Written by Kiara Pooja Chandru, Founder & CEO of KiLeela Kiara Pooja Chandru is the visionary Founder & CEO of KiLeela. A premium beauty brand built on the belief that beauty is inclusive, confidence-driven, and transformative, where she turned her pain into a brand. Nobody ever officially told us what beautiful was supposed to look like. There was no handbook. No meeting where we collectively agreed that clear skin was better than textured skin, that certain body types were more desirable than others, or that looking younger for longer should be something we all aspire to. Yet, somehow, most of us got the memo. We learned it through magazines, films, advertisements and, eventually, social media. We learned which women were called beautiful and which ones were told they were brave for simply existing in their bodies. We learned which features were praised, which ones were considered flaws and which ones we were expected to fix. The strange thing is that beauty standards are constantly changing. One decade tells us to be thin. Another tells us to have curves. One moment, fuller lips are everywhere. The next, a completely different face becomes the ideal. The rules keep changing. But women are somehow expected to keep up. That's where things get complicated. Because there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to look good. There is nothing wrong with makeup, skincare, dressing up or enjoying the feeling of looking your best. The question is, "When did looking good become something we enjoy, and when did it become something we feel we must do?" How many of our beauty choices are genuinely ours? How many began with a message we absorbed somewhere along the way? Maybe you've changed your outfit because you were worried about what someone would think. Maybe you've avoided a photograph because you didn't like how you looked. Maybe you've looked in the mirror before a date, an interview or a party and wondered whether looking better might somehow make you more liked. That last one is perhaps the hardest to admit. Because beauty isn't just about appearance. Somewhere along the way, many of us began connecting it to acceptance. To attention. To being chosen. To being loved. When the definition of beauty becomes too narrow, we don't simply think, That's not my definition of beauty. We often think, "Something about me needs to change." So, where does KiLeela come in? For me, this conversation is personal. There was a time when I genuinely felt that I needed to fit a certain image to be loved, to look a particular way because the standards around me had quietly convinced me that this was what being desirable, accepted and worthy looked like. I know I'm not the only one. That is where KiLeela comes in. KiLeela wasn't created to tell women that they shouldn't care about beauty. In fact, beauty can be fun. It can be creative. It can be expressive. It can give us confidence and allow us to show different sides of ourselves. But somewhere between enjoying beauty and constantly trying to achieve it, something has become lost. We've become so busy trying to meet the standard that we rarely stop to question it. Who created it? Why does it exist? Why do so many of us feel like we must change ourselves to meet it? KiLeela wants to create space for those conversations. Not the polished, perfect conversations where everyone pretends they have never compared themselves to another woman. The honest ones. The ones about looking in the mirror and not feeling enough. About wanting to change something about yourself and not always knowing whether the desire came from you or from everything you've been taught to believe. About loving makeup while also questioning why we sometimes feel uncomfortable leaving the house without it. About wanting to look beautiful but not wanting our entire sense of worth to depend on whether we are. Because change doesn't necessarily begin by rejecting beauty. It begins by changing our relationship with it. That's what KiLeela hopes to be part of. A space that doesn't give women another impossible standard to live up to. A space that doesn't tell you what you need to buy, fix, change or improve before you can feel confident. But a space that encourages us to question the messages we've been given and decide for ourselves what beauty means. Maybe beauty doesn't need more rules You can love makeup and still question beauty standards. You can enjoy skincare and still reject the idea that ageing is something to fear. You can want to look beautiful without believing there is only one way to be beautiful. You can care about how you look without allowing your appearance to determine how worthy you feel. KiLeela isn't here to pretend that beauty doesn't matter. The world has made it clear that it does. But perhaps that's exactly why we need to talk about it more honestly. Because if beauty has the power to influence how we see ourselves, then surely we should have a say in how beauty is defined. The rules have been written for us for long enough. Maybe it's time we started questioning them. Maybe it's time we started rewriting them. Who made the rules of beauty, and why are we still following them? Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Kiara Pooja Chandru Kiara Pooja Chandru, Founder & CEO of KiLeela Kiara is a beauty entrepreneur building KiLeela, where her journey began not from confidence, but from pain, spending her teens and twenties battling acne and personal insecurities that deeply wounded her self-worth and left her believing beauty was something she had to earn. She measured herself against impossible beauty standards, feeling like she never quite belonged in beauty spaces. But that pain became her turning point, and through intentional self-care and deep inner work, she discovered that real glow is not something you buy, it is something you build. That revelation gave birth to KiLeela, a brand rooted in the philosophy that beauty is a form of self-mastery. Because beauty fades, but your presence lasts.

Written by Kirsten Hemmer, Certified Resilience Health Coach Kirsten Hemmer is a Resilience Health Coach who graduated from Jay Shetty's Certification School. She has experienced many different health challenges in her own life and believes her purpose is to help others who also go through health challenges. Most people don’t get taught self-love growing up. At least I didn’t. Everyone has a different definition of what self-love means to them. For a while, I thought loving yourself was selfish and that you should give all of your love to others. As I’ve gotten older, I have learned just how important self-love truly is and how loving yourself is not selfish at all. It can quite literally change your life. I was always the last one I ever thought about. I thought that as long as I was getting external validation and people liked me, I was worthy and okay. But what happens when that external validation goes away? What happens if you can’t control what is happening in your life? The saying goes, “You can’t pour from an empty cup,” and the saying is true. I have learned this the hard way. However, nothing in life has ever come easy for me, and I am grateful for the challenging moments because they give me the opportunity to learn and grow as a person. Those are the kinds of moments that you don’t forget in life, and the lesson stays with you forever. Six years ago, on September 20, 2020, I experienced exactly the kind of challenging moment that you don’t forget and whose lesson stays with you forever. My family and I decided to go to Edgewater Park. Edgewater Park is a beautiful place to visit in the fall. The scenery is gorgeous, and there are lots of places for kids to run around and play. I had a 2-year-old and an almost 8-month-old at the time, so we needed all the playtime we could get. I was starting to get sick, though, and I also had postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS). POTS is a dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system that can significantly affect heart rate and blood pressure. It can also cause symptoms such as nausea, dizziness, lightheadedness, headaches or migraines, and fainting. POTS can manifest differently for everyone. For me, POTS manifests as a high heart rate and low blood pressure. This means that doing normal, everyday things, such as changing positions from lying down to sitting or standing, or simply walking, can make my body feel like it is constantly working out. At that time, it was physically challenging for me to go anywhere, but I still really wanted to enjoy Edgewater Park with my little family, so I decided to go. It was a long walk from our car to the big grassy area where the kids could play, and we also had to go down a very steep hill to get there. I made it, though, and the kids had such a fun time playing. Eventually, it was time to go home and head back to the car, which meant I now had to go back up that very steep hill. When I got to the hill, I was not feeling good at all. My 2-year-old was also tired and wanted me to carry her, so, of course, I did. The hill now looked like a mountain to me, but I made it up. I was not feeling well, I had POTS, and I was carrying my 2-year-old. I was out of breath, but I was so proud of myself for making it up that steep hill. My husband at the time turned to me and said, “You really need to get in better shape.” My pride turned to shame in 0.2 seconds. I was expecting him to be proud of me, just like I was proud of myself. It was devastating that he chose those words to say to me in that moment. It made me realize something, though, it didn’t matter what he thought. I knew how much strength it physically took for me to make it up that hill, and I was genuinely proud of myself for doing it while feeling sick, carrying my 2-year-old, and dealing with POTS. Why would I let one person dictate how I felt about myself? I was the only person who truly knew how much strength that moment took because I was the one who lived it. After that experience, I realized how important self-love really is. No one knows what another person truly goes through except the person living that experience. So why listen to negativity from people who have no idea what you face every day? What matters most is how you feel about yourself and how you talk to yourself. That day, I felt proud of myself, and nothing was going to change that. Follow me on Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Kirsten Hemmer Kirsten Hemmer, Certified Resilience Health Coach Kirsten Hemmer is a Resilience Health Coach. She believes in sharing her own authentic story about the challenging health experiences she has gone through. She believes she has gone through these health challenges to support others who also go through health challenges. She believes we all have a light within us, sometimes we just need extra support finding it.

Sarah Batchelor is a music educator, speaker, and founder of The Neurospicy Music Teacher. Drawing on 25 years in education, her experience as an educator with autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and her perspective as a parent, Sarah explores what meaningful inclusion can look like in classrooms, workplaces, and the systems we move through every day. In this interview, she talks about belonging, universal design, autonomy, the importance of normalizing failure, and why inclusion starts with changing the way we think about human differences. Sarah Batchelor, Music Educator & Neurodiversity Speaker What first led you to create The Neurospicy Music Teacher and bring neurodiversity into your work more publicly? I have always had a passion for appropriate inclusion, not simply placing people into systems that were never designed for them and calling that support. This belief became deeply personal as I navigated the education system with my daughter, who has autism, while struggling myself. After years of being misdiagnosed, unheard, and incorrectly medicated, I was finally diagnosed with autism and ADHD. Once I began appropriate treatment, I was angry. I remember thinking, “It can’t have been this easy for everyone else.” I wasn’t just disorganized, messy, difficult, or “too much.” I mean, sometimes I absolutely am, but that wasn’t the whole story. I had spent my life trying to be a horse when I was actually a zebra. That realization gave me permission to give myself some grace and stop masking so much. I started living out loud, saying the quiet parts out loud, being unapologetically imperfect, and allowing myself to be seen as I actually am. Most importantly, I discovered that being openly imperfect gave other people permission to do the same. That became The Neurospicy Music Teacher. I wanted to become the teacher, mentor, and friend I had needed but never had, while supporting both educators and students who are neurodivergent. After more than two decades in music education, what have you learned about the conditions students need in order to feel that they genuinely belong? The short answer is this: kids need to feel safe. They need to feel valued. They need to feel like they are needed and trusted. In a nutshell, they need Maslow before Bloom. I think what you are actually asking is how we create those conditions. When I’m assessing what I need to do in the moment to create a sense of safety and belonging, I rely on two guiding principles: behaviour is communication, and the role of power and control in the situation should never be discounted. Until we understand the why behind a behaviour, we do not have enough information to meaningfully support or change it. Kids need autonomy, especially kids who are neurodivergent. They generally do not thrive in systems controlled from the top, and frankly, neither do I. I think of it as building a house together. Adults provide the floor plan, the structural walls, and the boundaries that keep everyone safe. Within that structure, students need room to make choices and have some ownership. Even offering two choices, both of which I am genuinely comfortable with, can completely change an interaction because it gives the student some power without removing the structure. Kids also do not need us to solve every problem. They need us to validate their feelings and provide guideposts. “Your feelings are valid, but that response wasn’t okay.” Most importantly, they do not need perfect adults. They need adults willing to fail in front of them, take accountability, repair mistakes, and model resilience. That is where trust and real belonging begin. How has understanding your own ADHD and autism changed the way you interpret student behaviour in the classroom? Understanding my autism and ADHD changed the lens through which I see almost everything, not just student behaviour. I grew up knowing I was different, but I didn’t know why. I knew my brain was smart, which honestly wasn’t always a gift, because if I was smart, why couldn’t I do things that seemed so simple for everybody else? I internalized the messages I was getting. I was lazy. I was disorganized. I was difficult. I was too much. I wasn’t trying hard enough. I thought I was struggling because there was something fundamentally wrong with me. That followed me into adulthood. There were misdiagnoses, hospitalizations, addiction, and years of trying to fix what I thought was wrong. Understanding my ADHD and autism didn’t magically fix my life. What it gave me was context. It gave me guideposts for understanding my brain instead of constantly fighting with it. A diagnosis didn’t change my brain. It changed the story I was telling myself about my brain. That has absolutely changed the way I see students. I am much more careful about attaching character judgments to behaviour. A diagnosis is not an excuse. It is a reason, and reasons give us information. They help us understand what is happening and what supports or strategies might help us move forward. I give students more grace and understanding now, but I still hold high expectations. Support and standards are not opposites. Why do people confuse inclusion with simply adding accommodations? There’s an image I come back to when I think about inclusion. There’s a building with stairs and a ramp, and both are covered in snow. The person clearing the snow starts with the stairs because that gets most people into the building. The person using the ramp has to wait. But if they cleared the ramp first, everyone could get in. That’s how I think we often approach inclusion in education, workplaces, and society more broadly. We keep shoveling the stairs first. We design systems around what works for the majority and then add accommodations for the people who cannot access them. Accommodations matter. Sometimes an individual adjustment is exactly what someone needs. But accommodation is not the same thing as inclusion. Inclusion asks us to look at the design itself. Is there another way to build this, teach this, communicate this, or organize this so the barrier is removed before somebody has to ask for an exception? The goal isn’t to get rid of the stairs. It’s to stop assuming that shoveling the stairs first is the only sensible way to get people through the door. What does meaningful inclusion look like when teachers are already managing limited time, resources, and capacity? I actually want to challenge the premise of that question a little because it assumes inclusion is an extra. An addition. Something we do if there is enough time, enough funding, or enough capacity left over. That assumption is part of the problem. Teachers absolutely have too much on their plates. In the 25 years I have been in classrooms, my workload has more than doubled. But when we frame inclusion as one more thing teachers are being asked to do with limited resources, we risk marginalizing the very students who need support most. That framing reinforces a message many people who are neurodivergent grow up hearing, whether anyone says it out loud or not: “You are too much work. Your needs are inconvenient. Supporting you takes resources away from everyone else.” I know that message because I lived it. It is one of the reasons I do this work. Teachers already respond to individual needs every day. We just tend not to call it inclusion when the student is neurotypical. No one asks, “What does appropriate inclusion look like for this neurotypical child?” We simply teach the child in front of us. The bigger question is why teachers are being asked to solve systemic barriers without systemic support. Inclusion cannot be sustained by teacher goodwill alone. The people who control staffing, funding, class size, time, policy, and specialist support have a responsibility here too. You’ve spoken openly about your own neurodivergence. How has understanding your own brain changed the way you teach, lead, and advocate for others? For most of my life, I genuinely thought there was something wrong with me. I knew my brain was smart, which wasn’t always a gift, because if it was smart, why couldn’t it do things that seemed so simple for everybody else? I internalized that. I thought I was lazy. I thought I wasn’t trying hard enough. I thought I was just bad at being human. That followed me into adulthood. There were misdiagnoses, hospitalizations, addiction, and years of trying to fix what I thought was wrong. Understanding my ADHD and autism didn’t magically fix my life. What it gave me was context. It gave me guideposts for understanding my brain instead of constantly fighting with it. A diagnosis didn’t change my brain. It changed the story I was telling myself about my brain. Once I stopped looking only for what was wrong with it, I started noticing what was extraordinary about it too. My synesthesia, the connections my brain makes, the patterns it notices, the way it thinks outside the box. Those are all part of the same brain. I had great teachers and supportive adults, but nobody had the information to explain this to me. Now I want to be the person I needed when I was younger. I don’t want students to simply look like they belong. I want that belonging to be authentic. I don’t want kids to spend decades trying to fix themselves or have to recover from their education before they discover who they are. What can a music classroom teach us about supporting students who process sound, movement, communication, and mistakes differently? We used to talk as if there was a “normal” and then a small group outside it, but classrooms don’t look like that. I’m not sure they ever did. The range of learners in front of us is enormous. That’s not an outlier problem; that’s the reality. Even in something like a Grade 9 English class, what we might call a normal range can span students reading several grade levels apart. Once you really look at that variability, the idea of designing for one imaginary average learner starts to fall apart. The beauty of spaces like music and physical education is that variation is already visible. We naturally have students doing different things, using different strengths, and needing different kinds of support. In music, we don’t get to pretend otherwise because learning is public. No one asks a kid to perform a math problem in front of the class. In music, you hear yourself in real time. Mistakes are audible. So we have to build safety on purpose. Students need to be able to take a risk, miss, recover, and try again without believing that the mistake says something about who they are. That’s why universal design makes so much sense to me. We don’t have to start by deciding who is normal and who needs an exception. These are the humans we have in the room. Design for the humans in the room, not an imaginary average. How do you use your “failure first” approach to help students build confidence without lowering expectations? I joke that the secret to happiness is lowered expectations. I do mean it as a joke, but there’s something real underneath it. For me, lowering expectations doesn’t mean lowering standards. I want the standard to be high. But expectations have to be responsive to what’s actually happening in the room. I start with high standards, and as I get real information, I adjust my expectations. That’s not lowering the bar; that’s being realistic. If the standard was high to start with, even an adjusted expectation is probably going to land higher than if I’d set the standard low. That’s where failure first comes in. A mistake is just data. It tells us where we are. That doesn’t mean we stay there; it means now we know something. I think about behaviour the same way. Behaviour is communication. Not an excuse, but information that helps us move forward. Because band is such a space directed by the teacher, I have to be conscious of those power and control dynamics. I joke that it’s a benevolent dictatorship. There is a conductor, there’s a score, and ultimately I have the final say on the artistic decisions in the room. I’m not pretending that structure doesn’t exist or that it isn’t part of my responsibility. But because it exists, I have to be intentional about how students experience it. I’m watching for moments where a demand becomes the problem instead of the learning, and for places where I can build in meaningful autonomy without removing the structure the ensemble needs. I’m not trying to remove every demand. I’m trying to make sure the demands are purposeful, that students understand the why, and that there are places inside the structure where they still have ownership. That matters to me personally too, because I understand that tension around autonomy from the inside. Pattern recognition is fundamental to music. Music is patterns, and being wired to notice them is one of the strengths I lean on. But I don’t just want to notice patterns for students. I want to teach students to recognize them too: What happened? What usually happens before that? What worked last time? What changed? What can we try next? That’s metacognition. We’re teaching students to understand themselves. Through all of this, there’s one core philosophy for me: I don’t teach kids to play instruments. I teach them to figure out how to play instruments. That means naming from the beginning that learning takes work and that they share responsibility for their success. I can support them. I can model, troubleshoot, adjust the environment, give them strategies, and make sure they’re never alone in the process. But I cannot do the learning for them. That’s empowering, because when they succeed, it’s theirs. They noticed something. They adjusted. They practised. They failed. They tried again. They figured it out. My job is to empower them with strategies so they can continue learning when I’m not in the room. So failure first doesn’t lower expectations, and it definitely doesn’t lower standards. It teaches students that failure gives us information, that adjustment is part of learning, and that ultimately they have ownership over what they do next. In your videos and sessions, you often speak about your mantra, “Practice makes progress.” What does that mean to you beyond music? “Practice makes progress” doesn’t mean we’re lowering our standards or expectations. It means we stop equating our best work with perfection. Perfect is awesome when it happens, but it’s not realistic as the only measure of success. Honestly, perfect means something different to every person anyway. Progress means we set a goal, work toward it, and recognize when we’ve moved forward. Then the target can move. It isn’t fixed. We’re constantly asking ourselves: Am I improving? What have I learned? How far have I come? What do I want to work on next? I think that’s much more powerful than looking at life as a series of finite destinations where eventually you arrive at perfection, and you’re done. Real life doesn’t work that way. Life is messy. Growth isn’t always linear. Sometimes we move forward, sometimes we plateau, sometimes we have to go back and work on something again, and sometimes the destination changes completely as we learn more about ourselves and what we actually want. So for me, “practice makes progress” is about giving ourselves grace while we grow without giving up on growth. We can be proud of where we are and how far we’ve come while still knowing there’s somewhere else we want to go. What is one change educators can make that would help more students feel they belong without creating an unsustainable workload? I think the first change is to shift the way we look at support. Instead of looking at students with diagnosed or identified needs as the group that requires something extra, we need to recognize that all students have additional needs. A diagnosis can be incredibly helpful because it gives us language, possible strategies, and a starting point for understanding behaviour. But there are also plenty of students sitting in our classrooms without a diagnosis who benefit from many of the same supports. Rather than building a lesson for an imaginary average student and adding accommodations afterward, I try to design the lesson and environment with the students who need the most support in mind from the beginning. When you do that well, you often meet the needs of a lot of other students at the same time. I also do not want to pretend there is one simple change that fixes everything. There isn’t. Many educators are working in overcrowded, underfunded systems with complex needs and very little support. Universal design can make teaching more sustainable, but it is not a substitute for adequate staffing, resources, time, or systemic support. The shift is not a magic strategy. It is recognizing that support is part of good design, not something we add afterward for a few students. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Sarah Batchelor

Written by Tanya Georgieva, Holistic Transformation Coach & Educator Tanya Georgieva is an internationally accredited holistic transformation coach, educator, and business mentor. Founder of Happy & Successful Woman Academy, creator of the TG Total Transformation Method, and Businesswoman of Bulgaria 2025, she helps women turn inner transformation into confidence, purposeful living, and business growth. You write a post, then delete it. You have something to say in a meeting but wait until the conversation moves on. Someone praises your work, and you reply, “It was nothing.” You may want to grow while feeling uncomfortable with the attention that growth could bring. What are you afraid might happen if you let yourself be seen? These seven steps offer a way to explore that question and begin expressing yourself more confidently. What is the fear of being seen? In this article, “fear of being seen” describes discomfort with attention, recognition or possible judgement. It is not a diagnosis. You might feel comfortable helping someone privately but hesitate to explain your expertise publicly. You may want a thriving business while feeling uneasy about becoming its visible representative. Being seen can mean posting a photograph, stating your prices, speaking in a meeting or accepting praise without immediately minimising your contribution. The difficult part is often the meaning attached to that moment: “They will think I am arrogant,” “Someone will expose a mistake,” or “People close to me will disapprove.” Visibility is personal. A successful business does not require you to share every part of your life or become a constant presence on social media. The aim is to express what matters to you in ways that suit your goals. That might include asking for help, explaining a need in a relationship or considering a new career, as well as promoting your work. What can contribute to this fear? There is no single explanation. Previous criticism, rejection, perfectionism, unfamiliarity with public speaking and real experiences of discrimination or online harassment may all matter. Sometimes you also need a practical skill, such as learning how to explain your offer clearly. Family messages can be another influence. Perhaps you heard “Do not show off,” watched praise being dismissed, or learnt that keeping others comfortable mattered more than expressing your own needs. You may now associate standing out with disappointing someone or risking belonging. A woman may sincerely want her work to be recognised and still feel guilty at the thought of receiving more attention than her mother ever did. Another may be comfortable on camera but unable to name her price without apologising. These illustrative situations point to different questions. What does recognition mean to you? What do you imagine it could cost you in your relationships? In my approach as a coach and educator, I bring together Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), systemic reflection and practical business mentoring. I pay attention to the words a woman uses about herself and the place she feels allowed to occupy in her relationships. “Who am I to speak?” opens a different conversation from “I need to learn how to speak.” One asks for exploration of giving yourself permission, the other may call for practice and instruction. These are possibilities to explore, not conclusions to impose. Working with family patterns should leave room for your own interpretation and present circumstances. You do not need to blame your family or uncover a hidden story before you can take a useful step today. How this fear can show up You may keep collecting qualifications before introducing an offer you are already equipped to deliver. You might rewrite a simple post until it loses your voice, describe an achievement as “nothing special,” or agree to opportunities and then withdraw when attention becomes real. Ask yourself whether more preparation has a clear purpose. Checking an important fact improves your work. Repeatedly changing a caption because someone might dislike you may be postponing the discomfort of publishing it. The National Health Service (NHS) explains that avoidance can provide temporary relief while making feared situations harder to approach over time. Its guidance on facing your fears recommends a gradual approach. That principle can inform small actions that build confidence, it does not mean you should ignore genuine risks or force yourself into overwhelming situations. The question that kept me from growing There was a time when I felt afraid to record videos and put myself out into the world. I hesitated over applying for the Brand of Bulgaria award, appearing on television, launching my first advertisement and bringing my book to market. Each opportunity brought the same question: “What will the people who already know me say?” I wanted to grow, yet I imagined other people's reactions before giving myself a chance to try. My concern was about being seen differently by people who already had an idea of who I was. Their judgement occupied space in my decisions even before anyone had said a word. Today, I hold three international accreditations. Through my academy, coaching and education, I want to make my work accessible to more women around the world. I use a structured approach to help women explore fears, emotional blocks and recurring patterns, and turn their personal and professional goals into practical steps. Looking back at those hesitations helps me understand what can be at stake when a woman says she is “not ready.” Sometimes she needs more preparation. Sometimes she is waiting for permission to become someone the people around her have not yet met. 7 steps to greater confidence Choose the moment you want to handle differently: Replace “I need to become more confident” with a specific action. Perhaps you want to introduce your service at a networking event, publish one useful explanation or ask to contribute to a discussion. Write down what you usually do at that moment and what you would like to do instead. For example: “I normally wait for someone to ask about my business. This week I will introduce it in two clear sentences.” This gives you something you can practise and review. Name the reaction you fear: Complete the sentence: “If I allow myself to be seen, I am afraid that.” Be precise. Fear of an unkind comment needs a different response from concern about sharing inaccurate information. Then ask what is known, what is predicted and what you could do if the feared reaction occurred. If accuracy is the concern, check your claims. If someone might disagree, prepare a respectful response. You cannot guarantee approval, but you can plan how to respond without treating disagreement as a verdict on your worth. Reconsider the rules you learnt about standing out: Notice any familiar message behind your hesitation: “Good women do not talk about themselves,” “Success makes people jealous,” or “I must not become more successful than someone I love.” Ask whether that rule reflects how you want to live now. A more workable position might be: “I can describe my work accurately and still be considerate.” You can also ask: “Whose approval am I waiting for, and what decision am I postponing until I receive it?” Loving your family does not require making every professional choice according to their preferences. Consider how you can stay connected while making a decision that belongs to you. Write your own version in language you believe. The purpose is to examine a rule rather than replace it with an affirmation that feels untrue. Make room for feelings you usually silence: Before an important action, pause and identify what you feel. It may be fear, embarrassment, sadness or frustration. Write one sentence about it without criticising yourself: “I feel nervous because this matters to me.” You can acknowledge an emotion without sharing its entire history publicly. If helpful, talk with someone you trust or write privately about what you need. Notice whether you are trying to make the feeling acceptable to everyone else before you acknowledge it yourself. You might dismiss disappointment because “others have it worse,” or silence frustration because you learnt to be agreeable. Privately naming what you feel can help you recognise a need: encouragement, clearer boundaries, time to prepare or room to say no. Give yourself a moment to settle, then decide whether the planned action is manageable. Confidence practice does not require forcing distressing memories to surface or pushing beyond your capacity. Build a small visibility ladder: List three actions from easier to harder. You might first explain your service to a trusted colleague, then share a short written post, and later record a brief video. For a first post, explain one problem your service addresses, who it is suitable for and how someone can learn more. You do not need to turn a vulnerable experience into content to establish credibility. A useful, accurate explanation can be a meaningful first step. Start with a step that stretches you without overwhelming you, and repeat it before increasing the challenge. Prepare what the task actually needs: a clear message, accurate information and an appropriate audience. Afterward, compare what you feared with what happened. Notice what you handled, even if you felt nervous. Set boundaries around your visibility: Decide what belongs in your professional message and what stays private. You might share your approach and qualifications while keeping your children, relationships and painful experiences outside your content. Prepare a simple comment policy and decide when you will check responses. You can consider constructive feedback without engaging with abuse. If there is a credible safety or privacy concern, adjust the format or audience. Being visible should support your work rather than remove your control over personal information. Measure your actions and seek suitable support: Track the action you took, what you learnt and the next adjustment. Likes and enquiries can help assess communication, but they do not measure your personal worth. A post with little response may still teach you how to explain your offer more clearly. A coach or mentor can help with goals, practice and accountability. If fear is persistent, overwhelming or substantially affects everyday life, seek help from a qualified mental health professional. The NHS information on social anxiety explains when to seek help. Reflective exercises and business coaching do not replace that care. Take your first step today Choose one moment in which you usually hold back. Write down the reaction you fear, decide what preparation is genuinely needed, and select a small action you can take in the next 24 hours. You could send the introduction you have postponed, tell someone what you need or share a useful idea. You may still feel nervous, the useful question is whether the action is appropriate and manageable. As the founder of Happy and Successful Woman Academy, I support women in exploring fears, emotional blocks and recurring patterns while developing confidence and taking practical steps towards their personal and professional goals. My work brings together holistic practices, coaching and education, with attention to each woman's needs and circumstances. If you recognise yourself in this article, contact me to discuss what you would like to change and whether my mentoring, individual sessions or educational programmes are suitable for you. You can explore my work at Successful Woman Academy. For more reflections, practical guidance and updates, follow me on TikTok and YouTube. You can also email hello@successfulwomanacademy.com or contact me by phone, WhatsApp or Viber on +44 7434 445331. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Tanya Georgieva Tanya Georgieva, Holistic Transformation Coach & Educator Tanya Georgieva is an internationally accredited holistic transformation coach, educator and business mentor. She founded Happy & Successful Woman Academy and created the TG Total Transformation Method. She helps women navigate fears, release suppressed emotions and change limiting patterns rooted in past experiences and family systems. Recognised as Businesswoman of Bulgaria 2025, she connects inner transformation with confidence, fulfilling relationships and business growth.

Most of us know what we need to do. Courage is what gets us to actually do it. Clio Bushland helps entrepreneurs and leaders choose courage under pressure. As a coach, speaker, and founder of Clio Bushland Consulting, she brings together personal experience, a Master of Science degree in marriage and family therapy, and years of nonprofit and business leadership. That mix shapes her practical, human approach to equipping and supporting people to communicate more clearly, lead more effectively, and take meaningful action, even when they’re afraid. In this interview, Clio talks about fear, courage, regulation, and what it takes to lead when the stakes are high. Clio Bushland, Courageous Living & Leadership Specialist What first led you to make courage the foundation of your work with people and leaders? Courage saved my life long before it became my work. When clients kept describing our work with fear as transformative, I realized how deeply fear had shaped my early life. My childhood and young adulthood were steeped in abuse and trauma, rooted in my parents’ mental health struggles, addiction, and trauma histories. Life was often unstable or unsafe, and I made most of my decisions out of fear. Eventually, I hit a crisis point. A police officer told me, in effect, that if I stayed in my abusive relationship, I was going to die. Surviving meant making a major life change, and the only thing that could help me do that was courage. I had no confidence and no sense of my own worth. But I dared to ask for help and start over. I succeeded! Though I would have a few more bumps in the road, I was never in that kind of danger again. I created a stable life. It wasn’t long, however, before survival wasn’t enough anymore. I wanted my life to be about pursuing what mattered to me, not just staying out of danger. To my surprise, living at that level took even more courage. When I made these connections, I started studying the neuroscience of fear and courage. Fear shaped my early life. Courage shaped everything after. What do most people misunderstand about fear and courage? Fear is data, not a decision-maker. Fear is powerful and can be pervasive. Fear shapes how we see the world and the decisions we make. Fear is not an enemy, obstacle, or character flaw. Fear has one job: to keep us safe. It is one piece of a complex picture. Courage is also powerful, and I love it as a topic because it is inspiring. Modern life and work can feel reductive. Courage is how we reach for more. Courage isn’t reserved for big, dramatic moments. It shows up in everyday choices. Do you tell the truth or avoid it? Do you have the conversation or wait for the problem to go away? Do you ask for what you want or just hope it happens? Courage is choosing your values and goals over your fear. How does that understanding of courage shape the work you do with leaders and individual clients? You can’t train courage directly. It is a choice made in the moment. But you can make courage easier to choose. In my corporate work, I help leaders understand how stress, emotion, and nervous system activation affect the way they think, communicate, and behave under pressure. We look at how emotion and logic both provide useful information. When leaders understand (and even anticipate) fear and value courage, they can stay clear and regulated even when the stakes are high. I also find that work satisfaction goes up because being a courageous leader is inspiring and rewarding in itself. People can better find meaning in their work. With individual clients, understanding fear and leveraging courage helps to neutralize shame about feeling afraid or stuck. It also helps us identify and build on their strengths to overcome challenges. Shifting perception from stuck to courageous makes people feel more powerful and resilient. It’s hard to beat someone with both of those qualities! Across both individual and corporate domains, I help people act and speak in alignment with their goals and values. Emotion, thought, identity, and behavior are deeply intertwined. Using the fear and courage framework helps us reach all of them. We work with intangibles, but the goal is to create change you can measure. Why does courage need to come before confidence when someone is facing uncertainty or change? Confidence is lovely, but if it comes at all, it comes with or after courage, never before. Confidence takes time and repetition. You build it by doing the thing, courageously and consistently, until it feels familiar. It also depends on context. You might feel confident at work but not on a first date, and your mood, stress, and nervous system all affect it too. Courage doesn’t depend on any of that. It’s available at any time, in any situation. Even when you feel confident, you still need courage. Seasoned performers still get stage fright. You can be confident and afraid at the same time. One of my clients knew she needed to do cold outreach to get her business off the ground, but she dreaded it. She drafted her emails, then wrote to me: “I’m not confident enough to do this. I’m shaking. I feel nauseous.” I wrote back, “You can hit send even if you’re shaking and nauseous!” She did. She landed two clients, and her business took off. That’s why I focus on courage. For so many clients, confidence was a dead end. Courage got them moving. Confidence is a feeling. Courage is a choice. How has your background in marriage and family therapy shaped the way you approach leadership and workplace behavior? The most technically perfect plan will fail if it doesn’t account for human behavior. Clinical work trained me to see behavior on several levels at once: the individual, their relationships, and the larger system around them. Behavior makes sense in context. At work, a communication problem might be a skill gap, a strained relationship, or a culture that punishes honesty. Traditional training usually focuses only on the first. My business leadership taught me practicality. As an executive director, I had to justify every dollar and decision to a board. Every resource had to produce measurable results. My work draws on both my clinical and business experience. It’s educational and experiential, with a strong bias toward practical application. People don’t need more theory or more sound bites. They need skills that hold up under pressure. People in the workplace are people. They come with emotions, relationships, and histories. Good leadership accounts for all of that. Why do managers still avoid difficult conversations even when they have been trained in feedback and communication? Managers avoid difficult conversations for the same reasons the rest of us do: on some level, they feel scary. That’s why we label them “difficult”! Many fears can pop up, but three come up regularly. Managers fear being seen differently. This is especially hard for newer managers who now lead former peers. Holding a former coworker accountable can feel like a betrayal, and many worry about coming across as bossy or unlikable. But even experienced managers can hesitate to have a conversation that might get them seen in a negative light. Managers often worry a great deal about how others will react. We tend to see negative emotion as a signal that something has gone wrong. In reality, anger, frustration, embarrassment, fear, and even sadness are normal reactions to difficult news or challenging feedback. We want to keep these conversations kind and respectful, but negative emotions don’t necessarily signal failure. Many managers step into their roles thinking their job is to know everything. Saying “I don’t know” can be quite scary. Admitting they don’t have answers can feel like failing or like they don’t belong in their role. In today’s rapidly changing workplace, many difficult conversations require calmly and clearly communicating what you don’t know as well as what you do. Avoidance brings relief, but the issue doesn’t go away, and the longer we wait, the harder it gets. Each time we avoid, our brain learns that avoiding works, and we never learn that we could have handled it. Choosing discomfort hurts in the short term but is easier in the long term. Avoiding it is easier in the short term, but the pain lasts much longer. What is missing from leadership development when it teaches communication skills without preparing people for emotional pressure? Communication is both emotional and logical, but we teach it as if it’s purely logical. Most communication training relies primarily, sometimes exclusively, on logic. You learn the framework, plan the conversation, and feel prepared. Then, when it’s time to have the conversation, you become avoidant, freeze up, or sometimes even become combative. Those are flight, freeze, and fight responses. A script by itself won’t override that. A woman I know spent weeks preparing a pitch for an idea she planned to deliver at a board meeting. The project mattered a lot to her, and she practiced her opening lines and her delivery, even planning her outfit. She didn’t prepare for her nerves. She kept waiting for the right moment to speak up in the meeting, but it never came. The next time, she asked to be put on the agenda and prepared to be nervous. Because feeling afraid did not feel like a surprise or a failing, she could clearly articulate her vision despite her nerves. The project moved forward. She didn’t need a better script. She needed the emotional skill set: understanding her nervous system, recognizing what she felt in the moment, and regulating enough to act. We all do. Those skills are what let you think clearly, communicate effectively, and lead well under pressure, but they’re largely missing from traditional communication and leadership training. The good news is that they’re learnable. Logic and emotion are both data. Great communication uses both. How can someone tell the difference between fear that protects them and fear that holds them back? Fear responds the same way to real danger and perceived risk, so telling them apart takes both logic and emotion. Both are important. Neither is infallible. Have you ever said to yourself, “I knew something was off, but I didn’t want to be rude or too emotional”? I’ve ended up in bad situations, both personal and professional, that I could have avoided by listening to that feeling. But I have also missed opportunities because I inflated the risk. The first question is critical: Is there real, present danger, and what are the consequences of my choices? Your rideshare is here, but something feels off. You can get in, and if you were right about that feeling, the consequences could be catastrophic. If you decide to wait, whether you are right or wrong, the most likely downside is offending your driver, which is manageable. If your physical or mental safety is genuinely at risk, be cautious and stay safe. On the other hand, most of what sets off our threat detection system (fear) does not have such dire consequences attached, and the threat is not imminent. We have the opportunity to ask questions like “What am I really afraid of here?” “What are the consequences of saying yes?” “What are the consequences of saying no?” My favorite question is “Who do I want to be?” I find that helps me frame my fear and my response in a helpful way. Don’t ignore your fear, but don’t let it make your decisions either. What helps a leader stay steady enough to communicate clearly when a conversation becomes tense or unpredictable? When we say “steady,” usually we mean “regulated.” We want someone who can be in a tense situation without becoming reactive. That doesn’t mean emotionally uninvolved. Suppressing your emotions increases your physiological stress, and in conversation, it raises the other person’s stress, too. Naming your emotions works better. It helps the language and reasoning parts of your brain calm the parts that react to threat. The point of regulating emotions is not to eliminate or ignore them. Emotions, even negative ones, give us important information. Jealousy or envy, for example, can point us toward dreams or goals we are neglecting. The point is to extract the information we need without letting our emotions drive our decisions unthinkingly. Here are a few tools you can use to help you. Slow your breathing. Emotions can speed up our breathing. Slowing your breath can calm your emotions. Talk to yourself by name: “Take a deep breath, Clio.” Talking to yourself in the third person can reduce emotional reactivity quickly, without adding much additional cognitive effort. I have gotten good results through softening my gaze. The research here is still emerging, but stress may narrow our focus onto threats, and widening it seems to tell the brain, “I’m safe.” When I slow my breath and widen my gaze, I almost always sigh and relax, and my clients often do as well. Sometimes the most regulated thing you can do is say, “Let’s continue this discussion later.” Great leadership starts before difficult situations arise. Sleep deprivation, hunger, and dehydration can all affect your mood and make you more reactive. You wouldn’t expect an athlete to perform without sleep or fuel. Don’t expect it of yourself! What does choosing values and goals over comfort look like in your own life? Some of the best decisions of my life were highly uncomfortable. One beautiful example was adopting a teenager from Ukraine who didn’t speak English. We met her when a friend hosted her through a program that let kids in orphanages experience Christmas with a family. We already had three kids, including a newborn, and we weren’t financially set up for an international adoption. Many people thought we had lost our minds. But as our two older children said, she needed a family, and we had one. Generosity is one of our core values, so we began the difficult process of bringing a near stranger into our home. It wasn’t easy, but it was beautiful. She’s an adult now and thriving, and I can’t imagine my life without my daughter. Building my business has taken courage too. It has often been terrifying, requiring lots of investment before I had any evidence it would work. The visibility means constantly working through insecurities about my appearance, my age, and how I compare to others. But I feel called to bring what I’ve learned to a larger audience, and that keeps me going. Comfort is a poor compass. Values are a better one. What is one courageous action you would encourage someone to take when fear has been keeping them stuck? A wrong step that brings information is better than a right one that never happens. Start by letting go of any shame or judgment about being stuck. Shame drains the energy you need to move forward. Replace it with curiosity. What’s happening, and why? Do you have an information or skill gap to close? In my experience, that’s rarely the problem. More often, fear, grief, or another emotion needs tending. Keep breaking your task or project into smaller and smaller pieces until you find a manageable chunk. We are not looking for easy or comfortable. We are looking for doable. “Talk to Alex about missed key performance indicators (KPIs)” might become “schedule a meeting with Alex.” “Raise my prices” might become “quote the new prices on my next sales call.” A reasonable next move is good enough. It doesn’t need to be perfect! Then do it. Keep doing it, and you’ll build evidence that this big, scary thing is possible. Finally, find support. Courageous living and leadership are deeply rewarding but can also be difficult and sometimes lonely. Build a community that supports you and holds you accountable. Don’t settle. Be brave. Take the next courageous step. Then take another. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Clio Bushland

Written by Renee Devereaux, Regeneration Specialist Renee's work addresses what lies beneath the surface of "personal abandonment," creating an "addiction" to a coping mechanism that keeps the person from the fulfillment they seek. Each person's journey is different. Her role is to meet you where you are and guide you to what needs resolution. Beauty is more than what we see. It is also reflected in how we think, act, and take responsibility for our impact on the world. This article explores how acknowledging our inner shadows can deepen self-awareness and help us cultivate beauty from within. “Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.” – Mary Oliver, Blue Horses, Devotions By perceiving truth in those lines, we may be inspired to admit that everything we do is directly connected to the pursuit of beauty in one form or another! Think about it! We take vacations to see the beauty of other places, our homes are designed to display the beauty we have collected, and it appears that whatever we shop for will ultimately enhance the way we look and feel about ourselves. Even if done under the guise of supplying energy or easing pain, changing the energy will change our appearance. What we are now seeing, and have been seeing in our world for quite a while, is offensive to the very heart and soul of existence! It did not just start with the destruction of Dresden in Germany during World War II, along with the magnificent bells and so on! Ugliness had its roots long before. Sadly, cognitive dissonance and other illnesses have caused many people to forget that the world we are seeing now is not the same as the world we initially encountered. Of course, many are very young and have not experienced the world as it once was. They are now held captive, watching its deterioration, and do not have an image with which to compare what is taking place. The violation of all that is harmonious and beautiful has been tolerated and is now acceptable! We dare not bring attention to what is pathologically ugly and offensive. What is that all about? Does the possibility exist somewhere in the collective unconscious that there’s a mirroring of the individual human soul that we must look at, own, and correct in order to survive? That the loss of moral compass and principle in the collective has a subconscious impact on personal behavior, and that this behavior is being justified because others are doing it and each of us has suffered at the hands of perpetrators and abusers? That denial of a lack of integrity, disrespect, and other values exists in everyone and is mostly kept hidden in the belief that no one can tell or recognize the low vibratory rate that emanates and is perfectly evident to those willing to see? Conversely, does personal denial of what is ugly within not have consequences on a global scale? I believe that the refusal to see our “shadow” is what’s being played out. Our civilization has now reached a stage in Earth’s evolutionary process where pretending that only “holiness” resides within each being is lethal. Consciousness becomes a “lived” experience as we observe physical, mental, and spiritual illness become “normal.” Yet, we are free to choose to take personal action. The earnest study of the Self is supported by learning to decipher symbolic language and live accordingly. It’s not merely acquiring and accumulating knowledge but actually embodying what we learn from all that we experience. Learning to make corrections and adjustments as we grow, and applying discernment and critical thinking, provides us with the reason for living! Connection to the Self is delivered as we learn to remember how our ancestors taught us to navigate the world as best they could, though not always with honor and dignity. Perversion and unethical behavior have existed all along. Will a willingness to see and take responsibility for unconsciously participating in ugly behavior transform what is ugly into what is beautiful? Can’t we agree that in almost every culture there’s a saying relating to the eyes as the windows of the soul? Why would anyone suspect that the Soul would collude to keep the truth hidden? The spiritual journey takes us into depths that not everyone wants to acknowledge. Being in service to others becomes a reality as we learn to understand ourselves, as well as the human condition. Remembering all of our potential while taking responsibility for that which we are passing down to our descendants may be sufficient to alter all that is ugly into what is truly beautiful! Contact Renee Devereaux here or at 775 434 9568. Follow me on Facebook and Instagram for more info! Read more from Renee Devereaux Renee Devereaux, Regeneration Specialist Renee Devereaux built and rebuilt her business multiple times, surviving financial collapse, health crises, and relocations across countries. Every loss taught her about resilience and the impermanence of external security. This work has remained constant: helping people reclaim their power by resolving what holds them back. "Freedom and Empowerment Through Entrepreneurship" is her second book, a guide and workbook she shares with those eager to start their own business.

Written by Alena Elchaninova, Life Coach Alena Elchaninova is a London-based International Coaching Federation (ICF) certified life coach, artist, and Pricing Director. Guided by the belief that nothing is broken but much can be seen and integrated, she supports human beings in moving from inner friction and self-abandonment toward greater awareness, personal agency, aligned action, and consciously integrated living. You are sitting opposite someone who genuinely cares about you. They ask how you are. You say you're good. You listen to their stories, laugh at the right moments, offer reassurance, make space for whatever they need to share. It is a perfectly lovely conversation. Yet, on your way home, you notice a familiar sense of loneliness – the feeling of not being fully seen. You were included. You were appreciated. You may have even felt loved. But how much of you was actually there? There is a particular kind of loneliness that has very little to do with the absence of people. It can exist inside friendships, families, romantic relationships and even the most socially connected lives. It is the loneliness of being cared for without feeling fully seen. Sometimes without realising it, we have helped create that distance ourselves. The quiet agreement Most of us want to be loved and accepted. There is nothing unusual about that. But somewhere along the way, some of us learn that connection feels easier to maintain when we make ourselves easier to be with. We become understanding, accommodating, emotionally independent. We learn to notice other people's moods, anticipate their reactions and adjust ourselves accordingly. We don't want to be demanding or inconvenient. We don't want to create unnecessary tension. We may even feel quietly proud of this. We are self-aware. Reasonable. Low-maintenance. Emotionally mature. We notice the louder, needier, more demanding person in the room and think, I would never behave like that. Perhaps we wouldn't. But sometimes what looks like emotional maturity also contains an agreement we never consciously made: I will show you only the parts of me that are easy to love, so you have very little reason to leave. Over time, the agreement becomes difficult to see because it no longer feels like a strategy. It feels like who we are. We are the easygoing one. The strong one. The one who understands. The one who doesn't make a fuss. People appreciate us for it, which makes the whole arrangement even more convincing. Until one day, we notice how exhausting it is to remain someone who needs so little. When understanding becomes self-abandonment Someone hurts us. Before they have even had to explain themselves, we begin explaining them to ourselves. They're tired. They're under pressure. They probably didn't mean it that way. They've been through a lot. We know why they did it. Understanding another person can be generous. But sometimes we use understanding to abandon the parts of ourselves that hurt. Once we can explain somebody's behaviour, we quietly decide we are no longer entitled to feel hurt by it. So, disappointment becomes compassion before it has had a chance to be disappointment. Anger is softened into perspective. A need gets negotiated away before it has ever been spoken. I'm fine. It's okay. Don't worry about it. None of these sentences is inherently dishonest. Sometimes we genuinely are fine. Sometimes it genuinely is okay. The problem begins when we no longer know the difference. Repeated often enough, these small moments create a carefully edited self. Not a false self exactly. The kindness is real. The independence is real. The understanding is real. But they are not the whole story. Parts of us keep disappearing before anyone else gets the chance to meet them. Eventually we may start wondering why nobody sees us. The hidden manipulation There is another layer to this that can be uncomfortable to recognise. Making ourselves easy to love can also become a subtle form of manipulation. If I can hide my needs, soften my disappointment, contain my anger and stay agreeable, perhaps I can influence your response to me. Perhaps I can make rejection less likely. Perhaps I can make staying with me easier. We may tell ourselves that we are simply being considerate, but underneath that consideration there may also be fear. The moment we let ourselves be fully seen, we lose control over what happens next. Someone might disagree with us. Someone might not be able to meet our need. Someone might find us inconvenient. Someone we love might see more of us and decide they do not like everything they see. That is the risk of being fully seen: we cannot control what another person does with what they see. So, without consciously deciding to, we can begin choosing approval over intimacy. We want to be loved for who we are, while carefully managing how much of ourselves another person gets to experience. That contradiction can survive for years. The relationship may even look good from the outside. There may be affection, loyalty, history and genuine care. But something essential remains protected. The person we are trying so hard to keep has never been given the full opportunity to choose us. Approval is not the same as being seen Being liked can feel a lot like being seen. Especially when other people praise the exact qualities we learned to survive through. "You're so strong." "You're so easy to talk to." "You never ask for anything." "You're always so understanding." There is nothing wrong with any of those qualities. The question is whether they are qualities we choose – or roles we no longer know how to leave. Can the strong one say, "I'm scared," without immediately pulling themselves together? Can the understanding one stop explaining the person who hurt them long enough to admit, "That hurt me"? Can the independent one say, "I need you," before they have convinced themselves they don't? Can the person who is always “fine” let someone see them when they are not? Can the one who asks for almost nothing finally admit, "I do need something from you"? A quality stops being freedom when we are no longer free to step outside it. At some point, the questions become harder: What do I believe would happen if I became inconvenient? Am I allowing myself to be fully seen – or only allowing myself to be approved of? If I stopped earning closeness by being easy, who would still be here? The loneliness no one else can solve Eventually, we may begin to feel unseen. We wonder why nobody asks what we need, why we keep making room while everyone else seems free to take it. Sometimes the relationship really is one-sided. But sometimes people simply don't know what is happening inside us. We say we're fine. We explain away the hurt before they ever see it. We wait to be understood, even though we have never actually told them what we needed, what hurt, or what mattered. Someone can love us deeply and still fail to meet us if we expect them to understand what we have never allowed them to see. Becoming less edited For perhaps the first time, we let another person have their own response instead of trying to manage it in advance. That can feel frightening. Being more visible does not require some dramatic act of vulnerability. Sometimes it is simply saying, "I do mind." Letting someone know that something hurt. Admitting that we want something before convincing ourselves we don't. The urge to soften, explain or retreat may come immediately. But the work is not becoming more demanding. It is becoming less edited. Some relationships will deepen. Others may reveal that they worked better when we were easier to accommodate. Being fully seen does not guarantee that someone will stay. It allows us to discover who is actually there – and to meet ourselves more honestly too. Perhaps that is when the relationship becomes real: when we stop removing ourselves before another person has the chance to meet us. When disappointment is allowed to exist alongside understanding. When wanting something does not immediately become something to apologise for. When another person is finally relating not only to the version of us that keeps everything comfortable, but to someone more complete. Perhaps the loneliness was never simply about not having enough love. Perhaps it was also about how little of ourselves we allowed that love to reach. Maybe the question is no longer how to become easier to love. Maybe it is whether we are willing to be fully seen. If you recognise yourself in this pattern and want to explore the parts of yourself you've learned to edit, this is the work I do through life coaching. You're welcome to book a coaching conversation with me via my website. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Alena Elchaninova Alena Elchaninova, Life Coach Alena Elchaninova is a London-based ICF-certified life coach, artist, and Pricing Director working at the intersection of self-awareness and practical life change. She supports individuals who feel internally conflicted despite functioning well on the outside, helping them move from self-abandonment to self-trust, personal agency, and clear, conscious action. Her work explores inner narratives, emotional and somatic awareness, and the integration of different parts of the self, translating insight into grounded, aligned change. She brings both structure and depth to the process of meaningful realignment.

Written by Samantha Roach, Integrative Counsellor Samantha Roach is an Integrative Counsellor, author, speaker, and founder of Beauty for Ashes Ministry and Brokenness to Hope CIC (Community Interest Company). Through counselling, workshops, and community programmes, she helps individuals move from trauma, grief, and emotional pain toward healing, hope, and personal transformation. For many years, I knew how to look okay even when I wasn't okay. I could smile. I could function. I could support other people. I could keep going. What wasn't always visible was what was happening underneath. When you've experienced trauma, particularly during childhood, you can become very good at hiding your wounds. Sometimes this happens because we were silenced. Sometimes we learned that it wasn't safe to speak. Sometimes we simply didn't have the words to explain what we were feeling. So we adapt. We survive. Sometimes without even realising it, we begin to wear masks. My own journey from brokenness to hope has taught me that healing isn't only about addressing what happened to us. It's also about having the courage to look beneath the person we learned to become in order to survive. Here are 7 masks that can sometimes hide unresolved wounds. 1. The “I'm fine” mask “I'm fine.” Two small words that can hide so much. Sometimes saying we're fine is easier than explaining what's really happening inside. We don't want to burden anyone. We don't think they'll understand. Or perhaps previous attempts to speak were dismissed, ignored or silenced. So “I'm fine” becomes protection. But there comes a point when constantly pretending to be okay becomes exhausting. Healing gave me permission to acknowledge that I didn't always have to be fine. There is strength in being able to say, “Actually, I'm struggling today.” 2. The strong one This was a mask I knew well. When you've survived difficult experiences, people can begin to admire your strength. “You're so strong.” “I don't know how you do it.” Although those words may be well-intentioned, sometimes being “the strong one” becomes another prison. Everyone comes to you, but who do you go to? You carry other people's burdens while struggling to acknowledge your own. Strength is valuable, but healing taught me that vulnerability and strength can exist together. Being strong doesn't mean needing support. 3. The people pleaser For some people, keeping others happy becomes a way of keeping themselves safe. You say yes when you want to say no. You avoid conflict. You worry about disappointing people. You become highly aware of other people's moods and needs while becoming disconnected from your own. Underneath people-pleasing, there can sometimes be a deeper question: “If I stop doing things for people, will they still want me?” Healing challenges us to recognise that our value isn't determined by how useful we are to others. 4. The achiever Trauma doesn't always look like someone whose life is falling apart. Sometimes it looks like achievement. Qualifications. Promotions. Businesses. Awards. Constantly striving for the next goal. Achievement itself isn't unhealthy. But it is worth asking what is driving it. There was a time in my own life when doing more and achieving more became connected to proving my value. Healing has helped me understand that success can celebrate who I am, but it cannot tell me who I am. My worth existed before the achievement. 5. The helper Helping others can be beautiful. It can also become somewhere to hide. When we focus constantly on everyone else's problems, we don't have to look too closely at our own. We become the rescuer. The listener. The dependable one. The person who always shows up. But healing sometimes requires us to ask ourselves: “Am I giving from a healthy place, or am I giving because being needed makes me feel valuable?” As a counsellor, helping people is an important part of what I do. But my healing journey has taught me that I cannot base my identity on being needed. I am more than what I do for others. 6. The controller When childhood felt unpredictable, control can create a sense of safety in adulthood. We plan everything. We struggle when things change unexpectedly. We want to know what is happening, when it is happening and what comes next. Underneath the need for control may be fear. When you've experienced situations where you had little power or choice, controlling your environment can feel like protection. Healing doesn't mean becoming careless or abandoning structure. It means recognising when control is being driven by fear rather than wisdom. 7. The independent one “I don't need anyone.” Sometimes independence is celebrated as strength. But extreme independence can also develop when you've learned that relying on people isn't safe. You stop asking for help. You handle everything yourself. You convince yourself that needing someone makes you vulnerable. Yet human beings were created for connection. One of the lessons I've had to learn is that receiving support doesn't make me weak. Sometimes allowing someone trustworthy to stand beside you is part of healing. What is behind the mask? When I wrote my memoir, From Brokenness to Hope, I had to look beyond the woman people could see and reconnect with the parts of my story that had remained hidden. The childhood trauma. The silence. The rejection. The relationships. The survival. For so long, silence wasn't simply about not speaking. Silence was also hiding. It was smiling when I was hurting. Being strong when I felt broken. Continuing when I was exhausted. Allowing people to see the version of me I believed was safest for them to see. Writing my story became part of taking that mask off. Not because everyone needed access to every part of me, but because I no longer wanted shame to determine which parts of my story were allowed to have a voice. Healing isn't about removing every mask at once There is an important distinction here. Healing doesn't mean you suddenly have to tell everyone everything. Not everyone is entitled to your story. Vulnerability needs safety. Healing is about becoming honest with yourself first. Why do I always need to appear strong? Why is saying no so difficult? Why do I struggle to ask for help? Why does slowing down make me uncomfortable? Why do I need everyone around me to be okay before I can be okay? Instead of judging these behaviours, we can become curious about them. Because sometimes what we call a personality trait began as a survival strategy. 3 questions to reflect on Take a moment and consider: What mask have I learned to wear to protect myself? What am I afraid might happen if people saw what was underneath? What would it look like to feel safe enough to be more authentically myself? You don't have to have all the answers today. Awareness itself can be the beginning of change. From silence to voice One of the most powerful parts of my healing journey has been finding my voice. There was a time when I was silenced. Later, there were times when I silenced myself. Today, I understand the difference between privacy and silence created by shame. I can choose what I share. I can choose my boundaries. I can choose who has access to my story. But I no longer believe I have to hide who I am because of what happened to me. My faith has played an important part in that transformation. I have learned that my identity is not found in my trauma, my achievements, my mistakes or the opinions of other people. My identity is in Christ. That understanding helped me begin separating who I am from what happened to me. Ready to go deeper? The silencing of the wounds The masks I've explored in this article are also connected to something I am deeply passionate about: understanding the wounds beneath our behaviours. On 3 November 2026, I will be beginning my six-session Online Trauma Workshop, based on my From Brokenness to Hope Wounds Framework. We begin with Pillar One: The Silencing of the Wounds. This is particularly close to my heart because I know personally what it means to be silenced and what it means to eventually find your voice. Over the course of the workshop, we will begin exploring the wounds we carry, the ways they can influence our thoughts, emotions, relationships and behaviours, and how we can begin moving towards greater awareness and healing. The sessions will take place online every two weeks from 7 pm to 9 pm, beginning Tuesday, 3 November. If this article has caused you to recognise some of your own masks or made you wonder what may be underneath them, I would love to invite you to find out more about the workshop. For further information and registration, visit here. Final thoughts The masks we wear often served a purpose. They may have helped us survive environments where we didn't feel safe, seen, heard or protected. So healing isn't about looking back at ourselves with judgement. It's about compassionately recognising: “I needed this once, but perhaps I don't need it anymore.” My journey from brokenness to hope has taught me that healing isn't becoming a completely different person. Sometimes healing is finally feeling safe enough to become the person who was underneath the mask all along. You survived behind the mask. Now healing can help you discover who you are without it. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Samantha Roach Samantha Roach, Integrative Counsellor Samantha Roach is an ACC-registered Integrative Counsellor, author of From Brokenness to Hope, speaker, and founder of Beauty for Ashes Ministry and Brokenness to Hope CIC (Community Interest Company). Having overcome childhood abuse, addiction, trauma, and profound personal loss, she is passionate about helping others find healing and restoration. With over 1,000 counselling hours and extensive experience supporting individuals, couples, and trauma survivors, Samantha combines professional expertise with lived experience to inspire lasting transformation. Through her counselling practice, workshops, and community programmes, she helps people discover hope, healing, and purpose beyond their pain.

Written by Lynn Thorsell, Leadership and Team Coach A student of Buddhism with a history of outdoor athleticism, Lynn Thorsell brings an adventurous spirit and multi-faceted perspective to organizational life and leadership development. Since 2019, she's coached leaders and teams on six continents, enriching her appreciation of human diversity and ingenuity. I’ve hurt people. Maybe you have, too. But what do we do with that knowledge? There’s no one answer, of course, any more than there is one reason why our actions have hurt someone. You may have set a personal boundary, come out of the closet, or acted in alignment with a core value. Being true to ourselves doesn’t always please the people closest to us. You may have acted to prevent worse harm. Medical professionals and first responders have to make those decisions every day. Or someone may have wanted you to take responsibility for their emotional pain when the responsibility wasn’t yours. Just because someone is hurting doesn’t mean you were the cause. But then there are the times we do something vengeful, thoughtless, selfish, or mistaken. The most comfortable self-conception for most of us as individuals, teams, and nations is as a hero and protagonist. We want to see ourselves as good people. Many of us also readily identify with how we’ve been hurt, proclaiming our innocence and helplessness. But if we are to tell the whole truth, we have to include the stories about how we’ve unjustifiably hurt others. From victim to persecutor In my late twenties, rapidly heading nowhere, I had the good fortune of finding a therapist who helped me grapple with the idea that perhaps my childhood and adolescence hadn’t been completely idyllic, and that some events had left me with psychological scars that were poorly influencing my behaviour and relationships. While identifying as a victim came with its own issues, the therapist helped plant seeds for what eventually grew into self-compassion and got me standing on firmer ground. Working with other therapists through my thirties, I developed healthier ways of thinking and relating to others, and began to see myself from a fuller perspective. Eventually, an uncomfortable question kept coming to mind. I remembered incidents as a teenager when I had treated a younger person comparably to the ways I had been treated as a child, ways that I now identified as psychologically damaging. Could I have caused him the same type of harm? The recurring thought was intensely uncomfortable. Eventually, I accepted that I could only resolve that discomfort by knowing. So I asked him, and, of course, the answer was yes. We met in person so that he could tell me about his experience of what I’d done and feel heard. He told me he had been deeply hurt, that the experience had affected his relationships with women, and that he had been working through those issues in therapy. Hearing that was difficult. It hurt to know that my actions had had a lasting impact, that he had been suffering for so long, and that it had taken me until now to ask. I felt deeply disappointed that I had been first blind to my actions and then in denial. I felt humbled and ashamed to know that I was just as culpable as the person who had hurt me. I listened with empathy. I told him I was sorry for what I’d done. It was difficult to imagine what I could do to make amends. Untold stories As a coach, why am I writing about something so personal? The fact is, we’ve all hurt people. It’s just something we rarely talk about undefensively. Psychological injuries happen at home, at school, and in the workplace. We hear about them all the time from the perspective of the injured party. We’ve likely told those stories ourselves. Yet if we’ve been hurt, there must be someone who’s done the hurting. Where are those stories? Not the ones in which we justify our actions. The ones where we take responsibility for them. I was afraid of knowing I had hurt someone. It was painful to hear that I had. What I didn’t expect was that it was also enriching, liberating, and empowering. The self-made prison Because the truth is, denying my capacity to hurt someone denied me so much more. When I was only willing to think of myself as a “good” person, I had to deny evidence to the contrary and defend myself against anyone who experienced me differently. This didn’t just happen in my personal life. It happened in every arena, fed by an invisible undercurrent of fear and shame. Admitting I made a mistake or hurt someone could have opened the door to all my fears about being an unforgivably bad person, so I was quick to deny it. I shut myself off from information that contradicted my preferred self-perception. I blamed other people or circumstances, casting myself as a fellow victim (poor me!) or a misunderstood hero, fighting the good fight. Without even realizing it, I avoided the people associated with those incidents or kept our interactions superficial. This didn’t only affect one relationship, it became a pattern. My world became smaller. My sense of self remained limited. Does any of that seem familiar? I’m not the only person who’s been trapped there. Case studies of team dysfunction, a scan of LinkedIn, or any book on diversity, equity, and inclusion reveal similar stories: The team member who justifies why a colleague wasn’t included in a decision rather than directly addressing an underlying resentment. Rivalries within an executive team, each person trying to be seen as the hero and casting certain colleagues as villains or fools. The manager who responds to an employee’s feedback about a hurtful comment with explanations about what was really meant, how much the manager cares, and what kind of person the manager really is, until attention turns to reassuring the manager, leaving the employee feeling doubly dismissed. When we don’t own our actions, conflicts go unresolved, colleagues compete instead of collaborating, and injured parties become disengaged. These fractures damage professional relationships and impair people’s ability to do their best work. Those examples are relatively normal. Much more extreme is the leader who feels so threatened and isolated that they repeatedly lash out. What kind of intervention is most likely to address whatever harm has happened, prevent future outbursts, and, ideally, support that leader to change? We’re navigating sensitive and complex terrain. Opening the door "The individual who wishes to have an answer to the problem of evil, as it is posed today, has need, first and foremost, of self-knowledge, that is, the utmost possible knowledge of his own wholeness. He must know relentlessly how much good he can do, and what crimes he is capable of, and must beware of regarding the one as real and the other as illusion. Both are elements within his nature, and both are bound to come to light in him, should he wish, as he ought, to live without self-deception or self-delusion." – Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections Being willing to know that my actions had caused long-lasting harm to someone was a first step towards freeing myself from the prison of my preferred self-perception. While painful and difficult, it brought me into a closer relationship with the person I’d harmed and gave me a deeper sense of our humanity. It also deepened my relationship with myself. Unexpectedly, owning my actions and their effect helped me recognize the full extent of my power: that I can hurt someone. Or not, and my power to take responsibility for that. I now see the admission that we’ve caused harm as an act of courage. It’s a first step towards restoring trust and relationship, although that restoration is never a given. Perhaps as importantly, it’s essential to any honesty with ourselves about our power to both help and harm. One cannot know oneself fully without that honesty. To reconcile This is as true for teams and countries as it is for individuals. In Canada, as in South Africa and other countries, the ongoing process of Truth and Reconciliation challenges us to take stock of the whole truth of who we are. Acknowledging, documenting, and seeking to understand the histories of the Holocaust, apartheid, the Rwandan genocide, and the treatment of Indigenous peoples in Canada is painful, difficult, sometimes traumatizing work, most especially for those who were directly and indirectly harmed by those horrors. That work reveals a fuller history, invites more people to participate in the act of understanding, and illuminates our vulnerabilities and capabilities as human beings. Ultimately, it is work that enriches the nation willing to sponsor it. We become collectively bigger, not smaller, better integrated, and much more whole. As long as we see the Truth part of Truth and Reconciliation as a threat to our identity, we limit ourselves, individually and collectively. We erect walls within us and between us, narrowing our view. We put others and ourselves at risk. We remain imprisoned by our preferred self-perceptions. Reconciliation, within ourselves, much less with another, never becomes possible. Truth is, first and foremost, an inside job. Owning the ugliest parts of our history, personally and collectively, we open the door to our full humanity, our full responsibility, our full potential, and to each other. What more might be possible for you, for your team, for your organization? I’d love to explore that with you. Please feel welcome to add your comments to this article, connect with me on LinkedIn, or visit my website for more information! Read more from Lynn Thorsell Lynn Thorsell, Leadership and Team Coach Lynn Thorsell is a team and leadership coach whose practice is informed by outdoor athletics. Buddhist philosophy and her time working in Malawi. A student of human diversity and resourcefulness, she is continually heartened by the many leaders and teams working to increase our collective wellbeing, and honoured to support them.

Written by Dawn Reno Langley, Author, Writing Coach, & Yoga Instructor Dawn Reno Langley is an internationally known writer with more than thirty books and hundreds of short pieces to her credit. Her latest books, a novel entitled The Sunflower: Book Two of The Art of Rivers and a memoir, Love, Leashes & Letting Go, were both published in the summer of 2026. She is a digital nomad. I’ve had dogs throughout my whole life. Most of them were soul dogs, but every once in a while, there was one who just wouldn’t learn, like Danny, who continued to pee and poop in the house no matter how many times I took him out, and Smokey, who absolutely hated the leash and ran away more times than I could count. Most of the time, I could train the dogs to follow my commands and had some fantastic successes, like Jessie, the German shepherd who came to us as a pup with floppy ears and quickly proved that she was an escape artist, as well as the most intelligent dog I’ve ever known. When she was seven months old, I took her to obedience classes run by a police officer because she wouldn’t stop jumping on people. Not only did she learn to stop jumping, but she’d stay in a sitting position for hours outside the grocery store where we lived in Vermont. When she was an adult and we brought a mastiff puppy into the household, she taught him everything she knew. She lasted nineteen years with us, and when she died, my husband, daughter, and I grieved for months. When we moved to Florida, I sat for our neighbor’s dogs: an adult chow and a chow who was four months old. That experience resulted in one of the most horrific events of my life. The adult chow, Leo, attacked me one morning, ripping up my arms and hands. The attack resulted in years of physical and psychological therapy and left me with complex posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that can still be triggered by any kind of stressful event. Throughout the years I’ve been a trusted house-sitter, I’ve known many different types of dogs: the little ones who bark at everything, the big ones who couldn’t care less if you took them for a walk, and the dogs who are so afraid of the world around them that they react defensively, often endangering themselves, me, and the people or animals they are afraid of. Lester is one of those fearful dogs. He’s a big, glossy black German shepherd who’s always by my side in the house, wagging his tail when I speak, cocking his head when he recognizes words that I say, and generally being a big love. But the minute I put a leash on him, he goes into a state of heightened alertness. He pulls on the leash, head swiveling in every direction. If he sees a cat, no matter how far away it might be, he wants to eat it. If he sees a human being, he treats them as a threat. Forget about little kids. They terrify him so much that he practically turns himself inside out to get away from them. It’s both scary and heartbreaking to take him for a walk. Last night, during our penultimate walk around the neighborhood at 7 p.m., his senses were heightened by the abnormal number of people on the sidewalks. I led him from one side of the street to the other to avoid the people, other animals, kids, and bikes coming toward us. He sat obediently when I told him to, and as soon as we began to cross the street, he pulled hard to get to the other side. We avoided bikes, guys on their cell phones, and a kid on a scooter, but then came the moment I’d feared. On one side of the street, a woman carrying bags came toward us. I crossed the road, and suddenly, there was a couple in front of us, talking animatedly to each other. They were obviously returning home from the grocery store and laden with bags. I put Lester into a sit and prepared to grab his harness because the couple wasn’t paying attention to us. I wasn’t fast enough. Lester barked and lunged, mouth open, teeth showing, and he bit. I caught him at the last second, yanking him back and commanding him to sit once again, which he did. Then I stood in front of him for a second, looked over my shoulder at the now frightened couple, and called out, “You okay?” “He caught my bag,” the guy replied. Thank God, I thought. Lester was intent on protecting himself, and if he’d sunk his teeth into the man’s hindquarters or leg, he would have done damage. I tightened my hold on the dog’s leashes and kept moving. All the way home, I breathed deeply, trying to calm myself so that my emotions would travel down the leash to the highly anxious dog at the other end. We were close to home, thankfully, so I ended the walk and brought them back to the house. Once inside, I took Lester to the tiny yard and tossed his tennis balls for him until he worked out some of his heightened emotions. He wagged his tail as he chased the ball, and it dawned on me that the only place he feels safe is at home. (That’s Lester in the pic.) Throughout the rest of the evening, I was on edge, replaying the event over and over in my mind, wondering what I could have done differently. Finally, this morning, I realized that there are times when all of my training is for naught because I simply don’t have enough time with these animals to retrain them. I’ve also realized that even though my PTSD still lingers under the surface, I’ve recovered enough during the past couple of years to have confidence in my ability to take care of myself, as well as the animals I care for, and that’s huge. All the same, I’m glad that today is the last day I’ll be caring for someone else’s animals for a while. Tomorrow, I’ll be in Portugal, and for the next three months, the only being I need to take care of is me. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Dawn Reno Langley Dawn Reno Langley, Author, Writing Coach, & Yoga Instructor Dawn Reno Langley is an award-winning author whose recent novels, The Mystic, The Sunflower, and Analyzing the Prescotts, showcase her fierce command of character and emotional truth. A born writer, she published her first piece at the age of nine and has spent her career turning lived experiences into unforgettable narratives. Her work blends social justice, identity, and the revolutions of everyday life. As a Fulbright scholar and TEDx speaker, she brings her belief in art's power to audiences worldwide. Her memoir, Love, Leashes & Letting Go, is her most intimate work yet. Her voice remains unmistakably her own: precise, compassionate, and unafraid to tell the truth.

Written by Tricia Brouk, Founder of The Big Talk Academy Tricia Brouk helps high-performing professionals transform into industry thought leaders through the power of authentic storytelling. With her experience as an award-winning director, producer, sought-after speaker, and mentor to countless thought leaders, Tricia has put thousands of speakers onto big stages globally. Being able to support authors and speakers in using their voices for impact is a privilege, and I had the pleasure of sitting down with Maria DeLorenzis Reyes to talk about her powerful new book, "Unedited: Women’s Stories of Truth, Identity, and Transformation That Shape Leadership". Maria created and produced this collaborative book project and wrote it alongside seven other women, each bringing her own deeply personal story of identity, courage, loss, reinvention, and becoming. Together, their stories explore the experiences that shape who women are, how they see themselves, and ultimately, how they lead. At its heart, "Unedited" asks a question many women will recognize: What happens when we stop editing ourselves to fit the expectations of everyone around us? It is a book about the labels we inherit, the truths we silence, the identities we outgrow, and the freedom that becomes possible when we decide to tell the truth about who we are. Because when women stop editing themselves, leadership changes. Maria, why did you write this book? I created "Unedited" because I have spent my career watching what happens when people feel they have to edit themselves in order to belong, succeed, be accepted, or be seen as a leader. Women, in particular, become very good at editing. We learn when to be quieter. When not to be “too much.” When to make ourselves more palatable. We carry labels that were handed to us by families, relationships, workplaces, culture, and sometimes by one moment that changed the way we saw ourselves. Over time, those labels can become stories we begin to believe. I wanted to create a project that challenged that. So I developed and produced "Unedited" as a collaborative book and invited seven other women to join me in telling the stories that shaped us. I am not standing outside of these stories as the person who simply assembled them. I am in the book too. I wrote my own story alongside theirs, because I believe the power of this project comes from all eight of us being willing to go first, to tell the truth, examine the identities we have carried, and share the transformations that changed how we live and lead. Each woman returns to a pivotal experience in her life and explores what happened, what she came to believe because of it, and who she became when she stopped allowing that moment, expectation, or label to define her. For me, this is also a leadership book because I do not believe we can separate who we are from how we lead. Our experiences walk into every room with us. They influence our confidence, our decisions, our relationships, our boundaries, and the cultures we create. When we understand our own stories, we have the opportunity to lead with awareness of ourselves instead of old wounds, expectations, or performance. And when one woman tells the truth about her experience, something else happens: another woman recognizes herself in that story. That is where connection begins. That is where possibility begins. That is where transformation begins. What was the process of writing your book like for you? Did anything surprise you about it? The process was much more emotional than I anticipated, not only as a writer, but also as the person who created and produced the project. There were really two journeys happening at the same time. I was writing my own story and confronting the parts of my identity and experience that I was willing to put on the page, while also holding the vision for the entire book and supporting seven other women as they found the courage and clarity to tell theirs. I went into the project thinking about story, leadership, and impact. What I did not fully appreciate was what happens when you ask someone to revisit a moment that fundamentally changed the way she saw herself. You are not simply writing about something that happened. You are meeting an earlier version of yourself again. For each of us, there were moments we had explained away, minimized, compartmentalized, or simply moved beyond because life required us to keep going. Writing asked us to slow down and look again, not only from the perspective of the woman who originally experienced it, but from the perspective of the woman we have become. That was incredibly powerful. What surprised me most was how universal the emotions were, even though the stories themselves were completely different. The circumstances were different. The labels were different. The ages and experiences were different. But underneath them were emotions almost every human understands: wanting to belong, questioning your worth, feeling like you are too much or not enough, losing trust in yourself, finding your voice again, and deciding who gets to define you. I also watched something extraordinary happen among the eight of us. The more honest one woman became, the safer it became for another woman to be honest too. That reminded me that vulnerability is not weakness. Used intentionally, it creates connection. Connection is often where transformation becomes sustainable. There were certainly moments when I thought, “Do I really want to put this part of myself on the page?” I know some of the other women experienced versions of that same question. But that is exactly why the book is called "Unedited." The stories we are most tempted to remove are often the stories someone else most needs to read. What do you want the reader to feel while reading your book, and what do you want them to do after reading it, Maria? First, I want the reader to feel seen. I want there to be moments when she stops on a page and thinks, “I thought I was the only one who felt that.” That is one of the reasons I wanted this to be a collaborative book rather than only my story. Eight women can offer eight very different windows into truth, identity, struggle, and transformation. A reader may not see herself in every circumstance, but I believe she will recognize herself in the emotions underneath them. I want readers to experience the full range of the book: recognition, discomfort, compassion, hope, courage, maybe even anger. But ultimately, I want them to feel possibility. Possibility that the story they have been carrying does not have to remain the story that defines them. Possibility that they can question a label they accepted years ago and reframe it. Possibility that they can become more honest about what they want, what they believe, and who they are now. When they finish the book, I do not want them simply to close it and say, “Those were powerful stories.” I want them to turn the question toward themselves. Where am I still editing myself? Where am I making myself smaller to keep someone else comfortable? What label am I still carrying that no longer belongs to me? What truth have I been afraid to say out loud? What would change if I trusted myself enough to live and lead from that truth? Then I want them to do something with the answer. Have the conversation. Set the boundary. Tell the story. Take the opportunity. Make the change. Use their voice. Because transformation does not happen simply because we understand something differently. It happens when we begin showing up differently. How does this book tie into your work in the world? Where can we buy your amazing book, Unedited: Women’s Stories of Truth, Identity, and Transformation That Shape Leadership? This book is deeply connected to the work I have been doing for decades, and in many ways, it is an extension of the conversations I have been having with leaders throughout my career. Whether I am coaching a chief executive officer (CEO), working with a leadership team, speaking to an organization, or helping someone navigate a personal transformation, so much of my work comes back to the same fundamental question: Can who you are and how you lead exist in the same room? For a long time, leadership was associated with having the answers, projecting confidence, maintaining control, and keeping the personal separate from the professional. I believe leadership is evolving and becoming what it needs to be in this moment. The leaders who create meaningful connection and cultures that perform at a high level are increasingly the ones willing to lead with awareness of themselves, curiosity, courage, humanity, and truth. That does not mean sharing everything or leading without boundaries. Authentic leadership is not about having no filter. It is about not abandoning yourself in order to lead. That is the bridge between "Unedited" and the work I do every day. Creating and producing this book also allowed me to bring that belief to life in a different way. Rather than simply talking about authenticity, identity, vulnerability, and transformation, I invited seven women to join me in demonstrating what those things actually look like in real lives. I wrote alongside them because I wanted the book to reflect the same leadership principle I ask of others: if we are asking people to show up honestly, we have to be willing to do it too. When we understand the experiences that shaped us, we become more conscious of how we show up. We recognize our triggers, question our assumptions, understand our biases, make more intentional decisions, and create environments where other people have permission to bring more of themselves into the room too. That changes people. It changes teams. Ultimately, it changes cultures. "Unedited: Women’s Stories of Truth, Identity, and Transformation That Shape Leadership: is available now, and readers can learn more and find out how to get their copy here. My hope is that people will not only read the book, but share it, gift it, talk about it, and use it to begin conversations that perhaps they have been waiting a very long time to have. Because one person choosing to tell the truth gives someone else permission to do the same. About Maria DeLorenzis Reyes Maria DeLorenzis Reyes is a leadership expert, executive coach, author, speaker and founder of MDR Brands and Training Innovations. Having worked with more than 1,600 organizations and trained over 400,000 professionals, Maria helps leaders create cultures rooted in authenticity, courage, connection, and belonging. She is the creator and producer of "Unedited," a collaborative book she coauthored with seven women, and the host of the Finding the Upside podcast and TV show. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Tricia Brouk Tricia Brouk, Founder of The Big Talk Academy Tricia Brouk helps high-performing professionals transform into industry thought leaders through the power of authentic storytelling. With her experience as an award-winning director, producer, sought-after speaker, and mentor to countless thought leaders, Tricia has put thousands of speakers onto big stages globally. She produced TEDxLincolnSquare in New York City and founded The Big Talk Academy. Tricia’s book, The Influential Voice: Saying What You Mean for Lasting Legacy, was a 1 New Release on Amazon in December 2020. Big Stages, the documentary featuring her work with speakers, premiered at the Chelsea Film Festival in October 2023, and her latest passion is the new publishing house she founded, The Big Talk Press.

Written by Jeremy Burleson, Keynote & Motivational Speaker Jeremy Burleson is a motivational and keynote speaker with more than 30 years of leadership experience in transportation. Drawing on his journey of recovery and his Christian faith, he helps audiences build resilience, lead with purpose, and find hope through adversity. When a child is facing cancer, people often want to help but struggle to know where to begin. As Burleson Cowboy Ministries prepares for an October visit to OK Kids Korral, our Treatment Buddies outreach offers a practical starting point: a comforting gift, encouragement, and everyday supplies for families away from home. Treatment Buddies October outreach promotional artwork What Treatment Buddies is Treatment Buddies is an outreach of Burleson Cowboy Ministries, the ministry I founded to share faith, hope, and encouragement. We are preparing to bring stuffed animals and small Cowboy Bibles to children and families served by OK Kids Korral in Oklahoma City. The animals and Bibles are already secured. Our October effort also invites the community to help provide practical supplies. The purpose is simple. I want a child to have something to hold and a family to know that someone cares enough to show up. Our Cowboy Bibles contain the New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs in the New International Version. Prayer and encouragement are part of what we hope to offer alongside those gifts. According to The Toby Keith Foundation, OK Kids Korral provides a cost-free home for pediatric cancer patients receiving treatment in Oklahoma City. Its facilities for children and families include 12 private suites and four daytime rooms, along with spaces for cooking, laundry, play, and rest. Understanding that setting helps explain why ordinary household supplies matter alongside gifts for the children. Why everyday help matters A family staying away from home still needs clean clothes, meals, and a place to settle at the end of the day. Those ordinary needs continue while a child receives treatment. People who want to help can start there, without waiting until they have a large amount of money or a perfect plan. The foundation’s donation wish list includes household essentials such as laundry detergent, hand soap, cleaning supplies, and paper towels. It also requests individually wrapped food items and explains that expired food cannot be accepted. Following those requests helps people give something the organization can actually use. For our October outreach, the supplies we are seeking include laundry pods, paper towels, bottled water, individually wrapped snacks, coffee pods, cleaning supplies, hand soap, and dish soap. A church group might collect one item. A business might organize a supply drive. Someone with a small budget might add a needed product to their next shopping trip. Each is a manageable way to participate. Start by listening to the people you want to help The first useful question is often, “What do you need right now?” Asking gives the family or organization room to tell us what would help. It also keeps our enthusiasm from creating extra work for the people we hope to support. In her Brainz article on deliberate kindness, Angela C. M. Cox describes the importance of understanding another person’s needs before acting. That principle belongs in every collection drive. Check which products are wanted, how they should be packaged, and when they can be received. For Treatment Buddies, contact me before arranging a collection or delivery so we can coordinate it. Listening also matters when offering encouragement. Some people want conversation. Others need quiet or a little space. We can follow their lead, offer the help they welcome, and let them decide what to share about their lives. Caring for a family should leave them feeling respected. How faith shapes my reason for showing up In 2024, substance misuse nearly cost me my life. My faith is central to the way I understand my recovery and the purpose I now pursue through ministry and speaking. That history gives me a personal reason to care about people who are hurting while reminding me to listen carefully to experiences different from my own. As an ordained minister, I want the love of Jesus to be visible in how I treat people. Sometimes that means sharing Scripture or praying with someone who welcomes it. Sometimes it means gathering soap and paper towels, making a phone call, or carrying a box. Treatment Buddies gives that conviction a practical place to go. A stuffed animal cannot change a diagnosis, and I cannot promise a family how tomorrow will unfold. What I can offer is a gift chosen with care and a willingness to help with needs we can meet. My hope is that the children and their families feel remembered. Give people a clear way to take part People are more able to act when they understand the next step. If you organize a collection, choose a requested item, tell participants who it will support, and arrange the handoff with the organizer. Keep your commitment small enough to complete, then follow through. This is a useful lesson for leaders as well. In her Brainz article about making a difference in the community, Tanisha Taylor connects leadership with service to others. A workplace, church, or group of friends can practice that by taking responsibility for one concrete need. Someone who cannot contribute financially can still share accurate information or help organize supplies. For this outreach, sharing the Treatment Buddies flyer is one way to help us reach those people. Pass it to someone who might want to participate, explain that the visit is planned for October, and include my contact information. That gives the next person a clear path from interest to action. Help us prepare for October Burleson Cowboy Ministries is inviting financial support to purchase the supplies requested for our October outreach, along with donations of the needed items. You can support the Treatment Buddies outreach through Square, share our flyer, or contact me to coordinate a contribution. Financial support through this link goes to Burleson Cowboy Ministries for this outreach. Reach me, Jeremy Burleson, here or at 469 584 1037. If you are unsure what to give, call or email, and we can identify a practical way for you to help. Learn more about Burleson Cowboy Ministries and explore my keynote speaking and messages of faith and resilience. For speaking and booking inquiries, email here. I call this love with boots on. For these children and their families, I want that love to arrive with something useful in its hands. Help us get ready for October by choosing one item to give, making a financial contribution, or sharing the invitation today. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Jeremy Burleson Jeremy Burleson, Keynote & Motivational Speaker Jeremy Burleson is a motivational and keynote speaker with over 30 years of transportation leadership experience. His journey of recovery and Christian faith shapes his messages on resilience, leadership, hope, and purpose. An ordained minister and founder of Burleson Cowboy Ministries, he encourages audiences to overcome adversity and move forward with conviction.