Written by Zeljka Cacic-Escalera, Transformation Coach Zeljka is a transformation coach and founder of Day One with Zeljka. She coaches ambitious women through personal and professional change using mindset work, self-leadership, and the body-mind connection. Her mission is to help you take your power back and create a life that finally feels like yours. Many women learn early that saying yes keeps them safe, liked, and loved, and over time that habit pulls them away from who they really are. In this article, I share how trying to please others shaped my own life, from childhood through my career, and why the body often senses the mismatch long before the mind admits it. You will discover three practical tools. The first is to ask yourself, “What would I really say?” The second is to use a simple sentence with three parts to set boundaries with calm and clarity. The third is to make one concrete promise to yourself and put it to the test within seven days. Maybe it was a favor you agreed to with a smile while your stomach tightened. Maybe it was a meeting where you swallowed your opinion because keeping the peace felt easier. If you have ever heard yourself say “No problem, I can take that on” when what you really meant was “I am already at my limit,” this article is for you. Where it started for me I learned to please people long before I knew there was a word for it. As a little girl, I noticed how good it felt when my father was proud of me, and I quickly figured out what I could do to earn that look. I also learned that having friends often meant adjusting myself to them and that giving in to close family members was the fastest way to avoid a confrontation. None of it felt like a decision. It simply felt like being a good girl. That girl grew up and took her strategy with her into her career. Early on, I looked around the room and did what everyone else did because the thought of sticking out in a negative way felt unbearable. As the years went by, I kept saying yes to projects I already knew I would not enjoy because I thought I had to if I wanted to be promoted faster and because being without a project meant being noticed for the wrong reasons. From the outside, I looked successful. On the inside, I was drifting further away from myself with every polite yes. Why we do it and why your body knows first Trying to please others is not a character flaw. It is an intelligent strategy for getting what every human being needs for survival and connection: safety, belonging, and love. For most of human history, being rejected by the group was a real threat to survival, and researchers have found that social rejection activates some of the same brain regions involved in physical pain. Many of us, and women in particular, also grow up being rewarded for being agreeable, helpful, and easy to be around. No wonder we learn early that harmony is the safest road. What we often miss is that the body notices long before the mind does. Imagine your boss sends you a message that reads, “Can we talk briefly tomorrow?” Your rational mind says it is probably nothing. Your body may already have answered with a faster heartbeat, tight shoulders, and shallow breathing. Suddenly, your thoughts are racing. Thoughts, emotions, the nervous system, and behavior are all part of one connected system. That is why a clenched jaw, a sinking stomach, or a held breath at the moment you say “Sure, no problem” is not random. It is information. What your adjusted self costs you When we constantly adapt, we pay for it, and not only emotionally. Resentment builds, we feel unseen, and we slowly lose touch with what we actually want. I want to be careful here because I am not suggesting that every physical symptom comes from trying to please others. But living in permanent tension between what we show and what we feel is stressful, and prolonged stress can show up as tightness and exhaustion. This is why authenticity matters so much. It does not mean saying everything unfiltered. It means that what you show on the outside is no longer in permanent conflict with what you know on the inside. These three tools will help you get there. Tool 1. Ask yourself, “What would I really say?” Think of one situation in your life right now where you are not fully showing up, and take a pen and paper. Then ask yourself three questions. First, what am I actually saying? Often it sounds like “All good,” “No problem,” or “I can handle that.” Second, what am I really thinking or feeling? Perhaps the honest answer is “Honestly, this is too much for me.” Third, what would I say if I were not afraid of the reaction? That third question is where the shift happens. You do not have to say the sentence out loud to anyone. The point is to see the gap between your outer words and your inner truth because you cannot close a gap you have not seen. Notice what your body does when you write down the honest version. Many women describe a deep exhale, as if something had been waiting to be said for a long time. Tool 2. Use the sentence with three parts Many of us avoid honesty because we fear being harsh, difficult, or dramatic. But clarity is not hardness, and a boundary is not a rejection. A simple sentence with three parts can help you speak up with calm and kindness. It begins with “I notice,” followed by “I need” or “I want,” and ends with “Therefore, I will.” Here is how it could sound at work. “I notice that the additional tasks exceed my current capacity. I want to keep the quality of my work high. Therefore, I would like us to prioritize together what really needs to be done by Friday.” In your private life, it might sound like this. “I notice that our conversations are not feeling good to me right now. I need some distance. Therefore, I do not want to continue talking about this today.” Notice that nobody is attacked, nothing is explained more than necessary, and nobody has to apologize. You are simply telling the truth in a way that keeps the door open. Tool 3. Lead yourself with one promise Leading yourself begins with four honest questions. Who am I when I have nothing to prove to anyone? What do I really want? Why have I been holding myself back until now? What is one small step I can take to do things differently, starting today? Once you have your answers, finish the sentence “From today on, I allow myself to.” Perhaps it ends with “say no without justifying myself,” “share my opinion,” “not be available all the time,” or “stop making myself smaller.” Then make it concrete by choosing one situation in the next seven days in which you will try out this new behavior. This last step matters more than it seems. Behavioral science shows that deciding in advance when and where you will act, a technique known as forming an implementation intention, makes you far more likely to follow through than relying on good intentions alone. Inspiration fades, but a plan turns it into action. Leading yourself does not begin with suddenly losing all fear. It begins with learning to take yourself seriously even when the fear is still there. Final thoughts I used to believe that becoming more authentic meant becoming someone new. Today I see it differently. Perhaps it was never about becoming someone else. Perhaps it is about becoming, little by little, the woman you already are underneath the expectations. In my coaching, I support women as they recognize old patterns, rebuild trust in themselves, and make courageous decisions for their lives. If this article spoke to you, consider sharing it with a woman in your life who might need to hear it. If you would like support on your own journey back to yourself, I invite you to connect with me on social media or book a discovery call. You do not have to find your voice alone. Follow me on Instagram and visit my website for more info! Read more from Zeljka Cacic-Escalera Zeljka Cacic-Escalera, Transformation Coach Zeljka is a transformation coach and founder of Day One with Zeljka, with a professional background in international corporate and consulting environments. Years of working in high-performance, results-driven settings shaped her deep understanding of pressure, self-doubt, and identity loss behind outward success. Today, she bridges business acumen with mindset work, self-leadership, and the body-mind connection to support ambitious women through meaningful change. Her mission is to help you take your power back and create a life that finally feels like yours.

Written by Lara Dawn, CEO & Founder of The ADHD Village Lara Dawn, founder of The ADHD Village and ADHD Warrior Mamas, is a 25-year teacher on a mission to transform children's mental health by empowering mothers. She believes parenting is spiritual work, ADHD is a design, not a deficit, and neurodivergent strengths are essential to our AI-driven future. The holidays are supposed to be magical. But what happens when the person creating the magic is running on empty? Between family expectations, financial pressures and children navigating changes in routine, many mothers enter December already exhausted. One unforgettable Christmas morning taught me that the secret to a happier holiday isn't controlling every moment. It's understanding our expectations, regulating our emotions and rediscovering what really matters. Why do mothers feel so overwhelmed during the holidays? Let's be honest. Holidays aren't automatically enjoyable. They're enjoyable because someone puts an extraordinary amount of time, energy and love into making them that way. In many families, that someone is Mom. Think about everything involved in creating the perfect Christmas. The shopping, wrapping, decorating, baking, meal planning, school concerts, family gatherings and endless mental lists. The money you're spending, the work deadlines you're juggling and, of course, at least one relative who's guaranteed to poop on your parade. Now add attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a sprinkling of anxiety, disrupted routines and well-meaning relatives offering unsolicited parenting advice. Suddenly, you've got yourself a festive cocktail that's less merry and more meltdown-inducing. We carry around this Hallmark-inspired vision of Christmas. The perfectly decorated tree, children joyfully opening presents, laughter around the dinner table and everyone getting along. But then reality happens. Sometimes, the person who works the hardest to create the magic is the one who enjoys it the least. I know because I've been that mother. What if, before we spend another holiday season making magic for everyone else, we learn how to turn our own lights ON? That's why I'm bringing together extraordinary Warriors for Turn Your Lights On: A Warrior Mama Experience, a FREE virtual event happening November 9-13. These Warriors haven't lived perfect lives. They've navigated anxiety, trauma, burnout and some of life's toughest challenges. Now they're sharing the practical mental health tools that have helped them move forward. Here's what makes this experience different: You won't just hear their stories. You'll experience their tools. Because you deserve more than another holiday season spent simply surviving. You deserve to experience the magic, too. The Christmas morning I almost ruined I'll never forget one Christmas morning when I was determined to create the perfect family experience. The tree was glowing. Presents were piled high. Everything looked beautiful. I'd imagined my boys slowly and gratefully unwrapping their gifts, savouring each magical moment while I soaked it all in. But that's not how the morning unfolded. My boys were bursting with excitement. Wrapping paper was flying. Gifts were being opened faster than I could keep track of them. My youngest, always the rule-follower, jumped in with a bossy, "Mom said to slow down!" His older brother fired back with a snarky reply. There I was, holding back tears, blurting out the words I wish I'd never said: "Just behave! Don't ruin Christmas! I worked so hard to make this perfect for you!" Oh, the irony. Looking back, I can laugh about it. But at the time, I was exhausted, emotionally overwhelmed and desperately trying to control a moment that wasn't unfolding according to my expectations. My children weren't trying to ruin Christmas. They were excited, happy and experiencing the morning in their own way. I was so busy trying to create my version of Christmas magic that I almost missed theirs. Looking back through the lens of psychology, I now recognize something fascinating about what was happening. How cognitive dissonance can influence our parenting What began as a mismatch between my expectations and reality revealed a deeper psychological conflict known as cognitive dissonance. Psychologist Leon Festinger introduced cognitive dissonance theory in 1957. His landmark 1959 study with James Carlsmith provided experimental support for the idea that inconsistencies between our beliefs and actions can influence our attitudes and responses. In simple terms, cognitive dissonance describes the psychological discomfort we may experience when our beliefs, values or behaviours conflict. There I was, living a very human example of that conflict. I valued connection, joy and unconditional love. Yet my behaviour in that moment was creating tension and disconnection. I wanted my children to experience the magic of Christmas, but I was trying to control exactly what that magic should look like. My expectations had become more important than my intentions. My children weren't failing to experience Christmas properly. They were experiencing it differently from how I'd imagined. The cognitive dissonance wasn't simply that Christmas looked different from my expectations. It was the uncomfortable realization that my actions were no longer aligned with the mother I wanted to be. That distinction matters. Because when we become aware of the gap between our values and our reactions, we have an opportunity to make a different choice. Instead of asking, "How do I get my children to behave the way I expect?" I began asking, "How can I respond in a way that reflects the parent I want to be?" That question became part of a much bigger transformation in my life. Why parental mental health must come first For years, I believed that if everyone else was happy, I'd be happy too. I was a teacher for 25 years, including a decade in special education. I was raising two boys, managing a busy household and navigating my own mental health challenges, although I didn't receive my ADHD diagnosis until I was 40. From the outside, I appeared capable and successful. But I was often exhausted, overwhelmed and giving everyone else the best of me while leaving very little for myself. Eventually, I experienced burnout severe enough that I couldn't continue working. Through that experience, I learned something that fundamentally changed the way I approach parenting. We cannot keep expecting overwhelmed mothers to create calm, connected families without supporting their own physical, mental and emotional wellbeing. In 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General's advisory on parental mental health highlighted the significant stress experienced by parents. Among the findings, 48% of parents surveyed reported that their stress felt completely overwhelming on most days, compared with 26% of other adults. Those findings weren't specific to the holiday season or neurodivergent families, but they reinforce something I've witnessed throughout my career. Parents need support, too. That's why I created Turn Your Lights On: A Warrior Mama Experience, a free virtual mental health experience happening November 9-13, 2026. I've brought together extraordinary Warriors who have navigated their own darkness, including experiences of anxiety, trauma, illness, rejection and burnout, and discovered practical ways to nurture their mental health. Each Warrior will share a personal mental health "weapon," a strategy or practice they use in their own lives, and guide participants through an experience so they can explore the tool for themselves. Because hearing someone tell you to breathe, establish boundaries or practise self-compassion is one thing. Experiencing a tool and beginning to practise it is something entirely different. Before the holiday season begins, I want mothers to have more than good intentions. I want them to have tools they can actually use. Why holidays can be challenging for neurodivergent families For many children with ADHD, autism or anxiety, the very experiences that make the holidays exciting can also make them overwhelming. Think about how much changes in December. School routines become unpredictable. There are parties, visitors, unfamiliar foods, bright lights, late nights and increased social expectations. Some children may find the anticipation and excitement difficult to manage. Others may experience sensory overload, struggle with unexpected changes or need additional time to transition between activities. Of course, every child is different. Many neurodivergent children love the novelty and excitement of the holidays. Others enjoy particular traditions but need accommodations to participate comfortably. The goal isn't to make children fit our holiday expectations. It's to create celebrations that respect the people participating in them. Now imagine a child who has spent the entire school day managing sensory input, navigating social expectations and working hard to meet the demands of their environment. They arrive home with very little capacity left for additional demands. Who's waiting for them? A mother who has spent her own day working, managing responsibilities and holding herself together. Two overwhelmed nervous systems. One very busy household. What looks like defiance may be a sign that a child is struggling with the demands of the moment. What looks like an impatient mother may be someone whose own resources are depleted. Neither needs more judgment. Both need support. 3 mental health tools for a happier holiday season The goal isn't to eliminate every challenge or create a perfectly peaceful family. It's to develop the awareness, flexibility and tools that help us navigate challenges with greater compassion. 1. Replace perfect expectations with meaningful connection Before the holiday season begins, ask yourself a simple question: How do I want my family to feel this Christmas? Connected? Loved? Accepted? Joyful? Relaxed? Now look at your holiday plans. Are the traditions you're trying to maintain supporting those feelings, or are they creating unnecessary stress? Maybe you order the cookies instead of baking them. Maybe you skip a gathering that leaves everyone depleted. Maybe Christmas dinner looks nothing like the one you grew up with. Maybe your children open their presents at their own pace, even if it's nothing like the magical moment you imagined. The magic isn't in everyone following the script. It's in creating an experience where everyone feels welcome to be themselves. 2. Protect everyone's capacity, including your own Some children benefit from visual schedules, advance preparation and predictable routines. Others may need movement breaks, sensory accommodations, quieter celebrations or the freedom to opt out of particular activities. Ask your child what they enjoy, what feels difficult and what would help them participate comfortably. But don't forget to ask yourself those same questions. Are you getting enough sleep? Are you eating regularly? Are you allowing yourself moments of rest? Have you planned any time to do something that genuinely brings you joy? Perhaps most importantly, are you sharing the responsibility for creating the holiday experience? For years, I thought self-care was something I'd earn after everyone else's needs were met. Now I understand that nurturing my own wellbeing helps me have greater capacity for the people I love. Self-care isn't selfish. It's one of the least selfish things we can do. 3. Practise your SWITCH before the chaos One of the greatest lessons I've learned is that understanding emotional regulation and practising it during a difficult moment are two very different things. That's why I developed my SWITCH Method, which helps us pause, reconnect with our wisdom and make more conscious choices. When I notice myself becoming overwhelmed, I begin by stopping. I pay attention to what's happening in my body. I notice my thoughts and the expectations influencing my reactions. Then I ask myself two questions. Are my actions aligned with my values? Or am I reacting to an expectation that isn't being met? Sometimes I need to breathe. Sometimes I need to step outside. Sometimes I need to recognize that I'm trying to control something that doesn't actually need controlling. Sometimes I still lose my patience. That's when I take responsibility, repair the connection and keep practising. Regulating our own emotions doesn't guarantee that our children won't struggle. Their experiences are real, and their needs deserve support regardless of how calm we are. But developing our own emotional regulation skills can help us respond with greater awareness and compassion. This is why practice is central to my work. Transformation doesn't come from simply collecting information. It comes from putting what we learn into practice, repeatedly, especially when life becomes challenging. This year, let Mom experience the magic, too When I think back to that Christmas morning, I no longer see two children disrupting my carefully planned celebration. I see two little boys overflowing with excitement. A mother who was so exhausted and attached to her expectations that she couldn't fully enjoy the moment unfolding in front of her. My boys didn't need me to orchestrate the perfect Christmas. They needed me to be present enough to enjoy the Christmas we were actually having. I deserved to enjoy it, too. I still love traditions. I love creating beautiful memories. I love seeing my family happy. But I've learned that joy doesn't come from controlling every detail. It comes from creating space for connection, respecting our different needs and allowing ourselves to be human. So this year, before you spend another holiday season making magic for everyone else, I invite you to turn your own lights ON. Join me November 9-13 for the free Turn Your Lights On: A Warrior Mama Experience. You'll meet extraordinary Warriors, hear the stories behind their accomplishments and experience practical mental health tools that you can begin integrating into your own life. Because your family doesn't need a picture-perfect Christmas. They deserve a celebration where everyone has room to be themselves. Mama, that includes you. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Lara Dawn Lara Dawn, CEO & Founder of The ADHD Village Lara Dawn is the founder of The ADHD Village and visionary behind ADHD Warrior Mamas, a global movement transforming children's mental health by empowering mothers. A teacher for 25 years with a degree in Psychology and expertise in Special Education, emotional intelligence, women's positive psychology, somatic healing, and neuro transformation, she bridges science and spirituality. Diagnosed with ADHD at 40, Lara challenges conventional parenting beliefs with a bold philosophy: Parenting is spiritual work, and ADHD is a design, not a deficit. She champions neurodivergent creativity and innovation as essential strengths in our AI-driven future. Her mission is to awaken mothers' inner wisdom and redefine parenting for generations to come.

Written by Chelsey Gilbert, Trauma-Informed Bodyworker, Educator & Podcaster Chelsey Gilbert is a licensed massage therapist with nearly 10 years of experience, a trauma-informed somatic bodyworker, holistic wellness educator and host of the Transformative Talks Podcast. Through hands-on therapies, virtual services and creating educational content, she is driven to help others on their healing journey. Massage and bodywork can be utilized for more than just relaxation or an occasional treat. For someone with a history of trauma, or for someone looking to deepen their healing and wellness journey, feeling comfortable with touch may require additional communication, flexibility, and trust. That is where a trauma-informed approach comes in. Trauma-informed bodywork recognizes that past experiences can influence how someone responds to touch, positioning, the treatment environment, and interactions with a practitioner. It places your comfort, choices, and boundaries at the center of the session. It also takes into consideration any current mental health or other treatments. What it means to be trauma-informed In massage therapy and somatic bodywork, being trauma-informed means recognizing that the body and nervous system may respond to touch, environment, and social connections based on previous experiences. A trauma-informed bodyworker intentionally creates a supportive environment through clear communication, informed consent, respect for boundaries, and an awareness of nervous system responses. The goal is not to uncover or diagnose anything. It is also necessary to understand the boundaries of this approach. One of the most important things to remember is that bodywork is not mental health therapy. A massage therapist’s trauma-informed training does not qualify them to diagnose mental health conditions, provide psychotherapy, or interpret your experiences. Additional bodywork education does not replace the professional qualifications required to practice mental health care. Unless a practitioner also holds the appropriate mental health license and is explicitly providing that separate service, their work should remain within their bodywork scope of practice. A trauma-informed practitioner should also not deliberately trigger you, pressure you to revisit painful experiences, or promise to “release trauma” from your body. You do not need to share your trauma history to have your boundaries respected. You also do not need to cry, experience an emotional breakthrough, or have an intense physical response for a session to be meaningful. Sometimes people believe that bodywork must hurt or feel overwhelming to be effective. But discomfort is not a measure of progress. Your session does not have to be intense to be valuable. Feeling comfortable enough to rest, notice a sensation, or ask for an adjustment can be an important experience in itself. Communication is key Clear, ongoing communication is a central part of trauma-informed bodywork. Before a session, your practitioner may ask about your goals, preferences, relevant health history, and anything that would help you feel more comfortable. Some intake questions may explore sensitivities or previous experiences with bodywork. The practitioner should explain why the information is relevant, and you can ask questions or decline to discuss personal details. During the session, communication should remain open. Some examples of what can be communicated: More or less pressure. A change in positioning, draping, or technique. That a particular area be avoided. More explanation, or less conversation. A pause or an end to the session. Emotional distress caused by working on a particular area. A need for hands-off time to process. Consent and preference are an ongoing conversation. Agreeing to something at the beginning does not mean you have to continue if your comfort changes. You do not need to push through an unpleasant experience to be a “good client.” If you do have trouble communicating, a good trauma-informed bodyworker may pick up on your body’s cues and open a curiosity-driven dialogue. Awareness of stress response Sometimes we don’t know how to communicate something, or our subconscious is giving us signals that we don’t pick up on immediately. This is why having an understanding and awareness of what an activated nervous system looks like is part of trauma-informed care. A practitioner with trauma-informed training should have an understanding of how stress and overwhelm can affect a person’s experience of touch. For example, someone might become restless, tense, unusually quiet, or feel disconnected during a session. These responses can have many explanations, so a practitioner should check in rather than assume they know what is happening. You may also hear the term “window of tolerance” connected to the topic of being trauma-informed. This describes the range in which a person feels able to stay present and manage what they are experiencing. In bodywork, the practical goal is to choose a pace and approach that feels manageable for you. That might mean slowing down, changing techniques, offering a different position, or stopping touch altogether. A practitioner can work to create a supportive environment, but only you can describe whether it feels comfortable to you. Building trust with boundaries Trauma-informed care recognizes that your preferences and comfort matter throughout the appointment. You might prefer to remain clothed, avoid certain areas, keep your eyes open, or know what the practitioner plans to do before they begin. Those preferences deserve a respectful conversation. The practitioner should explain the available options and any limits to what they can provide. Together, you can decide whether the proposed session meets your needs. Trust develops through consistent actions: listening, asking permission, respecting a “no,” and adjusting when something does not feel right. Boundaries can also change over time. For someone coming into a session with a history of physical abuse, light touch or off-body modalities may be preferred. With time, as trust is built, that same person may begin to feel more comfortable with firmer pressure or traditional massage techniques. No matter the boundary, even if it seems small, it should be honored. Knowing when to refer out to other practitioners Bodywork can be one part of a broader support system. It cannot meet every physical, emotional, or mental health need. A practitioner who recognizes the limits of their role may suggest another qualified professional when appropriate. This could include a licensed mental health clinician, medical provider, physical therapist, or another practitioner whose expertise fits your goals. Some signs that a bodyworker may need to refer a client to another practitioner could include: A plateau in progress. A client’s need for verbal processing increases. Noticing gaps in a client’s care between sessions. A client requesting treatments outside the bodyworker’s scope of practice. A client directly asking for referrals. If a bodyworker does refer a client out, it does not mean the client cannot continue care with the bodyworker. The client can choose to continue, take a break, or move on altogether. The intention is always to act in the client’s best interest. Finding a trauma-informed bodyworker For someone looking to connect with a trauma-informed practitioner, a little bit of time and research is all that is needed. Browsing websites and social media can be a good start. A website description can be informative, but a consultation gives you an opportunity to learn how a practitioner applies their training. During a consultation, consider asking: What trauma-informed education have you completed? How do you handle consent and check-ins during sessions? Can I remain clothed or request that certain areas be avoided? What happens if I feel overwhelmed or want to stop? How do you determine when another professional’s support may be appropriate? Notice how the practitioner responds. Are they open to questions? Do they explain their approach clearly? Do you feel comfortable expressing a preference or concern? The right fit may also change over time. Choosing another practitioner or deciding that bodywork is not what you need right now is completely valid. Trauma-informed bodywork makes room for you to participate in your care while supporting the possibility for deeper work to be done. If you are looking to learn more or connect with holistic practitioners, check out the Empowered Healing Community or tune into the Transformative Talks Podcast. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Chelsey Gilbert Chelsey Gilbert, Trauma-Informed Bodyworker, Educator & Podcaster Chelsey Gilbert is a licensed massage therapist, trauma-informed somatic bodyworker, and holistic wellness educator with a passion for helping others reconnect with their mind, body, and spirit. Through her own healing journey and personal experience living with complex PTSD, Chelsey has developed a deep understanding of the importance of self-awareness, compassion, and creating safe spaces for healing and personal growth. She founded Transformative Wellness and created the Empowered Healing Community with the intention of empowering others to navigate their own unique healing journeys, along with hosting the Transformative Talks podcast.

Written by Dragana Favre, Psychiatrist & Jungian Psychotherapist Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert. A feeling may pass while the pattern organising it remains. Jungian complexes and a mathematical idea called a kernel offer a way to think about why we get stuck in some emotional situation and what it might mean to change. Imagine an ordinary evening. You send a message to someone you love. They read it. No reply arrives. You put the phone down, make tea, pick it up again. Within minutes, the silence has acquired a meaning. Perhaps you have become tiresome. Perhaps something has changed between you. Soon you are angry. That person has just ghosted me! Then you are embarrassed by your anger. You imagine all kinds of justifications: maybe he or she has died, had an accident, or been kidnapped! You sound ridiculous to yourself. You decide you will stop caring, which lasts approximately as long as it takes to check the phone again. Let us stay with this imagined scene, because something interesting is happening. Several emotions have come and gone, yet the situation still has only one convincing explanation: you are about to be left. How much has really changed between the anxiety, the anger, and the withdrawal? Emotionally, quite a lot. In the organisation of the experience, perhaps very little. Jung's account of complexes gives us a way to approach this peculiar mixture of movement and repetition. A complex gathers memories and images around a strong emotional charge and can acquire a degree of autonomy from our conscious intentions. We may understand a situation perfectly well in the morning and find that understanding strangely unavailable by evening. In our example, an abandonment complex would involve much more than the thought that someone might leave. The body tightens. Earlier disappointments become easier to recall. An affectionate exchange from yesterday suddenly seems less convincing. Attention keeps returning to the unanswered message. A whole version of the relationship takes shape around the silence. I find it useful to think of such a complex as an affective and embodied attractor: a configuration towards which experience repeatedly tends. Here, an attractor can include a family of related states. Anxiety, accusation, shame, and retreat may all belong to it. Moving between them can feel exhausting while leaving the underlying expectation almost untouched. The mathematical idea of a metastable region offers one possible way of making this more precise. A process can keep moving within a region while transitions beyond it remain comparatively rare. Applying that idea to a Jungian complex is a hypothesis. Its value would depend on whether it helps us describe something we can actually observe. An unexpected companion to this line of thought comes from the work of Donald Hoffman and his collaborators, now developed at the Trace Institute. Their research uses Markov kernels to describe transitions between possible experiences. The word sounds more forbidding than the basic idea. A kernel assigns probabilities to what can happen next, given a current state. Imagine a deliberately simple model containing only calm, curiosity, and fear. From fear, another moment of fear might be more likely than curiosity. From curiosity, a movement towards calm might become easier. These are illustrative possibilities, not measured facts about emotions. The state tells us where we are. The kernel describes the probabilities of the next step. In “Fusions of Consciousness”, Hoffman, Chetan Prakash, and Robert Prentner connect kernels for perception, decision, and action into what they call a qualia kernel, describing a sequence of experiences. Their larger theory treats consciousness as fundamental. That is a theoretical commitment; a matrix of probabilities cannot establish it. The Institute also presents its proposed links to the foundations of physics as conjectures. What interests me here is a more limited possibility: could this mathematical language help describe the paths through which a complex sustains itself? A complex would not simply be a kernel. In the connection proposed here, the kernel describes transitions, while the complex is the recurring organisation those transitions help maintain. The distinction matters. It keeps a psychological concept from becoming a mathematical label without gaining any precision. There is also a condition we should take seriously. In a Markov model, the fully specified present state contains all the information from the past needed to predict the next step. Calling someone “afraid” is unlikely to describe that state sufficiently. Their expectations, bodily condition, and present relationship may matter enormously. A useful model would have to account for these, and test whether its assumptions hold. Another idea in the Trace researchers' work concerns what is available to an observer. A trace chain follows successive visits to a selected subset of states. Suppose a wider process moves among A, B, C, and D, but an observer registers only A and D. The transitions they observe can still carry the influence of passages through B and C. This suggests an analogy with a familiar difficulty in understanding ourselves. We remember being comfortable at dinner, then furious on the way home. Between those moments there may have been a tightening in the chest, a slight feeling of exclusion, an image we barely noticed, and an assumption we never put into words. The mathematical result does not demonstrate a theory of the unconscious. It does, however, give us a useful question: what happened along the way that our account of the evening leaves out? Sometimes careful attention changes the story from “I became angry for no reason” to something much more specific. We begin to recognise a sequence. That sequence may include a real injury, an old expectation, or both. Understanding it requires attention to what actually happened between people, as well as to what happened within us. Let’s return to the unanswered message. How readily does the possibility of abandonment become dominant? Once present, how long does it organise the evening? How much authority does it acquire over what we remember and do? And can anything that happens next modify it? That last question is easily overlooked. The eventual reply might bring relief, yet leave the expectation of abandonment ready for the next silence. Alternatively, an ordinary explanation might gradually become something we can remember and trust during a later wait. New information has arrived in both cases. Its place in future experience may be very different. Psychic weight also deserves its own attention. A passing remark can reorganise an entire day. Counting how often a thought occurs would miss something essential if we ignored how strongly it directs attention and action. The body belongs inside this account. Our imagined evening unfolds through breathing, muscular tension, the urge to move, the difficulty of sitting still. A useful model would need to connect these changing conditions with memory and the relationship itself, across different timescales. A single brain rhythm could not, on its own, identify the meaning of this complex. Can an experience remain open long enough to acquire another meaning? Fear may initially leave room for only one conclusion. With sufficient support, we may become able to stay in contact with the feeling while allowing the other person, and the situation, to surprise us. Let’s now imagine the same person some time later, waiting for another reply. The first tightening still comes. They recognise the urge to check the phone. For a while, the old explanation feels persuasive. Then something else becomes possible. They remember that this person sometimes reads messages between appointments. They notice that they are particularly tired today. They can acknowledge wanting reassurance without immediately accusing, apologising, or disappearing. They might eventually ask a direct question about the silence. There is no guarantee that the answer will be comforting. Relationships can be unreliable; people do leave. Greater psychological freedom includes being able to recognise that reality and respond to it. It would be a poor form of therapy that taught someone to explain away every injury as their own complex. Within the model proposed here, a deeper change would appear as a shift in the probabilities of these responses across comparable situations. We would need repeated observations to distinguish that shift from a single good evening. Does fear more often allow reflection? Can uncertainty remain uncertainty for a little longer? Does a new experience influence what happens next time? Jungian work adds a further dimension to these questions. A recurring image or dream can give a form to something that has previously been lived through without much room for reflection. In an imagined example, someone dreams of waiting outside a locked house. Exploring their associations might bring loneliness into relation with anger, longing, or a wish for a home of their own. The image need not have one fixed interpretation. Its value may lie in the relationships it makes possible within experience. This is how I would approach individuation here: as a developing relationship with the forces that organise us. The complex can continue to carry a history and a vulnerability. We may still recognise its arrival. Yet it can gradually take a different place in a life that has other concerns and possibilities. The phone is still silent. There is no certainty about when it will light up. But the person waiting can return to the conversation at the table, or remember the tea they made. The unanswered message remains part of the evening. Other things have become possible again. Follow me on LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Dragana Favre Dragana Favre, Psychiatrist & Jungian Psychotherapist Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert. Her unique approach combines Jungian psychotherapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and dream interpretation, guiding patients towards self-discovery and healing. Beyond her profession, Dr. Favre is passionate about science fiction, nature, and cosmology. Her ex-Yugoslav roots in the small town of Kikinda offer a rich backdrop to her life's journey. She is dedicated to helping people find their true selves, much like an alchemist turning lead into gold. References: Jung, C. G. A review of the complex theory. In The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 8, The structure and dynamics of the psyche. Essay originally published in 1934 and revised in 1948. Hoffman, D. D., Prakash, C., & Prentner, R. (2023). Fusions of Consciousness. Entropy, 25(1), 129. Hoffman, D., Prakash, C., & Chattopadhyay, S. (2025). Traces of Consciousness. Preprint, version dated September 5, 2025. Trace Institute. Research programme. Accessed October 15, 2026.

Written by Ben Crowther, Founder of Crow Flies Growth Systems & Co-Founder of Aiden Solutions Ben Crowther is the founder of Crow Flies Growth Systems and co-founder of Aiden Solutions. He helps businesses replace static websites and fragmented marketing with AI-powered growth systems built to convert, support and scale. Businesses can spend heavily on a new website, then leave it largely unchanged until the next rebuild. Ben Crowther argues for a more useful approach: a connected system that improves as the business learns what customers need. I think the five-year website has had its day. By that, I mean the habit of building a website, launching it, then barely touching it until somebody decides it looks old. You spend a decent chunk of money. Everyone is excited for a few weeks. Then the website slips down the list until, four or five years later, you start the whole exercise again. The website itself still has a job to do. In plenty of businesses, it could be doing a much better one. With the right information and connections, it can help customers find answers, narrow down options, prepare an enquiry and reach the right person. It can also pass useful information into the systems your team already uses. Once you start thinking about it that way, launch day should be the beginning of the work. It shouldn't be the best it ever gets. Ask what business customers need A clear, well-built website with useful information and an easy way to get in touch is still valuable. I don't think every business needs a complicated platform. But I'd put a different question at the start of a website project. Before asking how many pages we need, ask what somebody needs to be able to do here. Choose a product? Understand a service? Find out whether you cover their area? Give you enough information to prepare a sensible quote? That changes the brief. You might still end up with Home, About, Services and Contact. Fine. Those pages should help a customer move forward, rather than simply tick off the sitemap. Use the knowledge you have A business can have experienced staff, years of customer conversations, technical documents and a detailed product catalogue. Then somebody visits its website and gets six marketing pages and a contact form. There's a fairly obvious gap there. Take a customer looking for equipment for a touring vehicle. They may know what they drive, what they carry and how they use it. They probably don't know how your catalogue is organised. A useful website could collect that context, point them towards relevant information and flag what needs checking with a qualified person. It shouldn't confidently recommend a safety-critical setup because a language model produced a convincing answer. The starting point is the information your business is comfortable making available. Keep it accurate, current and clearly separated from confidential material. Work out who owns it and who checks it. Without that work, adding AI mostly gives an incomplete website a more talkative interface. Search is raising expectations Google began rolling out AI Mode in Australia in October 2025. In its announcement, Google said early testers were asking questions nearly three times the length of traditional search queries. That is Google's report about its own users, not proof that everyone wants a conversation with every website. But it is a useful signal. Compare "accountant Penrith" with "I run a building company in Western Sydney and keep finding out my tax position too late. What sort of accountant should I be looking for?" The second question gives a business much more to work with. I expect people who get useful answers that way to become less patient with websites that make them hunt through menus. Some will still prefer browsing or picking up the phone. Give them a clear route too. Look behind the chatbot I suspect we'll see plenty of websites add a chatbot, put a little sparkle next to it and call the job done. The useful questions sit behind the interface. What information can it use? What happens when it doesn't know? Can the customer reach a person? What is it actually allowed to do? Imagine someone arrives at 9.30 pm with a service enquiry. A properly configured system could answer routine questions from approved information, collect the details your team needs and create a lead in your customer relationship management system. It could include a conversation summary and route the enquiry to the right person. The next morning, that person has something useful to work with instead of starting again. That's an example of what can be built, not a promise that any chatbot does it out of the box. The connections need testing. The customer needs to know what happens next. A failed handover needs to be visible. And answering a question is different from committing the business to a price, booking or technical recommendation. Decide where approval is required before giving a system the ability to act. Start with frustrating work The Australian Bureau of Statistics put reported AI use at 12% in its 2024-25 survey of employing businesses. That tells us something about adoption. It doesn't tell us whether the businesses improved. You can buy another subscription and still have the same problem. You can also make a bad process faster. I'd start by looking at where customers or staff get stuck. Which questions keep coming up? Where are people entering information twice? Where does an enquiry sit because nobody is sure who owns it? Then choose the simplest useful fix. It might be AI. It might be ordinary automation, a better form or rewriting a terrible page. AI isn't a religion. Use it where it makes sense. Connect the next step A website's job shouldn't automatically end when somebody presses Submit. If the customer then gets asked the same questions again, waits while information is copied between systems and has to chase a reply, the experience still needs work. This is where I think the traditional agency model can get in the way. Websites, search, content, advertising and CRM are often sold and managed separately. The customer has no interest in how we've divided up the invoice. They find the business, decide whether it looks credible, make contact and judge what happens next. I use the term living growth system for the connected work behind that experience: the website, useful business information, lead handling, follow-up and the people responsible for it. You don't need to replace everything at once. Connect the part that is causing a real problem, then decide whether the next improvement is worth doing. Improve after the launch This is the part that matters most to me. Six months after launch, the website should be more useful than it was on day one. That improvement won't happen because somebody calls it intelligent. Someone has to review the questions customers ask, fix weak answers, remove old information and check that enquiries reach the right place. I'd give that work an owner, a realistic budget and a regular place in the calendar. A monthly review is a sensible starting point for many businesses, with urgent corrections handled sooner. Look at a few measures that match the problem you're fixing. Are customers completing the enquiry? Are the details useful? How long does a human response take? Is the team spending less time re-entering information? Measure against where you started. If a new feature creates more confusion or extra work, change it or remove it. Continuous improvement also doesn't mean endless tinkering. Keep what works. A rebuild may still be justified when the existing platform is insecure, difficult to maintain or genuinely holding the business back. Its birthday alone isn't a compelling reason. Keep people involved I want good salespeople spending time on useful conversations. I want technical experts handling the questions that need their judgement. I don't want either of them stuck repeating information a customer could already have been given. Keep a straightforward way to reach a person. Make the handover carry the context, so customers don't have to explain themselves all over again. Review mistakes rather than assuming a confident answer was a correct one. The system needs to support the people doing the work. Otherwise you've just given them something else to manage. Follow one customer journey Before commissioning your next website, follow one enquiry from the customer's first question to the point where someone in the business takes responsibility for it. Write down where the customer gets stuck, what information is missing and what your team has to do manually. Pick one problem, agree what better would look like and fix it. Then check whether it helped. You may discover that the website needs rebuilding. You may discover that the existing one needs better information and a few sensible connections. Either way, you'll have a better brief than "make it look more modern". That's what I mean by moving beyond the five-year website. Build something useful, keep it accurate and give it the attention it needs to improve. Launch it. Just don't abandon it. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Ben Crowther Ben Crowther, Founder of Crow Flies Growth Systems & Co-Founder of Aiden Solutions Ben Crowther is an Australian entrepreneur, marketing strategist and artificial intelligence (AI) advocate focused on how technology is changing the way businesses attract, convert and support customers. He is the founder of Crow Flies Growth Systems and co-founder of Aiden Solutions, a knowledge and customer support platform powered by AI. His work combines digital strategy, search engine optimisation (SEO), answer engine optimisation (AEO), generative engine optimisation (GEO), automation and conversational AI to turn traditional websites into active business systems. Ben is particularly interested in the shift from static online brochures toward intelligent digital experiences that can sell, answer questions and support customers around the clock. Through his writing, he explores AI, entrepreneurship, marketing and the future of digital business.

Written by Florentina Gionea, Spiritual Mentor for Leaders Florentina Gionea is a spiritual mentor for leaders, featured on Fox TV USA, Forbes, and the TEDx stage. Author of The Blissful Leader book and backed by 16 years of intense practice, she blends business with spirituality to help leaders clear blocks and build their next legacy. Access her Blissful Leader Toolkit. Discover the 7-layer Blissful Leader Matrix, a concentric framework that transforms how leaders align inner energy with outer impact and legacy. Most leadership advice starts at the wrong layer. It jumps straight to strategy, team dynamics, and revenue targets, skipping the one thing that determines whether any of that actually works: you, the person at the center of it all. If your energy is misaligned, your business feels like dragging a boulder uphill. The results come slowly. The relationships feel draining. The legacy stays a distant idea you never quite reach. The Blissful Leader Matrix is a different map entirely, and you can find it in detail in The Blissful Leader, available worldwide on Amazon. It moves from the inside out, starting with your own essence, moving through every circle of relationship and responsibility, and culminating in something most leaders never plan for: divine integration. By the time you finish reading, you will know exactly which layer is costing you the most right now, and what to do about it. Layers 1-4: The inner foundation every leader must build first Before strategy, before systems, before scale, there are four layers you have to get right. Skip them and you'll keep hitting invisible ceilings. Work them in order and everything above them gets easier. Here's what each layer asks of you, and one thing you can do today to start. Layer 1: The center, rediscovering you You are the nucleus. Every decision, relationship, and result in your life radiates outward from who you are at your core, not your title, not your revenue, not your brand. Your essence. Most leaders never audit this layer. They stack achievement on top of unexamined wounds, wonder why success still feels hollow, and call it burnout. Leadership burnout jumped from 52% in 2023 to 56% in 2024, and most of that isn't a workload problem. It's an alignment problem. When you're running on borrowed identity instead of your real one, the engine burns hot and produces nothing clean. The work here is honest and often uncomfortable: naming the dreams you quietly abandoned, tracing the patterns that repeat across every failure, and separating who you are from who you learned to perform. Self-sabotage lives in this gap. Your action: Write down one pattern, in business, money, or relationships, that keeps repeating. Trace it back to the first time you remember feeling that same feeling. That's the root. You can't clear what you haven't named. Layer 2: Family and insiders These are the people who see you before coffee. They hold your unguarded moments, your oldest stories, and often your most entrenched triggers. The question isn't whether they affect your energy, they do, daily, it's whether you're managing that exchange consciously. Family and insiders can be your greatest sanctuary or your greatest drain, sometimes both in the same afternoon. A regulated leader doesn't wait to feel drained before setting an energetic boundary. Your action: Identify one relationship in this layer that consistently leaves you depleted. Decide one boundary, a conversation you'll stop having, a time of day you'll protect, and hold it for seven days. Layer 3: Friends and mastermind groups Your frequency rises or falls to match the room. This layer is the one you actually choose, which means you carry full responsibility for it. The right friends challenge your thinking without threatening your peace. A good mastermind doesn't just celebrate your wins, it calls out the story you're telling yourself about why you're stuck. Your action: Audit your top five recurring conversations. Are they expanding your vision or recycling your current limitations? If the same complaints surface every week, the room needs to change. Layer 4: Relatives and social life You didn't choose your relatives. They show up at holidays carrying old dynamics, unsolicited opinions, and energy that doesn't always match where you're going. The social sphere around them, events, community circles, extended networks, is similarly unchosen. This layer teaches adaptability. You don't have to absorb every environment you enter. You can show up, contribute, and leave with your frequency intact, but only if you've done the inner work in Layers 1 through 3 first. Your action: Before your next family or social gathering, set a clear internal intention: I am here to connect, not to be reshaped. Notice how that single decision changes the way you hold yourself in the room. Four layers, four actions, one audit you can start today. Once this foundation is solid, everything built on top of it, your business, your legacy, your divine integration, actually holds. Layers 5-7: From business impact to legacy to divine integration The inner work was never the destination. It was the preparation. Layers 5 through 7 are where everything you've cleared, aligned, and strengthened gets aimed at something larger than yourself, your community, your legacy, and finally, a way of leading that feels less like effort and more like expression. Layer 5: Your business and community impact Your business is not separate from your calling. It is your calling made visible. This layer is where your gifts meet the world's need, what the Blissful Leader Matrix calls your sacred contract. You are not just selling a service or scaling revenue. You are healing, inspiring, and lifting people who are exactly where you once were. That is not a metaphor. It is a leadership model. 86% of people expect business leaders to lead on societal problems that affect them, more than public leaders. People are hungry for leaders with real substance, not just reach. The question Layer 5 puts to you: Where can your energy create the most impact right now? Answer it honestly, then act on it this week. Layer 6: Crafting a lasting legacy Legacy is not built at the end of a career. It is built in the decisions you make today when no one is watching. Most leaders avoid thinking about legacy because it feels abstract or distant. But it is the most clarifying filter you have. When you know what you want to leave behind, your priorities sort themselves. Right now, before you read another word, write down three immediate steps you can take toward the legacy you want to build. They might look like starting that book, reaching out to a potential mentoring partner, or defining the community you most want to serve. Keep the list somewhere visible. Review it every Monday. Layer 7: Divine integration This is the outermost ring, and the quietest one. It is not a technique. It is a state. Divine integration is what happens when the other six layers are working: intuition and strategy stop competing. You make decisions faster and they feel right longer. Leadership stops being something you do and becomes something you are. The calendar, the client calls, the business systems, they all move in the same direction because you do. This is not mystical abstraction. It is the practical result of years of energy work, mindset clearing, and relentless inner honesty. The full map of all seven layers, with the practices that activate each one, lives inside The Blissful Leader. If this section left you with one question worth sitting with, let it be this: which layer have you been skipping? The answer is usually where your next breakthrough is hiding. Get The Blissful Leader on Amazon and start the work that makes everything else work. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Florentina Gionea Florentina Gionea, Spiritual Mentor for Leaders Florentina is the Spiritual Mentor for Leaders, featured on Fox TV USA, Euronews, Forbes, and the TEDx stage. Author of The Blissful Leader Book and backed by 15,000 hours of intense practice, she blends business with spirituality to help leaders clear blocks and build their next legacy. She is the creator of The BLISSFUL Leaders Program, The Spiritual Studies Academy, The Gentleman Code Program, and a series of courses on abundance, wealth, and spirituality.

Melbourne, Australia, November 2026: Author and Carnelian Heart™ founder Nelia Camara Pereira has launched the School of Soul-First™ Living, an online learning community on the Skool platform for people who no longer feel like themselves after years of adapting to roles, expectations, loss, and change. The School turns her Soul-First™ philosophy into a self-paced learning community, with a 12-module core journey, dedicated Science and Art courses, and practical courses addressing everyday challenges. Members explore how identity is shaped and practice making choices from an internal reference point. The School marks the next evolution of Pereira’s Soul-First™ philosophy, a body of work that emerged from her own experience of questioning the identity she had built, unlearning deeply embedded patterns and rebuilding her life from a different internal centre. What began as a personal transformation became a philosophy. That philosophy has since grown into books, writing, speaking, frameworks and now a structured learning environment exploring what Pereira describes as the science and art of living Soul-First™. From loss to philosophy Soul-First™ did not begin as a business concept. Its foundations were formed through Pereira’s own experience of loss, identity disruption and the realisation that much of who she believed herself to be had been shaped by roles, expectations, adaptation and survival. Following the death of her mother, Pereira began confronting a question that would eventually become central to her work: Who am I beneath the roles I learned to survive? That question led to years of examining the difference between the identity we consciously choose and the identity we gradually construct in response to life. Over time, as she began recognizing and changing the patterns shaping her decisions, relationships, and sense of self, Pereira developed the frameworks that now underpin her Soul-First™ philosophy. Pereira explores how these early roles take shape in her Brainz Magazine article The Roles We Perform Before We Know Who We Are. “What changed my life was not simply learning more about myself,” said Pereira. “It was beginning to see how much of my identity had been built through adaptation. Once I could see the patterns, I could begin questioning what was actually mine and what I had learned to become.” The science and the art At the centre of Pereira’s work is the belief that understanding human behavior requires both knowledge and lived practice. Within the School, The Science of Living Soul-First™ explores conditioning, emotional responses, habits, and the ways people adapt to their environments and relationships. Pereira draws on established psychological concepts to help members examine their own patterns, bringing these ideas into her broader philosophical framework. The art is what happens next. It is the lived process of noticing those patterns in real time, making conscious choices, practicing new ways of responding, and gradually building a life that feels more aligned with what is internally true. Pereira describes Soul-First™ as the relationship between Spirit, Soul, Mind, and Body, with the soul serving as the internal reference point rather than allowing learned roles, external expectations, or conditioned patterns to lead by default. Her core philosophy is captured in the line: “Your soul is the blueprint. Your life is the expression. Your identity is the bridge.” For Pereira, the philosophy is not about rejecting psychology, personal development, or the realities of human conditioning. It is about bringing those understandings together with the deeper question of identity. “We can understand why we behave the way we do and still continue living from the same patterns,” said Pereira. “The science helps us understand what has been happening. The art is learning how to live differently.” Not broken, but patterned One of the central ideas behind Soul-First™ is Pereira’s belief that many people approach personal growth from the assumption that something about them needs to be fixed. Her work begins elsewhere: “You are not broken. You are patterned.” Those patterns can include becoming the strong one, the peacekeeper, the performer, the fixer, or the person who disappears into the needs of others. Over time, Pereira argues, adaptations such as these can become so familiar that they begin to feel like personality rather than learned identity. She examines how these survival roles form, and how they can be released, in her Brainz Magazine article The Unlearning™ – Releasing Survival Identities. This distinction forms the basis of her work on identity beyond adaptation. The School of Soul-First™ Living has been created to help members explore that distinction in their own lives. Turning philosophy into practice The School brings together Pereira’s writing and Soul-First™ frameworks in a structured learning environment. A 12-module core journey provides the foundations, while further courses help members apply the philosophy to specific challenges in their lives. Members explore identity, boundaries, emotional regulation, self-trust and the relationship between their choices and everyday actions. The experience combines written teachings, visual frameworks, reflection exercises and community conversation, with minimal reliance on video. Membership is free to join, with the first six foundation modules unlocking through community participation. Modules seven to twelve are available to purchase individually. Premium membership provides access to the School’s paid learning collection while subscribed, including The Science of Living Soul-First™, The Art of Living Soul-First™ and practical courses exploring fear, procrastination and meaning in ordinary life. The Science course guides members in creating their own Soul-First™ Living Blueprint. The Art course helps them develop a Soul-First™ Living Practice Map, connecting what they understand with how they choose to live. The structure is designed to allow members to move through the material at their own pace rather than treating personal growth as something that must be completed according to a fixed timeline. “Insight is powerful, but insight alone does not change a life,” said Pereira. “There is a difference between recognizing a pattern and responding differently when that pattern appears. That space between knowing and living is where practice matters.” Pereira looks more closely at the gap between understanding a pattern and living differently in her Brainz Magazine article Are You Healing, or Just Becoming Better at Surviving? A pathway through identity change Pereira’s Soul-First™ Path describes seven stages of identity change: Awakening – Release/Return – Remembering – Healing – Rebuilding – Emergence – Integration. The pathway reflects Pereira’s own experience of transformation while also providing a framework for understanding the different phases people may move through when an old identity begins to fall away. Rather than presenting the stages as a rigid linear process, Pereira describes the work as something people often revisit at different points in their lives. The School also incorporates the Soul-First™ Spiral, a repeating reflection and practice framework: Awareness – Compassion – Truth – Choice – Integration. This reflects one of the central ideas behind the science and art of Soul-First™ living: awareness creates the possibility of choice, but repeated practice is what allows a different way of living to become embodied. Beyond The Unlearning™ The School is part of a growing body of work Pereira has been developing through Carnelian Heart™. Her book The Unlearning™, published in July 2026, explores the beginning of the Soul-First™ journey and is the first in a planned trilogy. The trilogy moves through the wider arc of the Soul-First™ Path: The Unlearning™ explores Awakening and Release/Return. The Becoming™ will explore Remembering, Healing and Rebuilding. The Embodiment™ will explore Emergence and Integration. Together, the books examine what happens when a person begins recognizing the identity they learned to inhabit, releasing what no longer fits and consciously rebuilding from a deeper sense of self. The School takes that work beyond reading. It creates a place where the philosophy can be explored through reflection, conversation and everyday application. Identity beyond adaptation Through Carnelian Heart™, Pereira is building Soul-First™ as a philosophical and educational body of work around one central idea: that the identity a person has learned to live from does not necessarily represent the entirety of who they are. Her work asks people to become curious about the difference between adaptation and alignment. For Pereira, that distinction changed the direction of her own life. The School of Soul-First™ Living is the next step in making that work accessible to others. “What began as my attempt to understand my own life became a philosophy,” said Pereira. “Then it became a body of work. The School is where that work becomes something people can experience for themselves. Not by becoming someone new, but by beginning to recognise what has been underneath the patterns all along.” How to join The School of Soul-First™ Living is open to new members and free to join. Members can begin with the foundation modules and explore further learning through individual course purchases or Premium membership. Visit the School of Soul-First™ Living on Skool to join, or learn more about Pereira’s work here.

Written by Aleksandra Di Gesaro, Fashion Photographer & Visual Strategist Aleksandra Di Gesaro is a fashion photographer and visual strategist with over 15 years of experience helping fashion and beauty brands build identities that convert. She specializes in authentic fashion marketing that creates real human connection, not just beautiful imagery. Can AI-generated visuals damage your brand’s credibility, even when they look flawless? From McDonald’s Christmas ad disaster to Nike’s award-winning campaign, this article challenges seven common myths about AI-generated brand visuals and explores what makes them succeed or fail. The hidden risk of AI-generated photos for your personal brand Lately, my Instagram feed has been full of the same ad for various apps promising the same thing: ten professional photoshoot pictures from one selfie. Using the promoted apps, you can turn a single photo into a whole portfolio of polished portraits in different outfits and settings within minutes. I understand why it can be very tempting, but using AI to create your visuals can be tricky. I have worked with many coaches and consultants on showing up on camera and creating visuals that communicate their expertise and personality, and I know how much they struggle with showing up on camera. Most of them are not professional models and have no idea what to do with their hands or where to look, so standing in front of a camera feels awkward. A professional photoshoot is also expensive, and you leave with a limited number of pictures while social media asks you to post consistently, week after week. When an AI photo generator offers to remove the camera, the cost, and the awkwardness for the price of a monthly subscription, saying yes feels like the sensible choice. But there is a difference between creating beautiful pictures and creating effective brand visuals. When you're a coach, consultant, or service-based entrepreneur, people aren't simply buying your expertise. They're deciding whether they can trust you with what they're struggling with most at the moment. Your pictures play a part in that decision before you've had a chance to speak to a potential client. While some AI-generated images are easy to recognise, others are convincing enough to fool the eye. The bigger question is what happens to your credibility when people discover that the person, place, or situation you've shown them isn't real. Before you buy a subscription to one of the AI image generators, I'd like you to look at what happened when seven major brands used AI in their advertising. Some faced criticism, while others created award-winning campaigns, and together they challenge seven common assumptions about AI-generated visuals that every entrepreneur should understand. Myth 1: AI always saves time and money "McDonald's Netherlands, December 2025" In December 2025, McDonald's Netherlands released a 45-second Christmas film on YouTube, made entirely from AI-generated clips. Its rewritten jingle called Christmas "the most terrible time of the year", and the film showed holiday chaos, Santa stuck in a traffic jam, a cyclist loaded with presents slipping in the snow, and other familiar seasonal disasters. The idea itself was questionable. A brand associated with happy moments and togetherness was telling its customers to skip the most emotional season of the year and hide out in McDonald's until January. Viewers found the message cynical, while the AI-generated execution added another problem. Critics described the film as creepy and soulless, pointing to unnatural-looking faces and rapid cuts. One commenter said it had single-handedly ruined their Christmas spirit. McDonald's switched off the comments and removed the video on 9 December, just three days after its release, describing the episode as an important learning experience. But the production story is just as interesting as the backlash. According to The Sweetshop, the production company behind the film, the team spent weeks generating thousands of takes and correcting AI errors in post-production. Its chief executive described seven weeks of work with very little sleep and said that the hours involved exceeded those of a traditional shoot. McDonald's hasn't published the campaign budget, so we can't compare the exact costs. But the promise of effortless AI production looks rather different when you consider how much specialist work went into a 45-second film that was withdrawn within three days. Now imagine this on a smaller scale. An AI photoshoot app might generate twenty polished pictures in minutes, but how many will actually be usable? How much time will you spend regenerating faces, fixing strange details, or trying to make the images look like you? Most importantly, will those pictures communicate anything meaningful about your business? AI can reduce certain production costs, but it doesn't eliminate the need for planning, creative direction, and quality control. A faster way to create the wrong message isn't much of a saving. Myth 2: If people can spot AI, the campaign won't work "Coca-Cola, 2024 and 2025" Coca-Cola remade its beloved 1995 Christmas advertisement, "Holidays Are Coming", using AI in 2024, and did it again in 2025, this time with animals gathering to watch the famous red trucks pass. Both campaigns attracted criticism. The 2024 version was called soulless, while viewers of the 2025 film pointed out visual glitches, including trucks that appeared to change shape between shots. You might expect the campaigns to have failed. But here's the interesting part. System1, a company that tests advertisements with real viewers, gave Coca-Cola's AI Christmas ads its maximum rating of 5.9 stars, indicating exceptionally strong predicted brand-building potential. Its analysts explained that viewers responded to the familiar Coca-Cola elements, the illuminated trucks, the music, the Christmas atmosphere, and the emotional associations developed over decades. In the testing, respondents weren't told that AI had been used. The brand's established visual identity did much of the work. That doesn't mean everyone loved the campaigns. Online criticism was real, and different audience groups reacted differently. But the testing results demonstrate that visible imperfections and online controversy don't automatically mean an advertisement fails to connect with its wider audience. Coca-Cola had something most entrepreneurs don't: around thirty years of visual consistency. You can recognise the brand from the red trucks, the lights, and the familiar Christmas atmosphere, even without seeing its logo. If you're still building your personal brand, you don't have that advantage. Your audience is learning who you are, what you stand for, and what makes you different. If your photographs look like those of every other business coach, luxury consultant, or wellness entrepreneur using the same AI templates, you're making that job harder. The problem isn't simply whether people recognise AI. It's whether your visuals communicate an identity that people recognise and remember. Coca-Cola's AI campaigns benefited from decades of brand-building. Myth 3: If an image looks perfect, it builds credibility "Guess in Vogue, August 2025" In August 2025, Guess ran advertisements in the US edition of Vogue featuring an AI-generated model created by the studio Seraphinne Vallora. She looked like a typical fashion model, beautiful, perfectly styled, and photographed in polished editorial-looking images. There was only one problem. She didn't exist. The advertisement included a small disclaimer identifying the use of AI, but that didn't prevent criticism. People raised concerns about unrealistic beauty standards and the potential displacement of real models, photographers, and makeup artists. Vogue distanced itself from the decision, explaining that it was a commercial advertisement rather than editorial content. What's particularly interesting about this controversy is that the images weren't criticised primarily for looking bad. They were criticised for what they represented. There's an important lesson here for personal brands. When a potential client sees a photograph of you on your website, they generally assume they're looking at the person they'll eventually meet or work with. They also assume that the office, stage, or client interaction shown in your photographs is real. Now imagine a business coach posting an AI-generated picture of herself speaking at a prestigious conference in front of hundreds of people, even though she's never delivered a keynote presentation. The image looks impressive, but it suggests professional experience she doesn't have. The same applies to fictional client meetings, luxury offices, or teams that don't exist. There's a difference between presenting your business beautifully and presenting a business that isn't real. Visual perfection isn't the same as credibility, and for entrepreneurs whose businesses depend on their personal reputation, an image that creates false expectations may do more harm than a less polished photograph that accurately reflects who they are. Myth 4: Being transparent about AI is enough "Valentino, December 2025" In December 2025, Valentino published an Instagram video promoting its DeVain handbag as part of a digital creative project developed with artists. The film showed surreal collages of models morphing into logos, bodies merging into unusual shapes, and the handbag appearing in constantly changing environments. The use of AI was clearly disclosed, yet the comments quickly filled with criticism. Viewers described the campaign as sloppy, sad, cheap, and lazy. A creative executive at Getty Images told the BBC that audiences hold expensive brands to higher standards, and that even full transparency about AI wasn't enough to win them over. A trends expert from the agency Loop explained that consumers sometimes interpret AI as cost-cutting disguised as innovation. This matters because the higher the expectations you create around your brand, the more carefully people judge the experience you deliver. If you're a premium consultant charging thousands for your expertise, your audience expects a certain level of thought, care, and professionalism. That doesn't mean you need expensive photography or that you should never use AI. But every visual choice should feel consistent with the quality you're promising, and simply adding an AI disclosure won't make an uninspired image more effective. Transparency is important, but it's not a substitute for a strong idea or thoughtful execution. People don't judge your visuals only by how they were created. They also judge what those visuals say about your standards. Myth 5: AI replaces human creativity "Nike, Never Done Evolving" For the final year of Serena Williams's tennis career, Nike and its agency AKQA created something that no camera crew could have filmed: a match between the Serena who won her first Grand Slam in 1999 and the Serena who won the Australian Open in 2017. Machine learning analysed archival footage and modelled how each version played, including shot selection, reaction times, movement, and decision-making. The system generated more than 130,000 games to explore how her performance had evolved. The campaign reached around 1.7 million viewers, according to AKQA, and achieved 1,082% more organic views than Nike's other content. It also won the Grand Prix for Digital Craft at Cannes Lions in 2023. What made it successful wasn't the simple fact that AI was involved. Nike had an interesting story to tell about a real athlete, her growth, discipline, and evolution over nearly two decades. AI made it possible to express that story in a way that traditional filming couldn't. The technology didn't replace the creative concept. It helped bring it to life. That's a distinction entrepreneurs should pay attention to. You might use AI to visualise a complex business transformation, explain an abstract concept, or create a metaphor for a problem your clients face. You can experiment with ideas that would otherwise be difficult or expensive to produce visually. But the most important part still comes from you, knowing your audience, understanding the problem, and deciding what the image needs to communicate. AI is most interesting when it expands what you can communicate, rather than simply replacing the effort involved in making an ordinary photograph. Myth 6: AI makes marketing less personal "Cadbury, Shah Rukh Khan-My-Ad" In India, much of Cadbury's gifting chocolate is sold through small local shops, many of which suffered during the pandemic as online shopping grew. Cadbury wanted to support these businesses during Diwali, so it created a campaign featuring Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan. Using AI voice and face technology, the company made it possible for him to appear in personalised advertisements mentioning individual local stores by name. Shop owners and consumers could also create their own versions through a dedicated website. The campaign generated thousands of personalised advertisements, and Cadbury Celebrations sales rose by 35% during Diwali. Household penetration also reached a three-year high of 9.4%, while the campaign topped WARC's ranking of the most effective campaigns in 2024. AI made something possible that would have been impractical to produce manually: a famous actor promoting thousands of individual businesses by name. But what makes this case particularly interesting is how the technology was used. Rather than replacing the human element, Cadbury used AI to create more personal connections between a global brand, local shop owners, and their communities. For entrepreneurs, the lesson isn't that you need sophisticated voice-cloning software or a celebrity ambassador. It's that personalisation should make your audience feel understood. Think of a consultant who works with different industries. Instead of using the same generic imagery everywhere, she could create visual explanations tailored to the challenges of manufacturers, retailers, or service providers. AI might help her develop those concepts quickly, while her expertise ensures they're relevant. AI doesn't have to make marketing impersonal. Used thoughtfully, it can help you communicate more specifically with different audiences, provided you understand those audiences before you start generating anything. Myth 7: AI is just a cheaper way to create visuals "Heinz, A.I. Ketchup" Heinz approached AI from a completely different direction. The brand asked an image generator to draw ketchup, and the results often resembled Heinz, even when the prompts didn't mention the company. Instead of using AI to produce a conventional advertising photograph, Heinz made that observation the concept of the campaign. The company invited people to submit their own ketchup-related prompts and used the resulting images across social media, print, and outdoor advertising. The campaign reported more than 1.15 billion earned impressions and became part of the wider "It Has to Be Heinz" platform, which went on to win the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix at Cannes Lions in 2024. The idea worked because the use of AI was central to the message, Heinz was so strongly associated with ketchup that even an AI generator appeared to make the connection. It was playful, easy to understand, and rooted in the brand's identity. Heinz didn't ask how AI could make its usual advertising cheaper. It asked what the technology could reveal about the brand. Imagine applying a similar approach to your own business. Rather than generating another polished portrait, could you use AI to illustrate a misconception about your industry, show the difference between how clients imagine a problem and what actually causes it, or make an invisible process easier to understand? Those visuals could offer something more valuable than another attractive picture of you, a reason for your audience to stop, think, and remember your message. The greatest opportunity AI offers isn't necessarily cheaper content. It's the possibility of communicating ideas in ways you couldn't easily explore before. What these 7 campaigns mean for your business Looking at these campaigns together, two lessons stand out. The brands that faced criticism often treated AI as a shortcut to producing visuals, without giving enough consideration to the message, their audience's expectations, or the values those images communicated. While not every controversial campaign was ineffective, the reactions showed how easily a visual decision can raise questions about a brand's authenticity and standards. The successful campaigns approached AI differently. They started with a strong creative idea and used technology to bring it to life, making marketing more personal or communicating something that would have been difficult to achieve otherwise. AI added value to an existing strategy rather than becoming the strategy itself. For entrepreneurs, coaches, and consultants, this distinction is particularly important. Unlike large corporations, your personal reputation is often inseparable from your business. The visuals you publish influence how potential clients perceive your expertise and trustworthiness, long before they decide to work with you. So, should you avoid AI-generated visuals altogether? Absolutely not. But you should be intentional about how you use them. In my next article, I'll share practical ways to incorporate AI into your brand photography and visual marketing without compromising authenticity or losing your clients' trust. In the meantime, if you're interested in learning how to create visuals that strengthen your brand, attract the right clients, and turn attention into conversions, subscribe to my Substack, where I explore the psychology behind effective visual branding and share practical strategies for entrepreneurs. Visit my Substack for more info and follow me on Instagram! Read more from Aleksandra Di Gesaro Aleksandra Di Gesaro, Fashion Photographer & Visual Strategist Aleksandra Di Gesaro is a fashion photographer and visual communication strategist based in Italy, with over 15 years of experience in the fashion industry. She has collaborated with brands including MAC Cosmetics, shot Milan Fashion Week, and directed short films recognized at the Aphelion Film Festival. She specializes in helping founder-led fashion and beauty brands move beyond polished, forgettable imagery toward visual communication that speaks directly to their ideal customer and converts. References: AFP via CTV News (10 December 2025). "Not lovin' it: McDonald's pulls Dutch AI Christmas ad." AKQA via Business Wire (20 June 2023). "AKQA Wins the Grand Prix and Gold Lion at Cannes Festival of Creativity." BBC News (10 December 2025). "McDonald's pulls AI Christmas ad after backlash." BBC News (2025). Report on the Guess AI model advert in Vogue. BBC News via MyJoyOnline (3 December 2025). "Fashion house Valentino criticised over 'disturbing' AI handbag ads." B&T (2024). "Coke Christmas and the AI challenge" (System1). Campaign Asia. "Cadbury's Shah Rukh Khan is the most awarded effectiveness campaign in WARC rankings." Cannes Lions. Nike, "Never Done Evolving". Cannes Lions. Heinz, "A.I. Ketchup". Fault Tolerant (December 2025). "McDonald's Netherlands learns people ain't lovin' their AI-generated Christmas Ad." Futurism (December 2025). "McDonald's Pulls Down AI-Generated Holiday Ad After Deluge of Mockery." Getty Images (30 April 2024). "Nearly 90% of Consumers Want Transparency on AI Images finds Getty Images Report." System1 (2024). "AI or No AI, Coke Gets the Christmas Love." The Grocer (2025). "Coca-Cola runs AI-generated Christmas ad for second year." WPP. "AKQA: Nike's Never Done Evolving." WARC. "Cadbury: SRK – My Ad." Storyboard18. "How Heinz reasserted its reign in the ketchup aisle with 'It Has To Be Heinz'."

Written by Anne Rigaud-Walker, Executive Coach & Transformation Strategist Anne Rigaud-Walker is an Executive Coach and Strategic Transformation Practitioner working with senior leaders and leadership teams. Her work focuses on uncovering the invisible patterns and blind spots that shape behaviour, leadership and performance. What if your team's lack of initiative, reluctance to challenge you, or constant need for approval isn't simply a people problem? What if the behaviours you find most frustrating are precisely the ones your leadership has unintentionally taught people to adopt? What if you're the problem nobody dares to mention? There is an uncomfortable possibility in leadership that rarely makes it onto the agenda. Your team may be having conversations about you that nobody is willing to have with you. They know which subjects to avoid, how to deliver bad news without triggering an unnecessary reaction, when a disagreement is worth the effort, and when it is wiser to remain silent. They know which decisions they can genuinely make and which ones will eventually be overturned, regardless of the authority you have supposedly given them. In some organisations, people become extraordinarily skilled at managing their manager. They anticipate reactions, adapt to preferences, and navigate invisible rules with remarkable precision. Meanwhile, the leader wonders why nobody challenges them, why every important decision comes back to their desk, or why their team seems incapable of taking genuine ownership. Here is the uncomfortable part. Your team may understand your leadership patterns better than you do. And the people who have learned to work around those patterns may be the very people you believe are not performing at their full potential. You may have trained your team to disappoint you Consider a familiar leadership situation. A CEO is increasingly frustrated with his executive team. He has recruited experienced, talented people, yet he still feels responsible for every important decision. "They need to step up," he says. "I can't keep doing everyone's job." Now imagine looking at what actually happened during his previous week. On Monday, he overruled a decision made by one of his directors. On Tuesday, he rewrote a presentation because it wasn't quite how he would have done it. On Wednesday, he stepped into a difficult client conversation that belonged to another executive. By Friday, he had personally resolved several issues his team could have handled. He sees himself as protecting standards and ensuring excellence. His team sees something else. Taking ownership is risky because he will probably intervene anyway. And so they adapt. They seek approval earlier, avoid unnecessary disagreement, and bring fewer unfinished ideas to meetings. Gradually, they become exactly the team he complains about. The leader believes he has a delegation problem. He may actually have created a dependency system. This is an illustrative scenario, but the mechanism is familiar across many organisations. People do not simply respond to the leadership principles displayed on a company's walls. They respond to the behaviours that are consistently rewarded, tolerated, or discouraged. Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety and team learning helps explain why this matters. When speaking up, admitting mistakes, or challenging assumptions feels interpersonally risky, the conditions for learning and open communication can deteriorate. This is not about making leadership comfortable or eliminating accountability. It is about recognising that what feels perfectly reasonable from the leader's perspective may create a very different experience for everyone else. Of course, not every organisational problem originates with the leader. Skills gaps, unclear strategy, insufficient resources, and individual performance issues are real. But when the same frustrations repeat across different people and situations, it may be worth examining the one element that has remained constant. Especially when that element is you. Your greatest strength may have become your biggest blind spot The behaviours that eventually create problems are often the very qualities that made a leader successful. Your speed built the business. Your attention to detail protected its reputation. Your ability to anticipate risks prevented costly mistakes. Your relentless standards created extraordinary results. Your willingness to take responsibility helped everyone through difficult moments. These are not weaknesses. They may be exceptional strengths. Until the context changes. As an organisation grows, other people need room to develop judgment, assume responsibility, and make decisions that will not always resemble yours. Suddenly, your speed makes everyone else appear slow. Your competence discourages experimentation. Your standards make people reluctant to take risks. Your sense of responsibility prevents others from fully owning theirs. And because these qualities have been rewarded for years, questioning them can feel almost absurd. Why would you change what made you successful? Because the qualities that made you indispensable may now be preventing everyone else from becoming capable of leading without you. There is a difference between being an exceptional performer and creating the conditions for exceptional performance around you. The first requires personal excellence. The second requires something considerably more challenging: allowing other people's excellence to emerge, even when it looks different from your own. And sometimes, that means confronting a question few leaders are particularly eager to explore. What if part of you actually needs the problem? We tend to assume that once a leader understands a dysfunctional behaviour, changing it should be relatively straightforward. If they recognise that they micromanage, they should delegate. If they know they become defensive, they should listen. If they understand that their impatience discourages others, they should become more patient. It sounds reasonable. And yet, highly intelligent, experienced leaders frequently understand their patterns perfectly well and continue repeating them. Why? Because the behaviour they want to change may still be protecting something they are not ready to lose. A leader who complains that everything depends on them may also derive considerable identity from being indispensable. Someone who wants more autonomy in their team may experience vulnerability when decisions are made without them. A manager who says they welcome disagreement may unconsciously associate being challenged with losing authority, credibility, or competence. These mechanisms should never be assumed without careful exploration. But they reveal an important possibility. What looks like resistance to change may sometimes be an attempt to preserve something psychologically important. Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey explored this paradox through the concept of competing commitments, showing how people can genuinely pursue change while remaining attached to assumptions or commitments that work against it. Their article, The Real Reason People Won't Change, offers a useful perspective on why intention and insight do not always translate into different behaviour. Consider the contradiction. You can sincerely want your team to become independent while remaining deeply uncomfortable with no longer being needed in the same way. You can want people to challenge your thinking while experiencing disagreement as a threat. You can want to develop future leaders while unconsciously reinforcing your position as the only person capable of making the most difficult decisions. Sometimes the problem persists not because you fail to understand it, but because part of your internal system still has a reason to maintain it. And until that reason is explored, another leadership workshop may simply teach you how to manage the same reaction more effectively. Which is not necessarily the same as changing it. What I look for beneath the behaviour In my work with leaders and leadership teams, I am interested not only in helping leaders behave differently, but also in understanding why changing those behaviours can remain so difficult, even when they know exactly what to do. If someone tells me they need to delegate more, I rarely begin by explaining how delegation works. Most experienced managers already understand the concept. I want to know what happens inside them at the precise moment they are supposed to let go. What do they experience when someone makes a decision without consulting them? What does another person's mistake mean to them? What feels threatened when their opinion is challenged? What happens to their sense of value when they are no longer the person everyone needs? And what might they have learned, perhaps long before becoming a leader, about control, responsibility, trust, or the consequences of relying on others? These questions are not about turning a business conversation into endless introspection. They are about discovering the internal logic that makes a behaviour persist. Once we identify that logic, the work can move beyond simply discussing what needs to change. I combine strategic coaching and systemic work with transformational approaches that explore the beliefs, emotional responses, and automatic patterns sustaining certain behaviours. Depending on the person and the situation, this may involve working beyond intellectual understanding, with the aim of helping them experience and respond to familiar triggers differently. The goal is not to make someone better at controlling an old reaction. It is to change, where possible, the conditions that keep producing it. Imagine two leaders who have both learned to delegate. The first delegates a decision but spends the following week resisting the temptation to intervene. Every disagreement requires self-control. Every mistake triggers frustration that must be consciously managed. The second gradually becomes more comfortable allowing others to decide, including when they would have approached the situation differently. From the outside, both may appear to be delegating. But internally, they are having very different experiences. One is continually managing an old response. The other may be developing a genuinely different one. And that difference matters because leadership behaviours rarely remain individual for long. Your team may be trapped in a system you created together Sometimes, the problem no longer belongs to one person. It has become a relationship. Consider a controlling leader and an increasingly passive team. The leader intervenes because the team appears incapable of acting independently. The team becomes more cautious because the leader keeps intervening. That caution confirms the leader's belief that people lack initiative, so the leader takes even more control. Eventually, everyone has evidence that seems to justify their behaviour. The leader says, "If I don't step in, nothing moves." The team says, "Why take responsibility when the decision will be changed anyway?" Nobody believes they are creating the problem. Everyone is helping to maintain it. What if your team isn't failing to take ownership, but has become exceptionally good at giving ownership back to you? This is why I find it particularly valuable to work with both leaders and their leadership teams. When a pattern has become embedded in the way a team functions, individual transformation may need to be accompanied by changes in how people interact, make decisions, and hold one another accountable. A leader can genuinely begin to delegate while the team continues seeking reassurance because that is what its members have learned to do. The leader interprets those requests as evidence that nothing has changed. The team interprets the leader's frustration as confirmation that independence remains unsafe. And the old dynamic begins rebuilding itself. Changing the system requires both sides to recognise their contribution. The leader must learn to release control. The team must learn to exercise responsibility. Both must stop waiting for the other to change first. This does not excuse poor performance or eliminate individual accountability. It recognises something more fundamental. Some leadership problems cannot be sustainably resolved by treating individuals in isolation from the system in which their behaviour occurs. 5 questions to ask before blaming your team If you want to explore whether your leadership may be contributing to the difficulties you experience, begin with five questions. Not as a personality test or leadership scorecard, but as an opportunity to observe what actually happens around you. 1. Have I made myself indispensable to decisions I should no longer own? Look at the decisions that regularly reach your desk. How many genuinely require your authority, and how many arrive because your team has learned that you will eventually want to be involved? When someone makes a reasonable decision without you, can you accept an approach different from your own, or do you feel compelled to improve it? Try this. For one week, identify a category of decisions that should belong entirely to someone else. Make the boundaries explicit, then observe not only what the person does, but also what happens inside you when you are no longer in control. 2. What does disagreeing with me actually cost? You may sincerely believe that you welcome challenge. But what happens in the seconds after someone questions your opinion? Do you become curious, or do you immediately begin constructing your defence? Does the discussion remain genuinely open, or does the room quickly understand which conclusion you prefer? Try this. At your next leadership meeting, invite someone to challenge an important assumption. Ask them to develop their reasoning before responding. Notice what you feel compelled to defend, and why. 3. Am I developing leaders or people who have become experts at pleasing me? Think about who gets recognised, promoted, and trusted. Are they the people who make the strongest independent contributions, or those who most consistently deliver what you expected? When someone takes a thoughtful risk that fails, do you recognise the quality of the reasoning or focus exclusively on the disappointing result? Try this. Review your last three significant disagreements with team members. What happened afterward? Were their ideas genuinely considered? Did those conversations change the way you viewed or trusted them? 4. Which of my greatest strengths becomes destructive under pressure? Perhaps you are exceptionally decisive, until urgency makes you dismissive. Perhaps your standards are extraordinary, until perfectionism makes everyone afraid to experiment. Perhaps you are deeply committed, until your inability to disconnect creates an unspoken expectation that everyone else should be equally available. Try this. Choose one strength you are particularly proud of. Ask a trusted colleague when that strength becomes excessive and what impact it has on others. The answer may reveal something you have never considered a weakness. 5. What does my team know about me that I am the last person to hear? What have people learned about your reactions, preferences, blind spots, and emotional triggers that they discuss with each other but hesitate to say directly to you? Consider asking: "What do you find yourself adapting to in my leadership that I may not be aware of?" Then listen. Do not interrupt, justify, explain the context, or immediately correct their interpretation. .If nobody answers, do not assume there is nothing to say. Ask yourself whether you have created the conditions in which an honest answer would feel safe. If necessary, use a confidential feedback process. Because sometimes the most valuable leadership feedback is precisely the feedback your position makes it difficult for others to give you. Stop fixing the symptoms while preserving the cause There is nothing wrong with expecting accountability, strong performance, and initiative from your team. Leadership sometimes requires difficult conversations, clearer standards, better recruitment decisions, and decisive action. But there is a difference between holding people accountable and assuming that the source of a problem must always lie with them. One of the most costly mistakes a leader can make is to keep changing people, processes, or organisational structures while leaving untouched the patterns that helped produce the difficulty. New hires arrive with fresh energy, then gradually become cautious. A reorganisation creates temporary momentum before familiar tensions return. A leadership programme gives everyone a new vocabulary, but months later, the same frustrations dominate meetings. The organisation appears to change. The underlying dynamics remain remarkably stable. At some point, it becomes worth asking whether another initiative will genuinely solve the problem or simply reorganise the conditions in which it continues to exist. This is not about blame. It is about responsibility. And responsibility becomes particularly powerful when leaders examine not only what they intended to create, but also what their behaviour has actually produced. A leader who recognises that their urgency creates hesitation, their perfectionism suppresses experimentation, or their need to feel indispensable limits others has identified something worth changing. The next step is to do something different with that awareness. The question that could change everything The next time you find yourself complaining about your team, pay attention to the story you are telling. Are they genuinely incapable of making decisions, or have they learned that you prefer making them yourself? Do they lack courage, or have they learned that disagreeing with you comes at a price? Are they insufficiently committed, or have your expectations made sustainable commitment almost impossible? And if everyone seems to depend on you, is that entirely their choice? These questions may not produce comfortable answers. They may challenge parts of your identity that have been central to your success. But discomfort can be useful when it prompts you to question a long-standing assumption. The aim of leadership is not to remain the most capable person in the room. It is to create the conditions in which other people become more capable, more independent, and more effective because of your presence, not permanently dependent on it. So before asking what is wrong with your team, ask yourself one more question: "What if they are not showing me their limitations, but the limitations of the leadership environment I've created?" Your team may not need a different leader. It may need you to lead differently. Ready to change the pattern? If you recognised yourself in this article, choose one recurring frustration and examine what your own responses might be reinforcing. Change one interaction. Observe what becomes possible. But if you are a leader who has already done the work, understands the patterns, and still finds yourself repeating them, perhaps the next step isn't more insight. It's a different level of transformation. That's where deeper transformation becomes possible. It involves uncovering the invisible mechanisms beneath visible behaviours, moving beyond managing old reactions, and creating changes that can reshape both individual leadership and collective performance. If you're ready to move beyond understanding your patterns and start transforming what they produce, let's connect. Because the real measure of transformation isn't what you now understand about yourself. It's what no longer needs to repeat itself around you. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Anne Rigaud-Walker Anne Rigaud-Walker, Executive Coach & Transformation Strategist Anne Rigaud-Walker is an Executive Coach and Strategic Transformation Practitioner who works with senior leaders, leadership teams and high-performing individuals. Drawing on a corporate background and a broad range of coaching, psychology and neuroscience-informed approaches, she helps uncover the invisible patterns that continue to shape behaviour and performance. Her work is particularly suited to leaders who have already done significant work on themselves yet still encounter recurring limitations or blind spots. She is currently exploring how leadership, human capacity and organisational performance can evolve towards more regenerative models.

Written by Lindsay Evans & Danielle McGrath, Co-Founders of Nourish Live Flow Twin sisters Danielle McGrath & Lindsay Evans are co-founders of Nourish Live Flow, a holistic wellness brand for women in midlife. As certified integrative holistic health coaches, clean living experts, and breathwork and meditation guides, they help women reset their nervous systems, reduce toxic load, and thrive through perimenopause and beyond. When perimenopause hit us in our early forties, we did what so many women do. We looked at our nutrition, our workouts, and our supplements, hoping to get our energy, sleep, and moods back on track. Those things matter. But there's another piece of the puzzle that often gets overlooked: toxic load. Every day, we're exposed to a wide range of chemicals through personal care products, food packaging, household cleaners, and the environment around us. Over time, these exposures can add stress to the body, and some may interfere with hormonal health in ways many women don't realize. For us, this topic is deeply personal. After losing our dad to cancer and watching other people we love face their own health battles, we became passionate about understanding what we put on and around our bodies. It's why "Ditch the Toxins" became one of the four pillars of everything we teach. What is toxic load? Your body is constantly interacting with the world around you: what you eat, what you apply to your skin, the air you breathe, and the products you use every day. Everyday toxins from personal care products, cleaning supplies, fragrances, plastics, and even food packaging can quietly add to the load your body is managing. These exposures may interfere with hormone signalling, increase inflammation, and place extra demand on the liver, the organ that helps process hormones and supports detoxification. Research supported by organizations such as the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) shows that some modern chemicals can interact with the endocrine system, the system that regulates our hormones. As exposures add up, they may influence how hormones are produced, broken down, and signalled throughout the body. In perimenopause, when our hormones are already shifting, reducing unnecessary exposures is one simple way to support the body's natural balance. It's not about a drastic overhaul. Rather, it's about lightening the load so your body can do what it was designed to do. What are endocrine disruptors? Some chemicals are known as endocrine disruptors, meaning they can interfere with the body's hormone signalling. They may mimic hormones, block hormone receptors, or change how hormones are made or broken down. Over time, this can affect many systems, including metabolism, reproductive health, and mood. Common endocrine-disrupting chemicals include: Parabens, often found in cosmetics and skincare Phthalates, frequently used in synthetic fragrances and plastics Bisphenol A (BPA), commonly found in plastic containers and food packaging Certain pesticides and herbicides used in agriculture, on our food, and in our environment It's nearly impossible to avoid every exposure, and that's not the goal. But knowing what to look for helps you make informed choices that lighten the load on your body. Beauty products and hormone health This one surprised us most when we started learning. Personal care and beauty products can be one of the biggest sources of daily chemical exposure. Think about your morning routine: cleanser, moisturizer, deodorant, makeup, and hair products. Each one can contain dozens of ingredients, and many of them can be absorbed through the skin. Certain common ingredients have been studied for their potential hormone-disrupting effects. Parabens, for example, are widely used as preservatives and have been shown to have weak estrogen-like activity. Synthetic fragrance blends can contain phthalates, which have been associated with endocrine disruption in some studies. The good news? Becoming more mindful about what's in your products is one of the most empowering steps you can take for your health in midlife. Tools like EWG's Skin Deep database can help you check what's in the products you already use. Everyday environmental exposures Beyond our bathroom cabinets, chemicals can also come from food packaging, non-stick cookware, pesticide residues on produce, synthetic air fresheners and candles, and household cleaners. These exposures are part of modern life, but together, they can add up. Organizations like the Environmental Working Group (EWG) highlight how some chemicals in everyday products may interact with our endocrine system, and their resources can be a helpful starting point for making more informed choices about what you bring into your home. Why toxic load matters in perimenopause Your body is already doing a lot during perimenopause. Hormones are shifting, your body's detox pathways are busy, and your nervous system is adapting to change. In this season, even small added stressors can feel heavier, not because your body is failing, but because it's processing more. Reducing toxic load isn't about perfection or living in a bubble. It's about gradually lowering unnecessary exposures so your body has fewer stressors to deal with. Small shifts really can add up over time. When you lower unnecessary inputs, you may help support: Hormone balance and metabolism Liver function and detox pathways Nervous system regulation Overall energy and resilience Most importantly, you give your body more breathing room to rest and heal. Small swaps that make a big difference This part is not about doing everything "right." It's not about replacing everything in your home or striving for perfection. It's about making small, intentional swaps that feel doable, supportive, and aligned with your real life, one choice at a time. Progress always matters more than perfection. Simple swaps that make a big difference: Personal care products: Begin by looking at your skincare, bath and body products, and cosmetics. Your skin is your largest organ, and it can absorb some of what you apply to it. During perimenopause, your skin can also become more sensitive and reactive as hormones shift. Choosing cleaner products can help reduce your exposure and may support both your skin health and hormone balance. Your home environment: We spend about 90% of our time indoors, which means the air in our homes and the products we use there matter. Choose fragrance-free household products, such as cleaners, laundry detergent, and dish soap, or try natural alternatives such as vinegar and baking soda. Open your windows regularly to let in fresh air. Take your shoes off at the door so you don't track pesticides and other outdoor residues inside. Switch to glass containers (ditch the plastic!) and stainless steel bottles for drinks on the go. Start with one swap. Then another. Each small change helps create a healthier environment for your body. Ditch the toxins: A core pillar of thriving in midlife In our work with women in perimenopause, we've seen how empowering it is when women understand how their environment affects their hormones. It turns overwhelm into informed, doable choices, and that feels so good. That's why Ditch the Toxins is one of the four pillars of our framework, alongside Mindset & Intentions, Nervous System Regulation, and Nourishing Your Body & Mind. Together, these pillars create a foundation for feeling calmer, more balanced, and more like yourself again in midlife. Final thoughts Many of the chemicals we're exposed to today weren't part of daily life just a few generations ago. We can't avoid them all, and we don't have to. But by becoming more aware of our toxic load, we can make thoughtful choices that support our hormones and our health. As identical twins who've navigated perimenopause side by side, we know how overwhelming this season can feel. Our mission at Nourish Live Flow is to help women understand what's happening in their bodies and give them simple, practical tools to feel supported. You'll find our four pillars in our #1 bestselling workbook, Nourish & Thrive in Perimenopause, and in the education we share every day as The Clean Twins on Instagram. You're not broken, and you don't have to do this alone. Small steps really can help you nourish and thrive. Find our workshops, guided workbook, and programs here! Follow me on Facebook for more info! Read more from Lindsay Evans & Danielle McGrath Lindsay Evans & Danielle McGrath, Co-Founders of Nourish Live Flow Danielle McGrath and Lindsay Evans are holistic health and wellness coaches specializing in perimenopause and midlife. After navigating their own challenges, they created the 4-Pillar Nourish & Thrive in Perimenopause framework: mindset and intentions, nervous system regulation, nourishment, and reducing toxic load. With backgrounds in physiotherapy, acupuncture, nutrition, integrative holistic health coaching, and clean-living advocacy, they bring a uniquely practical and preventative lens to women’s health. Their mission is simple: to empower women to thrive, not just survive, through midlife and beyond.

Written by Dr. Leanne Elich, Business Psychology Strategist Matching Leanne’s impressive qualifications, which include medical and business degrees from Harvard, are her energy, humor, and keen insight. Dr. Leanne Elich is an award-winning Sales Psychology and Business Strategist, author, speaker, and one of Australasia's most successful Technology Business Executives. When was the last time you consciously decided to keep scrolling? You open Instagram. You watch a video. You keep going. Chances are, you didn't. There was simply another post waiting. Then another. The next video started automatically, and at some point, a notification gave you a reason to come back. That's what makes the line between persuasion and manipulation so interesting. We like to think influence happens when someone actively convinces us to do something. But some of the most powerful forms of influence don't tell us what to do. They simply change the environment in which we make the decision. The decisions we don't realise we're making A major court case currently unfolding in the United States has put that idea under unusual scrutiny. A coalition of US states alleges that Meta deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram features to encourage young people to spend more time on its platforms. Among the features being challenged are infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications, and public likes. Meta disputes the allegations and argues that it has invested heavily in protecting young users. Whatever the court ultimately decides, the case raises a much bigger behavioural question. When does making something easy become hard to resist? Take infinite scroll. Before it existed, reaching the bottom of a page created a natural stopping point. You had to make another decision, click to the next page or leave. Infinite scroll removed that decision. There is no bottom. No next button. No obvious moment asking whether you still want to be there. You haven't been forced to continue. You simply haven't been asked to stop. Friction isn't always the enemy For years, businesses have been taught to remove friction. Make checkout faster. Reduce the number of clicks. Simplify the form. Remove unnecessary decisions. Often, that's excellent advice. If someone wants to buy a product and has to navigate six confusing pages to do it, friction isn't helping anyone. But behavioural science shows friction can do something else. Sometimes friction gives us a moment to think. Netflix asking whether you're still watching creates a decision point. A spending app asking you to confirm a large transaction creates a pause. A platform asking whether you really want to share something can interrupt an impulsive response. The extra step might be inconvenient. It can also be useful. When we remove every pause from an experience, we don't just make behaviour easier. We can make it more automatic. Automatic behaviour requires far less conscious thought. The environment is part of the decision We like to imagine decisions happen inside our heads. I want this. I choose that. I prefer this option. But decisions don't happen in isolation. They happen inside environments. A supermarket decides which products sit at eye level. A website decides which button is largest. A subscription service decides which option is preselected. An app decides whether another video waits for you or starts automatically. None of those decisions technically removes your freedom to choose. But they change the architecture around the choice. Behavioural scientists call this choice architecture. The way options are presented influences what people are likely to do. Once you notice it, you start seeing it everywhere. The question isn't simply, "Did I choose this?" It's also, "What made this particular choice so easy to make?" Defaults are more powerful than they look Imagine signing up for a service and seeing a box that says: "Send me weekly updates." If the box is empty, you need to actively opt in. If it's already ticked, you need to actively opt out. The choice hasn't disappeared. You can still say yes or no. But the behaviour changes dramatically. One option requires action, and the other requires nothing. That's the power of a default. We tend to stick with whatever has already been selected for us, especially when the decision feels small or changing it requires extra effort. Autoplay works in much the same way. The default isn't stop. The default is continue. You can still leave. But leaving is now the behaviour that requires a decision. So where does persuasion become manipulation? This is where things become less comfortable because behavioural design itself isn't inherently bad. The same principles can encourage someone to save more money, take medication on time, exercise regularly, or complete a course they've been putting off. A reminder can distract you from work. It can also remind you to call your mother. A default can keep you watching videos longer than you intended. It can also automatically enrol employees in a retirement savings program they might otherwise ignore. The psychology hasn't changed. The intention has, and perhaps that's where the more useful distinction lies. Instead of asking whether behavioural influence is good or bad, we might ask, "Whose goal is the design helping us achieve?" If a product makes it easier for me to do something I already want to do, persuasion can feel helpful. If it deliberately makes it harder for me to stop doing something that primarily benefits someone else, the line becomes much less clear. Good design doesn't have to remove every decision Modern design obsesses over making everything seamless. One click. One tap. No interruption. No friction. But perhaps seamless shouldn't always be the goal. Sometimes the most responsible design choice is to put a decision back in. Are you still watching? Do you want to continue? Are you sure? Those tiny moments create something increasingly rare in digital experiences, a pause between impulse and action. That pause gives conscious thought a chance to catch up. The choices we make are never entirely about the choice The Meta case will ultimately be decided on legal questions far more complex than whether infinite scroll is persuasive. But the debate surrounding it exposes something worth noticing about human behaviour. We make thousands of decisions every day inside environments somebody else has designed. The button has a colour. The options have an order. Something is selected by default. The next video either waits for us or begins automatically. There may be a natural stopping point, or there may be no stopping point at all. None of these things forces us to make a particular choice. But they can quietly change which choice requires the least effort. Perhaps that's the behavioural blind spot. We spend a lot of time asking whether people are free to choose. We spend much less time asking who designed the choices they were given. Because the most powerful persuasion doesn't always convince us to do something. Sometimes it simply makes one behaviour easier to accept without question. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Dr. Leanne Elich Dr. Leanne Elich, Business Psychology Strategist Matching Leanne’s impressive qualifications, which include medical and business degrees from Harvard, are her energy, humor, and keen insight. Dr. Leanne Elich is an award-winning Neuroscientist and Sales Psychology Strategist, author, speaker, and one of Australasia's most successful Technology Business Executives.

Written by Lauren Salzman, Educator, Coach & Writer Lauren Salzman is an educator, coach, and writer with over 25 years in the human growth and development field. She is the creator of the Integration Model, a framework grounded in interpersonal neurobiology, and the developer of three programs on self-esteem and relationships: Centered Sense of Self, Rupture and Repair, and The Ground Floor. You can read your partner's mood from the sound of their keys in the door, and by the time they say hello, you've already adjusted. Losing yourself in a relationship happens through small, skilled adjustments like that one, and most of them were learned long before this relationship began. What does it mean to lose yourself in a relationship? Losing yourself is a gradual process of overriding your own experience to keep a connection smooth. You soften what you were about to say. You talk yourself out of what you felt. You let your partner's version of events become the official one, because arguing for yours feels more dangerous than absorbing theirs. Each adjustment is small enough to pass unnoticed. You take on a task that was never yours. You apologize for a tension you didn't create. When something goes wrong, your first question is what you did. These moments rarely announce themselves as significant, and that is how they accumulate. Over months and years, they add up to a person who can tell you exactly what their partner needs and struggles to answer when asked what they want for dinner. In my work, I call this self-abandonment. From the outside, it looks like generosity, flexibility, and devotion. From the inside, it feels like a constant, low-level monitoring of whether the connection is still intact. The keys in the door are part of that monitoring. Why do some people lose themselves more than others? The pattern usually starts in childhood, in an environment where a child couldn't afford to locate the problem in the adults they depended on. A child who needs a parent for survival has few options when that parent is unpredictable, overwhelmed, or unavailable. Concluding that the parent is the problem would make the world unsafe. Concluding that something is wrong with me keeps the parent safe and gives the child something to work on. That conclusion is an intelligent adaptation. It preserves the bond and offers a strategy: if I can figure out what I'm doing wrong, I can fix it. The strategy travels forward into adult relationships, where it runs automatically whenever closeness feels threatened. What the pattern looks like under stress I call this the self-diffuse pattern. When stress rises, the self moves toward the other person. It softens, accommodates, and begins scanning for whatever needs to be adjusted to restore the connection. The inner voice sounds something like this: If I can just figure out what I did wrong, I can fix this. If I can just say it the right way, they'll hear me. If I can just be less needy, less reactive, less much, things will be okay. Some people carry the same belief and move in the opposite behavioral direction. They drive themselves to achieve and perform, working to prove the belief wrong. Their lives can look ambitious and self-sufficient, and the treadmill underneath runs on the same fuel: each accomplishment brings a moment of relief, and the question of worth returns before the relief fades. What research on self-silencing shows Dana Jack, a psychologist and professor at Western Washington University's Fairhaven College, has spent decades studying a closely related pattern she calls silencing the self. In her research on depression, she found many women holding back their feelings, needs, and opinions in an attempt to preserve their relationships. She developed the Silencing the Self Scale to measure the pattern, and researchers have since used it to connect self-silencing with depression across many cultures. Her early work focused on women, and later studies have found the pattern in men as well. At the center of her work sits a paradox. Self-silencing is meant to protect closeness, but over time it produces disconnection, because your partner ends up relating to a version of you edited for their comfort. What losing yourself costs The deepest cost lands on your perception. Each time you override what you noticed, your nervous system receives a quiet message: what you just experienced isn't worth acting on. Repeated often enough, that message makes your own signal harder to hear. Picture someone speaking to you in a dismissive tone. Before you've considered whether the problem lies in how they treat people, your mind has already turned inward. What did I do? How did I say it? Was I too much? The fault gets located in you before you've weighed the evidence. This is how the cost compounds. The capacity you most need to navigate a relationship, the ability to perceive clearly and trust what you notice, is the capacity self-abandonment wears down. You lose the instrument precisely where you need it most. Two more things erode alongside it. Self-worth is the recognition that your inner life has value and standing. Self-respect is the willingness to uphold that recognition in action. They build each other each time you honor your own experience, and they wear each other down each time you override it. What it looks like to stay with yourself The way forward is a third option between collapsing into the other person and hardening away from them. I call it a centered sense of self: a you that persists across states, staying connected to your own experience while remaining present with someone else. When stress rises, you can feel the pull toward accommodation and treat it as information rather than instruction. That capacity develops over time, through noticing the pattern as it happens and building a relationship with yourself that holds steady whether or not the tension gets resolved. The keys will still sound the way they sound. You'll still hear the difference between a good day and a hard one, because that sensitivity is real and it belongs to you. The change is that when the door opens, you can hear them and still hear yourself. Begin building a centered sense of self Centered Sense of Self is my 12-week course on the patterns that pull us away from self-esteem and healthy relationships, and on building the internal stability that helps you stay centered and connected to yourself. Learn more about self-study and one-on-one options here. Follow me on Facebook for more info! Read more from Lauren Salzman Lauren Salzman, Educator, Coach & Writer Lauren Salzman is an educator, coach, and writer with over 25 years in the human growth and development field. For 20 of those years, she served as Director of Education for an international personal development organization, training hundreds of staff annually and overseeing a coaching team of roughly 200 across North America. Her years of studying and teaching led her to build the Integration Model, an original framework for understanding how the self develops, fragments, and finds its way back to coherence. Drawing on Dan Siegel's interpersonal neurobiology and Nathaniel Branden's research on self-esteem, the model is the foundation of all her programs. She holds that a growth model is only as good as its consistent, reproducible results.