Not everyone is equally susceptible to hypnosis, but research has found that about two-thirds of adults are. It is also very important to mention that since no one can be hypnotized against their will, the real question is whether a person wants to be hypnotized rather than whether they CAN BE hypnotized. Myth 6: One of the risks of hypnosis is getting stuck in a trance. Fact: No one has ever been stuck in a hypnotic trance when working with a trained practitioner. Myth 7: You are not hypnotized if you can hear the hypnotherapist Fact: This is not true at all. Each person has a unique experience with hypnosis. Some people consciously hear the hypnotherapist, whereas others do not. This has no bearing on the success of the session whatsoever. It is usually down to choice. You can choose to allow your mind to drift away, or you can choose to listen carefully to what the hypnotherapist is saying. Some people may be prone to drift away, just like daydreaming, or you might be concentrating on the therapist’s voice. Myth 8: Hypnotherapists have special powers Fact: I have heard this quite often over the last couple of years. A hypnotherapist is a normal person who eats, sleeps, feels happy and sad, and loses their car keys. There is nothing special or magical about them at all. As hypnotherapists, we have simply been trained, and have honed this training with experience, to help guide people into a hypnotic state and help them make sustainable changes. Myth 9: Hypnosis is not an effective modality Fact: Results of a 2007 Comparative Study by American Health Magazine: Hypnotherapy: 93% success after 6 sessions Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: 72% success after 22 sessions Psychoanalysis: 38% success after 600 sessions I hope this gives you an overview and a better understanding of what hypnosis is, how it can help you create positive and sustainable changes and I also hope to have been able to debunk the most common myths about it. Follow Nadija on her Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, and visit her website for more info. Read more from Nadija! Nadija Bajrami, Senior Level Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine French by birth, Nadija lived in Scotland for 7 years and travelled the world. After recovering from some serious health issues, Nadija had a wake-up call and came to Ireland to find her path. She has been living in Dublin since 2017. Nadija is a multi-award-winning trauma and empowerment specialist and holds a double diploma in Hypnotherapy, Mind Coaching, and online therapy. She is also a reiki healer as well as a grief educator and trained with the international grief specialist and best-selling author David Kessler. She is dedicated to helping her clients get empowered, supercharge their confidence and self-esteem, overcome their limiting beliefs as well as manage anxiety, and symptoms of traumatic experiences and help people on their grief and healing journey through her therapy, coaching, grief education programmes and spiritual work.

Written by Charlotte Cheetham, Gut Health Coach Charlotte Cheetham is an expert coach in gut health for menopausal women. She is the founder of Lifeinsights and aims to help all menopausal women one by one to heal their symptoms, which are preventing them from living a normal life. She has also written articles for Healthieyoo magazine about gut health, menopause, and psychobiotics. Gut health plays a crucial role in digestion, energy, mental clarity, and overall well-being, especially for women over 40. This article explores how fibre, fermented foods, and prebiotics work together to support a healthy gut microbiome, reduce common symptoms such as bloating and brain fog, and promote long-term health through simple, sustainable dietary habits. Spring cleaning isn't just for your home When spring arrives, many of us feel inspired to clear out closets, open the windows, and create fresh space in our homes. Yet one area that often gets overlooked is our gut. For many women over 40, symptoms like bloating, brain fog, fatigue, irregular digestion, and stubborn weight gain can start to feel like an unavoidable part of aging. The reality is that these symptoms are often signs that the gut microbiome, the trillions of bacteria living within our digestive system, needs attention. Just as a garden thrives when it is nourished and tended regularly, your gut ecosystem flourishes when it is fed the right nutrients. Three of the most powerful tools for supporting a healthy gut are: Fibre Fermented foods Prebiotics. Together, these nutritional powerhouses help support digestion, reduce bloating, improve energy levels, and may even enhance mental clarity. Let's explore how each one works and how you can begin incorporating them into your daily routine. Understanding the gut microbiome Before diving into specific foods, it is helpful to understand why the gut matters so much. The gut microbiome consists of trillions of microorganisms that influence digestion, immune function, hormone balance, metabolism, mood, and cognitive function. Researchers often refer to the gut as the body's "second brain" because of its close communication with the nervous system through the gut-brain axis. In fact, approximately 90% of serotonin, often called the "feel-good neurotransmitter," is produced in the gut. When the microbiome is balanced, many women experience better digestion, increased energy, improved focus, more stable moods, and reduced inflammation. When it is out of balance, symptoms such as bloating, constipation, brain fog, and fatigue often emerge. The good news is that small dietary changes can create meaningful improvements. Fibre: The unsung hero of gut health Despite its importance, fibre remains one of the most under-consumed nutrients in modern diets. Many women consume less than half of the recommended daily amount. What is fibre? Fibre is a type of carbohydrate that the body cannot fully digest. Instead of being broken down and absorbed, fibre travels through the digestive tract, where it supports healthy digestion and feeds beneficial gut bacteria. There are two primary types of fibre: Soluble fibre: Soluble fibre dissolves in water and forms a gel-like substance. Its benefits include slowing digestion, supporting blood sugar balance, helping manage cholesterol levels, and feeding beneficial bacteria. Sources include oats, apples, chia seeds, flaxseeds, and beans. Insoluble fibre: Insoluble fibre adds bulk to stool and supports regular bowel movements. Sources include whole grains, nuts, seeds, vegetables, and fruit skins. How fibre supports brain function Many women are surprised to learn that fibre does not just help digestion. When gut bacteria ferment fibre, they produce compounds called short-chain fatty acids. These compounds help reduce inflammation, support the gut lining, influence brain health, and improve communication between the gut and brain. Emerging research suggests that a fibre-rich diet may contribute to improved cognitive function and reduced brain fog. Signs you may need more fibre You may benefit from increasing your fibre intake if you experience bloating after meals, constipation, irregular digestion, energy crashes, persistent hunger, or difficulty concentrating. One important note: increase fibre gradually and drink adequate water to avoid worsening digestive discomfort. Fermented foods: Nature's probiotics Long before probiotic supplements existed, cultures around the world relied on fermented foods to support health. Fermentation is a natural process in which beneficial bacteria transform food. The result is a product rich in probiotics, live microorganisms that may help support gut health. Popular fermented foods include yogurt with live cultures, kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, tempeh, and kombucha. Why fermented foods matter Fermented foods can help increase microbial diversity within the gut. A diverse microbiome is often associated with better digestion, improved immune function, reduced inflammation, and greater resilience to stress. A landmark Stanford University study found that participants consuming fermented foods experienced increased microbiome diversity and reductions in inflammatory markers. This is particularly relevant for women over 40, as inflammation often increases during the menopausal transition. The connection between gut health and brain fog Brain fog is one of the most common complaints among professional women. It can show up as forgetfulness, difficulty concentrating, mental fatigue, and reduced productivity. While many factors contribute to brain fog, gut health is increasingly recognised as an important piece of the puzzle. An imbalanced microbiome may contribute to increased inflammation, blood sugar instability, nutrient deficiencies, and disrupted neurotransmitter production. Supporting gut health through fermented foods may help create an environment that supports clearer thinking and improved mental performance. How to start using fermented foods If you are new to fermented foods, start small. Try one tablespoon of sauerkraut with lunch, a serving of kefir at breakfast, or yogurt with berries as a snack. Consistency matters more than quantity. Prebiotics: Feeding the good bacteria If probiotics are the seeds, prebiotics are the fertiliser. Prebiotics are types of fibre that nourish beneficial bacteria already living in your gut. Without prebiotics, many beneficial microbes struggle to thrive. Common prebiotic foods Excellent sources include garlic, onions, leeks, asparagus, chicory root, Jerusalem artichokes, green bananas, and oats. These foods provide fuel that allows beneficial bacteria to grow and multiply. Why prebiotics are often missing Many women unintentionally avoid prebiotic foods because they have been told to eliminate carbohydrates or certain vegetables. While some individuals with digestive disorders may need temporary dietary modifications, unnecessarily restricting prebiotic-rich foods can reduce microbial diversity over time. The goal is not perfection. The goal is building tolerance and supporting a thriving ecosystem. The power of combining fibre, fermented foods, and prebiotics While each of these components offers unique benefits, together they create a powerful synergy. Think of your gut like a garden. Fibre improves the soil, prebiotics feed the plants, and fermented foods introduce beneficial new species. When combined consistently, they help create an environment where beneficial microbes can flourish. A simple "gut spring clean" plan Instead of restrictive detoxes or juice cleanses, consider a gentler approach. Week 1: Add fibre. Focus on one extra serving of vegetables daily, along with foods such as chia seeds, oats, and legumes. Week 2: Introduce fermented foods. Add yogurt, kefir, or sauerkraut to your routine. Week 3: Increase prebiotics. Include foods such as garlic, onions, asparagus, and oats. Week 4: Build consistency. Create meals that combine all three elements. For example, enjoy grilled salmon with roasted asparagus, quinoa, and a side of sauerkraut. Common mistakes to avoid Going too fast: Suddenly increasing fibre may temporarily increase bloating. Gradual changes are more sustainable. Relying solely on supplements: While supplements can be helpful, food-first approaches provide additional nutrients and plant compounds that support overall health. Ignoring lifestyle factors: Gut health is not just about food. Sleep, stress management, physical activity, and hydration all play important roles in supporting a healthy microbiome. The bigger picture: Progress over perfection One of the greatest misconceptions about gut health is that it requires an extreme protocol. Many women are already overwhelmed by conflicting nutrition advice. The truth is that small, consistent changes often create the most meaningful results. Adding a little more fibre, including fermented foods regularly, and feeding beneficial bacteria with prebiotics may seem simple. However, over time, these habits can help support digestion, energy, mental clarity, and overall well-being. Final thoughts Spring is a season of renewal. It is an opportunity to create healthier habits that support how you feel every day. Rather than focusing on restriction, consider what you can add to nourish your gut microbiome. By incorporating fibre, fermented foods, and prebiotics into your routine, you are not simply supporting digestion. You are investing in the health of your brain, immune system, metabolism, and future self. Your gut is constantly communicating with the rest of your body. When you support it well, you may be surprised by how much better you can feel. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Charlotte Cheetham Charlotte Cheetham, Gut Health Coach Charlotte Cheetham is an expert Gut Coach for menopausal women. After suffering from an acute gut infection, she had to learn how to manage her gut health to prevent another massive flare-up. She has learned how to manage her nutritional needs to become healthy and happy during menopause. Her mission is to help as many women as possible manage their diet and lifestyle, so they can also learn how to become healthy and happy again.

Written by Danielle McKinnon, Equine Leadership Facilitator, Social Entrepreneur Danielle McKinon, founder of Eat Sleep Ride, a rural-based charity in Scotland, and a certified Equine Leadership Coach. Part of the global TeachingHorse network, Danielle applies the Diamond Model of Shared Leadership to help individuals and teams lead with confidence through uncertainty. How many of us, to get into the rooms that matter, have had to climb into a box? A box that says, “Be professional. Be certain. Don’t be too much. Show them the part of you that fits the role, and keep the rest out of sight.” Leaders do it more than anyone. We perform composure we don’t feel. We lead by the spreadsheet because numbers feel safer than people. We hide the parts of ourselves that don’t match the job title. I’ve spent most of my life being put in boxes and the last few years learning that the best leadership begins the moment you climb out of them. The boxes I was handed I grew up in care. I’m neurodivergent. When I started out, I didn’t understand finance or strategy at all, and for a long time, I believed those were boxes I was stuck inside, too different, too far behind, not the kind of person who leads anything. I had it the wrong way round. Those boxes weren’t my cage, they were the source of everything I now bring as a leader. The empathy, the pattern-spotting, the refusal to accept that broken systems have to stay broken, none of that came in spite of my history. It came because of it. Lived experience isn’t the thing you apologise for in leadership. Increasingly, it’s the thing that sets a leader apart. What I built It started in 2017 with one pony I rescued online for fifty pounds a pony, the world had written off as worthless. I founded Eat Sleep Ride around that single act of refusing to accept what something was “worth,” and for the next seven years, I built it, piece by piece, mostly learning as I went. Over those years, it grew into something far bigger than I had first imagined. We outgrew our first home and, just a week before the pandemic, moved to Quarry Farm, twenty-four acres of old landfill that nobody else wanted. Ninety local volunteers gave more than two thousand four hundred hours to turn a rubbish tip into a living place that runs entirely on the sun. We became an accredited riding school, teaching as well as rescuing, and took on horses of every kind: rescue, rehabilitation, working, and livery. In 2024, we became a registered charity after seven years of proving the work first. Out of all of it grew Herd Dynamics, my leadership and development work, born the day I realised that what the horses were teaching our young people, they could just as powerfully teach leaders. The systems meant to support people like us were broken, so we built our own. Building something from nothing over seven years teaches you more about leadership than any course. But the deepest lessons didn’t come from the spreadsheets or the strategy. They came from the horses. What horses teach about leadership Here is the thing about a horse: it cannot be fooled. It doesn’t care about your title, your diagnosis, or whether your numbers balance. It reads your nervous system, not your CV. Walk into a paddock pretending to be calm while your insides are in knots, and the horse will know before you’ve taken three steps and it will respond to the truth, not to the performance. That is the most honest feedback a leader will ever receive. Horses are prey animals, which makes them exquisitely attuned to the emotional state of everyone around them. They co-regulate. When you are genuinely calm and present, they settle. When you are braced and tense, they brace too. We understand the science of this now. Our nervous systems are wired to sense safety or threat in one another, well below conscious thought, which the neuroscientist Stephen Porges named neuroception. It runs both ways between species. Studies tracking heart rate variability have shown that the heart rhythms of a human and a horse can genuinely synchronise as they interact. Leaders do this to their teams every single day without realising it. Your people are reading your regulation, not your words. A horse simply makes it impossible to ignore. So horses teach the things leadership courses struggle to. Presence over performance. Influence without force, because you cannot bully a half-tonne animal into trusting you. You can only earn it. Reading a room before a single word is spoken. The humbling truth is that real authority starts with regulating yourself first. Lead like the lead mare Spend time with a herd and you notice something that quietly dismantles most of what we’re taught about authority. The horse the others choose to follow is rarely the biggest, the loudest, or the most forceful. Force creates movement a panicked, scattering kind of movement but it doesn’t create followers. The horse the herd actually trusts to lead them to water, to safety, to rest, tends to be the steady one. The consistent one. The one whose calm the others can borrow. We see the same thing in every organisation. There’s the leader who drives from behind with pressure and fear, and gets compliance and churn. And there’s the leader the team genuinely follows, not because of the org chart, but because being near them feels safe enough to do good work. One commands. The other is chosen. Horses have known the difference for millions of years, we’re only now catching up. Why do leaders come to the herd This is exactly why, through my leadership practice, Herd Dynamics, I bring leaders and teams to the herd. Not to ride for sport, but to learn through intuitive, ground-based and ridden work what it feels like to lead a being that responds only to who you actually are. Picture it. An executive who can hold a boardroom of forty people steps into the arena, asked to do nothing more than walk a pony a few paces beside her. She squares up, takes the lead rope, gives the instruction in her boardroom voice and the pony plants its feet and refuses to move. She tries again, firmer. Nothing. You can watch the frustration rise, the old reflex to push harder. Then, usually, something gives. She exhales. Her shoulders drop. She stops performing leadership and simply becomes present. The pony, without a word, falls into step beside her. People feel that shift in their own body in a way no slide deck could ever teach them. They carry it back to their teams, their negotiations, their kitchen tables. The horse becomes the most truthful coach in the room. The proof If you doubt how powerful this is, let me give you the smallest example. A girl came to us when she was ten years old. She wouldn’t speak a word to anyone at school. But she would talk to a horse. Years on, she is thriving, full of voice and purpose. If the herd can reach the most guarded, shut-down ten-year-old, imagine what it can unlock in a guarded executive who has spent twenty years in the box. The mechanism is the same. So is the result. Regeneration: Leadership as creating the conditions There’s a reason our sanctuary sits on an old landfill site. We took ground that had been written off as poisoned and useless, and we didn’t force anything to grow. We created the conditions, we cleared what was toxic, we planted, we waited, we trusted the process. Today, there are a thousand trees, ponds full of frogs, and birdsong where there used to be seagulls and waste. People are no different. Teams are no different. You cannot force a person to flourish any more than you can shout at a field and demand a harvest. What a leader can do, the only thing a leader can really do, is create the conditions in which growth becomes possible. Safety. Time. Belief. Then get out of the way and let it happen. The best leadership I know isn’t extraction. It’s regeneration. Leading without emptying yourself There’s a leadership lesson I learned the hard way, too. For years, I was the one who absorbed every shortfall, every tight month, every gap, every job nobody else would do. Capacity was just me, stretched thin across everything. But you cannot pour into other people from an empty cup. A leader who never regulates their own nervous system, who treats themselves as the shock absorber for the whole organisation, eventually has nothing left to give. The horses taught me that self-regulation isn’t self-indulgence. It is the precondition for leading anyone else well. Redefining what leadership is for We talk a great deal about building wealth and success. Here is what those words have come to mean to me: they’re shared. Leadership at its best isn’t command from the top of a hierarchy. It’s every voice being taken into account, and decisions being made with people, not done to them. That isn’t soft. That’s shared leadership, and in my experience, it’s the only kind that builds anything that lasts. I didn’t get here alone, either. People believed in me long before the numbers did, and that belief may be the truest form of wealth there is. Good leaders create that same belief in others. For the leader reading this So, if you’ve been climbing into a box to lead, and most of us have, here is what the horses would tell you. Regulate before you direct, because your team is reading your nervous system, not your strategy. Calm is contagious, and so is panic. Lead like the lead mare, remembering that authority isn’t the loudest voice, it’s the steadiest presence. Be the calm others can borrow. Create the conditions, don’t force the growth. You can’t command a person to flourish, but you can make it safe enough that they do. Seek the honest feedback you’ve been avoiding, and find the people, or the animals, who respond to who you are, not to who you’re performing to be. Lead as your whole self, because the parts of you that don’t fit the box are usually the very parts your people most need to see. Being human isn’t a box Someone asked me recently what box I’m in today. For once, I don’t mind the answer. I’m in a box of grace. I’m steadier than I used to be, and I can even make people laugh. But here is how I’d like to be remembered, as a leader and as a person, as someone who got up every single day to bring value, and who refused to leave any part of herself in the box. Nature never puts anyone in a box. Neither should leadership. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Danielle McKinnon Danielle McKinnon, Equine Leadership Facilitator, Social Entrepreneur Danielle McKinnon is the founder of Eat Sleep Ride | Rural-Based Charity in Scotland, a rural charity using horses, nature, and coaching to support disadvantaged and neurodiverse young people. She is a qualified equine-facilitated learning practitioner, coach, and licensed facilitator of shared leadership, working locally and globally to build brave spaces for change. Her work is rooted in lived experience, community care, and the wisdom of the herd. To explore Danielle's leadership programmes, visit the Leadership at Eat Sleep Ride page at Herd Dynamics | Equine Leadership and Personal Development. These programs support Eat Sleep Ride. References: Porges, S. W. (2022). ‘Polyvagal Theory: A Science of Safety.’ Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16 – on neuroception and co-regulation. Marchant-Forde, J. et al. (2024). ‘Unveiling directional physiological coupling in human–horse interactions.’ Scientific Reports – on heart rate variability synchronisation between humans and horses.

Written by Daryl Henderson, Transformational Facilitator & Creative Visionary Daryl Henderson is a master coach, facilitator, and artist known for blending spiritual traditions, shadow work, and leadership training. He is the co-founder of Odyssey of Man, the creator of True North Coaching, and the founder of One11, a health & wellness brand. You've probably felt it, maybe even for years. I know I did. It's like an itch that never fully gets scratched. A hunger that gets sated for a short time, and then it's there again. Gnawing at you, quietly at first, and then louder until it gets fed by another peak experience, another ceremony, or another new "medicine" experience that leaves you flying high for a while. It's that empty feeling after the retreat high fades. The moment your meditation app notification pops up, saying "Time to be mindful!" and you feel irritated rather than invited to drop in. It's the realization that you've read seventeen books about awakening and somehow feel more lost than when you started. If that sounds familiar, you're in the right place. Keep reading to find out what's really happening, and where to go when you finally stop seeking. How we got here To understand why pop spirituality is collapsing, you have to understand why it rose in the first place. The late twentieth century left a generation with a particular exposed wound, the wound of the disenchanted. The ones who know there's more to life than just working for a paycheck. Those who hear the echoes of their ancestors deep in their bones and have no idea how to connect with them. Those who dare to seek answers beyond the prescribed narrative we've been fed since birth. At that time, exploring oneself spiritually was still on the fringes of Western society. Science was consistently dismantling the mysteries of the cosmos in favor of something far more tangible and reasonable. Organized religion had, for many, become synonymous with control, shame, or simple irrelevance. This is where the dormant desire to deeply know what life is all about started to re-awaken. The grumbling in our guts began to stir and slowly take root. It's a hunger hardwired into our DNA, older than language itself. The upside of that era was a growing sense of safety and stability, a feeling that we finally understood the world and could control it. The downside was that many people became complacent, or worse, afraid of their own potential, condemning their dreams to gather dust. This created a vacuum where the search for meaning was lost for a while, and into that vacuum rushed something new. Nature abhors a vacuum. A new chapter of awareness and transformational experiences began. A tidal wave of seekers rushed in. Many of them are dissatisfied with their lives, wanting nothing more than to become enlightened people living "transformed" lives. Oh, was it glorious. The breakthroughs, the light bulbs going off, the ecstasy of healing old wounds. All of it was a welcome salve for years of prescribed numbness. So the Wellness industry was born. Eastern practices, stripped of their philosophical roots, arrived in Western gyms and office parks. Slowly, yoga trickled into the tiniest of towns across the Western world. Even into my little ole hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia. The language and rituals of indigenous ceremonies began showing up at festivals and weekend workshops. Shamanism, tantra, ayahuasca, breathwork, astrology, crystals, and every healing modality imaginable suddenly became accessible, searchable, and schedulable. The supply was there to meet the demand. This is how the transformational junkie was born. A transformational junkie, TJ for short, is someone who, like me, has perpetually chased the next experience, hoping it will "change everything." It does, for a little while. Then something else happens to remind us we're "not there yet." So the healing continues, endlessly. For me, it started at 25 with the Landmark Forum. That was the gateway to a world I knew existed but couldn't access before. After that, I was obsessed. Always the next course, the next retreat, the next teacher, the next ceremony. For fifteen years, I was convinced this one would finally crack it open and I'd be free to live the life I'd always dreamed of. TJs have done the work. God knows we've done the work. Passport stamps, journals full of insights, a long roster of modalities explored. What we haven't quite managed is staying still long enough for any of it to actually land. Yet, for a time, it was real. Liberating, even. I had life-altering experiences, traveled the world, and created memories I'll cherish for the rest of my life. It was a remarkable time for people like me. I had no access to living traditions outside the Christian church, no wise elders, no intact mystical or cosmological framework. Somehow, I was able to follow the bread crumbs to finally find something that felt real. Like it was actually mine. It was as if suddenly, a door cracked open. The light peeked in, and like a moth to the flame, I went straight for it. My body softened. My mind loosened its grip. Something opened in me, and I started to understand what had been missing from my life. But doors are meant to lead somewhere. After walking through the door, I found myself standing in a very nicely decorated hallway that didn't go anywhere, with a bunch of my equally confused friends. The healing I was seeking was just a soothing Band-Aid on a deeper wound. The problem with Band-Aids The great spiritual teacher and one of my favorite authors, Martin Prechtel, who spent years learning from the Tz'utujil Maya of Guatemala, describes a particular kind of grief that runs through modern Western culture like an underground river. It is the grief of a people who have forgotten how to grieve. Who have lost the rituals, the language, the cosmological home that would allow genuine sorrow, and by proxy, genuine joy, to move through the body the way weather moves through a landscape. Pop spirituality, at its worst, offers not a cure for this grief but a way to avoid feeling it. "High vibes only. Manifest your desires. Release what no longer serves you." As long as you stay positive and focus on your vision, the life you're really here to live will be yours. Just do this course, this retreat, this medicine journey, and you'll heal your worthiness wound and finally achieve your highest potential. There is nothing wrong with wanting to feel better and improve your life. But there is something worth examining in a spiritual culture that has made transcendence the goal and immanence, the messy, embodied, relational, mortal fact of being here, the enemy. There's the rub. We love a good enemy to defeat. It's in every great story. A villain so diabolical that it seems impossible to beat until the hero, you, in this case, receives magical powers and assistance that finally allow them to conquer the darkness once and for all. It's not necessarily a lie, but it's not the whole story. Because eventually the cycle returns, and we must face the darkness again and again in our lifetimes. The real goal is to become at peace with this cycle and accept your journey as your own unique story, to be treasured. To know and love ourselves so authentically and so deeply that what was once a terrible insecurity becomes our cherished guidance, showing us where we still have work to do. This is where we get to the real meat of it. Those beguiling, persistent feelings. Those old triggers that just won't go away, no matter what they are not there to be gotten rid of. No, they are actually your guidance system, pointing you to the next chapter of your life. Somatic therapist Peter Levine, whose decades of work with trauma gave us Somatic Experiencing, makes a point that sounds simple but goes very deep: the body is not an obstacle to healing. It is the site of it. Trauma doesn't live in the story you tell about what happened. It lives in the nervous system, in the tissues, in the place where time stopped and never started again. You cannot think your way out of it. You cannot vibrate your way out of it. You have to go in. You have to sit with and tend to those tender, uncomfortable places inside yourself. This is precisely what genuine spiritual practice, one that's rooted in actual lineage, in the long conversations between a people and their land, in the accumulated wisdom of generations, has always understood. The Q'ero healers of the Andes do not separate the healing of a person from the healing of their relationship to the living world around them. In fact, many shamans believe that modern seekers carry souls fragmented through generations of trauma and living in a world that doesn't support the deep spiritual understanding of who we are and where we came from. The Lakota understanding of Mitakuye Oyas'in, "all my relations," is not a cool phrase for ceremonies or a bumper sticker. It is a core cosmological statement about the web of reciprocity that holds all life, and the consequences of forgetting it. The real work begins with being willing to understand that each of us comes into this life whole and complete. Nothing lacking. Then something shatters us. Some more than others. That is all a part of your unique story. Our job isn't to seek out more understanding and experiences. It's to find those lost shards of our soul and slowly start piecing them back together. This is where I love the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where they take broken pottery and put it back together with golden glue, creating something more beautiful because it was broken. Accept that this is a process that takes time. You cannot download this. You cannot get it in a weekend. Period. What lineage actually offers This is the part that tends to make people uncomfortable, because it often sounds like gatekeeping and exclusivity. It's not. Lineage doesn't mean you need to have been born into a specific culture or initiated into a specific tradition to access depth in your spiritual life. It means something more fundamental that you are in a right relationship with something older and larger than yourself, and that this relationship has continuity, accountability, and cost. The Toltec seers spoke of the human being as a dreamer. One who has the capacity to wake up within the dream of ordinary consensus reality and begin dreaming deliberately. But this waking up, in their understanding, was not a solo project. It happened within a tutelage of practitioners who had mapped the territory, who knew the pitfalls, who understood that the ego's first response to genuine spiritual work is to co-opt it and sell it back to you in a form that keeps you comfortable. Oh, that daft ego! It gets more and more clever. As you evolve as a spiritually conscious person, so does the ego. This is why so many spiritual leaders get so caught up in their own stories that they end up believing their own bullshit and become the reason many of us have grown jaded about the world of spirituality. Alberto Villoldo, who trained with Q'ero masters of the Peruvian highlands and founded the Four Winds Society, describes the Munay-Ki, the nine rites of the medicine way, not as a set of techniques to acquire but as seeds that take root in you and change you over the years, even decades. The emphasis is always on the long arc. On a transformation that reorganizes you at the level of the luminous energy field, not just the psychological narrative. Munay is most closely translated as unconditional love. My very first Ayahuasca ceremony, I set an intention I honestly didn't understand, and it's still one of the most powerful ones I have ever created. My intention for that first weekend with my grandmother was to unconditionally love myself. I didn't realize how powerful that intention was until four years later, when I looked back to see all the events that had unfolded in my life that had stripped me of who I thought I was and what gave me value, and what was under that clutter was simply me. For the first time, I could look in the mirror with real love for the man staring back at me without the distortion of my flaws and shortcomings. No, those all became part of this hodgepodge of pieces that is my masterpiece in progress. The farther I get down the path of my own spiritual journey, the deeper this learning goes. It's a lesson I revisit constantly, even over a decade later. Still evolving. I believe it will continue for the rest of my life. Enter Vedic astrology. In its classical form, it operates from a similar premise. The Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, the foundational text of Jyotish, is not primarily a tool for predicting what will happen to you. It is a map of karma as a living, dynamic field of cause and consequence, and your engagement with it is meant to cultivate discrimination, which is the capacity to see clearly what serves the deepest evolution of your soul and what keeps you cycling through the same patterns. What all of these traditions share, and what pop spirituality largely lacks, is a cosmological seriousness. They take reality to be stranger, deeper, and more demanding of you than the surface level of the wellness industry suggests. They do not promise that your higher self is waiting patiently for you to find the right journal prompt. They suggest, with varying degrees of gentleness, that genuine transformation requires genuine surrender. Not the aesthetic of surrender, but the actual relinquishing of the small self's control. That, my friend, is one of the most terrifying things for the ego. Hence, the tendency to bypass the uncomfortable stuff and head straight for the party on the beach in Bali and call it awakening. The seeker is not the problem One point I want to be clear about is that the millions of people who have turned to crystals, horoscopes, and breathwork retreats are not foolish. Nor is their interest, money, or time wasted. It just isn't the end of the story. They are hungry. They are trying, in the language and resources available to them, to find something real. Something deep. Our modern culture failed them, not the other way around. When almost an entire civilization loses its rites of passage, loses its respect for elders, loses its teachers and guides, loses its connection to the land and the dead and the unborn, people must improvise. So they reach for whatever shards of the sacred they can find. That reaching is beautiful. It's courageous. Honorable, even. It is the same instinct that built the great temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia and painted the cave walls at Lascaux in France. So what's the lingering question most seekers wish to answer? Quite simply: who am I, really? Under the accomplishments, bank accounts, family wounds, and social programming. This is where the broken shards come back in. So what do you do when you realize you've been hoarding the shards instead of seeing how they all connect? You go deeper. You get curious about how they fit together, and you really take the time to file off the sharp edges and begin doing the painstaking work of piecing yourself back together. Not better, not faster, not more. Deeper. Stronger. Find a practice that has roots for you. Trust that your inner guidance system knows exactly where you need to go. Exactly the path that will take you to the next piece of yourself that needs to be found and tended to. When you're ready, you'll find a teacher, a real one, with their own lineage and their own scars and their own unfinished becoming. One you don't have to fawn over or perform for. One who sees you so clearly that it makes you uncomfortable sometimes, and yet you also feel okay to be just the way you are. Accept that this will take longer than you want it to, cost more than you planned, and ask things of you that the Instagram version of spirituality never could. You let yourself be changed by something you cannot predict. You finally surrender to the process and humbly take the next step, and then the next. "Left foot, right foot," as my dear friend Michelle always says. What's coming So, where is all this leading? Here's what I see. There's a shift happening right now in the cultural conversation around spirituality. Many of us have grown disenchanted with the promise of living the life of our dreams and manifesting our first million while working remotely from a beach in Costa Rica. We've lost interest in chasing our highest potential and are slowly coming to terms with the deep work needed to actually be prosperous and at peace. People are moving away from whitewashed eclecticism, which is basically a spiritual buffet, the mix-and-match menu of enlightenment that defined the wellness era, and moving toward something with more substance that has deep roots and dirt under its nails. There's a growing hunger for practices that are embodied rather than aesthetic, rooted in particular traditions, particularly relationships with land and ancestry, and hard-won understandings of what it means to be human. We're starting to choose depth over what just looks and feels good. Growing roots so our branches have greater reach. This is where we get to integrate the best of what we've learned and experienced, because everything you've done up till this point is part of your unique story. It will contribute to crafting the lens you see the world through next. So all is not lost and nothing is wasted. It's grist for the mill. Don't throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. That would be a mistake. This is not a regression. It is a maturation. It's the stripping away of all the things you thought were you, to find out who you really are. Getting down to your naked truth. How beautiful that is. Warts and all. This is accompanied, I think, by a willingness to sit with what genuine practice actually requires: continuity and consistency, not just peak experiences. Real community, not just content. Grief, not just gratitude. This is where we get to do the daily labor of becoming someone who can actually show up for their own life. The long way home to yourself, and remember that age-old truth that life is about the journey, not the destination. Astrologically speaking, Neptune, the great dissolver, is shifting signs, moving from the dreamy fog of Pisces, where illusions flourished and everything felt potentially magical, into the fire of Aries, where things are called to be real or be burned away. Astrologers across both the Vedic and Western traditions are marking this as one of the most significant collective thresholds in a generation. What dissolves is what was never solid. What remains is what was always true. The death of pop spirituality is something to celebrate At the end of the day, the death of pop spirituality is not something to mourn. I think it's something to celebrate, actually. This is a time of great awakening, and the most profound awakenings come with disillusionment, the recognition that we need to shine a warm light into the darkness that has been left in the cold recesses of humanity for far too long. The ache you feel when the retreat high fades, the restlessness that no amount of content can quiet, that is not your own shortcoming. That is your soul asking for more than any product or experience can give you. There is a living, breathing world that is profoundly and deeply interconnected, waiting for you beneath the noise. There is an end to the seeking, but it won't come from the world, it will come to you in the quiet places. In the moments where you finally put down what you've been carrying and allow life to bring you to your knees. There's power in that surrender. That's where the traditions that have been patiently carrying this knowledge through centuries of forgetting and subsequent reclamation will find you. When you're ready, the teacher will appear. Then the work is to dive into the practices that will ask everything of you. In return, they will give you back something that cannot be packaged or sold. Something that, once you find it, can never be taken away from you. Your peace. The ability to stop seeking and start truly living. You only have to be willing to be honest and go deeper than you've ever gone before. If you're ready to start that conversation, reach out here. Follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Daryl Henderson Daryl Henderson, Transformational Facilitator & Creative Visionary Daryl Henderson is a master coach, facilitator, and artist with over two decades of experience blending creativity, men’s work, and spiritual practices. He has photographed top brands and artists worldwide, including Nike and Michael Kors, and documented indigenous and peace gatherings across the globe. Drawing on this experience, Daryl guides high performers, artists, and businesses to express their stories through soul-aligned photography, branding, and personal transformation. He is the co-founder of Odyssey of Man, the creator of True North Coaching, and the founder of One11, a health and wellness brand. His work is playful, transformative, and designed to unlock authentic expression.

Written by Paula Miles, BACP-Registered Psychotherapist Paula Miles is a psychotherapist, BACP-registered, who helps people navigating anxiety, stress, and burnout. Drawing from her own experience in high-pressure corporate roles, and childhood trauma she offers a grounded, compassionate space for root-cause emotional change. She has the qualifications. She has built the career, earned the title, and delivered results that others openly respect. She is, by any reasonable standard, good at what she does. Yet, she sits in meetings with a quiet, persistent certainty that, at some point, someone is going to notice. That the competence she has demonstrated is not as real as it appears. That she has somehow been getting away with something, and it is only a matter of time before the gap between who people think she is and who she actually is becomes visible to everyone in the room. This is imposter syndrome, and it is one of the most common and least discussed experiences among high-achieving women. It does not announce itself loudly. It works quietly, running beneath the surface of an accomplished life, draining the confidence out of real achievements and replacing genuine pride with a persistent undercurrent of unease. This article explores what imposter syndrome actually is, why it is so prevalent among capable women, how it connects to anxiety and perfectionism, and what it takes to begin to move beyond it. What imposter syndrome actually is The term imposter syndrome was first introduced in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, specifically to describe an experience they observed in high-achieving women: a persistent inability to internalise success, combined with a fear of being exposed as less capable than others believed. In the decades since, the concept has expanded considerably, but the original observation has held up remarkably well under research scrutiny. A meta-analysis published in Current Research in Behavioral Sciences in 2024, drawing on data from over 100 studies and more than 40,000 participants, confirmed that women consistently score higher than men on measures of imposter syndrome. A 2025 systematic review found that the global prevalence of imposter syndrome among health service providers sits at approximately 62%. Among high-achieving female executives specifically, some estimates reach as high as 75%. What these figures describe is not occasional self-doubt. They describe a structured pattern of thinking in which a woman discounts her own competence, attributes her success to luck or circumstances rather than ability, and lives with a background fear that she will eventually be found out. The achievements are real. The credentials are real. The fear that none of it truly counts, and that she does not quite deserve to be where she is, is also real. Why high-achieving women are particularly vulnerable Imposter syndrome was originally identified in women, and the research continues to show that women experience it more frequently and more intensely than men. Understanding why matters, because the experience is not random. It reflects something specific about how women are conditioned to relate to success, to criticism, and to their own worth. Many of the women I work with grew up in environments where being capable was expected but rarely acknowledged, where praise was conditional or absent, and where love and approval were available in response to performance rather than simply in response to existing. In those early environments, the child learns something quietly but durably: that her value is not inherent. That it must be proved, maintained, and protected through achievement. That she is only as safe as her last successful performance. This is where the seeds of imposter syndrome are often planted. Not in adulthood, not in the competitive workplace, but much earlier, in the relational climate of childhood. The adult woman who cannot accept a compliment without immediately qualifying it, who cannot receive praise without suspecting it is not quite deserved, who works twice as hard as anyone around her and still does not feel like enough, is not irrational. She is carrying a very old and very understandable belief into a new context. "Imposter syndrome is not a thinking error. For many women, it is the logical conclusion of a childhood in which worth had to be earned rather than simply received." A 2025 study found that imposterism is strongly positively correlated with rigid and self-critical perfectionism, a pattern that reinforces exactly this picture. The imposter and the perfectionist are often the same person, running the same underlying programme: that she is not quite enough, and that she must keep working to prove otherwise. How imposter syndrome shows up in everyday professional life Imposter syndrome rarely announces itself as such. Most women experiencing it do not think of themselves as having imposter syndrome. They think of themselves as realistic, or as someone who just needs to work harder, or as someone who got lucky and needs to make sure they do not let anyone down. The pattern hides behind the language of humility and diligence, which makes it very effective at perpetuating itself. In practice, it tends to show up as over-preparation, the compulsive need to know everything before speaking, to rehearse before a meeting, and to triple-check before sending. It shows up as difficulty taking credit, an automatic deflection when someone compliments the work. It shows up as staying silent in a room where you have relevant knowledge, because the risk of being wrong feels greater than the benefit of being heard. It shows up as taking feedback personally in a way that cuts deeper than the comment warrants, because any evidence of imperfection feels like confirmation of the fear that has been running quietly all along. Research from the Survey Center on American Life, published in 2023, found that young professional women are significantly more likely than young men to feel like imposters in the workplace, even when their objective qualifications and performance records are equivalent. The gap is not explained by ability. It is explained by what women have been taught, explicitly and implicitly, about whether their ability is really theirs to claim. The connection between imposter syndrome and anxiety Imposter syndrome and anxiety are closely related, and research confirms what clinical observation has long suggested. A 2025 cross-sectional study found that individuals with high imposter syndrome scores are nearly three times more likely to report moderate to severe mental health symptoms. Research also shows associations with depression, emotional exhaustion, and burnout. The two conditions do not simply coexist; they amplify each other. The anxiety in imposter syndrome has a very specific quality. It is anticipatory. It is the constant, low-level vigilance of waiting to be found out. The nervous system, trained in childhood to monitor for the moment when approval might be withdrawn, carries that monitoring function into professional life. Every new project, every performance review, and every public presentation activates the same system: scan for evidence that you are not good enough. Find it wherever it can be found. What makes this particularly exhausting is that success does not resolve it. If anything, success raises the stakes. Each achievement creates a new and higher standard to maintain, and the more visible the success becomes, the greater the perceived risk of the exposure the woman fears. This is why imposter syndrome tends to intensify, rather than diminish, as a career advances. The achievement treadmill accelerates, and the fear of falling off it accelerates with it. "Success does not cure imposter syndrome. For the woman who believes she does not deserve what she has built, each achievement becomes another thing she is afraid of losing." What actually helps, and why understanding matters more than strategies Most advice about imposter syndrome focuses on strategies: reframe the thought, keep a success journal, and remind yourself of your achievements. These approaches are not without value, but they tend to address the surface of the pattern rather than its roots. Because the roots are relational and emotional rather than cognitive, cognitive interventions tend to produce only partial or temporary relief. What tends to create more lasting change is understanding. Not just knowing that the pattern exists, but genuinely tracing where it came from, what it was originally protecting, and why it made sense given the emotional environment it developed in. When a woman can see her imposter syndrome not as a flaw in her thinking but as a completely understandable response to a specific set of relational experiences, her relationship to it changes. She is no longer fighting a character failing. She is beginning to understand herself. This is the kind of work that psychoanalytic therapy is particularly well-suited to support. Not because it provides techniques, but because it creates the conditions in which a woman can slow down enough to explore the beliefs she carries about her own worth, to notice where they came from, and to begin, gradually, to relate to herself differently. Many women find that the imposter voice does not disappear entirely through this process, but it loses its authority. It becomes one perspective among several, rather than the final word. When imposter syndrome starts costing more than it should For many women, imposter syndrome is a background hum: uncomfortable, but manageable. For others, it crosses into territory that significantly affects their quality of life. When self-doubt is preventing a woman from speaking in meetings where she has relevant knowledge, from applying for roles she is qualified for, from accepting recognition she has earned, or from resting without anxiety about what her productivity says about her worth, it has become something that deserves more than strategic adjustment. The same is true when imposter syndrome is fuelling panic, chronic anxiety, or a persistent sense of emotional exhaustion that no amount of achievement seems to shift. These are not signs of weakness or of a career that needs to be managed differently. They are signs that the underlying beliefs driving the pattern need to be understood and, over time, changed at the level where they actually live. If you recognise yourself in this, it may be worth giving yourself more than another article to read or another strategy to apply. The women who tend to benefit most from therapy are not the ones who lack insight. They are the ones who are already insightful, who understand their patterns intellectually, and who have found that understanding alone has not been quite enough. What tends to shift things is not more information about the pattern, but a relationship in which something different can be experienced. Frequently asked questions Is imposter syndrome more common in women than in men? Yes. A meta-analysis published in 2024, drawing on 115 effect sizes and over 40,000 participants, confirmed that women consistently score higher than men on measures of imposter syndrome. The original 1978 study by Clance and Imes was itself conducted exclusively with high-achieving women, and subsequent research has broadly confirmed that pattern, though imposter syndrome is experienced by people of all genders. Can you have imposter syndrome even after years of professional success? Yes, and this is very common. For many women, success intensifies rather than relieves imposter syndrome, because each achievement raises the perceived stakes of eventual exposure. The more visible and established the career becomes, the greater the imagined fall. This is why imposter syndrome often goes unaddressed for years, because the outward evidence of competence makes the inner experience difficult to take seriously. What is the difference between imposter syndrome and low self-esteem? The two can overlap, but they are not the same. Low self-esteem tends to be more pervasive, affecting how a person relates to themselves across all areas of life. Imposter syndrome is more specifically tied to achievement and recognition, to the belief that one’s professional success is undeserved or fragile. Many women with imposter syndrome have genuinely good self-esteem in other areas of their lives, which can make the professional self-doubt feel particularly confusing. Is imposter syndrome something therapy can help with? Yes. Therapy, and particularly approaches that work with the emotional and relational roots of the pattern rather than just the cognitive surface of it, tends to be effective. The goal is not to eliminate all self-doubt, which would be neither realistic nor desirable, but to reduce the authority the imposter voice holds, and to help a woman develop a relationship with her own worth that does not depend entirely on her next performance. How is imposter syndrome connected to perfectionism? Research has found a strong positive correlation between imposterism and self-critical perfectionism. Both patterns share the same underlying logic: that worth must be earned through flawless performance, and that falling short, even slightly, carries disproportionate personal consequences. The perfectionist and the imposter are very often the same woman running the same fear with different vocabularies. A final note If you read this and recognised yourself in it, I want to say something directly. The fact that you doubt yourself does not mean your success is undeserved. It means you grew up in circumstances that made it difficult to fully receive what you were working toward. That is not a reflection of your ability. It is a reflection of something that happened before your ability had a chance to fully speak for itself. Understanding that distinction, and sitting with it long enough for it to become real rather than just intellectually acknowledged, is where things begin to shift. That is slower work than a strategy. It is also far more durable. If this resonates, you are welcome to reach out. Paula offers a free 30-minute discovery call, where you can talk openly about what you are navigating, ask any questions about the therapeutic process, and get a sense of whether working together feels like a supportive next step. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Paula Miles Paula Miles, BACP-Registered Psychotherapist Paula Miles is a BACP-registered psychotherapist working with anxiety, burnout, and high-functioning stress. With a background in demanding corporate environments and having grown up in a critical, emotionally unavailable, and neglectful family, she learned early to carry the pressure of being the “good,” capable, strong, and always-okay one in every relationship. She deeply understands the experience of performing while feeling depleted inside, broken, or like a failure. Paula transformed her own pain into a vocation, she supports clients in over eight countries, offering a deeply human space where people can understand their emotions, reconnect with themselves, and find a root-cause relief from the patterns that keep them overwhelmed. Sources and References: Clance, P. R. and Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high-achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 15(3), 241-247. Price, P. C., Holcomb, B. and Payne, M. B. (2024). Gender differences in impostor phenomenon: A meta-analytic review. Current Research in Behavioral Sciences. Survey Center on American Life. (2023). Women are achieving greater professional success, yet self-doubt is common. americansurveycenter.org Salari, N. et al. (2025). Global prevalence of imposter syndrome in health service providers: A systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Psychology. The prevalence of imposter syndrome and its association with psychological distress. PMC / NCBI. (2025). KPMG. Study on imposter syndrome among female executives. University of Idaho. (2025). Imposterism and perfectionism correlations. Published study.

Colette Duvall Pondella’s work begins where many traditional recovery spaces cannot reach, in the quiet, instinctive connection between humans and wolves. As a recovery advocate, spiritual educator, and co-founder of Shadowland Foundation and Wolf Wisdom Healing, she has spent years helping Veterans, First Responders, Indigenous communities, and others reconnect with trust, belonging, and the parts of themselves shaped by pain. At Freedom Ranch in the Angeles Crest Mountains, ambassador wolves are not treated as symbols, but as teachers whose presence can soften fear, open emotional barriers, and remind people what it means to be part of a pack. In this interview, Colette shares how her own healing journey led her to this work, what wolves reveal about emotional pain and authenticity, and why recovering ourselves may begin with remembering the wisdom we have forgotten. Colette Duvall Pondella, Author, Executive Director, Co-founder of Shadowland Foundation What first showed you that wolves could help people heal in ways traditional recovery methods often cannot? Before I met Paul, my husband and our founder, wolves were not on my radar. I vaguely remember hearing about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park in the 1990’s, other than that, I knew nothing. Part of their socialization was going out in public. People would stop us and ask to meet Shadow and Alaska. Many would pet them and weep. Just moved to tears by the connection. They would proceed to share stories of their dogs or times they encountered them in the wild or how much they love wolves and have pictures of them all over their walls. After establishing the nonprofit, Veterans and Indigenous Americans sought us out to just sit with them before we even had a program. One gentleman, both Indigenous and a Vet, would play his flute and spend hours with the wolves and came back once a week just to “be” with them. Eye contact with the wild moves us. It activates a remembrance inside us. A feeling about ourselves we have been searching for; a level of trust that eludes us between each other. People who are deathly afraid of dogs have visited and, within minutes, relax and beg for more contact. Visitors are met with wolf noses in their faces. Eye to eye with them. They kiss you, turn their bodies against yours, step on your feet and claim you before moving on to another. It's a demonstration of unconditional love and acceptance that some people never receive in a lifetime and the wolves give it in mere seconds. They touch hearts without having to earn it. How did your own healing journey shape the way you guide others today? Since I was three years old, I knew on every level I was on my own in this world. That soul decision kept me alive and made me a survivor, but also left me living in a constant state of wariness. In my mid-twenties, I had to address my eating disorder head-on, face the shame of exposure and do what had to be done to have even the possibility of a happy life. The hardest part was asking for help. I did many forms of therapy – 12 Step, individual and group therapy, acting classes, NLP, EMDR, hypnosis, weekend empowerment workshops, meditation, and reading books. All of it worked, except I still felt completely alone in the world. Then I met Shadow. Shortly after, I met my husband, Paul, who introduced me to his motherless female wolves, Shadow and Alaska. I spent the night. In the morning, as I awoke and sat up, Shadow and I were eye to eye. She jumped onto the bed, and this 110-pound black wolf put her forehead against mine, pushed me down onto my pillow, and held me there for what seemed like forever. When she released, she smiled and ran off to play with Alaska. Paul was standing in the doorway with a cup of coffee. I asked, "What was that?" He said, "She just made you part of the pack." I was initiated. That's when I realized: recovering alone rarely works. What do wolves reveal about emotional pain that humans often hide from each other? It's not that they reveal the emotional pain – they alleviate it for the time you spend with them. You feel joy, peace, acceptance, love, a lower heart rate, contact with true power and authenticity. In a short time, you experience emotions and create new neural pathways unfamiliar to people living in constant pain. The wolves sense out the needs, their outreach is energetic, emanating from their hearts, which is the first place we instruct people to touch them. Once there, they’ve got you. One cold afternoon, being outside with the wolves was too dismal. There was a 92-year-old gentleman visiting who got down on the floor face-to-face with our Takoda for nearly an hour. I don’t know what they were giving and getting from each other, I just know that it couldn’t have happened elsewhere. We had a dear friend who was dying of terminal cancer who never revealed his diagnosis with us. The last time he visited, he did the same. Got down on the floor eye to eye with Takoda, surrounded by Alaska and some of their adult pups. All we know is that on some level, the wolves know what you’re going through, and they offer what comfort they can give. Why do you think so many people feel disconnected from themselves despite having more access to wellness resources than ever before? We have learned through our families and everyday lives that people cannot be trusted with our deepest selves. Our worst traumas have often come from those who were supposed to love us most, whether intentional or not. The Indigenous People of the Americas believed that if you hurt a child, you injure seven generations and beyond. The legacy of that wound touches everyone. We all experience loss, grief, abandonment, betrayal, shunning, and shame before we ever graduate elementary school. The disconnection becomes a kind of homeostasis, established in childhood. Just because we have more resources and information than ever before doesn't mean the barriers have fallen. Help still comes at a cost to reputations and livelihoods. For example, we have the great honor to assist First Responders. A first responder or veteran diagnosed with PTS and self-medicating can ask for help – but risks being relieved of duty or involuntarily retired, so they suffer in silence. Suicide rates in these populations are increasing exponentially. We know PTS and addiction are not curable, but they are treatable. The real question is: would you rather have a police officer carrying a gun on the streets who is drunk and hiding their condition, or one who is present, accountable, and getting better every day? This applies to the truck driver, the ER nurse or the CEO alike. Even with the massive funding, we are failing each other by pretending we are addressing mental health. We are not. In simplistic terms, trauma splits a part of your brain away from your conscious mind. Stuck in a part of your brain inaccessible to your conscious mind, it activates involuntarily in unhealthy ways when triggered. Knowing and addressing the triggered responses is where evidence-based therapeutic techniques must be embraced to reclaim yourself. The brokenness individuals feel gets alleviated by participating in a session with the wolves during our Wolf Wisdom Healing program. What are the biggest misconceptions people still have about wolves and their emotional intelligence? It's interesting that we were just discussing childhood imprints and how difficult it is to confront ourselves with gentleness. The story of Little Red Riding Hood dates all the way back to 1697, and parents still read it to children today – creating an imprint of the big, bad, grandmother-eating, child-devouring wolf. Those imprints defy all logic and reasoning, which is exactly why changing hearts changes minds. It is getting easier, though. New archaeological findings reveal how wolves taught early humans to hunt and to refrigerate food in cold pools of water. They lived in ordered communities where everyone ate and was protected by the pack, led by a bonded male and female pair, with the female protected at all costs. They are literally giddy at the arrival of a new litter of pups, with every member of the pack responsible for raising them. Brutality is not tolerated. Wolves know what we humans have forgotten. How do pack dynamics influence the way you teach trust, belonging, and recovery? The wolves themselves break the trust barrier. Belonging grows gradually as the experience of knowing yourself as a whole becomes stronger than your dissociative self. Still flawed, still with more to learn – but gifted and uniquely deserving of the life given to you at birth. Rudyard Kipling wrote, "The strength of the wolf is the pack, and the strength of the pack is the wolf." It's masterful because each wolf's role is vital to the survival of the whole. Every rank carries a special talent, honored and protected. Pack members move to defend rather than attack. Losing one compromises the success of all. The necessary prescription for recovery mirrors this truth: recover yourself by discovering that you matter to your pack – your family and for us as humans, to the entire world. Observing our pack, visitors seems to relate to one wolf or another. They recognize themselves in the wolf they gravitate to the most. They tend to love in the wolf what they have rejected in themselves. The most striking lesson we highlight is that most people walk around with an invisible question mark, awaiting cues from others to determine their own worth, not fully aware of who they are. Wolves have no such question mark. They are who they are. They do not question it. They are truly, authentically themselves and it is unmistakable. The more someone wants to embrace these qualities, the pain starts to subside. Contact with the wolves is a once-in-a-lifetime embodiment of knowing your true self. Maybe for the first time. What shifts do people usually experience after spending time in one of your Wolf Wisdom Healing programs? The wolf visit tends to help people feel safe enough to open themselves up to us and to each other. We share stories about the wolves – including their own traumas and the origin stories Paul and I have patiently walked them through to healing. We share our own recovery journeys as well. These moments bring awareness that HOPE exists: Hearing Other People's Experiences moves mountains. Our pack family home, Freedom Ranch, sits in the Angeles Crest Mountains of Los Angeles County – a true safe haven where communing with the elements is inescapable. We offer a Medicine Wheel Ceremony: a healing prayer inside a sage-purified circle representing all stages of life. When the circle is closed, participants receive guided messages, clearing of adverse energies, and insight into memories, blocks, and unexpressed grief. Every person leaves with tangible healing tools for their emotional, physical, and psychological well-being and the promise that we are here for them. You often say healing is about "recovering yourself." What does that look like in everyday life? Creating new neural pathways is key. As I mentioned before, it is vital to trace back the origin of the pain that created the disconnect – how old you were, uncovering the mystery, and looking at it from an adult, cognitive point of reference. Clarifying what went wrong and why goes a long way toward forgiving your original response to a deep wound. Sometimes traumas happen during preverbal stages of development, which are harder to understand. A family member who remembers for you can ease that pain, if it is still available. We, humans, have an insatiable need to understand what, where, when, and how – especially after making the courageous decision to choose ourselves for the first time. Yes, courage is what it takes to shake the very foundation you've been standing on and let go of the version of yourself you needed in order to survive. True healing is finding meaning and connection through living authentically. You need tools that work for you. For me, I had a realization that I talked to myself in horrific ways. It was suggested to me to frame a picture of myself when I was a child and ask myself if I would talk to her the way I talk to myself. I ended that unconscious behavior quickly. Exercises that activate the senses and keep you present and connected are the best. Sitting up against a tree, feeling the veins in a leaf, lying in the grass listening to the birds, walking and brushing your dog, keep you present in your body. Start small. Journaling, meditating, and healing sounds can work their way into your daily routines as rituals as you discover what feels best for you. If someone feels emotionally lost or disconnected right now, where should they begin reconnecting with themselves? Embrace a touchstone you already depend on. The only place I felt safe as a child was at the top of a Live Oak in a field near my home in Houston. For others, it might be pounding the pain out in the waves of the ocean, putting your hands in the dirt of your garden, or holding a piece of jewelry gifted by someone you love. Close your eyes and ask, "Tell me what I need to know." Trust whatever surfaces as your first step. For some, the journey from the heart to the head can take a lifetime. No matter what you hear, reach out to someone you know who is safe. If you don't know who that is, close your eyes and ask, "For my highest good, who is safe for me to call?" Then reach out. It may be someone you know, a therapist, a group, a hotline, or an author whose writing made you feel truly seen. I wrote Wolf Wisdom for Recovery and Companion Workbook just for you. At Shadowland, the wolves are our teachers, inspiring transformation in a loving, gentle, and powerful way. We want to give to others what was unavailable to me and Paul as children. The wolves see you and so do we. Discover More: Shadowland Foundation Creating New Neural Pathways Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Colette Duvall Pondella

Written by Angela Dawn, Sex, Love & Relationship Coach Angela Dawn is a Certified Sex, Love & Relationship Coach and a Certified Tantric Sex Coach whose mission is to empower you to find fulfillment in love & life, enrich your intimate relationships, and help couples "get closer." Most couples don't come to me because they've stopped loving each other. They come to me because they've gotten stuck in a pattern that they can't seem to find their way out of. One of the most common patterns I see is the fight or withdraw cycle. One partner gets activated and wants to talk it out, push back, defend, or push for resolution. The other partner shuts down, walks away, goes quiet, or disappears into their phone. Around and around it goes. Each person feels misunderstood. Each person feels alone. Neither of them is really getting through to the other. If this sounds familiar, you're not broken. Your relationship isn't doomed. You're just in a rough season. The truth is that you need a tool to help you get out of the cycle. As a Sex, Love & Relationship Coach, I've been sharing something with my clients lately that I'm calling a Plan for Engagement. It's simple, it's repeatable, and it works when emotions are running hot, and you can already feel the conversation starting to spiral. Why fighting and withdrawing both fail Before I share the plan, it helps to understand what's actually happening in your body during a high-tension moment with your partner. When tension rises, your nervous system reads the situation as a threat. Your body floods with stress hormones. Your heart rate goes up. Blood flow shifts away from the parts of your brain responsible for nuance, empathy, and creative problem-solving, and into the parts that want to fight, flee, or freeze. In a fight-or-flight state, you really cannot have a productive conversation because you’re each responding to a situation that feels threatening. The partner who pushes harder isn't being a jerk, they're trying to deal with a threat. The partner who shuts down isn't being cold, they're trying to survive. Both responses are protective. But neither of them actually helps the two of you connect. So the first job isn't to "communicate better." The first job is to get each of your nervous systems back online. Then you can talk. This idea (that small, deliberate steps are more effective than forcing a big breakthrough) is something I've written about before in my article on Incremental Intimacy. The same principle applies here. You don't fix a hard moment by powering through it. You fix it by slowing down and taking the next small, doable step. Here's the plan I give couples. Practice it when you're not feeling activated, so it's available to you when things are heated. The plan for engagement 1. Call for a time-out Say "We need to take a break," or "I need a time out." Or, pick a safe word together that you both agree to honor. It can be something neutral, even silly, like “Tangerine!” The agreement is when one person says the word, and both people pause. No defending, no last word, no "just one more thing." A 15-minute break, minimum. 2. Use the break to regulate your nervous system This is not the time to mentally rehearse your next argument or scroll through your phone. This is the time to move the stress chemistry out of your body. Walk around the block. Run up and down the stairs. Do push-ups. Take slow, deep breaths. Splash cold water on your face. Whatever helps you come back to yourself. If you can, tell your partner where you're going and what you'll be doing. It helps both of you stay tethered. Example: "I need a break. I'm going to run around the block. I'll meet you on the couch in 15 minutes." 3. Come back together Agree on the place and time in advance. Maybe it's the couch. Maybe it's the kitchen table. It could be a specific time on the clock. The point is that the break has a clear end. That way, neither of you is left wondering whether your partner will ever come back, which could lead to feelings of abandonment for one of you. 4. Decide whether to talk now or talk later This is the step couples often miss. Just because you've calmed down doesn't mean it's the right moment to dive back into the hard conversation. Sometimes you'll both be ready. Sometimes one or both of you need more time. Sometimes it's better to bring it into your next coaching or therapy session. Continued example (on the couch), "I know we need to talk about what happened. Is it okay if we wait until our next session?" or "I'd like to talk about what happened. Is now a good time?" The asking matters. It hands both of you back your agency and signals that this conversation is something you're choosing to have together, not something one of you is forcing on the other. Why this works A break isn't avoidance. This kind of break is the opposite. It's a pause that lets both of you return to the conversation as the people you actually want to be in your relationship. When you practice this system over time, a few things start to shift. You stop dreading hard conversations because you trust you have a way through them. You stop saying things in the heat of the moment, that you have to apologize for later. You start to feel like teammates again, instead of opponents. Most importantly, remember that you're on the same side. If you need more support If you and your partner are caught in a difficult dynamic and you want help breaking the pattern, I want to tell you about an offering I've created for couples who are working on breaking this type of cycle. The Relationship Reset My Relationship Reset session is designed to help couples connect, communicate more deeply, and remember why they chose each other. Through guided exercises in holding space, eye gazing, and heart-centered sharing, you'll leave feeling more present, more understood, and more connected. I offer this on Zoom or in person in Annapolis, Maryland. You can fill out my couples' interest form to get started, or explore my couples' tantra coaching on my website. You don't have to keep doing the same dance. There's a way through, and it starts with one small, intentional step. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Angela Dawn Angela Dawn, Sex, Love & Relationship Coach Angela (she/her) is a Certified Sex, Love & Relationship Coach and a Certified Tantric Sex Coach, dedicated to helping couples get closer. With a wealth of experience in yoga and Tibetan Buddhism, she brings a holistic approach to her coaching. Angela's mission is to empower clients to find fulfillment in love and life, free from societal taboos. Based in Annapolis, Maryland, her unique perspective and extensive training in tantric practices make her the ideal guide for enriching your intimate relationships. Don't wait, the time for the best version of yourself in love and intimacy is now!

Michelle Scolaro is a licensed therapist, transformational coach, retreat leader, and founder of Created Life Consulting, where she helps high-achieving women begin living from a deep place of self-trust, truth, alignment, and stop abandoning themselves. With more than 20 years of experience in the mental health field, Michelle blends clinical expertise with transformational coaching to support women who appear successful on the outside but feel disconnected, depleted, or unsure of themselves within. In this interview, Michelle explores the hidden cost of high-functioning burnout, the subtle ways women learn to override themselves, and why self-trust is essential to creating a life that feels authentic, powerful, and fully one’s own. Michelle Scolaro, Therapist and Transformational Coach What first made you realize that so many high-achieving women are living disconnected from themselves despite appearing successful on the outside? I recognized it because women kept telling me. I have sat with highly accomplished women in therapy sessions, group rooms, workshops, retreats, networking spaces, and personal conversations. I kept hearing different versions of the same experience, “I don’t feel like myself anymore.” Or, “I never used to be this way.” Or, “I feel like I’m just going through the motions.” That is what so many high-achieving women are carrying. They are driven, capable, purpose-filled, and deeply committed to making a difference. But somewhere in the constant pushing, producing, and holding everything together, they begin to lose touch with themselves. Because women in leadership get conditioned to believe they have to become some other version of themselves in order to succeed. Until one day they realize, “I don’t think this is really me.” I recognized it because I had lived it too. At a time when I was performing at a very high level, I looked successful from the outside, but inside I felt depleted, unseen, and disconnected from myself. I think many of us believe we are the only ones feeling that way. We look around and assume everyone else has figured it out. But through my own transformational work, and through sitting in rooms with people who were brave enough to tell the truth, I began to see how universal this experience is. You speak often about self-abandonment rather than just burnout, what does self-abandonment actually look like in everyday life? Self-abandonment often starts with something as simple as going along to get along. It looks like saying yes when your whole body is saying no. It looks like staying quiet to keep the peace, laughing something off when it hurts, or pushing through exhaustion because people are counting on you. Sometimes it is subtle or momentary. The problem is when it becomes a default way of living. You start molding yourself into who you think you need to be in order to succeed, be loved, be respected, or belong. You tell yourself, “If I want to be a leader, I need to have thicker skin.” Or, “If I want to be taken seriously, I need to sound a certain way.” Or, “If I want people to accept me, I can’t be too much, too emotional, too direct, too needy, or too honest.” It is not always dramatic or obvious. Often, it looks like you are being responsible. You look polished. You look professional. Underneath, you have been conditioned to override your true self-expression in order to be acceptable to others. That is self-abandonment. You blend clinical therapy with transformational coaching in your work, where do you see the biggest gap in traditional approaches to burnout recovery? Traditional approaches absolutely have value. As a therapist, I deeply respect clinical tools, nervous system education, stress management, creating healthy boundaries, getting adequate rest, learning and practicing mindfulness, and evidence-based support. Many women need those tools, especially when their bodies have been living in a prolonged state of stress. But I don’t believe burnout is only about doing too much. For many women, burnout is the result of living too far away from themselves for too long. The biggest gap I see is that burnout is often treated as something to manage, rather than something to understand. That is the part I think often gets missed. We can teach a woman to set boundaries, but if she still believes her worth depends on being available, needed, pleasing, or productive, those boundaries will feel unsafe to her nervous system. We can tell her to rest, but if rest brings guilt, anxiety, or a sense that she is failing, rest will not feel restorative. That is where real recovery begins. Not just with better coping, but with having a relationship with yourself where you honor your needs. My work brings together the clinical and the transformational because women need both. They need tools to regulate their nervous systems, but they also need space to ask, Who have I been trying to be, and what would become possible if I stopped abandoning myself. Why do you think so many women confuse being needed, productive, or “good” with being worthy? We live in social systems whose messages teach us that being useful is an easy and safe way to be accepted and to belong. In childhood, we noticed the way adults softened when we behaved, the pride when we achieved, and the tension when we expressed too much need or emotion. Without anyone intending it, we learned that belonging must be earned. Like many women, I grew up believing that my value came from being useful, helpful, dependable, and hardworking. So I learned to anticipate needs, not to ask for too much, and become the strong one, the capable one, the one who could be counted on. Those early experiences become embedded in the nervous system. The body remembers the safety of harmony, compliance, and excellence. It also remembers the discomfort of disappointing others. As we go through life, it can continue to feel like our value increases when we meet expectations and decreases when we take up too much space. This is how core beliefs form. Not only through what we are told, but through what we feel. In adulthood, those qualities keep getting rewarded. In families, workplaces, relationships, and leadership spaces, women are praised for how much they can hold, produce, manage, and tolerate. The more capable you are, the more people rely on you. The more you produce, the more praise you receive. The more you hold, the more trusted you become. So it makes sense that worth starts to feel tied to usefulness. But being needed is not the same as being loved. Being productive is not the same as being fulfilled. This is the part so many women never stop to question, no amount of doing will ever create the feeling of being enough. That feeling has to be remembered from somewhere deeper. One of the most healing truths I have had to learn, and now help other women reclaim, is this, your value does not begin with your usefulness. It comes from your existence. You describe your retreats as more than a wellness escape. What shifts happen when women finally step out of survival mode and begin returning to themselves? When women finally step out of survival mode, their bodies get a chance to stop bracing. They begin to notice how much energy they have been using just to keep functioning, pleasing, performing, and holding everything together. At first, that can feel unfamiliar. Many women are so used to being “on” that slowing down can feel uncomfortable before it feels restorative. But once the nervous system begins to settle, something powerful happens. They can hear themselves again. They start recognizing what they want, what they need, what they have been tolerating, and where they have been overriding their truth. The retreat environment creates space for that awareness to rise without the constant noise of daily responsibility. That is why I created Thrive in Paradise. I designed it as a retreat experience where women can step out of survival mode and return to their lives with more clarity, presence, and self-trust. For me, the retreat is not about escaping life. It is about creating enough space to return to life differently. Women often leave with more softness, energy, and deeper trust in themselves. They begin creating what is next from a place of power and alignment because they finally have room to connect with who they are beneath all the roles they carry. What are the earliest signs that a woman has stopped trusting herself, even if she appears confident and capable? Self-trust is an inside job, so it can be hard to spot outwardly. But there are patterns women can begin to notice in themselves. One early sign is second-guessing. Not the occasional kind. The chronic kind. She outsources her inner authority. She asks everyone what they think, often before making a decision, and then again afterward for confirmation. She over-explains herself. She replays conversations over and over in her head. Another sign is taking longer to make decisions. What may look like procrastination is often fear of making the wrong choice. She may get stuck because she no longer trusts herself to know, choose, or recover if something does not go perfectly. Over time, every choice starts to feel negotiable. She may have spent so long overriding her own voice that she is no longer sure what it sounds like. What looks like indecision may actually be her nervous system no longer feeling safe enough to choose. This can show up outwardly in the language she uses, “We’ll see,” “maybe,” “I’m not sure.” It can also look like deference to others. She answers questions with, “What do you think?” or “I’m fine either way,” even when she does have a preference. On the outside, she may look confident and capable because she knows how to perform confidence. She can lead the meeting, solve the problem, manage the crisis, and make sure everyone else is okay. But internally, there is often a constant negotiation happening, “Was that okay? Did I say too much? Did I disappoint them? Am I allowed to want this?” When a woman doesn’t fully trust herself, she does not lose her ability to function. That is why it can be so hard to see, even for herself. She can still perform. She can still achieve. But she no longer feels anchored in herself. The work of self-trust begins when she starts listening inward again. For someone stuck in chronic over-functioning, what is one practical way to begin reconnecting with themselves again? Chronic over-functioning trains you to stay on alert, keep moving, and keep fixing, even when nothing urgent is happening. The first practice is to pause. Be still long enough to hear what your body is telling you. That may sound simple, but simple does not always mean easy. For someone who is used to over-functioning, stillness can feel uncomfortable. Even unsafe. When your nervous system is accustomed to moving, managing, fixing, and anticipating everyone else’s needs, stopping or even slowing down can feel like you are doing something wrong. That is why nervous system regulation is so important. The body needs to feel safe enough to be heard. A practical place to begin is with a few minutes of intentional stillness each morning. Use whatever time you have to start. If you only have five minutes, use the five minutes. You can build to longer over time. Before reaching for your phone or stepping into the demands of the day, pause. Place a hand on your heart. Notice your breath. Notice sensation. Ask, “What is my body telling me today? What is it asking for?” Somatic movement and body scan meditations are simple, accessible ways to begin this practice. It does not have to be long or complicated. The point is not to do it perfectly. Just do it, and do it consistently. Over time, those few moments of stillness give you something to build on. They help your body begin to experience safety, presence, and connection again, which supports your overall well-being. This practice may seem small, but it matters. This is part of what I explore in my upcoming book, self-trust begins in the small moments where we stop overriding ourselves and start believing that what we feel matters. Your work consistently returns to the idea of living “from truth”, how do you personally define a truthful life? For me, living from truth means living from your own inner knowing rather than performing a version of yourself that was created to please and impress others, or for self-protection. It means checking in with yourself often and asking, Does this choice feel aligned with my values? Does it reflect what I actually want? Is this connected to the life I am creating, or am I living inside someone else’s expectations? That is why I named my company Created Life Consulting. I believe we are all authors of our lives. We are writing our own stories, whether we realize it or not. Living a truthful life means becoming conscious of the story you are writing and having the courage to create it from the inside out, on your terms. It does not mean you always know exactly what comes next. I am constantly evolving, creating, and learning as I go. But I keep returning to myself. I keep asking myself whether the choices I am making feel authentic and aligned. For me, truth is not only intellectual. It is embodied. It is something you feel. Your body often knows when something is off before your mind can explain it. A truthful life is one where you stop abandoning yourself to look good, keep peace, or make everyone else happy. It is remembering that your happiness is your responsibility, and other people’s happiness is theirs. That is not selfish. It is freedom. When you live from that place, life feels more honest, more powerful, and more fully your own. If every high-achieving woman reading this interview remembered one thing about success and self-trust, what would you want it to be? At the heart of my work is a belief that women are at their most powerful when they stop performing and start honoring who they truly are. So many high-achieving women have learned to lead, serve, succeed, and care for others by overriding themselves. They become excellent at holding everything together, but somewhere along the way, they lose touch with their own needs, desires, and inner knowing. Burnout is not a flaw in our wiring. It is often a symptom of self-abandonment baked into how we have been conditioned to lead, serve, and succeed. I believe prioritizing self-care is bold leadership, presence is power, and the body never lies. When a woman stands fully in her power and aligns with her truth, everything opens. Her clarity deepens. Her relationships become more honest. Her impact expands. She feels freer in her own life. So if there is one thing I want women to take from this, it is this, listen to your inner wisdom and trust yourself. That is the doorway. When a woman truly loves, honors, and trusts herself, everything changes. She stops performing for approval. She stops abandoning herself to be chosen. She stops chasing a version of success that was never really hers. From there, she gets to create a life that is rooted in truth, guided by her own wisdom, and big enough to hold her heart, her authenticity, and her bold leadership. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Michelle Scolaro

Written by Pritesh Lohar, Certified Medical Oncologist Dr. Pritesh Lohar, MD, FACP, is a Board Certified Medical Oncologist. He is also a Mindvalley-certified life coach and a six-phase meditation trainer. He is the Founder and CEO of the School of Mindset Coaching. We have long been taught to view anxiety as a systemic glitch - a weakness to be medicated, a flaw to be managed, or a vulnerability that undermines our authority. The conventional self-help industry treats it as a malfunction of the mind. But what if we are misdiagnosing the problem entirely? What if your anxiety isn't a sign of fragility, but a byproduct of high-tier intelligence? For high-performing executives, visionary founders, and deep thinkers, chronic hyper-vigilance is rarely an emotional defect. More often, it is the tax paid by a highly sensitive, hyper-tuned nervous system that is processing more environmental, psychological, and energetic data than the average human biology was designed to handle. You are not broken. You are simply receiving more data than you have the bandwidth to process. Your anxiety is the price of being awake in a world built for sleepwalkers. The physics of information overload To understand this paradigm shift, we must look past traditional psychology and enter the realms of biophysics and neurobiology. Every leader is an information processing engine. Your brain and nervous system constantly scan your environment, reading micro expressions in boardrooms, predicting market shifts, detecting misalignments in team dynamics, and projecting future risks. When you possess a high sensitivity nervous system, your sensory gating, the biological filter that weeds out irrelevant stimuli, is set to an ultra refined threshold. You do not just see the data, you feel the undercurrents. This results in a massive, continuous influx of biological and psychological data: Subconscious pattern recognition: Your brain recognizes systemic anomalies long before they reach conscious awareness. Hyper empathic resonance: You absorb the unexpressed stress, friction, and incoherence of your organization. Neuro electric saturation: The sheer volume of incoming signals creates an internal electrical overload, causing the nervous system to default to a sympathetic, fight or flight state. When this immense volume of data is not consciously translated, the body reads the energetic surplus as a threat. The result is an ambient, buzzing sense of dread. It is not a psychological failure, it is a mechanical bottleneck. It is brilliant intelligence trapped in an un integrated biological circuit. From friction to flow: The data processing matrix To scale your impact without burning out your biology, you must shift from enduring the data to integrating it. Biological State Operational Mode Internal Experience Leadership Outcome Un-Integrated Overload Reactive Hyper-Vigilance Chronic Anxiety & Mental Fog Scattered Focus & Defensive Decision-Making Coherent Integration Grounded Perception Deep Certainty & Clear Vision Strategic Velocity & High-Impact Presence Moving beyond the failure threshold In executive coaching, we often encounter the Failure Threshold, the point where an individual's operational capacity is choked by their own internal resistance. For the highly sensitive leader, this threshold is breached not because of a lack of skill, but due to a lack of biological coherence. When you operate in a state of chronic sensory inundation, your mitochondrial energy is diverted away from cellular repair and high level cognitive synthesis and channeled entirely into survival architecture. You cannot lead a quantum shift in your industry if your biology is trapped in a defensive crouch. The solution is not to turn down your sensitivity. Your sensitivity is your competitive advantage, it is the source of your intuition, your strategic foresight, and your depth of influence. The solution is to build a more robust container to process it. Mastering biological coherence: Three strategic shifts To convert raw, anxious data into clean leadership intelligence, you must upgrade your internal operating system using deliberate biophysical and psychological pattern interrupts. 1. Establish somatic degating Anxiety is data stuck in the body. When you feel the familiar surge of executive anxiety, do not attempt to rationalize it away with logic. Interrupt the loop somatically. Utilize physiological sighs, two quick inhales through the nose followed by a long, extended exhale through the mouth, to instantly shift your autonomic nervous system from sympathetic dominance to parasympathetic regulation. This clears the neural bandwidth so you can actually read the message behind the stress. 2. Practice energetic auditing As a leader, you must differentiate between your stress and the absorbed stress of your environment. Ask yourself, is this anxiety a reflection of my actual reality, or am I processing the unexpressed incoherence of my team or organization. Labeling the data immediately neutralizes its emotional grip on your nervous system. 3. Build a coherent vessel High sensitivity requires high capacity infrastructure. Protect your mitochondrial health. Prioritize circadian alignment, eliminate bio energetic toxins, and create dedicated periods of zero input silence. By upgrading your cellular energy production, you raise your baseline capacity, allowing you to hold massive amounts of environmental data without losing your center. The ultimate leadership metamorphosis The world does not need more desensitized, mechanical managers who move through life on autopilot. The future belongs to the conscious leader, the individual who feels deeply, perceives accurately, and acts decisively. Stop apologizing for your intensity. Stop trying to cure your sensitivity. Your nervous system is not malfunctioning, it is trying to wake you up to a higher level of awareness. When you learn to ground that electric current, your anxiety dissolves, leaving behind something infinitely more powerful, unshakeable, luminous certainty. Follow me on Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Pritesh Lohar Pritesh Lohar, Certified Medical Oncologist Dr. Pritesh Lohar, MD, FACP, is a Board Certified Medical Oncologist. He is also a Mindvalley-certified life coach and a six-phase meditation trainer. He is the Founder and CEO of the School of Mindset Coaching. His goal is to impact as many lives positively as he can by imparting his life experience and coaching skills to others.