Addison Thornton is a Program Specialist in Employer Brand & Engagement based in Chicago, Illinois. She is an emerging leader in employer branding, workforce strategy, recruitment marketing and community engagement. With a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Spelman College, she combines an understanding of human behaviour with a practical approach to building meaningful connections between organisations and the people they serve. Raised in the St. Louis area, Addison developed an early commitment to leadership, service, and community involvement. Through her participation in Jack and Jill of America, Inc., she was introduced to opportunities that strengthened her confidence, communication skills, and understanding of service-based leadership. Her early experiences in athletics also reinforced discipline, resilience, and teamwork. These principles continued to shape her development at Spelman College, where she served as Class Vice President for two consecutive years, held leadership positions across several student organizations, and became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated. Through these experiences, she developed a passion for transforming creative ideas into meaningful initiatives that educate, engage, and positively impact the communities around her. Professionally, Addison has gained experience across human resources, talent operations, consumer insights, brand marketing, and employee engagement through opportunities with organizations including Advantage Solutions, Fiserv, Beats by Dre, The Coca-Cola Company, and NARS Cosmetics. In her current role at Advantage Solutions, she contributes to initiatives focused on strengthening employer brand visibility, employee advocacy, and engagement. Her work has allowed her to apply her understanding of human behavior while developing skills in program strategy, cross-functional collaboration, and project execution. Alongside her corporate career, Addison is a Co-Founder of After Five, a women-led social experience collective founded by five Spelman alumni. Through curated events and experiences for young professionals, she has strengthened her skills in brand development, strategic partnerships, marketing, event execution, and business operations. The experience has also reinforced her entrepreneurial mindset and ability to bring creative concepts to life while navigating the responsibilities of building and growing a business. Outside of work, Addison remains committed to mentoring, volunteering and promoting leadership development. She enjoys hiking, yoga, creative marketing and event planning. Throughout her career, she has remained focused on creating opportunities for others, believing that lasting success is measured not only by results, but also by the positive impact made on individuals, organisations and communities. Q&A with Addison Thornton, Program Specialist, Employer Brand & Engagement Tell us about your background. What first inspired your interest in leadership? I grew up in the St. Louis area in a family that placed a strong emphasis on faith, service, education, and community. At a young age, I became involved in Jack and Jill of America, Inc., which introduced me to leadership through community engagement, service, and opportunities to develop my confidence and communication skills. Looking back, I think those experiences helped shape my understanding of leadership before I even recognized it as such. I learned early on that leadership is not necessarily about being the person in charge, but about understanding how your involvement, voice, and actions can positively impact the people around you. You were involved in academics, athletics, and community organizations from an early age. How did those experiences shape your approach to leadership? I think being involved in several different activities at a young age taught me the importance of balance, discipline, and accountability. Athletics certainly played a role in developing those principles, particularly when it came to teamwork, consistency, and resilience. However, my community involvement also challenged me to think beyond my individual responsibilities and consider how I could contribute to something greater than myself. Together, those experiences helped me become comfortable taking initiative, managing competing priorities, and working with different personalities, all of which are skills I continue to rely on today. How did Spelman College influence your career? Spelman College played an instrumental role in preparing me for the professional I am becoming today. One of the things I appreciate most about my experience is that Spelman challenged me early on to think intentionally about the impact I wanted my work to have, not just the positions I wanted to hold or the accomplishments I wanted to achieve. Through my involvement in campus leadership, particularly serving as Class Vice President for two years and holding positions in other student organizations, I was constantly challenged to take creative ideas and turn them into tangible experiences. A large part of my involvement centered around developing programming and events that not only brought people together, but also informed, educated, and created meaningful conversations around topics that mattered to our community. Those experiences taught me how to take an idea from concept to execution, collaborate with different stakeholders, manage expectations, and think strategically about the audience and impact of my work. At the same time, studying Psychology strengthened my understanding of human behavior, motivation, and the importance of connecting with people. I think Spelman equipped me with more than just technical or academic knowledge. It gave me the confidence to take initiative, the ability to lead with purpose, and the understanding that creativity and strategy can work together to create meaningful outcomes. As I continue navigating my transition into corporate America, I recognize how much of that foundation I rely on every day. Was there a leadership lesson that changed your perspective? Absolutely. One of the biggest lessons I learned early in my leadership journey was that having a great idea is only the beginning. I have always been someone who enjoys being creative and bringing new ideas to the table, but my experiences taught me that successful execution requires just as much intentionality, preparation, and communication as it does creativity. That became especially clear during my time serving as Externals Co-Chair for SKIRTS at Spelman. Working alongside a team to develop initiatives, coordinate programming, and support fundraising efforts challenged me to think more strategically about the planning and collaboration required to create meaningful outcomes. It taught me that leadership is not simply about having a vision. It’s about creating the structure, building the relationships, and doing the work necessary to bring that vision to life. You also have an entrepreneurial background. Tell us about that. During my time at Spelman, four of my classmates and I co-founded After Five, a women-led social experience collective focused on creating curated experiences that bring young professionals together through music, culture, and community. What initially started as a creative idea has grown into an opportunity for us to build a brand and expand into new markets. Through After Five, I’ve gained hands-on experience in branding, partnership development, marketing, budgeting, and event execution. More importantly, entrepreneurship has taught me the importance of ownership and being comfortable navigating ambiguity. When you’re building something from the ground up, there isn’t always a clearly defined process, so you have to be willing to think strategically, solve problems, and take initiative. Those are lessons I find myself applying in my corporate career as well. How did you move into employer branding and workforce engagement? My interest in employer branding developed naturally from my background in Psychology and my previous experiences across human resources, talent operations, and brand marketing. I’ve always been interested in understanding people, what motivates them, what makes them feel connected to a community, and how their experiences influence their perceptions. When I began exploring employer branding, I realized it brought together several areas I was already passionate about: human behavior, storytelling, strategy, creativity, and relationship-building. Now, in my role at Advantage Solutions, I have the opportunity to explore how organizations can communicate their culture authentically while creating experiences that resonate with both current and prospective employees. It’s been especially rewarding to see how concepts I studied at Spelman translate into the work I’m doing today. What achievement are you most proud of professionally? One of the initiatives I’m particularly proud to contribute to is the development of the One Advantage Brand Influencer Program at Advantage Solutions. The program focuses on exploring how authentic employee voices and experiences can strengthen employer brand visibility and help people better understand the organization beyond traditional recruitment messaging. What makes this experience especially meaningful is having the opportunity to contribute to a program that brings together strategy, creativity, and human connection so early in my career. It has challenged me to think about how ideas are developed, how different stakeholders contribute to a shared objective, and how organizations can create opportunities for employees to become authentic advocates for their workplace. You've worked with several well-known organisations. What have those experiences taught you? One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that every organization operates differently, and there is so much value in being exposed to different industries, business functions, and ways of thinking. Through my experiences with organizations such as Fiserv, Beats by Dre, The Coca-Cola Company, and NARS Cosmetics, I’ve had the opportunity to explore areas ranging from human resources and consumer insights to brand marketing and engagement. Those experiences taught me to remain curious, ask thoughtful questions, and approach unfamiliar environments with a willingness to learn. They’ve also helped me recognize the importance of understanding how different parts of a business work together, something I believe will continue to be valuable as I grow professionally. What qualities do you believe future leaders need most? I believe adaptability, curiosity, emotional intelligence, and the ability to navigate ambiguity are going to be increasingly important for future leaders. As technology continues to evolve and organizations adapt to new ways of working, leaders will need to be comfortable with change while remaining intentional about understanding the people they lead. I also think strong leaders have to be lifelong learners. You don’t always have to be the person with every answer, but you should be willing to ask the right questions, listen to different perspectives, and create an environment where people feel empowered to contribute. How do you define success today? At this stage in my life and career, I define success through growth, impact, and intentionality. Of course, achieving goals and producing meaningful results is important to me, but I also think success is about who you’re becoming throughout the process. I constantly challenge myself to think about what I’m learning, how I’m contributing, and whether the work I’m doing is creating value beyond my individual accomplishments. I want to continue becoming someone who not only achieves personal and professional success, but also creates opportunities and meaningful experiences for the people around me. What advice would you give to students and young professionals starting their careers? My biggest piece of advice would be to get comfortable being uncomfortable and don’t wait until you feel completely prepared to pursue an opportunity. Some of the experiences that have shaped me the most came from saying yes to something I hadn’t necessarily done before and trusting myself to learn along the way. I would also encourage students and young professionals to be intentional about getting involved, building genuine relationships, and asking questions. Don’t underestimate the value of experiences outside of a traditional internship or job. Whether it’s community service, student leadership, entrepreneurship, or mentorship, those opportunities can help you develop skills that become incredibly valuable later in your career. Most importantly, remain curious and remember that your career is something you’re continuously building. You don’t have to have everything figured out to start making an impact.

Written by Jo Warwick, Founder of Glitches to Gold™ | Author | Podcast Host Jo Warwick is The Money Therapist, host of the Glitches to Gold podcast, and author of The Big Book of Love. Blending over 25 years of expertise in psychotherapy, business, energetics, and Human Design, she guides women to uncover inherited and unconscious patterns that drive their money and success in life. For years, women have been taught that success should feel exciting. Bigger launches. Bigger months. Bigger achievements. But what if the thing we've been chasing isn't freedom at all? What if the constant pursuit of the next high is quietly keeping us from building real wealth? In this article, The Money Therapist and creator of Glitches to Gold™, Jo Warwick, explores why stability, not intensity or endless striving, may be the most overlooked form of feminine power, and why it could be the foundation of the Gold Standard Life every woman is designed for. Why modern women have been taught to chase the high For years, I thought success looked exciting. The big launches. The breakthrough months. The moments everyone applauded. Like so many entrepreneurial women, I believed I was chasing freedom. Looking back, I wasn't. I was chasing the high. They're two very different things. What I see now, both in myself and in the women I work with as The Money Therapist, is that most ambitious women aren't actually craving bigger highs anymore. They're craving something much rarer. They're craving stability. The kind of stability that allows you to breathe. Where money isn't constantly on your mind because it's supporting your life instead of demanding your attention. The kind where your business doesn't constantly need rescuing. Where your nervous system can stop performing for survival and start creating from overflow. Yet somewhere along the way, we've been taught that stability isn't exciting. We've confused drama with aliveness. We've mistaken unpredictability for freedom. We've been conditioned to believe that if life becomes steady, we'll somehow lose ourselves. The hidden program women are still living inside The biggest hidden program modern women are still living inside is The Secret Feminine Tax. It's the invisible pattern that is taxing to experience, as it drains our energy, time, passion, and capacity, and, ultimately, our ability to build lasting wealth. It keeps us chasing intensity instead of stability, proving instead of receiving, and constantly working harder for results that never quite feel proportionate to the effort we're putting in. The cost isn't simply financial. It's that we become so busy chasing what sparkles that we never stop to build what lasts. Why gold lasts while glitter fades People are naturally drawn towards glitter because it catches the light. Yet, gold has lasted for thousands of years because it is solid. Its value isn't built on excitement. It's built on longevity. Wealth works in the same way. Most women say they want more money. But when we really decode it, what they actually want is something much deeper. They don't just want more money. They want the kind of financial stability that creates freedom. So they can pay for the weekly groceries without giving it a second thought. Take weekends away with girlfriends, partners, or alone. Money that's making more money. They can choose to do what they want and when they want it, invest more or use it on pleasure. Because they're tired of uncertainty. There's a huge difference between having money and creating wealth. I've seen this in my own life too. Years ago, I thought the exciting parts of business were launches, visibility, and growth. In my life, working anywhere in the world and traveling as I wish. These days, some of the sexiest things in my life are my Individual Savings Account (ISA), my investments, my savings account, and my property portfolio. If you'd told the younger entrepreneurial version of me that I'd get excited about those things, I'd have laughed. Now I see them completely differently. They're my riverbanks. Your river flow needs banks A river needs solid banks. We are the same. The river is your creativity, your intuition, and your life force. But a river without strong, flexible banks will flood everything. The banks are your structures. Stability. Financial foundations. Long-term thinking. The systems that support you. They create the safety that allows the river to flow exactly as it was designed to. We’ve confused success with intensity. Social media will have you believe that we only need the peak moments, the launch, the viral post, the six-figure month, the big breakthrough. But peaks were never meant to become somewhere we seek to live. We can become addicted to recreating them, the next achievement, the next milestone, the next piece of recognition, the next moment that promises, this will finally be enough. Except it never is. Because highs can’t create safety. Only foundations do. Don't grow a business, grow the business of you One of the biggest lessons of the last decade for me has been this. Don't just grow a business. Grow the business of you. For me, that includes my company, my health, my relationships, my finances, my spirituality, my home, my joy, and the way I move through the world. Every part either supports the whole or taxes it. That's what a Gold Standard Life really means to me. Not having one extraordinary area that's held together by exhaustion everywhere else, but creating a life where every part becomes strong enough to support every other part. The Secret Feminine Tax rewards busyness over being, urgency over sustainability, performance over presence, and proving over peace. It teaches women to chase glitter instead of building gold. Why stability makes expansion possible The women who create lasting wealth don't separate who they are from what they build. They become the foundation from which everything else grows. Their business, their finances, their relationships, their health, their joy, and the way they experience life all begin to support one another rather than compete. That's what I mean by the Gold Standard Life. Real wealth isn't a business that succeeds while everything else struggles. It's creating a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. I still love beauty. I still love luxury. I still believe every woman is designed for gold. But gold is never just about what you own. It's about living as the woman you were always designed to be. It's about creating a life that reflects who you truly are, where stability creates freedom, wealth creates choice, and success no longer comes at the expense of yourself. That's why stability isn't ordinary. It's extraordinary. Not because it removes ambition, but because it gives ambition somewhere safe to grow. That's the difference between chasing glitter and building gold. That's the Gold Standard Life every woman is designed for. Ready to stop paying the secret feminine tax? If you've recognised yourself in this article, it may be because you've been paying The Secret Feminine Tax without ever realising it existed. Decode the Matrix is my three-day experience designed to help the Modern Woman uncover the hidden patterns that are taxing their money, energy, time, and capacity, so they can stop chasing glitter and start experiencing the Gold Standard Life they were already designed for. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Jo Warwick Jo Warwick, Founder of Glitches to Gold™ | Author | Podcast Host Jo Warwick brings over two decades of experience in psychotherapy, human behaviour, business and energetics to her work exploring the hidden patterns and systemic circuitry shaping money, business, success, love and life. A former elite athlete, entrepreneur and author of two books, she is also the host of the Glitches to Gold™ podcast, with over 250,000 plays and 1,500 five-star reviews across four seasons. Discover more at GlitchesToGold.com. Related articles: Why Smart Women Still Struggle To Allow Wealth To Grow ( Podcast S4/Ep4) Exclusive Interview With Jo Warwick and Glitches To Gold

Written by Jo Warwick, Founder of Glitches to Gold™ | Author | Podcast Host Jo Warwick is The Money Therapist, host of the Glitches to Gold podcast, and author of The Big Book of Love. Blending over 25 years of expertise in psychotherapy, business, energetics, and Human Design, she guides women to uncover inherited and unconscious patterns that drive their money and success in life. As women, we spend so much of our lives collecting identities. The good girl. The responsible one. The woman who achieves it all. But what happens when the identities that once helped us belong, survive, or succeed no longer fit? In this article, The Money Therapist and creator of Glitches to Gold™, Jo Warwick, explores why becoming more of your 'self' might have far less to do with adding another layer and far more to do with finally taking some off. How many identities are you still wearing? As women, we collect a lot of identities. The good girl. The responsible one. The woman who holds everything together. The woman who never says no. The woman who is always available. The woman who needs to be needed. Even the high achieving one. We put them on, layer after layer, until eventually we’re walking through life wearing so many versions of ourselves that we can barely move, and wonder why we struggle to move into our desires without so much effort. It always makes me think of that episode of Friends where Joey puts on every single piece of Chandler’s clothing at once. “Could I be wearing any more clothes?” It’s funny because it’s ridiculous. Yet, I wonder how many women are doing exactly the same thing with their identities. Some identities are given to us. Some we chose. Some helped us belong. Some protected us. Some helped us survive or succeed. Some fitted us beautifully for a particular season of our lives. But that doesn’t mean we’re supposed to wear them forever. Personal development has become obsessed with becoming. We’re constantly encouraged to add another layer. Become more confident. Become more successful. Become a better version, a future version, that version. What if becoming more of your SELF requires the opposite? What if you need to start taking things off instead? When an identity no longer fits An identity that once held you together can eventually become the very thing stopping you from breathing. I think of it like wearing a corset. A corset can look beautiful. It can create the right shape, hold everything perfectly in place, and even be admired by everybody looking at you. You still can’t breathe. That’s what an old identity can become. It can look incredibly successful on the outside while restricting the life underneath. I recently came face to face with an echo of one of my own, the caretaker. I’ve carried this identity for most of my life, and I’ve spent years stripping it back, layer by layer. But when I returned to where my parents live after a month away, I realised a little piece of it was still hanging around. It was almost like getting completely changed, putting on a beautiful new outfit, walking out of the house, and then discovering you’ve had an old pair of knickers stuck to the back of your trousers the entire time. Oh. You’re still here. That’s what this felt like. Not the caretaker suddenly taking over my life again. Not me stepping back into an old identity I’d already predominantly put down. Just an old piece of clothing I’d somehow walked out of the house still carrying. The identity that still wants a job Within a couple of days, I could feel the familiar pulse in my body. My energy wanted to mobilise. I could feel myself questioning and behaving from a state where I don’t trust my dad to take care of my mum. From there, I found myself asking him questions. Has he done this? Has he sorted out her pills? Has that been taken care of? And then I caught it. Because underneath all of those questions was another assumption. Does my mum actually need someone to take care of her? There it was. The caretaker. Still trying to find herself a little job. That’s when I realised there was another piece of this identity I was ready to take off. Being responsible for my parents’ wellbeing. Their health, their happiness, their emotional world. Keeping them alive. Caretaking had woven itself through much of my life. You could see it in my career as a psychotherapist, energy healer, medium, and business consultant. My natural 'self' is caring. But caring and caretaking are not the same thing. The caretaker in me was overstimulated and overgiving, always ready to mobilise, always looking for who needed help, what needed fixing, and where my energy needed to go next. Being needed gave me an identity. It gave me a purpose. At one point in my life, it helped justify my existence. If I was useful, if I was helping, if I was taking care of everyone, then I had a place in my family, in the world. Every identity gives us something Like so many identities women carry, caretaking wasn’t confined to one area of my life. It affected my work, my business, and my money. Because attached to the caretaker was another belief that so many women will recognise, if I truly care, I’ll do it for free. I’ll give more, ask for less, keep going, and make sure everyone else is okay first. Until, eventually, resentment begins to creep in because you’ve given away far more than you ever had available to give. But resentment is poisonous and blocks the flow of life force energy until nothing flows or works well. Perhaps that’s a conversation we don’t have enough of when we talk about identity. The caretaker gets to be needed. The busy woman gets to feel important. The good girl gets to belong. The woman who never says no gets to avoid disappointing anyone. The woman who holds everything together gets to feel in control. Every identity gives us something. Not always something good. But it serves a purpose. Otherwise, we wouldn’t keep wearing it. But eventually, you have to ask whether what it’s giving you is worth what it’s costing you. Does it still fit? Can you move in it? Can you breathe? Or are you wearing an identity that has become so tight around your life that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to move without it? Related article: Why Stability Has Become the New Luxury for Modern Women What if you’re ready to take it off? I don’t hate the caretaker. She had a purpose. She served me. At one point, I needed her. But I don’t need to wear her anymore, and I truly don’t want the job anymore. There is finally no anger or fear in that realisation. I know I can be caring without being the caretaker. Love deeply without becoming responsible for everybody I love. Share my wisdom without rescuing and support without sacrificing myself. Care without mobilising my entire life force every time somebody I love is struggling. So am I finally willing to let this identity go? Not manage it better. Not heal it more. Not turn it into a more evolved version of itself. Take it off. Get naked. Be me. Live fully without it? Yes is the only answer I know to be true to my core. Who are you underneath it? This understanding sits at the heart of the Glitches to Gold™ Method. Instead of being encouraged to add another new identity, the more powerful move is the opposite, shedding the conditioning, decluttering, and taking off the layers that no longer belong. Human Design teaches us that a true SELF already exists underneath the conditioning. You don’t need to dress her up as somebody else. You just need to give her room to move and breathe fully, without hiding. Shedding an identity can feel so confronting because you’re not simply changing a behaviour. You’re taking off something you may have worn for decades. Something people recognise you in. Something they may even expect you to keep wearing. And when you’ve worn something for that long, taking it off can leave you wondering who you’ll be without it. But perhaps that’s the wrong question. The question isn’t, "Who will I become without this identity?" Perhaps it’s, "Who am I already underneath it?" As I put down the final pieces of the caretaker, I’m not becoming less of who I really am. I’m simply taking off a role that has long been outgrown and has no purpose. So when you are asking to be more, have more, and feel more alive, have you considered what becoming more of your SELF really looks like? Does it really need you to add more or simply remove? Carry less? Perhaps it’s time to stand in front of your wardrobe of lifetime identities, decide to declutter, and choose what you wish to take forward into your future. Ready to discover the truth underneath? The power of an identity is that it doesn’t just affect how you see yourself. It can affect how you give, receive, work, earn, love, and move through your life every single day. And when an old identity starts taking more from you than it gives back, it can become part of what I call The Secret Feminine Tax. Decode the Matrix is my three-day experience for women to uncover the hidden patterns taxing their money, energy, time, and capacity, so they can stop paying for who they thought they needed to be and start experiencing the Gold Standard Life they were already designed for. Start with the Glitches to Gold™ podcast, with four seasons and 900+ five-star reviews. It’s the perfect place to begin turning your glitches to gold. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Jo Warwick Jo Warwick, Founder of Glitches to Gold™ | Author | Podcast Host Jo Warwick brings over two decades of experience in psychotherapy, human behaviour, business and energetics to her work exploring the hidden patterns and systemic circuitry shaping money, business, success, love and life. A former elite athlete, entrepreneur and author of two books, she is also the host of the Glitches to Gold™ podcast, with over 250,000 plays and 1,500 five-star reviews across four seasons. Discover more at GlitchesToGold.com.

Lucia Petrusova is a leadership mentor, certified Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT®) hypnotherapist and founder of Lutencia who has guided executives and entrepreneurs through more than 2,000 transformational sessions to change the subconscious patterns behind how they lead. After almost 20 years in international corporations, including as a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, she now applies root cause thinking to a different system: the leader. She is also the author of Unapologetically Feminine and creator of her methodology, Standards That Magnetize®. In this interview, Lucia explains why capable leaders struggle to do what they already know they should, how to tell when success is being driven by survival, and why what we accept in our relationships shows up in how we lead. Lucia Petrusova, Leadership Mentor What did you discover about leadership that ultimately led you to create Lutencia? For almost 20 years in the international corporate world, my job was to troubleshoot transformation. I moved between the big picture and the smallest detail, found patterns in complex systems and went deep enough to reach the real root cause. But I was never transforming processes alone. Every program required changes in culture, behavior and the way people led. Over time, I noticed something. The people I coached and developed kept growing beyond their roles. Some were promoted, while others moved on to bigger opportunities. I grew increasingly curious about human transformation itself. Then I saw the pattern. The principle I applied to business problems applied to leaders too: the visible problem is rarely the real problem. Behind overcontrol, perfectionism, self-doubt, or difficulty delegating sits a deeper pattern driving the behavior. That realization became Lutencia. I combine a Master Black Belt's discipline for diagnosing root causes with transformational work at the level of identity and the subconscious. I stopped fixing systems and started working with the one that determines whether any strategy succeeds: the leader. How did your corporate career shape your leadership work today? My international corporate career gave me the ability to think in systems and search for root causes rather than symptoms. I spent almost two decades in operational excellence and business transformation, including as a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt. I was trained to challenge assumptions and understand why a problem keeps repeating instead of correcting its visible consequences. I still work exactly like that today, except the system I am analyzing is human. When a leader tells me, "I need to delegate more," I don't teach another delegation technique. I ask why this highly capable person finds it so hard to let go. Often, somewhere inside, control has become associated with safety. A technique alone rarely survives that. My analytical background lets me spot patterns quickly. My expertise in subconscious transformation, including RTT® and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), lets us change what sits underneath them. Because I spent two decades inside large international organisations, I can discuss business logic with a chief executive officer (CEO) and then go to the level where the behavior actually begins. That is the combination I bring to every leader I work with. Few people offer both. Why do subconscious patterns influence leadership decisions? We like to believe leadership decisions are rational. We analyse the information, assess the risk, build a strategy and decide. But human beings don't operate from logic alone. A leader can know exactly what they should do, whether that is delegating, setting a boundary, raising prices, challenging a senior stakeholder or making a bold strategic move, and still find themselves unable to do it. That gap between knowing and doing is where subconscious patterns take over. Underneath the behavior, there is often a belief such as "If I lose control, something will go wrong," "I have to prove my value," "I cannot disappoint people," "Failure is dangerous," or "It has to be perfect before I can move." The conscious mind can produce an excellent strategy while an unconscious pattern quietly decides how that strategy gets executed. That's why capable leaders can repeat the same pattern across different roles. Our decisions are not only strategic. They are also subconscious. Once a leader sees this, the work changes. Instead of correcting behavior again and again, we examine what creates it. That is where lasting change begins. How can leaders recognize when they are operating from survival? The clearest sign is that everything starts to feel urgent. Leaders operating from survival become controlling, reactive or overly responsible. Trusting someone else feels risky, so they struggle to delegate. They constantly anticipate what could go wrong. Rest creates guilt, mistakes feel threatening, and the mind rarely switches off because it is always preparing for the next problem. What makes this so difficult to spot is that survival doesn't look dysfunctional. In high achievers, it looks productive. It looks like ambition, exceptional standards, perfectionism, independence and relentless performance. These behaviors may even have built the person's success. So the question I ask is not, “Is this behavior productive?” It is, "Is this a conscious choice, or does this person feel unsafe when they stop?" That distinction matters. A leader who can rest, delegate or slow down by choice is operating from strength. A leader who can't, even when they want to, is being driven by pressure or threat, however successful they look. Sustainable high performance requires the capacity to act intentionally rather than being continuously driven by an internal alarm. How do you help clients break patterns like overcontrol, perfectionism, and self-doubt? I work with the root of the pattern, not its symptoms. Take overcontrol. Telling an overcontrolling leader to delegate makes perfect intellectual sense. But if their subconscious links control with safety, "letting go" creates enormous internal resistance. Their first answer is usually, "I don't know how to do it." That is not a skills gap. It is protection. So I ask what the behavior is protecting. What does this person believe will happen if they stop controlling everything? What does a mistake mean to them? Why does perfection feel necessary? Why does external validation carry so much weight? Depending on the leader, I combine executive coaching with subconscious transformation, NLP and approaches informed by the nervous system. First, we identify the underlying pattern. Then we work with what maintains it. Then we translate that internal change into practical leadership behavior. That last step is essential. The change must show up in the decisions they make, the boundaries they hold, the conversations they are willing to have, how they delegate and how they respond under pressure. The goal is not greater self-awareness. It is a different way of operating. What is Standards That Magnetize®, and how does it support stronger leadership? Standards That Magnetize® is my methodology around standards, identity and the way we teach other people to interact with us. I created it while writing my book, Unapologetically Feminine, when I realized the same pattern runs through relationships and leadership. What we accept in our relationships, we tend to accept in how we lead. That is why, when a leader comes to me with a work issue, my first question is often, "Tell me about your marriage." One client came to me after reading the book. Her business was struggling and her numbers were dropping. Reading it, she realized that her marriage was mirroring unresolved issues of her own, the same ones affecting her business. We worked on the hidden pattern behind both. Her business recovered within a few months. Standards are not expectations. An expectation focuses on what others should do. A standard brings responsibility back to us: what I choose, what I accept and what I am prepared to walk away from. When leaders strengthen their standards, they stop trying to control everyone around them and begin to attract different people and dynamics. Standards are an expression of identity. When your identity changes, your standards change, and your leadership changes with them. How is your approach different from traditional executive coaching? Traditional executive coaching often begins with observable behavior: communication, delegation, decision-making, executive presence, or leadership style. Those matter, and they are part of my work too. But I go one level deeper and ask: what is creating this behavior? Take a leader who avoids difficult conversations. We can teach communication frameworks and feedback models. But if underneath sits a belief such as "If I challenge people, they will stop respecting me," the framework has limited impact. Under pressure, the leader returns to the original pattern. This is where my background makes the difference. I bring almost 20 years of international corporate experience and analytical thinking, and combine them with executive coaching, subconscious transformation, NLP and work informed by the nervous system. I describe it as working at the intersection of business transformation and human transformation. We can discuss strategy, performance and leadership behavior. We also examine the identity and subconscious patterns of the person executing that strategy. The quality of a strategy is only one part of the equation. The internal capacity of the leader carrying it out matters just as much. What changes when leaders strengthen their identity, standards, and emotional capacity? Leadership becomes less reactive and more intentional. People sometimes assume that a stronger leader is more forceful, more dominant, more controlling. In my experience, internal strength has the opposite effect. When identity gets stronger, there is less need to keep proving yourself. When standards get clearer, there is less need to control other people's behavior. When emotional capacity expands, uncertainty, disagreement, difficult conversations and responsibility become easier to hold without reacting immediately. What remains is more clarity and less internal noise. This changes how leaders communicate, delegate, decide and handle conflict. It also changes the energy of an entire team, because people respond strongly to the emotional state of the person leading them. People follow your state, not only your instructions. A leader can deliver all the right messages, but if their behavior communicates fear, distrust or urgency, the team feels it. Communication training alone cannot fix that. That is why strengthening leadership internally reaches far beyond personal development. It shapes the environment the leader creates around them and the results that environment produces. Who benefits most from your work at Lutencia? I work best with high-achieving leaders, executives, entrepreneurs, and founders who are already capable and successful but recognize that their next level cannot come from working harder. They are intelligent, ambitious and highly self-aware. They don't need generic motivation or another productivity system. In many cases, they already know what they "should" be doing. The challenge sits somewhere deeper. They may see patterns of overcontrol, perfectionism, difficulty delegating, chronic internal pressure or self-doubt despite external success. Some realize that the strategies that got them to their current position are becoming limitations at the next level. That is the moment my work becomes more powerful. It is probably not the right fit for someone looking for quick tips, a checklist or a standardized model of a "good leader". I am not interested in that. I want to understand the individual in front of me: how they operate, what drives them and what holds them back. The question then shifts from "What else should I do?" to something far more interesting: "Who do I need to become to lead what I am building next?" Where can readers learn more about your work and services? The best place to start is my website, where the blog explores my approach to leadership transformation, subconscious patterns and human behavior, alongside my services and client work. I also wrote the book Unapologetically Feminine, available on Amazon in paperback or Kindle, and regularly share my perspective on leadership and identity on LinkedIn. Lutencia is the company behind all of this. I work with leaders and entrepreneurs through private transformational coaching and mentoring, and with organisations through leadership workshops. Next, I am expanding into transformational leadership retreats: experiences where leaders step outside their everyday environment, go deeper into their own transformation and return to their businesses leading differently. Everything I create is connected by one philosophy: business transformation and human transformation cannot be separated. When the person leading changes, the way they lead, decide and build changes with them. If you are a leader who suspects your next level will not come from working harder, let's talk. You can apply to work with me for a 45-minute introductory call. Follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Lucia Petrusova

Written by Dee Mani, Natural Health Consultant, Best-Selling Author & Founder of My Way CBD Dee Mani is a holistic healing advocate and founder of My Way CBD, who transformed her life after overcoming an aggressive breast cancer diagnosis using natural remedies. She is an author, entrepreneur, and speaker dedicated to empowering others through the healing potential of cannabis and holistic wellness practices. We have become incredibly good at silencing our bodies, which has somehow become the norm. A headache appears, so we take something for it. We get acid reflux, so we suppress the acid. We can’t sleep, so we look for something to make us sleep. We are exhausted, so we drink more coffee. We become constipated, bloated or uncomfortable and search for something that will make the symptom disappear. But how often do we actually stop and ask the most important question of all: why is this happening? Your body cannot sit you down and have a conversation with you, so it communicates in a completely different way, through pain, fatigue, inflammation, headaches, digestive problems, skin problems, disrupted sleep, changes in appetite, changes in bowel habits and that general feeling that something just isn’t quite right. Yet instead of listening to those changes, we have been conditioned to silence them as quickly as possible, and I think that is where we have gone very wrong when it comes to understanding our health. The symptom isn’t necessarily where the problem started One of the biggest mistakes we make is assuming that the place where we feel the symptom must also be where the problem lies, but it simply isn’t always that straightforward. If somebody cannot sleep, the immediate focus becomes sleep, but what is actually keeping them awake? Is it chronic stress, too much caffeine, blood sugar fluctuations, hormonal changes, digestive discomfort, an overstimulated nervous system, or something happening emotionally that they have never really dealt with? The same applies to almost every symptom we experience. If somebody continually suffers from headaches, why do they keep getting them? If they are bloated after almost every meal, why? If they are exhausted despite spending eight hours in bed, why? If their skin suddenly changes, why? I am not suggesting that we should diagnose ourselves or assume that every symptom has some sinister hidden meaning, but I do think we need to rediscover something incredibly basic, which is curiosity about our own bodies. Instead of only asking, “What can I take for this?” maybe we should also start asking, “What could be contributing to this?” That one simple change in thinking can completely alter the way we approach our health and stop us from constantly treating the end result without ever looking at what may have come before it. Your body leaves clues Our bodies are performing an extraordinary balancing act every second of every day, regulating temperature, blood sugar, digestion, circulation, hormones, fluid balance, immune activity and countless other processes without us consciously doing anything at all. So when the body repeatedly begins telling us that something feels wrong, surely that deserves our attention. Constant exhaustion is information. Recurring digestive problems are information. Poor sleep is information. Persistent headaches are information. Skin flare-ups are information, and pain is information. None of those things automatically tell us exactly what the cause is, but they do give us somewhere to start looking, and sometimes what the body needs is not particularly complicated. It may need better nutrition, more water, proper sleep, movement, sunlight, less alcohol, less ultra-processed food, more time outdoors, better stress management, improved digestion, support for a nutrient deficiency, or simply the chance to rest properly. We have become so accustomed to searching for complicated solutions that sometimes we completely overlook the basics, when in reality the basics are often where we should have started. Stress does not stay inside your head Another mistake we make is separating mental and physical health as though they exist in completely different bodies, when of course they don’t. Stress creates very real physical changes because when we perceive a threat or pressure, the nervous system responds. Our heart rate can increase, our muscles can tense, digestion can alter, sleep can become disrupted and stress hormones are released. This is useful when we genuinely need that response, but it becomes a very different story when the body is living in that state for weeks, months, or even years. Financial pressure, unhappy relationships, work stress, caring responsibilities, lack of sleep, constant notifications, social media, rushing from one thing to another and never truly stopping can leave somebody living in a nearly permanent state of tension. Then we wonder why the body eventually begins complaining. When somebody tells me they are exhausted, I don’t just want to know how many hours they sleep. I want to know what their life looks like because health does not exist separately from the life you are living, and I think this is something we still massively underestimate. We throw the word stress around so casually that it can almost sound harmless, but there is a huge difference between having a stressful day and living in an environment where your nervous system rarely feels safe enough to switch off. The body does not separate emotional stress from physical stress in the neat way we sometimes imagine it does, and while I would never claim that stress is responsible for every illness, I do believe it needs to be taken far more seriously as part of the bigger picture. Pay attention to your gut The digestive system is one of the clearest examples of symptoms becoming normalised, because people will often tell you they have been bloated for years as though it is simply part of who they are, while others live with reflux, constipation, diarrhoea or discomfort and have almost accepted that this is just how their digestive system works. But if something happens repeatedly, it is worth asking why. What are you eating? How quickly are you eating? Are you actually chewing your food properly? Are you eating while stressed or rushing? Are you getting enough fibre and fluids? Do certain foods repeatedly make you feel worse? Digestion plays a fundamental role in breaking down food and absorbing the nutrients our bodies need, and it is closely connected with immune and metabolic processes too, so ignoring digestive problems indefinitely makes very little sense. Your body may have been trying to get your attention for a very long time, but because those symptoms have become familiar, you may have stopped seeing them as signals altogether. Don’t wait until the whisper becomes a shout The part I feel most strongly about is the fact that we are very good at pushing through. We push through exhaustion because we are busy. We ignore poor sleep because life has to continue. We normalise pain, we become used to bloating, and we stay in situations that are draining us because we convince ourselves that we can cope. We live stressed for so long that eventually we forget what being relaxed even feels like. Sometimes we ignore the whispers until our body has no choice but to shout. My own health journey completely changed the way I viewed the human body because it taught me to stop looking at health as something we only deal with once a diagnosis arrives and start seeing it as something we should be participating in every day. Looking back now, I can see that my own body had been trying to get my attention long before I was diagnosed with cancer, but at the time I did exactly what so many people do, which was to manage the symptoms instead of asking why they were there. Around a year before my diagnosis, I developed a cough that I simply could not shake off. After that came an unexplained rash followed by extreme fatigue, but I never once connected any of those things to the enormous amount of stress I was living under at the time. I was in an abusive relationship, my nervous system was constantly overwhelmed, and yet I still saw each symptom as a separate problem that needed fixing, rather than asking myself whether my body was trying to tell me that something deeper was going on. I used steroid creams for the rash and took antibiotics for the cough, neither of which resolved the problem. If anything, I now look back and feel that I was simply adding more pressure to a body that was already struggling. At the time, I did not understand any of this because I had spent most of my life learning how to cope, how to keep going, and how to function through stress without ever really questioning what that stress was doing to me physically. It took a cancer diagnosis for me to finally stop and look at the whole picture. The root can go back much further than you think When I look back now, I personally believe that the roots of what I was experiencing went back much further than the abusive relationship I was in at the time. I was raised in a toxic household and carried a great deal of unresolved childhood trauma into adulthood without ever really understanding the effect it had on me. Like many people, I had learned to survive what happened, but I had never properly dealt with it. Then, years later, I found myself in an abusive relationship, which created another overwhelming period of stress, and I believe that became the trigger that pushed an already exhausted system even further. I am not saying that trauma or stress alone caused my cancer, because cancer is far more complex than that, and I would never reduce it to a single cause. But I do believe that unresolved trauma, chronic stress and the state of my nervous system formed a very important part of my own personal health picture. By the time I was diagnosed, I can only describe my central nervous system as being completely torn to pieces. I had spent years living in survival mode without even recognising it as survival mode, and when you have lived that way for long enough, it becomes your normal. That diagnosis forced me to look at everything, not just what I was eating or what supplements I was taking, but the life I was living, the people I was surrounded by, the stress I was carrying, the trauma I had buried and the way I had trained myself to push through everything instead of listening to what my body was telling me. That was the point where I began to understand that health is not just about food, exercise or supplements. Sometimes the root is emotional, sometimes it is environmental, sometimes it is relational, and sometimes it goes all the way back to things that happened years before we ever became physically unwell. Your life experiences can affect your health When we talk about root causes, people often immediately think about food, toxins, nutrient deficiencies, poor sleep or lack of exercise, and all of those things can absolutely form part of the picture, but sometimes we also need to ask what has happened to the person. What have they lived through? What are they still carrying? What relationships are they surrounded by? Do they ever feel safe enough to switch off? Are they permanently anxious? Are they suppressing grief, fear, anger or trauma because they believe they need to be strong? Are they living in an environment that keeps their nervous system on constant alert? I think these questions are just as important as asking what somebody eats because the mind and body are not separate, and you cannot put one through years of emotional strain and assume the other will remain completely unaffected. For me, healing therefore became about far more than changing my diet or taking supplements. It meant looking at the life I had created around myself, understanding my past, learning boundaries, protecting my peace, removing myself from situations that kept me in survival mode and finally understanding the difference between merely coping and actually feeling safe. 9 years later, I listen differently After I was declared to have no evidence of disease (NED), I made my own personal decision not to continue with routine imaging because I did not want repeated radiation exposure unless I felt it was necessary. That was my choice, and I am not suggesting that anybody else should make the same decision, because follow-up after cancer is individual and everyone needs to decide what feels right for them. For the first two years after being declared clear, I continued with regular blood work. Over time, I found myself relying more and more on knowing my own baseline and paying attention to changes in my body. Now, nine years later, I feel more in tune with myself than I ever have before. I practise mindfulness, I protect my peace far more than I used to, and I care for my mind just as much as I care for my physical body. I pay attention when something feels different instead of immediately overriding it and carrying on. I also listen to my intuition in a way I never did before because I have learned that your body often gives you information long before you consciously understand what is going on. I genuinely cannot remember the last time I was properly unwell, and I am not saying that mindfulness or intuition makes somebody immune to illness, because of course it does not. But what I do know is that the relationship I have with my body now is completely different from the relationship I had with it before cancer. Before my diagnosis, I thought, worried, coped and pushed through. Now I listen. Become curious about your own body I’m a huge believer in people becoming active participants in their own health, but that doesn’t mean obsessing over every sensation or refusing medical advice. It means knowing your own body well enough to recognise when something has changed and being willing to investigate why. Notice patterns and ask yourself questions. When did the symptom begin? What was happening in your life at the time? What makes it better? What makes it worse? Has anything changed in your diet, sleep, environment or stress levels? How are your relationships? How does your body feel around certain people? Are you actually resting, or are you simply collapsing at the end of another exhausting day? One of the biggest things I have learned is that symptoms should not always be treated as an inconvenience to get rid of as quickly as possible. Sometimes they are information, sometimes they are warning signs, and sometimes they are the body’s way of trying to get your attention before something becomes much harder to ignore. That does not mean living in fear of every headache, every rash or every tired day, because that would be just as unhealthy, but it does mean paying attention when something persists, changes or repeatedly comes back. Your body should not have to scream before you acknowledge what it has been whispering for months or even years. I wish I had understood that before my own diagnosis, but I understand it now, and that has completely changed the way I view health, healing and my own body. Your body is communicating with you every single day, and the question is whether you are actually listening. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Dee Mani Dee Mani, Natural Health Consultant, Best-Selling Author & Founder of My Way CBD Dee Mani is a Natural Health Consultant, bestselling author and founder of the award-winning My Way CBD. With a professional background in pharmaceuticals and a personal journey that reshaped her approach to health following a breast cancer diagnosis in 2017, Dee is dedicated to educating and empowering others through nutrition, lifestyle and evidence-informed natural therapies.

Written by Ryan Campinho Valadas, Therapist, Educator & Trainer Ryan Campinho Valadas is a specialist psychotherapist, educator, and public speaker working in the areas of relational health, sexuality, identity, and organisational culture. He is based in the UK and works with a diverse range of individuals, community groups, and organisations. Redundancy can feel deeply personal, bringing grief, uncertainty, and a sense of betrayal. By exploring attachment and workplace relationships, this article examines why job loss affects us so profoundly and how we can begin to move forward. Betrayal at the office Towards the end of 2021, I found myself supporting an organisation through its restructure and redundancy process for the first time by providing psychologically informative workshops and talks, as well as individual therapy. It was during one of those workshops that I heard someone say for the first time that they felt betrayed by their employer. I remember feeling stunned by the strength and intensity of the feeling being expressed, and the impact it was having on this person. Many of their colleagues agreed, and I realised then that redundancies can be extremely destabilising events in someone’s life. I’ve never forgotten that moment in all my years supporting companies and employees in similar circumstances. But like many things in life, it all felt somewhat theoretical, because it wasn’t happening to me, and in fact, I fully believed that it wouldn’t happen to me. And so, in 2025, when I was made redundant from a job role that I created in a company that I helped build, I knew exactly how that feeling of betrayal felt. After some negotiations, I kept my role in a different capacity, only to be made redundant again a few months later. The feeling of betrayal was pronounced and absolute. I couldn’t believe it. It activated some of my worst fears and shame, and left me in a state of shock and helplessness. The last few months have been marked by important reflections on my personal and professional lives, and I couldn’t help but think about attachment and relationships when considering the impact of my redundancies, and when expanding my understanding of the impact on all of those individuals I supported through redundancies in the last few years. In the beginning, unrememberable and unforgettable The influence and depth of our early experiences are so profound that neuroscientist Doug Watt describes the early years as “unrememberable and unforgettable” (as cited in Gerhardt, 2015). We can’t remember what happened in a conscious capacity, but our bodies and brains do, and this dictates many of our emotional responses to people and life, as well as our behaviours. In fact, much of the work that therapists undertake is in seeking and gaining clarity about the potential reasons that drive our lives. It may be a cliché, but explorations about how we relate to our parents revolve around a type of emotional archaeology of a person’s life: which events led to what behaviours, which words led to what beliefs, which relationships created what patterns. Who we are is deeply connected to how we relate, communicate, cooperate, and regulate with others and the world around us. It’s why, no matter what the popular workplace trend may be, “bring your full self to work”, “join a work family” or “leave the personal outside the office”, the relational is always there. It’s there when feedback from a manager feels daunting or hurtful; when we may feel anxieties around having lunch in front of our colleagues; when we avoid saying what we are really feeling and send a passive-aggressive email instead; when we are made redundant and feel betrayed by our managers and excluded by our colleagues. Attachment patterns Attachment theory proposes that our early relationships with our caregivers greatly influence our internalised views on self, others, and the world, and that some of these patterns, values, and core beliefs follow us into adulthood. They are the difference between being cooperative or distrustful with colleagues, managers, and organisations. They determine how we manage impulses, emotions, and responses to workplace dynamics. Attachment styles develop through experiences and interactions in those early years that we don’t remember, and can also be influenced and shaped all the way through adolescence, and even beyond. They can be defined as secure or insecure, the latter with the additional subcategories of avoidant, anxious, and disorganised. They are not fixed, however, and they can evolve over our lifetimes. We can also have secure attachments to some people and places, and insecure attachments with others. Our specific attachment styles and how they show up at work can influence whether we experience an unexpected change in work circumstances as challenging or catastrophic, and whether we experience relationships with colleagues as comfortable or anxiety-inducing. It is ultimately the difference between having an inner confidence and certainty that you can work your way through a challenge, or not. Securely attached individuals typically develop better emotion regulation, sense of self, social skills and mental health, which may translate into supportive, cooperative, resilient behaviour at work. Insecure attachment histories (anxious, avoidant, disorganised) are linked to hypervigilance for threat or rejection, difficulties trusting others, and problems with closeness and boundaries. The workplace as a parental dynamic: Identity, grief, and moving on In Organisational Attachment Theory, employees project needs and expect them to be met by the workplace, in the same way that children need and expect their parents or caregivers to provide safety, predictability, and validation. I find this a helpful framework for understanding many of the complicated feelings I experienced and for helping others navigate them. When an organisation then initiates a restructuring process and makes roles redundant, this is not experienced by employees from a business perspective. It is experienced as an attachment and relational rupture, sometimes in very profound ways, triggering deep relational grief, identity collapse, and an overwhelming feeling of systemic betrayal. It is during this process that the psychological and emotional contract we have with work can shatter as we realise that work never really “cared” about us, because its relationship with us was predicated on specific transactional conditions. Furthermore, due to traditional and legally minded HR procedures, employees may often feel harmed by the cold and indifferent way in which they are spoken to and by losing access to the work and systems that were part of their daily life. The crisis that can be triggered by this kind of event relates to the deeply intertwined dynamics between our personal and professional selves. Because we spent so much time at work, and have spent so much additional time working towards the different careers that we all have, and have built so many interpersonal relationships along the way, it is inevitable that there will be some confusion as to when one part of us ends and another begins. Without our job, who are we? When something gets taken away from us by a superior force, what kind of response gets activated? For some, this question presents exciting opportunities to look beyond what they’ve known or imagined, but for others, this sometimes constitutes a complete collapse of the Self. How do we move on, when we don’t know what’s next or feel paralysed by the change? How do we process this sense of loss, not just of the job or role, but the identity attached to it? The company, people, and systems are still there, but we’re no longer part of it. This kind of ambiguity can be confusing, destabilising, and can trigger our worst attachment wounds. Importantly, this life event can have very serious consequences for people whose financial stability is precarious, for people who have experienced trauma which is connected to relational and emotional ruptures like the ones in a redundancy, and for people of different marginalised social groups who may already have experiences of distrust, hypervigilance, and anxiety towards systemic discrimination or harm. It may not be a personal process for businesses, but it is deeply personal for the people who experience it. The case for discernment It is notoriously difficult to acknowledge different truths at once when we are overwhelmed, or feeling threatened by a sudden change in our daily stability and routine. In the event of a redundancy, we might be thinking about practical solutions such as finding a new job, determining if we need to make any budget adjustments in the short term, whilst experiencing intense emotional confusion and anxiety. It is often not a time when we can exercise discernment without great focus and intention. However, one of the reasons why so many people find themselves in this situation is because a real, harsh truth is that businesses are businesses. They are not part of the so-called village that is required to raise a child, even though we probably confuse them quite often with that. Work is not there to always provide emotional comfort and meet our personal needs, because that’s not its function. We hope we can rely on work to not aggravate or create emotional distress, but surely, expecting work to resolve our emotional experiences might need some rethinking? It’s important to consider the roles, responsibilities, and limitations of the workplace in attending to our personhood. Perhaps how we counteract some of our attachment style traits at work is by focusing on our professional development of skills in certain areas: managing difficult conversations, giving and receiving feedback, managing and maintaining boundaries, resolving conflict, and developing better, clearer communication styles and frameworks. Then we can take what remains and feels more personal to more trusted relationships and spaces of personal development, such as self-study and reflection, reaching out to loved ones and practising vulnerability with them, going to therapy and healing attachment wounds through a consistent and boundaried relationship, and attending workshops and talks with topics that resonate with the areas of life we want to explore. Growing up and developing discernment mean accepting what life is presenting to you, rather than fighting or resisting it. It’s not about what should have been, but about what is and what can be done about that in each moment. It’s understanding that we have different needs and that they require different people, places, and contexts in order to be met. There is no shortcut through the grief and rupture of a redundancy. What we might need in these shattering life moments is something of a quieter and more demanding nature than what we want in a fast-paced culture or when there are very real life decisions which require imminent attention. It’s not about a LinkedIn post filled with platitudes about new chapters or lessons learned, or performing some kind of resilience to the world. What is often required is the willingness to sit with uncertainty long enough for something new and genuine to emerge from it. This takes an undefined amount of time. Ultimately, for many people who have come through it, this is the beginning of understanding something about themselves that the security of the role has quietly diminished or hidden away. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Ryan Campinho Valadas Ryan Campinho Valadas, Therapist, Educator & Trainer Ryan Campinho Valadas is a specialist psychotherapist, educator, and organisational trainer based in the UK. With 10 years of experience in psychotherapy and almost 20 years in public speaking, community organizing, and advocacy, he is interested in how social, cultural, and global dynamics influence our daily lives. Ryan specialises in psychosexual and relationship therapy, LGBTQ+ wellbeing, male mental health, and relational health in organisations. The main intention is to help people build stronger connections to their identities, desires, relationships, and life journeys. References: Gerhardt, S. (2015). Why love matters: How affection shapes a baby's brain (2nd ed.). Routledge. Harms, P. D. (2011). Adult attachment styles in the workplace. Human Resource Management Review, 21(4), 285-296. Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. R. (1990). Love and work: An attachment-theoretical perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(2), 270-280. Rousseau, D. M. (1995). Psychological contracts in organizations: Understanding written and unwritten agreements. SAGE Publications. Yip, J., Ehrhardt, K., Black, H., & Walker, D. O. (2018). Attachment theory at work: A review and directions for future research. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39(2), 185-198.

Cary, North Carolina – October 5, 2026 – Global Resilience Ambassador, international author, mentor, speaker, and U.S. Air Force veteran Martie M. Smith launches The Resilience Keychain™, a practical and deeply personal book built around 14 Keys that invite readers to examine who, or what, may be holding the keys to their peace, identity, voice, boundaries, decisions, and purpose. Rooted in lived experience rather than theory, the book traces how perspective, forgiveness, self-discovery, and transformation can turn adversity into wisdom, direction, and legacy. English and Spanish editions are available through Amazon. “This book was not written from a perfect life. I earned these keys while living one. My wounds taught me perspective. Forgiveness taught me freedom. Self-discovery helped me recognize who I was beneath what I had survived. Transformation taught me to choose what came next, and purpose showed me that what we survive can become wisdom someone else can use.” – Martie M. Smith At the heart of The Resilience Keychain™ is one direct question: Who has your keys? Smith asks readers to consider where they may have unknowingly handed away authority over their peace, confidence, identity, or choices, sometimes to another person and sometimes to fear, comparison, expectations, or an old story repeated so often that it begins to sound like truth. Through 14 Keys, Smith explores self-awareness, inner softness, emotional mastery, expansion, healthy boundaries, sustained action, perspective, inner clarity, radical self-care, inner narrative, healthy relationships, identity, purpose, and legacy. The book does not ask readers to become someone entirely new. It challenges them to recognize what is already within them, decide what no longer deserves authority, and use what life has taught them with greater intention. Smith’s work has received international recognition, including being named among the Top 100 Mujeres Líderes 2026 by Mujeres Dreams Boss and honors from the International Association of Top Professionals (IAOTP), including Top Resilience Ambassador of the Year 2025 and Empowered Woman of the Year 2025. Women of Heart and Story of Global Impact have also recognized her story and impact. For Smith, however, recognition is not the destination; the greater measure of impact is whether someone begins to see their own story differently. A U.S. Air Force veteran whose work reaches across cultures, languages, and generations, Smith carries a mission she describes as reaching from 8 to 88. Her message is simple: lived experience does not have to remain only something that happened to us. It can become wisdom we use, purpose we live, and legacy we pass forward. “The extraordinary part of resilience is not simply surviving. It is deciding what survival is going to teach you and what you are going to do with that wisdom next.” – Martie M. Smith Reclaim the keys. Transform the story. Build the legacy. Read the books and continue the conversation English: The Resilience Keychain™ on Amazon Español: El Llavero de la Resiliencia™ on Amazon Listen: ¿Y tú, quién tiene tus llaves? on Spotify, a Spanish-language conversation about identifying what is directing your life, changing what no longer serves you, and resolving what has been left waiting. The invitation is simple: do not merely admire someone else’s resilience. Discover what your own has been teaching you. Then ask yourself: Who has your keys, and which one are you ready to reclaim? About the author Martie M. Smith is a Global Resilience Ambassador, international author, mentor, speaker, and U.S. Air Force veteran whose work centers on resilience, identity, personal transformation, purpose, and legacy. Through her books, mentoring, speaking, podcast, and The Resilience Keychain™ framework, she helps people recognize that lived experience can become wisdom they use, purpose they live, and legacy they pass forward. Her work crosses cultures, languages, and generations with one enduring belief: Your story still matters. What you do with it matters even more. Media contact Martie M. Smith Global Resilience Ambassador, International Author, Mentor, & Speaker Email Website Instagram YouTube

Written by John Quaid, Bespoke Wellness Consultant Thirty-five years in corporate life. Seven years of inner work. One simple truth: when the inner world shifts, the outer world changes. Founder of Believe in Wellness. John Quaid is a Bespoke Wellness Consultant who guides individuals and organisations towards greater balance, inner clarity and fulfilment through mind, body and spirit. Most leadership development focuses on what you do: how you communicate, how you decide, how you perform under pressure. Very little of it addresses who you are when the pressure arrives. This article is about that gap, and why closing it may be the most important leadership work available to you. I want to begin with a meeting that stayed with me long after it ended. I was the subject matter expert in a large programme review. The detail, the dependencies, the risks. I knew them well. We were presenting an update to a senior executive whose style I had encountered before. Bullish. Certain. The kind of leader who arrives at a conclusion before the conversation has begun and considers any alternative view a personal challenge rather than a useful perspective. He was approaching the situation from the wrong angle. Key points were being missed. I tried to redirect the conversation, to offer the context that would have changed the picture entirely. He talked over me. In front of everyone. What I felt in that moment was clarity rather than anger. I paused. I said to myself, quietly and without drama: I will figure this out. I recognised what was happening partly because I have felt my own ego try to run a room. There had been times earlier in my career when I was the one who was certain, the one who had already decided, the one who was not truly listening. The difference that day was only that I had done enough inner work to recognise it as it happened, this time in someone else, and to know better than to meet it head-on. This was not the moment. His ego was running the meeting. Nobody taught me to notice that and choose a different response. That is the skill. Going head to head would produce one loser, and it would not be him that day. I let it go. I got him aligned later, privately, with the right context and the right conversation. The programme went over the line. Losing that particular battle was how we won the war. What real leadership actually requires That moment taught me something I have carried into every leadership conversation since. The most important work a leader does is seldom visible in the meeting itself. It happens before the meeting, inside the leader, in the quality of self-awareness they bring through the door. The executive on that call had authority. What he did not have was the inner steadiness to hear something that contradicted his position. His certainty closed the room. People learned, watching it happen, that it was not safe to offer an alternative view in his presence. That lesson cost the organisation more than any single programme decision ever could. Real leadership is not about being the most certain person in the room. It is about being the most open one. Open to alternative views. Open to ideas that challenge your own. Open to the possibility that the person with less authority and fewer years of experience is seeing something clearly that you are not. That kind of openness is not weakness. It is one of the rarest and most valuable qualities a leader can possess. It cannot be performed. It has to be built, from the inside out, through the honest and sometimes uncomfortable work of knowing yourself. The qualities that make people genuinely follow you There is a version of leadership that operates through authority: through title, seniority, the implicit power to reward or remove. People comply with this kind of leadership. They do not bring their best thinking. They learn quickly what is safe to say, and they say that. The organisation operates on a fraction of its available intelligence. There is another version entirely. The leader who has done the inner work to become genuinely trustworthy. Who treats people as human beings rather than resources. Who listens actively rather than waiting for their turn to speak. Who creates an environment where people feel safe enough to say what they actually think, including when what they think challenges the leader's own position. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson has spent decades researching exactly this. Her work on psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, shows consistently that when people feel unable to speak up, organisations lose access to the very information they need most. The problem is rarely a lack of knowledge in the room. It is a climate that makes sharing it feel unsafe. That climate is set by the leader. Every time. The leader who has built that climate does not need to be the loudest voice in the room. They have become the kind of person others trust enough to speak honestly to. Honest conversation, freely given, is one of the most powerful competitive advantages any organisation can have. This is also what it means to change the energy of every room you enter, not by taking up more space, but by creating space for everyone else. These qualities – trustworthiness, authentic presence, genuine respect, active listening, and the ability to hold space for perspectives that differ from your own are not skills you learn from a leadership manual. They are qualities you develop by turning the attention inward. By understanding your own patterns well enough to interrupt them. By recognising when your ego is running the show and choosing a different response. I learned this not from a course but from the inner work. From the steady, sometimes difficult practice of becoming more honest with myself about what was actually driving my behaviour in the moments that mattered. Try this Before your next significant meeting, pause for a moment and ask yourself one honest question: What does this room actually need from me, my certainty or my openness? Not what you plan to say. Not what you need to prove. What the room needs from you. That question, asked sincerely before you walk through the door, is the beginning of a different kind of leadership. The kind that creates space rather than fills it. The kind that earns trust rather than assumes it. The leader the room needs In every room you will ever lead, there are people watching. Not just watching what you say. Watching how you handle the moment when someone challenges you. Watching whether you listen or perform listening. Watching whether you are trustworthy when trust is inconvenient. Watching whether you create space or fill it. What they see in those moments shapes everything: their willingness to contribute, their level of engagement, their trust in the organisation itself. The leader who has done the inner work changes the energy of every room they enter. Not by taking up more space. By creating space for everyone else. Real leadership begins inside. The work of becoming someone worth following is the most important professional development available to any leader. It does not begin with a new framework or a better strategy. It begins with the willingness to look honestly at yourself and ask: What kind of leader does the room actually need? Then, quietly and consistently, to become that person. If this article resonated with you, I would love to hear your thoughts. Visit my website to explore more on inner work, leadership and the quiet practices that change everything from the inside out. My book Keep Believing – The Best Is Yet to Come is out now, a practical guide to the inner work that changes everything. Available here or in Ireland. Follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from John Quaid John Quaid, Bespoke Wellness Consultant John Quaid, known as JQ, is the founder of Believe in Wellness and a Bespoke Wellness Consultant who guides individuals and organisations to transform from within, through mind, body and spirit. After 35 years in corporate life, including leadership roles at Dell Technologies and O2 Ireland, he left to fully align his work with his purpose. That decision was not made lightly. It was the result of seven years of inner work, lived quietly alongside a demanding corporate career, that changed not just how he worked but how he showed up for every relationship, conversation and ordinary moment within it. JQ writes for the professional who senses that the most important work of their life has nothing to do with their job title.

Written by Stacey Jane, Founder, Life Coach & Radio Host Stacey Jane is a Self-Leadership Coach who helps capable women and business owners stop betraying themselves and lead their lives, relationships, and decisions under pressure. Drawing on a decade in corporate construction and her own experience of rebuilding her life, she teaches practical ways to break recurring patterns, regulate emotions, and build self-trust through consistent action. Have you ever looked at your partner and realised you feel closer to a stranger than the person you chose? You share a home, a routine, maybe a bank account, but not your world. This is one of the most quietly painful experiences in relationships. It doesn’t happen because love ran out. It happens because connection was slowly replaced by coexistence. Why does this happen? Most couples don’t fall out of love dramatically. It happens gradually, almost imperceptibly. Life fills up, routines set in, comfort becomes complacency. Before long, two people who were once deeply connected are living parallel lives under the same roof. But routine and comfort are only part of the story. Underneath the surface, something else is usually at play. The patterns that quietly disconnect us Projection and unresolved wounds: We bring ourselves, all of ourselves, into our relationships. Our insecurities, our unhealed wounds, our unspoken expectations. When those things go unexamined, we start projecting them onto our partner. We interpret their behaviour through the lens of our own fears, and suddenly they’re always doing something wrong, always falling short, always the problem. Here’s what that does to a relationship: it removes safety. Without safety, vulnerability disappears. Without vulnerability, real connection cannot exist. The ego gets in the way: When conflict arises, the ego’s first move is to protect itself. It deflects, blames, and defends. It turns the argument into a competition to be right rather than a conversation to be understood. When both people are operating from ego, no one is actually listening, they’re waiting for their turn to be heard. There is always a part to take responsibility for in every relationship dynamic. Always. The moment you stop asking, “What am I contributing to this?” and only ask, “What are they doing wrong?” you’ve handed your power away. Speaking different languages: One of the least talked about reasons couples disconnect is that they are genuinely communicating in ways their partner doesn’t receive. We know about love languages. Just because you feel loved when someone recognises your effort doesn’t mean your partner does. They might feel love when you turn the kettle on before they ask or open the car door. Small things. Their things. The same applies to how we communicate altogether. One person speaks through feelings. The other processes through logic and facts. One needs to hear something to feel it land. Another needs to see it. These are not incompatibilities, they are differences. But when we don’t understand them, we spend years talking and never quite reaching each other. Patience and curiosity are the bridge. Learning how your partner gives and receives love, instead of assuming they do it the way you do, changes the entire dynamic. How couples can make their relationship feel safe again Connection doesn’t come back through grand gestures. It returns through consistent, intentional acts of safety. Here is where to start: Remove your ego from the conversation: When your partner shares something, a feeling, a frustration, a need, practise making it about them. Resist the urge to defend yourself immediately, and resist the urge to fix it. Just receive what they’re sharing. Be genuinely open: Open to hearing what your partner wants to share, how they’re feeling, what’s going on in their world. Sometimes they don’t need answers. They need you to be present. That alone can shift the temperature of a relationship significantly. Never use what they share against them: If your partner trusts you enough to be vulnerable, that vulnerability is not ammunition. Using someone’s honesty against them in future arguments is one of the fastest ways to destroy intimacy permanently. Once that safety is broken, it is very difficult to rebuild. Show them. Tell them: Love is not implied. It needs to be expressed in the way they receive it. Little acts of love and kindness build and compound over time. A text, a coffee made without being asked, a moment of genuine physical touch. Notice things. Show them you’re paying attention. These acts add up, and so does their absence. Be consistent: Safety in a relationship is not built in a single moment. It is created through repetition. Show up consistently, love consistently, choose the relationship consistently. The relationship becomes what you repeatedly decide to give it. Connection is a daily choice The couples who stay deeply connected are not luckier or more compatible than anyone else. They have simply chosen, over and over again, to prioritise their connection. To listen more than they react. To take responsibility for their part. To show up for each other in the small, unglamorous, ordinary moments. Coexisting is a choice. So is connection. The only question is which one you’re making today. If your relationship feels more like coexisting than connecting, it might be time to look at what’s really going on beneath the surface. I work with women navigating exactly this. You can learn more here. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Stacey Jane Stacey Jane, Founder, Life Coach & Radio Host Stacey Jane is a Self-Leadership Coach, business mentor, and founder of Stacey Jane Coaching and the Good Girl Gone Bad movement. Before coaching, she built what looked, from the outside, like the right life: the career, the marriage, the house, the stability. Underneath it, she was disconnected, self-abandoning, and running on autopilot. She ended her marriage. Sold her house. Walked away from corporate. Not to start over, but to finally start leading herself. With a decade of experience in corporate construction and over six years in coaching, Stacey helps her clients break patterns, communicate effectively, and follow through consistently with clarity, emotional regulation, and integrity. Through her private coaching, Good Girl Gone Bad Academy, courses, podcast, radio show, and speaking, she is known for her direct, no-fluff approach that creates real, lasting change.

Written by Manuel Wotsch, Founder of AURA Silent Disco Manuel Wotsch is the founder of AURA, a Barcelona silent disco and wireless headset company that has produced over 1,200 events across 14 countries. He writes about experiential events, wellness formats, and how personal audio channels are reshaping the way people gather. More than any other single factor, sound decides how a room feels. After producing more than 1,200 events and watching over 250,000 people move through a room, I no longer treat a room’s energy as some mysterious, unpredictable thing. It is not luck, and it is not simply the crowd. Where the audio lives, how it reaches people, and whether it pulls a group together or scatters it decide how a room feels from the moment people walk in. I did not set out to study this. I set out to rent and sell wireless headphones. But by 2026, the headphones had taught me something about sound and group energy that I now see everywhere, including in how I lead. The lesson underneath it all is about attention. Where a group’s attention goes, its energy follows. The room is always competing for you A normal event is a dozen signals competing for you at once, and that competition is what drains a room. Walk into one and count the things asking for a piece of you. There is the music from the main speaker, the conversation two steps to your left, a clatter from the bar, a video playing on a screen, and a phone buzzing in someone’s pocket. Your brain is not lazy. It is overloaded. It keeps sampling all of it, just in case something matters, and the cost of that sampling is that you are never fully anywhere. Like most people, I assumed a great event was a loud one. More energy, more volume, more stimulation. Giving people a single, clean stream of audio directly into their ears, with no speakers filling the room and no cables tying them down, changed my mind completely. The change was not subtle. People closed their eyes. They stopped scanning the room. They actually listened to the person in front of them because the noise that used to leak into every gap was simply gone. That is when it clicked for me. Attention is not something you demand from people. It is something you protect for them. Is focus a personality trait or a design choice? Focus is a design choice, not a personality trait. The same person who cannot concentrate in a chaotic room becomes calm and locked in the moment you remove the competing signals. Give people an environment with fewer things pulling at them, and their attention organises itself. I watched this happen with a corporate group that arrived frazzled and half-checked-out. We put headsets on them, gave each person one channel, and within minutes, the fidgeting stopped and the room went quiet in a good way. Nobody had become more disciplined in those few minutes. We had simply taken away the things that were splitting their attention. Our headsets carry up to three simultaneous channels, so in the same physical space, one group can be in a guided movement session, another in a talk, and another moving to a completely different soundtrack. Nobody is fighting anybody for silence. Each person chooses one stream and gives it everything. What looks like chaos from the outside is, from the inside, the most focused those people have felt in weeks. I started applying the same idea to my own work. When I am scattered, the problem is rarely my willpower. It is that I have left too many channels open. Three tabs, two chats, a half-finished thought. The fix is not to try harder. It is to close channels until one clear signal is left. What does shared group energy feel like? Shared group energy is the feeling of a hundred nervous systems settling into one rhythm at the same instant. At a silent event, everyone hears the same thing at the same moment, but privately, right against their own ears. It is shared and personal at once. People laugh at the same beat. They exhale at the same line. You feel the energy of the room lift as one thing rather than a scatter of moods. There is a moment I look for at every event, when a track drops and a whole crowd inhales at once. In a normal room, that beat scatters because half the crowd is talking over it and the other half cannot hear it cleanly. On headsets, it lands in every pair of ears at the same instant, so the reaction is unanimous, and you can physically watch the room become one body. Compare that to the usual version of a group, where a few people are engaged, a few are half-listening, and a few have quietly checked out. The energy leaks. Nothing lands with full force because attention is spread thin across the room like a weak signal, and the feeling of the space never quite gathers. This is exactly why so many companies now use team activations with wireless audio when they want a group to actually connect rather than just gather. It is not about the novelty. It is about giving a team the rare experience of being fully present with each other, with nothing in the room competing for them. When people share undivided attention, even for an hour, something changes in how they treat each other afterwards. The leadership lesson hiding in the headphones Leadership is mostly an attention problem, and an equipment business taught me that. Your team is standing in a loud room, metaphorically, with a dozen priorities all shouting at the same volume. When everything is urgent, nothing is. I learned this the hard way while running the company, when I would hand my team five priorities in a single morning and wonder why none of them moved. Each new urgent thing did not add focus. It quietly stole a little from everything already on the list. Now, I try to name the one signal that matters this week and deliberately turn the others down, the same way I would clear a room of competing sound. A team is rarely slow because it lacks effort. It is slow because nobody has protected its attention. People burn energy sampling all of it and commit to none of it. The best thing I do as a founder is to act like a good audio engineer. Turn down the noise. Give people one clear channel at a time. Make the signal that matters louder than everything else, and let the rest fade. A focused team is not one with more discipline. It is one with fewer competing streams and a leader willing to protect the quiet. I also learned to respect how fragile attention is. It takes a long time to build a room full of presence and one careless interruption to shatter it. The same is true of a person deep in their work, a couple in the middle of a real conversation, or a child telling you a story. Attention is a gift people hand you, and most environments are designed to steal it back before you can use it. Shaping how a room feels is the real job We used to treat information as scarce and attention as free. That has flipped completely. Information is infinite and mostly free. Attention is the scarce, expensive thing, and everyone is quietly exhausted from having theirs pulled in fifty directions all day. The way you use sound is the fastest lever you have for changing how a room feels because it decides where all that scarce attention lands. The future of gathering, and honestly, of living well, is not louder. It is more intentional. The events that stay with people are the ones that give them permission to focus on one thing fully, without guilt and without their phone winning. When you hand someone a single, clear stream and remove everything else, you are not just improving the audio. You are giving them a small holiday from the noise. I live by this off the clock, too. When I am with my team, my friends, or the people I love, I ask what is competing for us right now and what I can quietly turn down. Sometimes it is my own phone. Sometimes it is the twelve things I am carrying in my head. The act of lowering the noise is almost always more powerful than the act of adding more. After more than 1,200 events, that is the lesson I keep coming back to. You cannot manufacture presence, but you can design the conditions for it. Remove what competes. Offer one clear signal. Then get out of the way and let people do the thing they have quietly been missing, which is to be fully, undividedly here. If your team needs an hour of genuine focus, look at a silent disco team activation and get in touch, and we will shape it around your group. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Manuel Wotsch Manuel Wotsch, Founder of AURA Silent Disco Manuel Wotsch is the founder of AURA, a silent disco and wireless headset company based in Barcelona. Since 2021, he has grown AURA from an equipment provider into a full experience producer, delivering more than 1,200 events for 250,000 attendees across 800 venues and 14 countries. His work focuses on experiences that thrive inside real constraints, from city noise limits and venue curfews to inclusive access and corporate wellbeing. He writes about silent disco, sunrise sessions, wellness formats, and the shift from events to designed experiences. Through AURA, he helps brands, wellness practitioners, and companies bring people together around sound without disturbing anyone nearby.

Jennifer Stewart is a technology and productivity trainer, speaker, and owner of Gateway Productivity, where she patiently helps individuals and small businesses simplify their digital world, reduce technology stress, and work more efficiently. Known for turning technology overwhelm into practical, sustainable systems, Jennifer helps clients create calmer workflows, lighten their workload, and feel more confident using the tools they already have. This interview highlights Jennifer Stewart’s patient, practical approach to helping people reduce technology stress, build confidence, simplify digital workflows, and create calmer, more productive lives by focusing on clear processes, personalized learning, and intentional tech habits. Jennifer Stewart, Technology & Productivity Trainer What do you enjoy most about helping someone go from technology frustration to that first “lightbulb moment”? My favorite thing about creating “lightbulb moments” for my clients is seeing the clarity, relief, and stress reduction that happen when something finally makes sense. So many people carry frustration around technology for far too long, and when they realize the problem was not that they were incapable but that no one had explained it in a way that worked for them, their whole demeanor changes. They often say things like, “I could have saved so much time if I had known that sooner!” or “Why did no one ever tell me this?” I especially think of one client whose expression brightened and who sat up straighter as we worked together to reduce her inbox from 30,000 emails to 5,000. Once she understood how Gmail labels and filters worked, she not only had a cleaner inbox, but she also had a new sense of confidence and control. That is what I enjoy most: helping someone move from feeling overwhelmed and stuck to realizing that technology can be understandable, manageable, and even empowering. How do you adapt your training when two people struggle with the same technology but learn in completely different ways? This is one of my favorite things to do because it allows me to really pay attention to how each person thinks and learns. I am constantly listening to the language my client uses so I can explain the concept in a way that makes sense to them. The way I explain a software or technology concept to one person may sound completely different from the way I explain it to someone else, even when we are working toward the same result. For example, take the idea of digitally deleting a file. Some people understand it best when I explain that you have to be “outside of the box to trash the box,” meaning you need to be outside of the file before you can delete it. Others understand it better when I explain that the software program cannot delete a file while you are actively working inside it. Both explanations lead to the same conclusion, but different people hear and process information differently. If one explanation does not click, I simply try another way of looking at it. My goal is not to force someone to learn technology the “right” way; it is to find the explanation that helps the lightbulb go on for them. What have you learned from working with women business owners who feel they are simply “not tech-savvy”? Through 15 years of client interactions, I have learned that many people who feel they aren’t tech-savvy simply haven’t had the right teacher yet. So many women business owners are incredibly capable, knowledgeable, and successful in their work, but they have been made to feel inadequate with technology because no one slowed down enough to explain it in a way that made sense to them. Technology is often taught with too much jargon and not enough patience. When someone has only experienced tech support as a rushed interaction where the problem gets fixed but nothing gets explained, it is easy for them to assume they are the problem. In reality, they were never given the chance to fully understand what was happening. What I have learned is that confidence grows when technology is explained in simple, straightforward terms and at the right pace. Once women business owners realize they are not “bad at technology,” they often become much more willing to ask questions, try new tools, and trust themselves to learn. Where do you see businesses losing the most time because their technology and workflows have become unnecessarily complicated? The businesses I work with are usually losing the most time in three places: email, unclear workflows, and choosing software before they understand their process. Email is often the first place I see the problem show up. People spend hours each week shuffling through messages, searching for information, and trying to keep track of what needs to be done, when they could be using AI and other email productivity tools to save time and reduce the mental load. Another major time drain is the lack of written workflows and processes. When team members do not have a clear process to follow, everyone creates their own way of doing the work. That leads to duplicated effort, missed steps, inconsistent results, and a lot of unnecessary back-and-forth. Lastly, I see businesses waste time by implementing new software before writing down their workflows and processes. Without a clear plan, it is hard to know what tool is actually needed. New software can only support a good process; it cannot create one on its own. As workplace technology changes faster, what helps people keep up without feeling they need to master every new tool? Technology is changing at an incredible pace, and the truth is that nobody can keep up with every new app, platform, or feature. The good news is that you don’t have to. What helps people adapt is shifting their focus from mastering tools to understanding outcomes. Instead of asking, “How do I learn everything?” ask, “What problem am I trying to solve?” The most successful professionals aren’t necessarily the ones using the newest technology. They are the ones who stay curious, learn the basics of the tools that matter most to their work, and remain open to trying new approaches when needed. Building confidence with technology comes from small, consistent learning rather than trying to absorb everything at once. I often encourage people to give themselves permission to be beginners. Learn one feature, automate one repetitive task, or explore one new tool at a time. Technology should reduce frustration, not create it. When you focus on practical benefits and continuous learning, you can stay current without feeling overwhelmed by every new trend that comes along. When someone feels buried by email, files, and unfinished tasks, where should they start to regain control? It is normal to feel overwhelmed by digital chaos, and the best place to start is by getting everything out where you can see it. I use a process that works for physical organizing, digital organizing, and mental organizing: gather, sort, and place. First, gather everything into one visible place. For email, that may be your inbox. For files, get them into one main area of the computer so you can see what you have. For tasks, get them out of your head, off the sticky notes, and into one trusted place. Second, sort what you have and purge what you don’t need as you go. For email, you can use AI or your own review process to identify what needs action. For files, group similar items together and give them clear, searchable names. For tasks, organize them by priority so you know what needs your attention first. Third, place everything where it belongs. Emails can be filed into folders or moved into one “Done” folder. Tasks from email can stay in the inbox temporarily or be moved into a task system. Files can go into a few simple folders, and tasks can be added to the program or notebook you trust. The goal is not to create a perfect system overnight. The goal is to reduce the mental clutter and create one clear place to see what needs your attention next. How can someone tell whether a productivity problem needs a better tool or a change in habits? A majority of the time, a change in habit is what’s needed to fix a productivity problem. People often get excited about the tools and assume a new app or program will solve the issue, but a tool cannot fix a problem if there is no plan for how the work should actually happen. I always recommend starting with the habit first. Look at what you are currently doing and ask, “Where is this breaking down?” For example, if you are not putting tasks in your task app, the problem may not be the app. It may be that you do not have a consistent habit for capturing tasks when they come in, or you may be waiting for more information before deciding where the task belongs. Once the habit is clear, then you can decide whether the tool supports it. If you have a solid habit in place and the tool still creates extra friction, then it may be time to try something else. I usually recommend giving a new tool at least two to three weeks of consistent use before deciding whether it is the right fit. Start with the habit, then let the tool support the way you actually work. Why is patience such an important part of the way you teach technology? Patience is the cornerstone of how I teach technology because I believe everyone deserves the chance to learn without stress, frustration, or embarrassment. I often tell my clients, “There’s no judgment here, only patience,” because so many people come to me after past experiences where they felt rushed, dismissed, or afraid to ask questions. To me, patience means I will explain a concept ten different ways if needed, start with the most basic steps, and move at the pace that actually works for the person in front of me. Technology can feel intimidating when someone fixes the problem for you but does not explain what happened or how to handle it the next time. My goal is not just to fix the immediate issue. My goal is to help clients understand what they need to know so they can solve future problems with more confidence and less dependence on someone else. I want to transfer skills, not just provide answers. What is one change you would encourage someone to make today to create a calmer, more productive digital life? Turn off as many non-essential notifications as possible. Most people don't realize how much their attention is being pulled throughout the day. Every ping, banner, vibration, and alert creates a small interruption, even if you don't immediately respond to it. One client comes to mind who had never turned his notifications off for his plethora of apps. Because of this, he ignored almost all the notifications, which led to missed meetings and forgotten tasks. After paring his notifications down to texts, calendar, tasks, and voicemails, he was able to pay attention to the pings and no longer lose track of the important things in life. A calmer digital life starts with being intentional about what deserves your attention. When you reduce the noise, you create space for deeper thinking, better concentration, and less stress. I've found that productivity is rarely about doing more. It's often about removing distractions so you can focus on what matters most. Technology should work for you, not constantly compete for your attention. The best part is that this change takes only a few minutes to make, but the impact can be immediate. Fewer interruptions can lead to more focus, better decision-making, and a greater sense of control over your day. Sometimes the simplest digital habits create the biggest improvements. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Jennifer Stewart

Susan Postnikoff is a human performance strategist, author, speaker, and executive leadership coach whose career spans more than three decades in sales, marketing, and organizational leadership. Drawing on her experience as a medical device executive, professional beach volleyball player, and practitioner of hypnosis and kinesiology, she developed Empowered Communication, an approach designed to transform how people think, connect, lead, and achieve their potential. In this interview, Susan explores why traditional communication training often falls short, how authentic listening transforms organizational culture, and why the conversations we have with ourselves and others may be the most powerful influence on our success, relationships, and quality of life. Susan Postnikoff, Human Performance Strategist You describe communication as the foundation of human performance. What first inspired you to build your career around that belief? I've always been passionate about bringing out the very best in people. Throughout my life, whether as an athlete, sales executive, or coach, I've witnessed how profoundly communication influences who we become and what we believe is possible. Communication is so much more than the exchange of information. It shapes our identity, our relationships, our beliefs, and ultimately, our ability to achieve our goals and fulfill our dreams. We communicate through our actions, our energy, our body language, and perhaps most importantly, through the ongoing conversations we have with ourselves. Those conversations can either expand our possibilities or limit them. I have come to realize that people generally don’t fall short because they lack intelligence, talent, or ambition. They are being held back by patterns of communication, both internal and external, that they usually are not even aware of. That realization has inspired me to focus on helping people become more conscious, intentional, and empowered in how they communicate, so they can achieve their fullest potential. Your career began in executive leadership and medical device sales. What lessons from those experiences continue to shape the way you train leaders and sales teams? Throughout my career, I've observed that many sales organizations prioritize sales volume and performance metrics over genuinely understanding and meeting customer needs. Traditionally, sales professionals have often been trained to control conversations and influence decisions through techniques that can feel manipulative rather than collaborative. Much of this approach evolved within hierarchical organizational structures, where leadership was based on authority and information was concentrated at the top. I believe the greatest opportunity for today's leaders is to evolve beyond hierarchical models from the industrial era toward a more humanistic approach that respects a more informed population. Due to the internet, we now have a more informed and knowledgeable workforce, with more individualized values, diverse perspectives, and a greater desire for genuine collaboration. When leaders combine their experience and expertise with authentic listening, empathy, and mutual respect, something remarkable happens. Employees feel valued, customers feel understood, and trust becomes the foundation of every relationship. The result is not simply improved sales performance. It's stronger teams, greater employee commitment, more loyal customers, and organizations positioned for sustainable success. You created the Empowered Communication framework by bringing together leadership, emotional intelligence, kinesiology, and hypnosis. What gap were you trying to solve that traditional communication training often misses? The greatest limitation I see in traditional training is that it focuses primarily on intellectual understanding rather than lasting transformation. People attend seminars, learn valuable concepts, feel inspired, and genuinely intend to make changes. Yet within days or weeks, most return to their familiar behaviors and communication patterns. Why? Because understanding something intellectually doesn't necessarily mean we've integrated it into who we are. My approach recognizes that the mind, body, emotions, and spirit are interconnected. For meaningful transformation to occur, learning must extend beyond conscious thought and become part of how we naturally experience and respond to the world. Through Empowered Communication, I integrate leadership principles, emotional intelligence, movement and body awareness, and hypnotic techniques to help people explore and shift deeply ingrained patterns. Meditation and self-hypnosis, for example, can provide opportunities to work with subconscious beliefs and habitual responses, while physical practices can reinforce awareness of how emotions and communication are experienced in the body. My objective isn't simply to teach people what effective communication looks like. It's to help them practice and embody the learning on a much deeper level and develop new habits and ways of being. That's when learning moves beyond information and becomes integrated mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually to produce true transformation. What communication challenges do you see most often in today's sales organizations, and why are they so difficult to overcome? One of the greatest challenges facing today's organizations is that people are overwhelmed. Leaders and employees are navigating extraordinary demands on their time, attention, and emotional energy. When people are chronically stressed or mentally overloaded, their capacity to listen, consider new perspectives, and respond thoughtfully can become compromised. Combine that with deeply ingrained hierarchical leadership models, and we often see environments where people become more concerned with appearing competent, protecting their status, or being right than with remaining curious and open to learning. I believe one of the most limiting behaviors in any organization is the need to be right. When we're attached to defending our existing beliefs, we lose access to the creativity, insight, and collective intelligence available through genuine collaboration. The solution begins with creating space, mentally, emotionally, and physically. Practices such as meditation, self-hypnosis, physical activity, music, art, and intentional reflection can help people manage stress and develop greater self-awareness. When leaders learn to regulate their own emotional responses and approach conversations with curiosity rather than defensiveness, they create an environment where others feel safe to contribute. That's where innovation, trust, and exceptional performance begin. Customer experience is often linked to processes and technology. Why do you believe communication has an even greater influence on service culture and business performance? Technology and processes are important, but they don't create meaningful human connection. People do. One of the most compelling examples of the importance of connection comes from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed participants and their families across generations. Its findings consistently emphasize the powerful relationship between the quality of our relationships and our happiness, health, and well-being. When employees feel genuinely seen, heard, understood, and valued by their leaders, they're more likely to bring that same care and attention to their interactions with customers. Communication creates a ripple effect throughout the organization. A leader who listens authentically develops stronger relationships with employees. Those employees become more engaged and committed to the organization, and their customers experience a greater sense of trust, respect, and connection. Customers who feel valued are more likely to remain loyal, return for future business, and recommend the organization to others. The opposite is equally important. When employees feel dismissed, unsupported, or disrespected, that dissatisfaction can eventually influence the customer experience. Ultimately, organizational culture is defined by how people communicate with and about one another every day, and a culture that rewards collaboration and support will produce highly effective teams that thrive and deliver top results. For leaders who want stronger teams, what is one communication habit that creates an immediate difference in trust and accountability? Authentic listening. By that, I mean something far deeper than simply hearing the words someone is speaking. Authentic listening requires us to be fully present, without preparing our response, formulating a judgment, or waiting for an opportunity to express our own perspective. It's about listening not only to the words but also to the energy, emotions, intentions, and experiences beneath them. When someone feels that we are genuinely interested in understanding them, something powerful happens. They feel respected. They feel valued. Trust begins to develop. This type of authentic listening is a gift of love and respect. For leaders, this practice can transform relationships almost immediately. When we demonstrate sincere interest in listening to and understanding others, we create the conditions for mutual accountability, responsibility, and trust. People are far more willing to take ownership, contribute ideas, and work collaboratively when they know their voice matters. Listening isn't simply a communication skill. It's a demonstration of how much we value another human being. You often say the conversations we have with ourselves shape our potential. What is one practical way people can begin changing that inner dialogue? The first step is awareness. Most people have an ongoing internal conversation that influences how they perceive themselves, interpret experiences, and respond to opportunities. Yet much of that dialogue happens subconsciously, without conscious examination. I encourage people to begin with a simple practice of meditation or intentional self-reflection. We need to listen to and name the voices inside our heads that shape our internal identity. Becoming aware of our internal dialogue reveals how our self-image shapes what we project to others. With that awareness, we can reshape our thoughts, change how we experience the world, and influence how others perceive us. Over time, this shift can affect the opportunities we receive and how we respond to them. What does it mean for someone to feel truly seen, heard, understood, and valued, and why has that become the heart of your work? At our core, I believe every human being wants to know that they matter. To be truly seen means someone recognizes us beyond our roles, accomplishments, or outward appearance. To be heard means our voice is welcomed without immediate judgment. To be understood means someone makes a sincere effort to appreciate our experiences and perspectives, even when they differ from their own. To be valued means we know our existence and contributions matter. I believe we're all connected, and the way we treat one another creates a ripple effect that extends far beyond any single interaction. When we offer compassion, authentic listening, and understanding, we create opportunities for others to extend that same kindness and respect. Imagine what our workplaces, families, communities, and ultimately, the world could look like if more people approached one another with the intention of understanding rather than judging. We could reduce conflict, strengthen relationships, and create environments where people feel safe to express themselves and contribute their unique gifts. This is why Empowered Communication has become so much more than a leadership or professional development program. It's about elevating the human experience. I genuinely believe that learning to see, hear, understand, and value one another creates greater human connection, and ultimately, this can pave the way to world peace. As you continue expanding Empowered Communication through speaking, training, and your books, what message do you hope every leader takes with them? I'd like to share an analogy from one of my greatest passions, competitive two-person beach volleyball. In beach volleyball, one of the most effective strategies for scoring is to hit or serve the ball into the space between the two defenders, commonly called "the seam." At lower levels of play, when a ball lands between two players, it is common to hear someone say, "That was your ball!" But great teams don't operate that way. As a defender, if I see my partner is out of position, I will hustle to get the ball regardless of whether it was technically my partner's responsibility. Why? Because we're both accountable for the success of the team. If I allow the ball to drop simply because I believe it wasn't my responsibility, we've both lost the point. The same principle applies to leadership. In many organizations, mistakes are met with blame, criticism, or shame. Yet most people don't intentionally make mistakes. They're doing the best they can with the knowledge, resources, and circumstances available to them. When leaders respond to mistakes by assigning blame, employees often become afraid to admit errors or ask for help. Problems are hidden, opportunities for learning are lost, and small issues can grow out of control. Exceptional leaders create a culture of collaboration and support. They encourage people to take ownership, acknowledge mistakes, seek support, and work together to find solutions. They understand that accountability isn't about assigning blame. It's about taking responsibility for achieving the best possible outcome. My message to every leader is simple: Don’t focus on who dropped the ball. Focus on how the team can win. By replacing blame with support, judgment with curiosity, and internal competition with genuine collaboration, we create organizations where everyone can excel. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Susan Postnikoff