Written by Michael J McCusker, Founder & Podcast Host Michael J McCusker is a Global Freedom Fellow, a multi-book author, and host of the acclaimed “Lived Experience Podcast Series.” He’s a respected advocate for justice reform and a thought leader in Lived Experience Leadership, using storytelling to spark social change. Those who understand this shift are no longer chasing engagement. There was a time when showing up consistently online was enough. Volume signalled relevance. Frequency created visibility. The algorithm rewarded those who fed it daily, sometimes hourly, with fragments of insight packaged as content. That era is fading. What replaced it is more demanding, honest, and ultimately more valuable. Attention is no longer impressed by presence alone. It is shaped by depth. Audiences have matured. They have been exposed to thousands of posts, endless carousels, recycled quotes, and superficial insights masquerading as expertise. What once felt fresh now feels predictable. The scroll has become instinctive, almost defensive. People are no longer searching for more content. Instead, they are seeking more meaningful experiences. They are searching for clarity, direction, and transformation. Teaching meets that demand in a way that posting never could Teaching requires ownership. It forces you to move beyond observation and into articulation. It demands that you take what you know, what you have lived, what you have tested, and structure it so others can apply it. This is where thought leadership separates itself from content creation. One informs. The other forms. The difference is not subtle. A post might capture attention for a moment. Lessons change how someone thinks long after they have left the page. Those who understand this shift are no longer chasing engagement. They are building intellectual property, not asking, “What should I post today?” Instead, they ask, “What do people need to understand to progress?” That question changes everything. It moves you from reacting to trends to setting direction. From being part of the noise to becoming a signal others seek out. Teaching builds authority because it carries responsibility. When you teach, you are no longer hiding behind vague statements or motivational language. You are making your thinking visible, exposing your frameworks, processes, and perspective. That level of clarity cannot be faked for long. It either stands up to scrutiny, or it doesn't. This is why teaching is now the real currency–it compounds. A single well-structured idea, explained properly, can travel further and last longer than a hundred disconnected posts. It becomes something people return to. Something they reference and share, not because it sounds good, but because it works. That is where influence begins to deepen. The shift also changes the relationship with your audience. Passive consumption gives way to active engagement. People stop scrolling past your work and start studying it. They begin to see you not just as someone who shows up, but as someone who leads. That distinction is what opens doors to speaking, consulting, partnerships, and paid opportunities. Teaching also requires discipline that most content creators avoid. It requires structure, sequencing, and understanding that knowledge is not delivered in fragments but in progression. You cannot teach effectively if you are constantly jumping from one idea to the next without connection. Teaching demands coherence. That coherence becomes your advantage. When your work starts to connect, it creates a body of thought rather than isolated moments of insight. Your audience begins to recognise patterns in how you think. They understand your lens and anticipate your perspective. Trust is built not through repetition, but through consistency of thought. Many resist this shift because teaching feels slower. It does not always deliver immediate spikes in engagement, nor lend itself to quick wins or viral moments. It requires patience and confidence in the long game. Yet what it builds is far more durable. Posting is transactional, and teaching is transformational The market is already reflecting this change. Decision-makers are not looking for those who can create content. They are looking for those who can transfer knowledge. Organisations do not invest in noise. They invest in clarity and people who can articulate complex ideas simply, guide teams through uncertainty, and challenge thinking in ways that lead to action. This is where lived experience becomes powerful, not as a story alone, but as a source of instruction. Experience without reflection remains personal. Lived experience that is processed, structured, and shared becomes educational. It becomes something others can use to navigate their own challenges. That is the evolution required This also carries responsibility. Teaching is not about positioning yourself as the answer to everything. It is about being precise about what you know, honest about what you do not, and intentional about what you share. Credibility is built in that space. It is reinforced every time your insight holds up in a real-world application. The temptation to return to posting for visibility will always be there. It is easier. Feels productive. Gives the illusion of momentum. Yet over time, it erodes differentiation. When everyone is saying something, very few are actually being heard. Teaching cuts through that. It creates space and slows the conversation down just enough for meaning to emerge, inviting people to think rather than react. In a landscape dominated by speed, that alone is powerful. Those who commit to teaching will find that their content naturally becomes more selective. Not every idea needs to be shared, or every moment documented. The shift is from quantity to intentionality. Each piece of work carries weight because it is part of something larger. That larger body of work becomes your platform It is what people point to when they describe your thinking. What organisations reference when they consider bringing you into a room. It is what audiences engage with when they are ready to go deeper. You become an ecosystem rather than a feed. This is where thought leadership begins to mature. No longer about visibility alone. It is about contribution and building something that outlasts the moment it was created. Teaching does that because it is anchored in value rather than attention. The question is no longer how often you show up. It’s what happens when you do. If your work leaves people informed, you have posted. If your work leaves people changed, you have taught. That distinction will define the next era of influence. Follow me on Instagram and visit my website for more info! Read more from Michael J McCusker Michael J McCusker, Founder & Podcast Host Michael J McCusker is a dynamic storyteller and podcast host who uses the power of voice to spark meaningful change. As a seasoned leader with lived experience, they’ve dedicated their life to guiding others toward purpose, self-leadership, and impact. Through powerful interviews and transformative conversations, their podcast The Lived Experience Series amplifies voices that are often unheard but deeply needed. A published author, Michael J McCusker, writes with clarity and conviction in Hidden Potential: Unlocking The Door Within, turning personal insight into universal lessons. Their work empowers individuals to own their story, speak with influence, and lead with authenticity. Whether on stage, behind the mic, or on the page, The Resilient Irishman: How to Tackle Life's Adversities. Michael J McCusker is committed to shifting narratives and building a legacy that inspires others to rise.

Written by Dr. Omosefe Christina, CEO & Founder of Elite Exams Dr. Omosefe Christina is a Medical Doctor, Entrepreneur, and Founder of Elite Exams. She blends frontline clinical practice with medical education and community programmes to help International Medical Graduates (IMG) and African families flourish in their careers and communities in the UK. Nobody hands you the unwritten rules. But understanding them and navigating them deliberately may be the most consequential professional skill of your first year. For Black professionals and internationally trained doctors, learning how workplace culture, informal networks, and sponsorship shape career progression can help make the path forward clearer. There are two versions of every workplace There is the version that lives in the handbook. The org chart, the dress code, the IT login, the complaints procedure. Tidy, documented, and only partially true. Then there is the version that actually operates. The one that runs on unwritten rules: about who gets heard in meetings, what “professional” is really code for, how visibility works, which relationships open doors, and what you must never say out loud even when everyone is thinking it. For internationally trained doctors and Black professionals navigating UK systems, learning that second version is not optional. It is frequently the difference between a career that moves and one that quietly stalls, not because of ability, but because the playbook was never handed over. The rules favour those who already know them. They penalise those who do not, often without anyone consciously intending harm. What the research actually shows This is not anecdotal. A 2025 study in the British Journal of Management examining Black academics in UK universities found evidence of covert racism, pressure to outperform non-Black colleagues, and the invalidation of their knowledge contributions. The environment does not need to be overtly hostile to be structurally disadvantaging. It just needs to keep rewarding familiarity. For IMGs specifically, a survey of 300 IMG doctors in the UK, conducted in 2024 and published in 2025, found that 40% did not feel they had adequate senior support in their first UK job. A separate 2024 survey of 173 IMGs found that 86% had no dedicated mentor in their first NHS job. Without a guide inside the system, learning the unwritten rules is left entirely to chance, and chance is not equally distributed. 4 rules worth naming The first is that communication style is cultural, not neutral. What reads as “confident” or “professional” in UK workplaces is a culturally specific standard, not a universal one. Research on code-switching shows how professionals from minority backgrounds routinely adjust their accent, tone, and directness, often as invisible labour that colleagues from dominant cultural backgrounds are rarely required to perform. The second is that visibility is managed, not automatic. Work quality does not speak for itself. Coqual’s research on Black professionals in the UK found that nearly half say race shapes how they are perceived at work, and that achievements are less likely to be noticed or amplified by senior colleagues without deliberate effort. The third is that the informal hierarchy differs from the org chart. The NHS presents itself as a collaborative, multidisciplinary structure. In practice, informal hierarchies determine who gets the benefit of the doubt and whose clinical judgement is questioned. For IMGs, understanding the difference between formal authority and informal influence is a skill worth building early. The fourth is that professional identity comes under quiet pressure. Research on Black professionals across UK sectors finds that 61% of racially minoritised women have adjusted their hair, speech, clothing, or other cultural markers to fit professional environments. The pressure is rarely explicit. It accumulates through small signals about what is “normal.” Managing it without losing yourself is one of the least-acknowledged dimensions of professional life in the UK. What the first month actually requires Understanding the rules is one thing. Navigating them is another, and the first month in any new role is the highest-leverage window for doing so. Most professionals spend that window trying to prove themselves. The ones who advance fastest tend to spend it learning the terrain first. That begins with observation rather than performance. Resist the impulse to prove yourself immediately. Watch who speaks first in meetings, who interrupts without consequence, and whose ideas get credited. You are mapping the informal power structure, and it will tell you far more than any induction pack. Identify two or three people who navigate the environment with ease and credibility, and pay attention to how they communicate, where they position themselves, and what they do after meetings end. Once that map starts to form, the work turns to relationship-building, and it has to be intentional. Informal networks are not a nice extra. They are load-bearing infrastructure. Research on IMG progression repeatedly identifies the absence of informal relationships as a bigger barrier to advancement than clinical skill. Schedule brief conversations across grades. Ask colleagues what they wish they had known in their first month. The answers are almost always revelatory. From there, the priority shifts to identifying a sponsor, not just a mentor. A mentor advises. A sponsor acts. Catalyst recommends active sponsorship for Black employees, who may face systemic barriers and receive less recognition for their achievements. Sponsorship has to be built, usually by finding one senior colleague whose work you genuinely respect and looking for a legitimate way to add value to something they care about. Sponsorship is earned through demonstrated contribution, not requested as a transactional ask. Only then does claiming visibility make sense, when there is enough context to make a contribution known, not performatively but deliberately. That might mean volunteering for a project with cross-departmental exposure, contributing in meetings in specific, solution-oriented ways, or documenting your thinking in writing. None of this requires performing a version of yourself that is not yours. It requires being strategic about where your authentic work gets seen. The playbook does not fix the structure, but it helps you move through it TUC research shows that two in five Black and minority ethnic workers experienced racism at work in the previous five years. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation discusses evidence that ethnic minority professionals may be steered toward roles with less autonomy, reflecting structural inequalities in hiring, promotion, and task allocation. These are structural realities, not personal failures. No playbook fixes a system that was not designed with you in mind. But naming the rules, mapping the terrain, and moving through it with deliberate strategy is not the same as accepting it. It is how you build the networks, visibility, and positioning that the system was never going to hand you automatically. The professionals who navigate this best stay true to themselves and play the game with their eyes open. That is not settling. That is the long game, played clearly. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Dr. Omosefe Christina Dr. Omosefe Christina, CEO & Founder of Elite Exams Dr. Omosefe Christina creates digital learning platforms that turn frontline experience into practical support for international doctors in the UK. She is the CEO of Elite Exams, which supports the medical education of internationally trained doctors aspiring to become independent GPs. She builds digital systems, courses, platforms, and automated learning pathways to support doctors who migrate to the UK. References: Adisa et al. (2025) – Unequal Academy: Black Academics in the UK. British Journal of Management IMG Doctors' Experience of Starting Their First NHS Job (2024). PMC Code-Switching at Work. Diversity and Inclusion Leaders (2026) Coqual / Fair Play Talks – Being Black in the United Kingdom (2022) Lane, Shrotri & Somani (2024) – Challenges and Expectations of IMGs Moving to the UK. Scottish Medical Journal Code-Switching and Concrete Ceilings – Working Chance (2022) Catalyst (2025) – Performance Feedback and Support: Retaining Black Employees TUC – Still Rigged: Racism in the UK Labour Market (2022) Joseph Rowntree Foundation – Ethnicity, Poverty and In-Work Inequalities in the UK (2026)

Written by Leah Crescenzo, RTT Hypnotherapist & Women's Coach Leah Crescenzo is a Transformational Coach and RTT Hypnotherapist who guides women through life’s biggest transitions. She helps them reconnect to their inner wisdom, bridge the gap between who they were and who they are becoming, and step confidently into their next chapter. One of the hardest questions that can come after the end of a significant relationship isn't What happened? It's, "Who am I now?" We don't always realize how much of our identity becomes intertwined with a relationship while we're living inside it. We become someone's partner, perhaps someone's wife or husband, a parent within a particular family structure, the person who handles certain things, the one who makes certain decisions. We develop routines, traditions, friendships, habits, and expectations that all begin to feel like simply part of who we are. Then the relationship ends, and some of those things disappear almost overnight. It's not surprising that it can leave you feeling unsteady. You aren't only adjusting to life without another person. You may be adjusting to life without a version of yourself that existed within that relationship. When the familiar version of you disappears After a breakup or divorce, people often talk about "finding yourself again." I understand what they mean. There can be something beautiful about reconnecting with parts of yourself that became quiet while you were in the relationship. But I also think there is another possibility. What if you're not meant to find the exact person you were before? You have lived since then. You've experienced things. You've learned things. You've been changed by love, by loss, by disappointment, by joy, by becoming a parent, by building a career, by all of the ordinary and extraordinary things that happen in between. You aren't the person you were when the relationship began. Maybe you don't need to be. The question may not be, How do I get back to myself? It may be, Who am I now? The space between who you were and who you're becoming There can be an uncomfortable period after a relationship ends when you don't quite recognize your life yet. You may not know what you want to do with your weekends. You may discover that some of the things you thought you liked were actually things you did because they were part of the relationship. You may find yourself making choices simply because you can, and then realizing you have no idea what you actually want. This can feel like being lost - but sometimes it is something else. Sometimes you're simply in the space between an old identity and a new one. We aren't accustomed to seeing that space as a place of possibility. We usually want to fill it quickly. Find someone new. Create a new routine. Make a plan. Prove that you're okay. But there can be value in letting yourself discover who you are before rushing to define who you're going to be. You might find that some things you thought were essential to your identity no longer fit. You might find that things you had pushed aside matter more than you realized. You might discover that there are parts of yourself you haven't had much room to hear. You get to decide what comes with you Beginning again doesn't mean rejecting everything that came before. Your past is still part of you. The relationship mattered. The love mattered. The experiences mattered. Even the difficult parts can teach you something about yourself. But you get to decide what you carry forward. Maybe you want to carry your capacity to love deeply, but not the habit of losing yourself in the process. Maybe you want to carry the lessons you learned about partnership, but not the belief that you have to earn love by being everything someone else needs. Maybe you want to carry your strength, your compassion, your loyalty, but leave behind the version of those qualities that required you to continually put yourself last. This is where becoming conscious about your identity becomes so important. Because we can unconsciously carry pieces of an old life into a new one. We can continue behaving like the person we had to be, long after we no longer need to be her. You don't have to know who you're becoming yet After an ending, there's often pressure to have a plan. People want to know what you're doing next. Where you're living. Whether you're dating. What you're looking for. What your future looks like. Sometimes you don't know yet. Maybe that's okay. There is a difference between being stuck and being in a period of discovery. You don't have to immediately replace what you lost or have your next chapter figured out. You can simply begin paying attention to what feels good, what matters, what you've been missing, and what you no longer want to compromise. You don't have to know who you're becoming to begin becoming that version of yourself. Re-becoming who you are now There is something I find hopeful about the idea that we don't have to return to who we were. Returning suggests that the best version of you already exists somewhere in the past. I don't believe that. I think there are parts of you that are still unfolding. The end of a relationship can create a kind of interruption, a moment when the identity you've been living inside no longer fits quite the same way. Although that can be painful, it can also give you the opportunity to become more conscious about who you are and how you want to live. You don't have to erase your past or become someone entirely new. You can simply begin asking, "Who am I now?" Then, little by little, live into the answer. Beginning again isn't about becoming who you were before. It's about re-becoming who you are now. Once you begin to see yourself differently, another question emerges, "What has been shaping the way I see myself?" That may be where the deeper work begins. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Leah Crescenzo Leah Crescenzo, RTT Hypnotherapist & Women's Coach Leah Crescenzo is a Transformational Coach and RTT Hypnotherapist who helps women rebuild their sense of self through life’s biggest transitions. After witnessing firsthand how easily women lose connection to their inner truth in relationships and motherhood, Leah dedicated her work to guiding them back home to themselves. Through subconscious reprogramming and somatic healing, she helps women bridge the gap between who they were and who they are becoming, releasing old identities, stepping into new possibilities, and trusting their own wisdom. Her mission is to help every woman remember who she is beneath the noise, grounded, whole, and free.

Written by Dr. Hussein H. Rifai, Thought Leader & Chairman Dr. Hussein H. Rifai is a global business leader, investor, and company chairman with more than four decades of experience across 85 countries. He writes on leadership, corporate governance, private equity, artificial intelligence, and international business. Every country develops its own way of doing business. After a while, the habits that work at home stop looking like habits at all. They become common sense. How quickly a meeting should move, whether a chief executive can be challenged openly, how directly someone should say no, whether a relationship comes before a transaction, how much weight hierarchy should carry, and how long a decision should reasonably take all begin to feel like obvious rules rather than cultural choices. That is usually harmless until business crosses a border. A company may export a product, service, technology, or capital, but it also exports the assumptions of the people running it. The management style that helped it succeed at home travels with it. So do its ideas about authority, trust, time, negotiation, and what professional behaviour is supposed to look like. Sometimes those habits travel very well. Sometimes they become a handicap. I have seen this from several sides over more than four decades. I have lived, worked, negotiated, or done business in Australia, Canada, the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, and Japan. I also spent eight years living in Dubai, where I managed investment banking and private equity activities and funds, raising and deploying capital and dealing with investors, companies, and institutions across the Gulf and internationally. Moving between those markets made me increasingly curious about why perfectly capable businesspeople can misread one another so badly. The subject eventually became the focus of my Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) research in cross-cultural negotiations. The academic work gave structure to something I had already experienced repeatedly. The economics may tell you whether a deal makes sense, but culture can determine whether the parties ever get far enough to complete it. Communication, hierarchy, trust, relationships, attitudes to time, and even the way disagreement is expressed can change the result. The more interesting question, however, is broader than negotiation. What happens when the business culture that made a company successful domestically is carried into international markets? Does it remain an advantage, or does it begin to work against the company? In my experience, the answer is often both. The culture we stop seeing Most executives are not consciously trained in a national business style. They absorb one. An Australian grows used to first names, relatively flat organisations, direct conversations, and getting to the point. An American develops in a huge and intensely competitive economy that rewards confidence, speed, ambition, and measurable results. A Japanese executive may place more weight on consensus, precision, institutional reputation, and the quality of the process leading to a decision. Singapore and Hong Kong taught me something else. Both are international commercial centres where businesspeople routinely move between Western corporate practice, Chinese commercial traditions, regional relationships, and international capital. Changing gears is not an occasional requirement there. It is part of doing business. China reinforced the importance of relationships, hierarchy, patience, and understanding where real authority sits. Dubai and the Gulf showed me, over a much longer period, that personal credibility and commercial credibility are often far less separable than Australians assume. None of these systems is inherently superior. Each developed because it works reasonably well in its own environment. Trouble starts when domestic success convinces us that our own way is not simply our way, but the sensible way. The Australian style: A strength, until it is not Australian business culture has many qualities I value. It is generally informal, pragmatic, egalitarian, and direct. My research also found Australian negotiation to be relatively low context and individualistic, with straightforward communication, decentralised decision-making, and less emphasis on titles and status than many other cultures. At home, those traits create real advantages. Decisions can move quickly. A chairman or managing director can speak directly to junior employees. People are usually comfortable challenging an idea without treating disagreement as a personal insult. We prefer substance to ceremony and tend to be suspicious of unnecessary theatre. Australians also have a reasonably well-developed bullshit detector, which is not a minor commercial asset. But almost every strength has a point at which it turns. Directness can become bluntness. Informality can look disrespectful. Speed can become impatience. Egalitarianism can make us underestimate hierarchy. Pragmatism can become insufficient attention to protocol. Our desire to get to the point can stop us noticing that, in another market, the relationship and the process are part of the point. An executive who is highly effective in Sydney can therefore become less effective in Tokyo, Shanghai, or Dubai without changing anything about the way he or she behaves. The environment has changed, but the executive has not. That is the paradox of domestic business culture. Companies go global before their culture does I have seen companies internationalise geographically long before they internationalise culturally. They open an Asian office, appoint a Middle Eastern distributor, acquire a European company, or recruit people in North America. Revenue becomes international, but head office continues to think and communicate as though everybody is sitting in Sydney or Melbourne. The same thing happens elsewhere. American companies export American management habits. Japanese companies export Japanese processes. Chinese businesses take their approaches to relationships and authority overseas. This is not an Australian defect. It is a human one. The difficult task is separating the values and practices that are genuine competitive strengths from the habits that only worked so smoothly because everyone at home understood the same unwritten rules. The United States: Confidence and commercial gravity The United States can feel familiar to an Australian because both cultures are relatively direct and results-oriented. Yet I have found American business culture more overtly confident, competitive, and commercially assertive. Objectives are usually expected to be clear, the economic proposition needs to be demonstrated, and there is often a strong preference to move the process towards a result. My research similarly identified American negotiators as direct, data-driven, and outcome-oriented, with a strong emphasis on speed and contractual clarity. Those characteristics have helped build some of the world's most successful companies. Confidence travels well. But the United States also enjoys something Australia does not: enormous commercial gravity. Businesses around the world want access to American customers, technology, capital, and investors, so counterparties frequently adapt themselves to American practices. Australians cannot assume the world will make the same accommodation for us. We need to be better at adapting first. Canada: Familiar, but shaped by a different neighbourhood Canada is one of the countries that can initially feel most familiar to an Australian. Both are advanced, resource-rich democracies with relatively small populations spread across enormous territories. Both have British institutional roots, large migrant populations, and economies that depend heavily on international commerce. The difference is geography. Canada lives beside the world's largest developed economy. Canadian businesses encounter American customers, investors, competitors, and business habits very early, and they have had to learn how to operate alongside that scale without simply becoming American. Australia faces a more varied challenge. Our commercial neighbourhood includes China, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Korea, Vietnam, India, and the wider Asian economy. The cultural range is extraordinary. Cross-cultural capability should therefore be one of Australia's natural competitive advantages, but I am not convinced we have treated it seriously enough. Singapore and Hong Kong: Adaptability as a business habit My experience in Singapore and Hong Kong changed the way I thought about adaptability. International commerce is embedded in the daily business life of both places. A single transaction can sit at the intersection of Chinese family business, Western corporate governance, regional relationships, and global capital. People learn to move between those worlds because they have to. Singapore is perhaps the clearest example. Its domestic market was never large enough to support its ambitions, so international commerce became fundamental rather than optional. Hong Kong developed differently, but for decades it played a similar bridging role between China and international business and capital. The important lesson is that adaptability itself can become part of a business culture. Changing gears is not the same as surrendering your identity. It simply means recognising that your own business style is one of many and that insisting on it in every market is not strength. Sometimes it is just inflexibility. China: The transaction is only part of the transaction China reinforced for me how easily Western executives can become so focused on the transaction that they misunderstand the process that makes the transaction possible. Australians are generally comfortable meeting someone, establishing commercial alignment, negotiating terms, signing an agreement, and allowing the relationship to deepen afterward. In China, relationships, networks, hierarchy, face, and long-term orientation can have a much greater influence on how the process unfolds. My research found that Chinese negotiations may involve more indirect communication, several rounds of discussion, and consultation with senior authority before a decision is reached. An Australian can read that as delay or indecision. The Chinese counterpart may read the Australian demand for speed as evidence that the relationship matters less than the immediate deal. Neither side necessarily has a poor negotiating style. They are simply interpreting each other through different domestic rules. Japan: Learning not to fill the silence Japan taught me a different lesson. Australians generally like clarity. We ask a question and expect an answer, and silence can make us uncomfortable. Our instinct is often to fill it. In Japan, that instinct does not necessarily help. Japanese business culture places greater weight on consensus, hierarchy, detail, and indirect communication. A decision may require broad internal agreement, and silence can mean consideration rather than disagreement or uncertainty. What looks to an Australian like frustratingly slow decision-making may be a process designed to create enough internal support that implementation becomes easier once the decision is made. Our instinct for speed can therefore become counterproductive precisely because we believe we are being efficient. Dubai: When relationships are part of the investment My eight years living in Dubai gave me the most sustained exposure to a very different commercial rhythm. I was not flying into the Gulf for occasional meetings. I was managing investment banking and private equity activities and funds, raising and deploying capital and dealing with investors, businesses, and institutions across the region. When you live inside a market, rather than visit it, you begin to understand the logic behind behaviours that initially look unfamiliar. Relationships and transactions were often much less separable than I had been used to in Australia. Who introduced you could matter. Who trusted you could matter. Your personal credibility could matter as much as the institution on your business card. Seniority and hierarchy mattered, but so did family, reputation, and the networks behind the formal corporate structure. None of that reduced the importance of financial discipline. I was managing other people's capital, and the numbers mattered enormously, but the numbers existed inside a human framework. An Australian executive arriving for a ninety-minute meeting can become restless when the first half hour is spent discussing family, travel, mutual acquaintances, or what is happening in the region. He may be thinking, when are we going to start talking business? The answer is that business has already started. The relationship being established is part of the transaction. My research reached the same conclusion about Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) negotiations. Personal trust, hospitality, hierarchy, and access to senior decision makers matter, and attitudes to time are often more flexible than Australians expect. What looks inefficient through Australian eyes may be performing an entirely different commercial function. Sometimes investing time in people before trying to close the deal is not delaying the business. It is the business. Every national strength has an international shadow After working across these environments, I have come to believe that every national business strength has an international shadow. American confidence can become arrogance. Australian directness can become bluntness. Japanese consensus can become slowness. Chinese relationship orientation can frustrate outsiders looking for immediate clarity. German precision can become rigidity. Gulf relationship building can test executives who treat a timetable as more important than the relationship. Even the Australian characteristics I personally value – informality, pragmatism, and egalitarianism – can work against us when transported unchanged into cultures where status, hierarchy, and protocol carry more weight. The answer is not to eliminate those qualities. It is to recognise when a domestic strength has crossed the line into an international weakness. That requires something harder than studying somebody else's culture. It requires understanding our own. Australia's multicultural advantage This is where Australia should have an extraordinary advantage. We are geographically part of Asia, historically and institutionally connected to Britain, Europe, and North America, and demographically connected to much of the world. Walk through Sydney or Melbourne, and you encounter people with deep family and cultural connections to China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Lebanon, the Gulf, Greece, Italy, Korea, Africa, Europe, and many other markets. Many Australians understand two cultures instinctively, and some understand three or four. They understand humour, family structures, hierarchy, relationships, and social signals that cannot be learnt from a presentation called Doing Business in Asia. Yet Australian companies do not always treat this knowledge as a serious commercial capability. We should. Our multicultural population is not simply a social characteristic. It is part of Australia's international economic infrastructure. A company entering Indonesia should not ask only who understands the industry. It should ask who understands Indonesia. A company seeking Gulf capital should not merely improve the financial presentation. It should ask who understands how capital, family, reputation, government, and personal relationships interact in that market. A company entering Japan should understand how decisions are actually made, not merely identify the person whose title suggests that he or she has authority. Cultural knowledge belongs alongside legal, financial, and technical knowledge in any serious international expansion plan. Cultural intelligence is not stereotyping There is an obvious danger in writing about national business cultures. Not every Australian is informal, not every Japanese executive avoids confrontation, not every Chinese businessperson is relationship-driven, not every Arab investor wants hours of conversation before discussing a deal, and not every American wants the contract signed by Friday. My PhD research specifically recognised the limits of national generalisations and the differences created by region, generation, and individual personality. Culture is a map, not an instruction manual. It tells you what to pay attention to. Then you watch the people in front of you, listen carefully, and adapt. The best international executives understand both sides of the equation: the culture of the person opposite them and the assumptions they themselves brought into the room. Business culture is part of national competitiveness This is why I think the discussion has to go beyond negotiation. Business culture is part of national competitiveness. Governments spend heavily on trade agreements, trade missions, export assistance, and investment agencies, but eventually somebody still has to walk into a room in Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore, Dubai, Toronto, or New York and create enough understanding and trust to do business. Some countries develop that capability through necessity. Singapore had to look outward. Canada was shaped commercially by living beside the United States. Hong Kong became a bridge between China and international capital. American companies benefit from the extraordinary pull of their domestic market. Australia's opportunity is different. Our geography places us in Asia, our institutions connect us with Europe and North America, and our population connects us culturally with much of the world. Few countries have that combination, but multiculturalism and geography do not automatically produce internationally successful companies. We have to turn them into commercial capability. Know what must travel and what should stay home Perhaps the hardest task for a company expanding internationally is distinguishing between its core values and its domestic habits. They are not the same thing. Integrity should travel. Quality, accountability, and respect should travel. The fundamental values of the organisation should travel. The way meetings are conducted, decisions are made, disagreement is expressed, relationships are established, and negotiations are paced may need to change substantially. One advantage of having worked across Australia, Canada, the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, and Japan, while also spending eight years managing investment businesses from Dubai, is that eventually you stop asking which country's business culture is best. It is the wrong question. The better question is which behaviour works in this environment, with these people, for this transaction. The Australian executive of the future should be comfortable being Australian in Sydney, patient with consensus in Tokyo, attentive to hierarchy and relationships in China, comfortable building personal trust in Dubai, ready for confidence and speed in New York, and able to move between cultures in Singapore and Hong Kong. The objective is not to become Japanese in Japan, Chinese in China, American in America, or Arab in the Gulf. It is to remain yourself while understanding them. The question every global business should ask When companies struggle internationally, management naturally looks at strategy. Was the product right? Was the price right? Did we choose the correct partner? Did we enter at the right time? Was the acquisition overpriced? There is another question that deserves to be asked just as seriously: did we export a business culture that really only works at home? Domestic success teaches companies how to win in one environment. International success requires them to recognise when the environment has changed. Australia's directness, egalitarianism, pragmatism, and informality are valuable characteristics. We should not lose them, but neither should we mistake them for universal business principles. My experience across North America, Australia, Asia, and the Gulf, reinforced by my PhD research into cross-cultural negotiations, has convinced me that there is probably no single best national business culture. Every culture has strengths and weaknesses shaped by the environment in which it developed. The countries most capable of producing successful global businesses will not necessarily be those with the strongest domestic business culture. They will be the countries whose companies and executives understand their own culture well enough to recognise when it helps, when it does not, and when they need to change gears. The ability to adapt without losing your identity may ultimately be one of the most important competitive advantages in global business. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Dr. Hussein H. Rifai Dr. Hussein H. Rifai, Thought Leader & Chairman Dr. Hussein H. Rifai is a global business leader, investor, company chairman, and thought leader with more than four decades of experience across 85 countries. His career spans multinational corporations, entrepreneurship, investment banking, private equity and corporate governance, advising boards and business leaders on strategy, mergers and acquisitions, capital raising, business transformation and international growth. With a PhD in Business Administration, Hussein writes on leadership, corporate governance, artificial intelligence, international business, and global competitiveness, combining academic insight with practical experience at the highest levels of global business.

Written by Shahrukh Asif Khan, Chief Vision and Culture Officer Shahrukh Khan, DBA Candidate, MBA, QArb., is an arbitration and mediation professional, labour relations specialist, and academic leader focused on workplace dispute resolution and policy compliance. His research and practice advance DEI, talent management, legislative compliance, and leadership strategy in higher education and industry. Workplace conflict is not always as simple as identifying one difficult manager. Sometimes the behavior employees experience is shaped by deeper organizational pressures, unclear structures, and unhealthy workplace norms. The easiest person to blame is the closest one Workplace conflict is rarely simple, although we usually treat it that way. Something goes wrong at work, and we look for the nearest person to pin it on, the supervisor who keeps questioning our work, the manager who suddenly starts checking everything we do, the colleague who has become unusually interested in how we spend our time, the leader who has opinions about our communication style, our lunch hour, and whether we are really the right fit for the team. Eventually, we land somewhere, and usually that place is that our manager is toxic. Sometimes that is exactly right, but often we lose objectivity along the way because we are busy diagnosing a person while ignoring everything around them. What if the manager isn't where the problem started and is only passing it along? I thought my manager had it out for me Early in my teaching career, a manager took issue with the fact that I joked with my students in class, and the concern, as it was put to me, was that I was not being paid to joke around. It made very little sense to me at the time. I had been recognized for my teaching more than once by then, and humor was how I built rapport, held a room, and got the quieter students talking, so I took it personally, the way most people would. I challenged the conduct through the appropriate process, and the issue was dealt with. Honestly, it would have been easy to close the file right there and move on with a tidy conclusion about one bad manager. Except I kept watching, and over the next few years, I saw colleagues under other managers describe versions of the same experience. Different identities, different departments, yet the same dynamic persisted, which was extremely odd. This forced me to go back and look at my own conclusion again. If the same behavior keeps turning up under different managers, then the manager may not be the only variable worth examining. The focus shifts from why my manager is doing this to what is happening inside this organization that has several managers behaving this way. That's a far harder question to sit with, but it's usually the more useful one. What we actually mean by toxic Toxic has become a very convenient word. A manager disagrees with us, toxic. We get feedback we did not want to hear, toxic. Someone holds us accountable, denies a vacation request, or brings in a rule we don't like, and we reach for the same word again, though none of that gets us there on its own. The research uses more careful language and offers terms worth borrowing, such as abusive supervision, workplace bullying, incivility, employee silence, and psychosocial safety climate. Abusive supervision, for instance, describes a sustained pattern of hostile supervisory conduct rather than one uncomfortable conversation or a legitimate performance management issue.[6] [2] A difficult manager is not automatically a toxic one, and a demanding workplace is not automatically a toxic workplace, so what we are really looking for is the pattern, although even a clear pattern will not tell us where it began. The conflict the organization built I have seen this one play out more times than I can count. Someone starts asking questions about a colleague. Why do you do that work? Why are you paid that? Why do you have responsibilities I do not have? A few months later, the manager is asking much the same thing, and now everything that employee does gets a second look. From where they sit, the story writes itself, the colleague complained, the manager took their side, and now it is two against one. It is interesting when somebody actually looks at the org chart. They notice some strange patterns. People in nearly identical roles have different job descriptions, overlapping duties, and differing pay for comparable work. Reporting lines nobody in the building could draw for you if you handed them a pen, not because they don't make sense, but because they are so convoluted. The colleague may still have been out of line, and the manager may still have handled it badly, because micromanagement is micromanagement, whatever the cause. But the ambiguity came from somewhere, and it definitely did not come from the two people now fighting about it. Follow the behavior upstream The simplest way I know to tell managerial dysfunction apart from organizational dysfunction is to follow the behavior upstream and see where it comes from. Your manager changes priorities constantly, but are their priorities being changed constantly? They seem fixated on small details, but is somebody doing exactly that to them? They will not commit to a decision, so what tends to happen in that organization to a manager whose reasonable decision turns out badly? They never give you a straight answer, but are they getting straight answers from the people above them? People are careful about what they say in your area, but does that caution disappear on another team, or does everyone in the building already know which subjects not to raise? None of that lets anybody off the hook. A dysfunctional organization may explain a manager's behavior, but it doesn't excuse it. Bad behavior is bad behavior. The human element remains, managers still control how they speak to people, how the work gets handed out, and how much of what lands on them gets pushed straight down onto somebody else. Pressure moves, and it almost always moves downward. Simply put, it's like a chain of toxicity, a senior leader leans on a director, the director then leans on a manager, and lastly, that manager starts watching her staff more closely than she used to. People notice, they get careful, conversations get shorter, trust shrinks, and the work slips. Leadership sees the slip and, instead of addressing the culture, defaults to asking for more oversight. By the time all of this reaches the employee at the end of the chain, the only face attached to it is their immediate supervisor. This is also where organizations stop receiving the information they need to fix any of it. Morrison and Milliken (2000) described organizational silence as a collective phenomenon in which employees hold back what they know about problems, and the psychological safety literature arrives at a similar point by asking whether speaking up feels personally risky.[1] Once people work out that raising something is pointless or costly, the organization stops hearing about its own problems and instead starts diagnosing individuals. Sometimes the manager really is the problem There is an opposite danger in all of this, and I want to name it plainly, because it is easy to become so interested in systems that you start explaining away conduct that should never have been explained away. A former colleague worked under a manager whose behavior grew steadily more antagonistic, lunch breaks turned into a point of contention, vacation became contentious, a sick day caused friction, and questions kept coming up about whether certain people were really the right fit for the team. It wasn't happening to just one person, since several people on that team described the same experience. At first glance, that sounds like a bad manager, but then we see the context. The manager had been well regarded for years. So, what changed? People were moved onto his team without consulting him. The workload quadrupled, and the systems, the resources, the support, all of it remained unchanged. All of that matters, a lot more than you think. Still, none of it makes the behavior acceptable, because other managers at this organization carried the same load that year, lived the same experience, and did it all without counting lunch breaks, picking fights over approved leave, or treating their own people like suspects. The organization absolutely built the pressure, but the manager decided what to do with it. In most of these situations, the honest answer is both. So what do you actually look at? First, whether the behavior follows the manager. If you notice that it is just the one team churning out transfers, just the one team describing the same experience on the way out, and six months later the new hires are describing it right back to you, everything in that picture is changing except one person. Sustained hostile supervision tracks with lower job satisfaction, weaker commitment, more exhaustion, and a stronger intent to quit,[2] so a pattern like that is worth catching early rather than late. Second, whether it follows the organization instead. If you notice that it is not one team at all, that it is different managers in different departments with different people telling you a version of the same thing, you are looking at something else. Nobody decides anything without cover. Complaints go into the process, and nothing comes back out. A new leader arrives with their own way of working, and within a year they sound like the person they replaced. That last one is the tell, because if the behavior outlives the people, then the people were never what was holding it up. Third, what happens after somebody speaks up. Healthy organizations still have bad managers, still receive harassment complaints, and still have leaders who make mistakes, so conflict alone proves very little. However, what the organization does next proves a great deal. Are complaints looked at fairly, does anyone notice the pattern running across several of them, are people protected from retaliation, and does anything actually change, or does the person who raised the problem quietly become the problem? Fourth, what the organization rewards, because every workplace has the values it publishes and the values it rewards. An organization can say it values collaboration while advancing leaders whose teams empty out every eighteen months, or say that people come first while rewarding its managers almost entirely on operational numbers, and employees read the second set long before they ever read the first. Culture is also what employees have to do in order to survive there and get ahead. Fifth, whether incivility has quietly become ordinary, meaning dismissive comments, interruptions, public embarrassment, downward-aimed sarcasm, and talking about colleagues rather than to them. Incivility registers with people well beyond whoever it was aimed at, including those who only witness it.[4] [5] People have bad days, and one rude moment proves nothing, although when employees start telling you that this is just how things are here, that is worth sitting with for a while. Lastly, whether psychological health counts for anything when it costs the organization something. If you notice that wellness programming is running fine while the environment underneath it quietly falls apart, then the employee assistance program isn't telling you much. What tells you something is the moment well-being runs into productivity and one of them has to give. Watch what gets decided when staffing is short. Watch what happens when somebody reports bullying, when the workload stops being reasonable, or when a manager who hits every number keeps generating complaints. Priorities stay invisible until they compete. Explanation is not the same as an excuse None of this sorts itself into clean categories, and I would be cautious of anyone who tells you otherwise. A manager can be struggling inside a broken organization and still behave badly, an organization can create unreasonable conditions and still employ managers who handle them decently, a good leader can come apart under years of pressure, and a genuinely abusive manager can last a very long time in a place that rewards results without ever asking how they were produced. That is why the easiest person to blame is usually the wrong place to stop. Replacing a manager will not repair a broken system, rewriting a policy will not change how leaders behave, and coaching rarely holds in a culture that keeps rewarding the very thing the coaching was meant to remove. However, blaming the culture should never become the reason a manager is allowed to mistreat employees. We are good at seeing the person in front of us and much worse at seeing the organization, because that one lives in policies, incentives, workloads, reporting structures, and a pile of unwritten rules laid down years before most of us walked in. Sometimes your manager really is the problem. Sometimes your manager is the messenger. Sometimes they are both at once, caught in a dysfunctional system and feeding it along the way. Sometimes what looks like a personality problem turns out to be an organizational problem that found a human face. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Shahrukh Asif Khan Shahrukh Asif Khan, Chief Vision and Culture Officer Shahrukh Khan, DBA Candidate, MBA, QArb., is an academic leader, arbitration and mediation professional, and labour relations specialist focused on workplace dispute resolution and organizational governance. A Qualified Arbitrator and former Lead Negotiator and Vice President of Grievance, he brings deep expertise in collective bargaining, grievance arbitration, and labour-management relations. He is also an expert in policy auditing and development, ensuring legislative compliance and strengthening governance frameworks. His research centers on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), talent management, and labour relations, examining how inclusive policy and leadership strategy drive sustainable organizational performance. References: [1] Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. [2] Mackey, J. D., Frieder, R. E., Brees, J. R., & Martinko, M. J. (2017). Abusive supervision: A meta-analysis and empirical review. Journal of Management, 43(6), 1940–1965. [3] Morrison, E. W., & Milliken, F. J. (2000). Organizational silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world. Academy of Management Review, 25(4), 706–725. [4] Pearson, C. M., Andersson, L. M., & Porath, C. L. (2000). Assessing and attacking workplace incivility. Organizational Dynamics, 29(2), 123–137. [5] Reich, T. C., & Hershcovis, M. S. (2015). Observing workplace incivility. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(1), 203–215. [6] Tepper, B. J., Simon, L., & Park, H. M. (2017). Abusive supervision. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 4, 123–152.

Written by Shaun Provost, Women’s Health & Performance Expert Shaun Provost is a women’s health and performance expert, endurance athlete, and founder of Live Unbreakable. With more than 16 years of coaching experience and 34 certifications, she helps women transform their health through strength training, hormone education, and lifestyle coaching. There has always been a complicated relationship between women, sports, and body weight. If you are a female athlete, particularly an endurance athlete, there is a good chance you have heard some version of the same message before: lose a few pounds and you will run faster, get a little leaner and climbing will feel easier, reach “race weight” and performance will follow. Sometimes, that pressure is explicit, other times, no one ever has to say it out loud. We see the bodies that get celebrated (hello, Sydney Sweeney. We see you), notice which athletes are described as “fit,” and quietly start to wonder whether two or three pounds might actually be the difference between the pace we’re at now and the pace we think we should be capable of. That is exactly why the rise of GLP-1 medications deserves a deeper conversation in athletic spaces. Medications such as semaglutide, along with dual agonists such as tirzepatide, have changed obesity treatment in a meaningful way, there’s no doubt about it. For many people living with obesity, type 2 diabetes, and related metabolic conditions, these medications can be incredibly useful. They can lead to substantial weight loss and important improvements in health, and their success has helped force a long-overdue acknowledgment that body weight is influenced by far more than discipline, willpower, or simply “trying harder.” That is a good thing. What concerns me, however, is what happens when medications designed to treat metabolic disease enter a fitness culture that was already overly obsessed with being smaller. Athletes are not immune to body-image pressure simply because we are strong, capable, or physically active. In some cases, I think we are even more vulnerable to it because the desire to be smaller can disguise itself as a desire to perform better. It sounds different when we say we are trying to improve our power-to-weight ratio, get to competition weight, feel lighter on the run, or carry less body mass on the bike. The language sounds athletic, disciplined, and strategic, but the underlying pressure can be very similar. A 2025 study examining GLP-1 use and attitudes among 681 UK exercisers and recreational athletes found that, among those who were familiar with the medications, one in four had considered using a GLP-1 off-label to change their physical appearance. One in four! Women were significantly more likely than men to fall into the group that had used or considered using the medications, and that group also reported higher levels of body-image disturbance, anxiety, and depression. What this shows is that the interest in these medications has already moved beyond the treatment of metabolic disease and into the world of body image and performance. That matters. Lighter is not automatically faster Scientifically speaking, body mass absolutely influences performance in certain sports. Running requires moving your body over distance, cycling performance can be affected by the power-to-weight ratio, and body composition can play a role in some competitive environments. Pretending otherwise is just as unhelpful as the alternative. The problem is that the conversation all too often stops with the scale. Performance is not determined by how little an athlete weighs. It is determined by what the athlete can produce at that weight. A lighter athlete who has also lost strength, muscle, power, glycogen availability, or the ability to recover is not necessarily a better athlete. She may simply be lighter. This is where the GLP-1 conversation overlaps with a problem sports medicine has already been trying to address for years: low energy availability and Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S). The International Olympic Committee describes low energy availability as a mismatch between the energy an athlete consumes and the energy required to support both training and normal physiological function. When that mismatch becomes significant or prolonged, the consequences can extend well beyond hunger or weight loss. RED-S can affect reproductive function, bone health, metabolism, immunity, cardiovascular health, psychological health, and performance. Contrary to popular belief, an athlete does not have to have an eating disorder to end up with low energy availability. Sometimes restriction is intentional, but sometimes training volume simply increases and food intake does not keep up. Sometimes life gets busy. Sometimes athletes are praised for losing weight before anyone stops to ask whether they are actually fueling enough to support the work they are doing. GLP-1 medications add another layer because appetite suppression is part of how these medications work. For someone whose excessive hunger or food noise has made weight management incredibly difficult, that appetite suppression can be therapeutic. For an athlete training eight, ten, or twelve hours per week, however, reduced appetite requires considerably more attention. The challenge is not simply whether the medication works. The challenge is whether the athlete can still consistently meet the nutritional demands of training when hunger is significantly reduced. This is especially relevant in endurance sports, where athletes already struggle to eat enough. A long ride, long run, or multi-session training day can create enormous energy demands. Add work, family, stress, and everyday life to that schedule, and it becomes very easy for someone to believe she is eating “pretty well” while still falling short of what her body actually needs. (Don’t believe me on the stress piece? This is for you.) Now add a medication that causes earlier satiety and prolonged fullness, and the potential for accidental underfueling becomes even greater. Carbohydrate availability still matters for training quality. Protein still matters for recovery and muscle maintenance. Total energy availability still matters for adaptation. Hydration, iron, calcium, and other micronutrients still matter. None of those requirements disappear because someone is less hungry. This is where the psychological side becomes especially important. A female athlete may experience a dramatic reduction in appetite and initially see it as an advantage. If she has spent years believing she would perform better five pounds lighter, being less hungry can feel like the easiest path she has ever had toward finally getting there. Meanwhile, she may be creating the exact conditions that make her training worse. The 2023 International Olympic Committee (IOC) consensus on RED-S specifically recognizes the relationship between body-composition pressure, restrictive eating, psychological health, and low energy availability. We have known for years that athletes can underfuel themselves in pursuit of better performance. GLP-1 medications did not create that problem, but they may give some athletes a far more powerful tool with which to do it. Bone health belongs in this conversation too Bone health is another reason this discussion needs to go beyond the scale. Female endurance athletes are already a population in which clinicians pay close attention to low energy availability, menstrual dysfunction, stress fractures, and bone density. Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) is broader than the old Female Athlete Triad model, but bone health remains an important part of the picture. A 2024 randomized controlled trial involving adults at increased fracture risk found that semaglutide treatment was associated with increased bone resorption and lower bone mineral density at the lumbar spine and total hip after 52 weeks compared with placebo. That does not prove that semaglutide causes osteoporosis. The participants receiving semaglutide also lost substantially more weight, and significant weight loss itself can affect bone because mechanical loading decreases as body mass decreases. The current evidence around glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) medications and bone remains mixed, which is exactly why fearmongering is not helpful. But for a female athlete who may already be managing high training loads, low energy availability, menstrual changes, or a history of stress fractures, bone health should be part of the conversation before intentionally driving body weight lower. This is especially true because the risk can be easy to miss. Weight loss is visible. A lower number on the scale gets celebrated. Bone loss is silent until it is not. Female athletes have been taught to be smaller for a long time Women have spent generations being encouraged to make themselves smaller, and unfortunately, fitness did not completely eliminate that pressure. In some cases, it simply changed the language. We were not dieting anymore, we were cutting. We were not restricting, we were dialing in our nutrition. We were not trying to become thin, we were trying to become lean. We weren’t avoiding muscle, we were trying to “tone.” In endurance sports, the message became even easier to rationalize because we could frame it entirely around performance. The language matters because it can make the same behavior feel virtuous. A woman restricting food because she dislikes her body raises concern. A female athlete restricting food because she wants to qualify for Boston can look like dedication. Physiologically, however, the body does not care what story we attach to the energy deficit. This is why the psychological conversation around GLP-1s and athletes needs to happen alongside the physiological one. The 2025 study on recreational athletes is particularly interesting because the people who had used or considered using GLP-1 medications reported greater body image disturbances than those who had not. Women were also more likely to be represented in that higher-risk group. That does not mean GLP-1 medications cause poor body image. It suggests that people drawn toward off-label use may already be carrying complicated beliefs about their bodies. For coaches and clinicians, that should matter. For athletes, it should matter too. Before asking whether a medication can help someone lose weight, it may be worth asking why an already active body needs to become smaller in the first place. Sometimes there is a legitimate medical answer. Sometimes there is a legitimate sport-specific reason. Sometimes, if we are being honest, the answer is simply that being a female athlete has not protected us from spending most of our lives believing there is always another five pounds we could lose. Appetite and nutritional need are not the same thing One of the most important things I think athletes need to understand is that reduced appetite does not mean reduced physiological need. GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1) medications can dramatically change hunger, but they do not change the amount of carbohydrate required to fuel a long training session. They do not remove the need for amino acids to repair muscle, calcium to support bone, iron to carry oxygen, or enough total energy to allow the body to adapt to training. For that reason, an athlete taking one of these medications may actually have to become more intentional about fueling. That could mean eating before hunger becomes strong, using smaller meals more frequently, prioritizing carbohydrate around key sessions, making protein intake more deliberate, or working with a sports dietitian who understands both the medication and the demands of training. This is also why I become uncomfortable when extreme appetite suppression is celebrated as proof that a medication is working especially well. Statements like “I barely eat anymore” may sound exciting in a weight-loss conversation, but they should raise very different questions in an athlete. Are you actually recovering? Are you maintaining strength? Are you sleeping well? Are you fueling long sessions? Are your cycles changing? Are you becoming more capable, or just lighter? Those questions matter more than appetite alone. GLP-1s can be useful, but the overarching focus needs to be on health and performance I do not want the takeaway from this conversation to be that athletes should fear GLP-1 medications. There are athletes living with obesity, insulin resistance, and type 2 diabetes. There are athletes for whom GLP-1 treatment may meaningfully improve health, mobility, confidence, and quality of life. Being athletic does not make someone immune from metabolic disease, and using medication does not make someone less of an athlete. The problem is not the medication. The problem is using an effective medical tool inside a culture that has spent decades rewarding women for becoming smaller at almost any cost. We have seen this pattern before through restrictive diets, fasted training, fat burners, ignored menstrual cycles, untreated stress injuries, and the glorification of “discipline” when what we really meant was chronic underfueling. GLP-1 medications are simply much more effective than most of the tools that came before them, which means the conversation around how and why they are used has to become much more responsible. Female athletes do not need another reason to be afraid of taking up space. We need strong bodies that can absorb training, recover between sessions, maintain healthy bones, support hormonal function, and produce enough force to actually perform. If a GLP-1 helps someone improve her health while maintaining those things, it can absolutely be a useful tool. But the goal cannot simply be to weigh less, especially in athletes. Lighter does not automatically mean faster, leaner does not automatically mean fitter, and smaller has never been the same thing as stronger. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Shaun Provost Shaun Provost, Women’s Health & Performance Expert Shaun Provost is the founder of Live Unbreakable and a women’s health and performance coach with more than 16 years of experience in fitness, nutrition, and hormone health. She is passionate about helping women build strength, improve confidence, and create sustainable habits that support long-term wellness. As an endurance athlete and educator, Shaun combines science-backed coaching with a relatable, empowering approach that makes health feel achievable in real life. Through her writing, she aims to educate, inspire, and help women feel truly unbreakable. References: Mountjoy M, Ackerman KE, Bailey DM, et al. 2023 International Olympic Committee's consensus statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S). British Journal of Sports Medicine. 2023;57(17):1073-1097. doi:10.1136/bjsports-2023-106994. Martin D, Hawkins RM, Gee TI, Turnock L, Lazuras L. Use of glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) agonists among exercisers and recreational athletes and associated mental health symptoms. Performance Enhancement & Health. 2025;13(4):100353. doi:10.1016/j.peh.2025.100353. Look M, Dunn JP, Kushner RF, et al. Body composition changes during weight reduction with tirzepatide in the SURMOUNT-1 study of adults with obesity or overweight. Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism. 2025;27:2720-2729. doi:10.1111/dom.16275. Hansen MS, Wölfel EM, Jeromdesella S, et al. Once-weekly semaglutide versus placebo in adults with increased fracture risk: a randomised, double-blinded, two-centre, phase 2 trial. EClinicalMedicine. 2024;72:102624. doi:10.1016/j.eclinm.2024.102624. Naseem Eisa and Omar Baroodet et al. Lean Mass Changes With Incretin Therapy Versus Lifestyle Intervention: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomised Controlled Trials. Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism. 2026. doi:10.1111/dom.70666. The Obesity Society, American Society for Nutrition, Obesity Medicine Association, and American College of Lifestyle Medicine. Nutritional Priorities to Support GLP-1 Therapy for Obesity: Joint Clinical Advisory. 2025.

Written by Anastasiia Puzyrina, Couples & Relationship Psychotherapist & Methodologist Anastasiia Puzyrina is an esteemed relationship counselor and expert in couple dynamics. She is also a certified CBT therapist with over 20 years of experience. In recurring conflict, people do more than exchange words, they often move into familiar ways of participating that shape what they notice, expect, and do next. Understanding conflict therefore requires asking not only, "What did I say?" but also, "Who do I become when this particular interaction begins?" Why can the same person behave so differently during conflict? Because conflict does not simply reveal a person's usual character, it can organize a particular way of being in relation to another person. Someone who is flexible and thoughtful in most areas of life may become unusually controlling during conflict. A person who communicates openly with friends or colleagues may suddenly struggle to explain anything to a partner. Someone who normally tolerates uncertainty may become intensely focused on receiving an answer immediately. These changes are often interpreted as evidence of personality, this is who she really is, or this is what he is actually like under pressure. But that explanation may be too simple. The more useful observation is that certain interactions repeatedly bring forward particular ways of participating. Conflict does not merely give us something to respond to. It can change the position from which we respond. How do people fall into the same roles during conflict? Conflict roles become increasingly automatic when the same responses have been repeated within the same relational conditions. At first, a person may consciously explain, reassure, withdraw, insist, monitor, or attempt to restore peace. Over time, however, these responses can become less deliberate. The partner who repeatedly feels responsible for keeping the relationship stable begins managing tension before anyone has asked them to. The person who expects not to be heard starts explaining more intensely before there is clear evidence that they are being dismissed. Someone who has learned that disagreement becomes overwhelming may begin distancing themselves at the first sign of tension. The important point is not that one person is the fixer, the pursuer, the rational one, or the avoidant one. Such labels can easily turn a relational process into a description of personality. A role in conflict is better understood as something a person repeatedly occupies rather than something they permanently are. Why do these roles feel so natural? Because repeated participation gradually reduces the amount of conscious choice involved. Once a familiar interaction begins, people often recognize what is happening only after they are already inside it. Attention narrows toward familiar signals, expectations become activated, and certain responses begin to feel self-evident. The person may experience their behaviour not as one possible response among several, but simply as what the situation requires. This is one reason recurring conflict can feel so convincing from the inside. Each partner's behaviour appears to be a necessary response to what the other person is doing. One insists because the other is withdrawing. The other withdraws because the first is becoming increasingly insistent. Each response provides the conditions that make the other response seem necessary. What looks like two independent reactions may therefore be a mutually organized process. Are conflict roles part of your personality? Not necessarily, because the same person may occupy very different roles in different relationships or under different conditions. A person who withdraws during conflict with a partner may become highly confrontational with a parent. Someone who habitually accommodates at home may be decisive and demanding at work. Even within the same relationship, roles can change depending on what is at stake. This variability matters because it suggests that conflict behaviour cannot always be understood by asking, "What kind of person am I?" A more precise question is, "Who do I become here?" The difference is significant. The first question searches for a stable identity. The second examines the relationship between the person, the conditions, and the form of interaction in which that person is participating. Why does noticing who you become matter? Because changing words while remaining in the same mode of participation often leaves the deeper interaction untouched. A person can learn to replace an accusation with an "I statement" while still speaking from the position of someone who must obtain reassurance immediately. Another can learn to validate a partner's feelings while continuing to occupy the role of the person responsible for regulating every difficult interaction. The language improves, but the organization of participation may remain surprisingly similar. This is why observing conflict only at the level of communication can miss something important. Words matter, but they are produced from within a particular position. That position influences what feels threatening, what seems necessary, what the person believes their partner is doing, and which responses appear available. What we say in conflict matters, but so does the person we temporarily become in order to say it. Questions that shift observation Rather than focusing only on what was said during the last argument, it may be useful to notice: Who do I reliably become once this particular conflict begins? What do I suddenly feel responsible for doing, preventing, proving, or obtaining? Does this version of me appear everywhere, or primarily within particular relationships and conditions? What does my partner become in response to the position I occupy? These questions are not intended to replace responsibility with explanation. Automatic participation still has consequences, and recognizing how a role developed does not make every behaviour acceptable. What changes is the object of observation. Instead of examining only the sentences exchanged during conflict, we begin to notice how people organize themselves within it. The question then becomes larger than whether the right words were used. It becomes a question of how, within a recurring relational form, each person repeatedly becomes someone who makes the next familiar move possible. Follow me on LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Anastasiia Puzyrina Anastasiia Puzyrina, Couples & Relationship Psychotherapist & Methodologist Anastasiia Puzyrina, a renowned authority in relationship counseling and cognitive behavioural therapy, brings a unique approach to her practice in Canada. With over 15 years of experience and a Master's in Psychology from Ukraine, she excels in addressing relationship challenges among couples and families. Anastasiia integrates cutting-edge neuroscience with proven psychotherapy techniques to foster personal and interpersonal development. She actively promotes healthy parent-child dynamics and leads initiatives in this area. Anastasiia founded the Restore Connections Development Center to support couples, co-founded a service for enhancing parental relationships, and authored the Workbook for Couples.

Written by Sabio Janiak, Founder of Mastering Harmony Sabio Janiak is a psycho-sensory specialist and human behaviourist, and founder of Mastering Harmony. He guides individuals to rewire stress-driven neural patterns, resolve trauma, and restore emotional balance using cutting-edge neuroscience and holistic methods, empowering lasting clarity, resilience, and high-performance living. Conflict rarely begins with raised voices or visible disagreement, but with the hidden assumptions, interpretations, and emotional responses that shape how we experience another person’s actions. By understanding what happens beneath the surface, we can create space between reaction and response, allowing curiosity, choice, and connection to replace the cycle of escalation. From agreement to disagreement and beyond Conflict rarely begins where we think it begins. We usually notice it once it becomes visible. Voices rise. People interrupt. Listening disappears. One person attacks, the other defends, withdraws, or retaliates. Conflict can also be quiet. Messages become shorter. Eye contact disappears. Affection is withdrawn. Two people may sit in the same room while an entire argument continues without a word. So perhaps shouting is not the beginning of conflict. Perhaps it is already the performance. Like a play in a theatre, by the time the actors step onstage, something has already happened behind the curtain. What happened backstage? That is where the anatomy of conflict becomes interesting. Before disagreement, there is often an agreement Relationships are full of agreements. Some are explicit: “We’ll meet at seven.” “Don’t tell anyone.” Others are implicit: “If we are friends, you won’t deliberately humiliate me.” “If we are partners, you won’t betray me.” Then there are assumptions that feel like agreements, even though they were never negotiated. “If you love me, you should know what I need.” “If you respect me, you should answer when I call.” One person may have lived according to such a rule for years. The other may never have known the rule existed. Then something happens. One experiences betrayal. The other experiences intrusion. Both believe something obvious has been violated. Perhaps many conflicts are not only about what happened. They are also about the invisible rules we believed the other person had agreed to follow. Disagreement is not conflict Two people can see reality differently without fighting. I can dislike what you love. You can believe something I reject. We can disagree and remain curious about each other. So where does disagreement become conflict? Perhaps it happens when the difference becomes consequential. Something important now feels threatened: dignity, freedom, fairness, safety, belonging, a relationship, a boundary, or even my image of who I am. I no longer simply disagree. I want something to change. You may want something different. I want you to stop. You want to continue. I want an apology. You refuse. I want closeness. You want distance. I want to talk. You want silence. My attempt to restore what feels right to me begins to interfere with what feels right to you. My solution becomes your problem. Your solution becomes mine. The loop has begun. The signal is not the meaning Now we need to move one step further back. We do not receive another person’s meaning directly. We receive signals and interpret them. Imagine someone does not return my call. The observable event is simple: My call was not returned. Then interpretation begins: They ignored me. Meaning follows: They don’t respect me. Then comes the label: They’re selfish. Eventually: That’s the kind of person they are. We began with a missed call. We ended with an identity judgment. Human beings respond not only to events, but also to what we believe those events mean. Two people can assign completely different meanings to the same behaviour. “I was trying to help you.” “You were controlling me.” Same event. Different realities. Now the argument may no longer be about what happened. It can become a struggle over which meaning defines what happened. The conflict before the conflict If we slow everything down, a hidden sequence begins to appear: Signal – Perception – Interpretation – Meaning – Discrepancy – Emotional activation – Reaction. Then something crucial happens. My reaction becomes your next signal. You interpret my reaction through your own history, beliefs, expectations, and emotional state. You react. Your reaction becomes my next signal. What began as a sequence becomes a loop: Reaction – Counter-reaction – Escalation. Each person experiences themselves as responding to the other. At the same time, each person is producing the next signal the other will respond to. This is the conflict before the conflict. By the time somebody shouts, the process may have been developing for some time. The shouting is simply where we finally notice it. When the nervous system enters the conversation Another layer to this process exists. Conflict happens between two minds and two nervous systems. A tone of voice, facial expression, gesture, or familiar phrase can carry emotional significance before we consciously analyse it. We can see this clearly in relationships between parents and their adult children. You may genuinely think: “I’m fine with my mother now.” Then you meet after several months. She uses a particular tone. A familiar expression appears. One sentence is spoken in exactly the way it was spoken twenty years ago. Suddenly, you feel 12 years old again. The reaction seems to come from nowhere. It may actually be coming from a very long history. A parent can represent one of the richest sensory and emotional patterns we ever learn: voice, face, posture, characteristic phrases, affection, criticism, approval, rejection, safety, unpredictability. The nervous system does not respond only to what a signal is. It also responds to what experience has taught that signal to predict. The amygdala helps evaluate the learned emotional significance of such cues, alongside sensory, memory, autonomic, and regulatory systems. So the conscious adult may know: “I am safe. This is only a conversation.” An older learned response may still carry another prediction: “When this tone appears, something bad follows.” The present is new. The prediction may be old. This does not mean a literal child is frozen somewhere inside the brain. Internal Family Systems uses the language of protective “parts” to describe experiences like this. Neuroscience approaches the same territory through concepts such as learned associations, memory retrieval, threat generalisation, and regulation. These are different ways of describing an important human experience: The past can become active inside the present without the present actually being the past. When the loop escalates Now imagine what happens when two activated nervous systems begin responding to each other. Your tone changes. I hear criticism. My body mobilises. My face changes. My voice gets louder. You now receive a stronger signal. Your body responds. Your voice changes. I hear your response and think: “See? I knew you were attacking me.” The psychology and physiology begin feeding each other: Signal – Meaning – Activation – Reaction – New signal – New reaction. This helps explain why an argument about dishes, lateness, money, or a missed phone call can suddenly become much larger than the event that started it. Eventually, someone says: “I lost it.” They have not literally lost their rational brain. High emotional arousal can narrow attention, increase impulsive responses, and make reflective regulation harder. Nuance begins to disappear. Listening becomes harder. The conversation that started with: “What happened?” can gradually become: “Who is going to win?” From “What is true?” to “Who is right?” That change of question matters. When we ask, “What is true?” new information is useful. I may discover that I misunderstood you. You may discover that you misunderstood me. Both of us can update our understanding. When the question becomes, “Who is right?” new information can start to feel threatening. Being wrong may feel like losing. Now I am no longer protecting only an idea. I may be protecting my credibility, dignity, authority, certainty, or identity. The object of loyalty shifts from discovering truth to defending the self. Listening becomes much harder when the self believes it is on trial. Can I feel the reaction without becoming the reaction? This is where the practical work begins. The aim is not to eliminate anger or suppress emotion. Nor does it mean accepting harmful behaviour or abandoning boundaries. The aim is to create enough space to ask: "Can I experience the impulse to react without automatically obeying it?" I can feel angry without immediately speaking from anger. I can feel misunderstood without correcting you this second. I can notice the urge to defend myself without immediately launching into defence. Not every disagreement requires immediate correction. Sometimes one of the most intelligent things we can do in conflict is simply: Stop producing the next signal. Not punitive silence. Not withdrawal. A conscious pause. The familiar sequence: Reaction – Counter-reaction – Escalation now has another possibility: Reaction – Awareness – Choice. The pause does not need to solve the disagreement. Its first purpose is simpler. It gives us back a choice about what happens next. Working with conflict at Mastering Harmony This is central to my work at Mastering Harmony, where I work with individuals, couples, and groups to understand and navigate what happens underneath conflict. Instead of looking only at: What did the other person say? We can also ask: What happened inside me when they said it? What meaning did I give it? What did I believe had been violated? What was I trying to protect? What might this moment have reminded my nervous system of? What happened in the seconds before I reacted? I also draw on psychosensory approaches, including Havening Techniques, to work with learned emotional responses underlying recurring patterns of conflict. The aim is to disrupt maladaptive associations between present sensory cues and threat responses learned in the past, allowing the nervous system to respond to what is happening now rather than automatically repeating an older pattern. The signal may be familiar. The response does not have to be the same. When conflict becomes resentment What happens when the argument ends while the conflict continues inside us? Resentment can begin carrying it forward. Anger says: “Something is wrong. Change it.” Resentment says: “Something was wrong. It was never adequately resolved, and I am still carrying it.” Then the next disagreement does not arrive alone. It lands on everything that came before it. A small event can activate a much larger history. The past is no longer physically present. But the system shaped by the past is. The opposite of conflict may not be agreement Perhaps the goal is not to make everyone agree. Two people can experience the same situation differently and remain connected. The deeper capacity may be learning to remain in disagreement without immediately needing to correct, dominate, silence, defeat, or destroy the other person’s reality. That begins with recognising a simple distinction: “I experience this as true.” is not the same as: “This is true.” Enormous psychological space exists between those two statements. Inside that space lives curiosity. Curiosity changes the questions we ask. Instead of How do I win? How do I prove I am right? We can ask: What am I actually reacting to? What meaning have I given this? What am I trying to protect? Am I responding to what is happening now, or to what something similar once meant? Perhaps most importantly: Do I need to react to this right now? The pause does not need to resolve everything. It creates something more immediate: the possibility of not automatically creating the next conflict. When we stop trying to win long enough to become curious again, something fundamental changes. We move from defending positions to clarifying realities. Perhaps that is not simply how conflict ends. Perhaps it is how we stop creating the next one. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Sabio Janiak Sabio Janiak, Founder of Mastering Harmony Sabio Janiak is a psycho-sensory specialist and human behaviourist, and the founder of Mastering Harmony. Over the past two decades, he has worked in 88 countries as a therapist, musician, and workshop facilitator, exploring the connections between sound, art, the nervous system, and human behaviour. He specialises in trauma resolution and nervous system regulation, helping individuals rewire stress-driven neural patterns and restore emotional balance. Using holistic modalities and applied neuroscience, Sabio empowers people to cultivate resilience, emotional clarity, and self-regulation. He continues to evolve the Mastering Harmony Method through individual sessions, group workshops, and practical training programs.

Written by Lisa Decker, Owner of Aligned Fitness Lisa Decker has been in the field of posture alignment and biomechanics for 20+ years and has helped thousands of people free themselves from chronic pain. She is the owner of Aligned Fitness Posture Therapy & Qigong in San Jose, CA, where she specializes in many areas of holistic wellness. Tai Chi and Qigong may look soft and effortless on the outside, but they are powerfully transformative within. Rooted in the Chinese energetic arts, Tai Chi carries the strength and wisdom of martial arts, while Qigong offers the gentle clarity of the healing arts. Both offer a dynamic integration of movement, breath, and energy. Whether you choose to begin with Tai Chi or Qigong, you will experience benefits that have the power to transform your well-being from the inside out. The first step in both Tai Chi and Qigong is to learn to sense and feel energy. You will gain this skill regardless of which practice you choose. However, Tai Chi involves more complex integrated choreography, which may prove more challenging when you are just beginning to work with subtle energy. Building your kinesthetic sense and deepening your overall awareness is a vital first step in both practices. Tai Chi is translated as "Supreme Ultimate," while Qigong is defined as "Cultivation of Life Force Energy." Both practices use physical movement, breath, and mindful intention to guide energy efficiently through the body. One key difference is that Qigong tends to be more prescriptive, with specific forms designed for particular health issues. In fact, Qigong hospitals in China have long used these healing practices to support patients with a wide range of conditions. Researched benefits Qigong is relatively new to the United States, whereas martial arts and Tai Chi are more widely recognized and practiced. This is likely why most of the research focuses on Tai Chi. However, both disciplines demonstrate profound, well-documented health benefits. Tai Chi has been proven to significantly improve executive function, including multitasking, time management, and decision-making. It was also proven to slow the progression to dementia more than any other form of exercise. It even outperformed walking! Healing ingredients So why do Tai Chi and Qigong seem to improve function more effectively than other forms of exercise? I believe it comes down to a unique combination of ingredients that work together like a brilliant healing concoction: Awareness: The slow, intentional movements in Tai Chi and Qigong help us develop our kinesthetic sense and experience heightened awareness. Slow breathing, harmonized with mindful movements, naturally release stress and tension while regulating the nervous system. Intention: Through focused visualization, we strengthen our ability to observe and direct our attention. We learn to utilize our mind as a powerful tool to influence the patterns of our body. As we practice the forms and flows, we guide the energy, consciously releasing stagnation and obstruction within our tissues and vessels. Process-driven: Qigong is process-driven rather than goal-driven. With consistent practice, we gradually reshape habitual patterns through direct experience. Rather than driving ourselves to achieve a goal, we stay present in each step of the process, practicing mindfulness while naturally building strength, flexibility, and balance. Structural integration: Rather than treating the body in isolated parts, movement is experienced through the entire kinetic chain and across all planes of motion. In Tai Chi, full-body movements are integrated immediately. Qigong may prescribe exercises to open through individual joints, creating relative motion before progressing to more complex, fully integrated movements. Breathwork: Breathwork is one of the most essential components of both Tai Chi and Qigong. Our breathing patterns influence our posture, nervous system, and emotional well-being. Regulating our breath shifts the nervous system from stress to relaxation. This allows the muscles and fascia to release tension, encouraging greater range of motion and improving the flow of oxygen, blood, and lymph throughout the body. Strength & flexibility: Both Tai Chi and Qigong encourage a balance of strength and flexibility. By learning to move efficiently in all planes of motion, we generate greater energy flow. With consistent practice, we can develop an innate understanding of our alignment, breath, and movement patterns as we connect to the higher intelligence of our body. Social support: Community is another vital component of both practices. When practiced in a group setting, we resonate with one another's energy in a shared energetic field. Social connection and community have profound, scientifically proven benefits and are strongly associated with overall health and well-being. Spirituality: Finally, Tai Chi and Qigong embody an element of spirituality that sets them apart from many other practices. Spirituality is not synonymous with religion. Rather, it refers to connecting with and transcending beyond the conscious mind. Through these practices, we explore our relationship with the earth and the universe as we integrate our body, mind, and spirit. More than exercise Tai Chi and Qigong are far more than just exercise! When we connect within physically, energetically, and spiritually, we move through life from a more balanced, centered, and calm state. We become rooted and connected internally and are thereby able to connect more deeply and authentically with the world around us. It is my joy and life purpose to share this practice with all of you. Join a Qigong class today! For a listing of Qigong classes, visit my website at www.alignedfit.com Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Lisa Decker Lisa Decker, Owner of Aligned Fitness Lisa Decker began her work 25 years ago as a personal trainer but realized quickly the importance of addressing dysfunctional alignment and muscular compensations before strengthening. She has a master's degree in Human Movement, a 3-year certification in medical Qigong, and multiple certifications in biomechanics, spinal decompression, posture therapy, breathwork, and corrective exercise. She is the owner of Aligned Fitness in San Jose, CA, where she specializes in helping others restore functional alignment and movement patterns to reduce chronic pain symptoms. Her goal is to educate and empower people to understand the root cause of their pain so they can safely and pain-free return to enjoying the activities they love.

Written by Dr. Elizabeth Kathryn, Intuitive Coach and Healer Dr. Elizabeth Kathryn is an Intuitive Coach and Healer who helps women clear emotional and energetic blocks, awaken their inner power and divine gifts, and manifest soul-aligned lives through her practice, Creating Inner Beauty, LLC. If you have found yourself attracting the same kind of relationship over and over again, you are not alone. Perhaps the relationship begins with intensity, chemistry, and emotional depth. At first, it feels deep and exciting, and you find yourself thinking, “Maybe this is the one!” But eventually, the same painful dynamics begin to emerge. Communication becomes inconsistent. Emotional closeness starts pulling away. You begin overanalyzing texts, questioning where you stand, or trying to regain the sense of connection that felt so strong in the beginning. Over time, this love rollercoaster can become exhausting and deeply discouraging. You begin wondering why you continue attracting emotionally unavailable partners or relationships that feel unstable, and why it never seems to work out. One of the hardest parts is that intellectually, you may already understand the dynamic. Part of you knows you want healthy, emotionally available love. Yet another part still finds itself drawn toward relationships that ultimately create anxiety, confusion, or heartbreak. What I have come to understand through both my own love healing journey and years of working with women is that these relationship patterns are rarely random. Most often, they are rooted in subconscious emotional conditioning, attachment wounds, and beliefs about love that were formed long before you consciously recognized them. The encouraging part is that these patterns can absolutely change once they are brought into awareness and healed. When you do that inner work, you naturally begin attracting healthier and more emotionally aligned love. Why inconsistent love feels so compelling One of the most important things to understand about relationship patterns is that you do not only attract from what you consciously want. You also attract from what feels emotionally familiar to your nervous system and subconscious mind. If you grew up around emotional inconsistency, unpredictability, criticism, abandonment, or conditional love, those dynamics may have quietly become associated with intimacy. Even if they caused pain, they can still feel strangely compelling because they mirror emotional experiences your system learned early in life. This is one reason emotionally unavailable relationships can feel so magnetic. If you carry unresolved emotional wounds, they will quietly shape what feels familiar, attractive, or emotionally real to you. If love once felt uncertain, you may unconsciously associate longing with connection. If affection had to be earned, you may feel deeply drawn toward partners whose validation feels inconsistent or difficult to secure. If emotional closeness once felt unstable, calm and emotionally available love may initially feel unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or even a little boring. This does not mean something is wrong with you. It means your nervous system is still trying to recreate what it recognizes, even while your conscious self desires something healthier. The beliefs beneath the pattern Our relationships show us the emotional wounds within us that are still asking for healing. If you repeatedly attract emotionally unavailable partners, some part of you may also fear true emotional vulnerability or intimacy. If you constantly overgive in relationships, you may unconsciously believe love must be earned through self-sacrifice. If inconsistency from a partner creates emotional obsession, your nervous system may still associate unpredictability with connection. Beneath these experiences are often subconscious beliefs about love, safety, worthiness, and emotional intimacy. You may unconsciously carry beliefs such as: “Love always leaves.” “I have to earn love.” “If I express my needs, I will be rejected.” “Being fully seen is unsafe.” Or “healthy love does not really exist.” Even when these beliefs are not fully conscious, they quietly shape the relationships you allow into your life. While this realization can initially feel confronting, it is also deeply empowering. Once you begin identifying and healing these subconscious beliefs, your relationships naturally begin reflecting the healthier emotional reality you are creating within yourself. Healing the pattern at the root Breaking unhealthy relationship cycles asks you to become willing to look honestly at the emotional wounds, fears, and beliefs that continue shaping your experiences in love. This often involves healing abandonment wounds, strengthening self-worth, reconnecting with your intuition, developing healthier boundaries, and becoming more emotionally honest about what truly feels aligned for you. As you reconnect with yourself, your intuition, your worth, and your emotional truth, your relationships begin changing as well. You become less available for inconsistency. You stop romanticizing emotional unavailability. You begin valuing emotional safety and steadiness just as much as chemistry and passion. As you heal, you begin noticing subtle but profound shifts. Situations that once felt intoxicating begin to feel emotionally draining instead. You become less attracted to inconsistency and more drawn toward authenticity, emotional maturity, and stability. Your intuition becomes clearer, and your standards begin rising naturally. Perhaps most importantly, you begin trusting yourself again. From that place, the relationships you attract into your life become very different, and far more aligned with what you consciously desire. A different relationship with love One of the deepest transformations that occurs through this healing work is the shift from seeking love as validation to experiencing love as resonance. Instead of focusing primarily on whether someone chooses you, you begin paying attention to whether a relationship actually feels emotionally safe, mutual, and aligned. You begin asking yourself different questions. Can I fully be myself here? Do I feel emotionally safe expressing my needs? Am I abandoning myself in order to maintain this connection? Does this relationship support the life and version of myself I am growing into? This shift changes everything. Because healthy love cannot be created through self-abandonment, emotional chasing, or overfunctioning. It becomes possible when you heal the wounds and beliefs that taught you to settle for less than the kind of connection you truly deserve. Magnetize love If you recognize some of these patterns within your own relationship history yet deeply desire healthy, committed, emotionally mature love, know that you are not alone and you can absolutely have the kind of love you truly want. The process of identifying subconscious love blocks, healing emotional wounds around love and worthiness, reconnecting with your intuition, and learning how to align with healthier partnership is the deeper work we explore inside my course, Magnetize Love Heal Your Love Blocks and Magnetize Your Soulmate. Inside the program, I guide women through clearing the emotional and energetic patterns that keep love feeling difficult, unavailable, or inconsistent so they can begin manifesting relationships rooted in emotional safety, authenticity, and genuine alignment. Because when you heal the wounds that taught you to settle for inconsistent love, you naturally begin magnetizing the healthy, soul-aligned relationship you truly desire. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Dr. Elizabeth Kathryn Dr. Elizabeth Kathryn, Intuitive Coach and Healer Dr. Elizabeth Kathryn is an Intuitive Coach and Healer for conscious and spiritual women. With a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and deep expertise in energy healing, she guides women to heal emotional wounds, reconnect with their intuition and divine gifts, and create soul-aligned, fulfilling lives. Through her practice, Creating Inner Beauty, LLC, Elizabeth blends psychology, intuition, spirituality, and Goddess energy to help women release blocks and manifest empowered, joy-filled lives. She is devoted to helping women reconnect with their divine feminine essence and step fully into their radiant, empowered selves. Related articles: Why Do We Find Stability Boring in Relationships? The Truth About Passion, Intimacy, & Healthy Love The Importance of Self-Love For A Loving and Long-Term Relationship

Written by Amanda L. Neiley, Founder of StillGrounded Labs & Creator of Return to North™ framework Amanda Neiley is the founder of StillGrounded Labs and creator of the Return to North™ framework. Drawing on her experience as an educator and school leader, she helps high-capacity women and leaders recognize overwhelm earlier, reconnect with what they need, and make more intentional choices before depletion becomes burnout. There is a particular kind of tired that can come from being the person who can handle everything. Not the tired that makes you stop. The kind that lets you keep going. You still get up. You go to work. You answer the messages. You make the appointments. You remember what everyone needs. You solve the problem. You show up for the people you love. From the outside, you may look completely fine. Capable, even. But somewhere inside all that capability, you may have stopped noticing yourself. That is the woman I wrote Return to North™ for. In many ways, she is me. When being capable becomes your default For much of my life, I have been someone who gets things done. I am a mother, educator, and school leader. I have trained for endurance sports, completed an Ironman, navigated difficult seasons, supported people I love, and built a life that I am deeply grateful for. I like goals. I like learning. I like creating things. I am not interested in telling women to stop being ambitious, stop caring, or stop doing hard things. But I have become increasingly interested in another question: "Can we build full, meaningful lives without disappearing inside them?" There was a moment that helped me understand just how far I had drifted from myself. My husband and I were on a bike trip through wine country when he asked me a completely ordinary question: "Where do you want to stop for lunch?" It shouldn't have been difficult. But I sat there staring at the road ahead and felt something close to panic. I didn't know. After months of making decisions, managing responsibilities and considering what everyone else needed, I couldn't seem to access an answer to a simple question about what I wanted. It wasn't really about lunch. It was information. Somewhere along the way, I had become so practised at responding to everything around me that I had stopped checking in with what was happening inside me. That realization eventually became part of the foundation for Return to North. What if you are not failing? What if you have simply drifted? We often notice ourselves late. We notice when we finally snap at someone we love, when we cannot make one more decision, when our chest feels tight, and everything suddenly seems urgent, when something small makes us disproportionately emotional, when we are sitting on the couch but cannot actually settle, or when we have moved beyond wired and overwhelmed into something quieter, flat, tired, disconnected, and running on empty. Then we judge ourselves for it. Why am I reacting like this? Why can't I handle this better? What is wrong with me? Return to North begins somewhere different. Not with judgment. With information. Instead of immediately asking, "How do I fix myself?", we can begin with: Where am I right now? That question changes things. Because you cannot choose what you need until you notice where you are. The compass I began imagining our internal experience as a compass. It is not a diagnostic tool, and it is not four boxes we permanently belong in. These directions are simply language for noticing patterns in our experience. They are patterns, not medical conditions. East is when everything feels urgent. Your mind may be racing. You are jumping between tasks, checking your phone, thinking ahead, planning, worrying, or trying to do five things at once. South is when feelings take the wheel. You may feel reactive, frustrated, hurt, angry, tearful, or emotionally flooded. Something may feel much bigger than the moment itself. West is when you are running on empty. You may feel depleted, flat, disconnected, or simply done. You can still be functioning in West. In fact, capable women can become remarkably good at functioning while depleted. Then there is North. North is not perfect. North is not a permanently calm life where nothing bothers you. In fact, one of the chapters in Return to North is called "Calm Is Not the Goal." North is something more useful. North is steady enough to choose. You can hear yourself again. You have enough space between what is happening and what you do next to make a choice. This distinction matters because the goal is not to spend our entire lives in North. We are human. We will move. A difficult conversation may send us South. A relentless morning may push us East. A demanding season may leave us West. The work is not learning how never to leave North. The work is learning how to find our way back. Your direction is information, not a verdict This may be the idea I care most about. There is no shame in East. There is no failure in South. There is no weakness in West. North does not make you better than you were ten minutes ago. Each direction gives you information. When I began thinking this way, I became less interested in criticizing my reactions and more curious about them. What is this telling me? What might I need? That shift from criticism to curiosity is small, but powerful. Because sometimes East does not need another productivity strategy. It needs fewer inputs. Sometimes South does not need you to tell yourself to calm down. It needs space before you respond. Sometimes West does not need motivation. It needs rest. Sometimes North gives you the clarity to realize that the thing you need isn't a breathing exercise or a better morning routine. You need to change something. The NORTH method™ The compass helps us identify where we are. But I wanted Return to North™ to go further than awareness. I wanted it to give women a practical way to respond. That became the NORTH method. Nurture where you are. Open to what you need. Regulate before you react. Take one steady step. Honour yourself. These are not five more things to accomplish perfectly. They are invitations. Start where you actually are, rather than where you think you should be. Get curious about what you need. Create enough steadiness to respond rather than automatically react. Then take one step. Not twelve. Not fix your entire life by Friday. One steady step. Finally, honour yourself enough to listen to what you discover. Sometimes returning to North means changing direction This is where Return to North became bigger for me than stress management. Because what happens when you regulate yourself, become steady again, and realize that something in your life still isn't working? What if the problem isn't that you need to become better at carrying it? What if you need to put something down? We can become very skilled at helping ourselves tolerate lives that are asking too much of us. Another breathing exercise, a walk, an early bedtime, and another Sunday spent preparing ourselves to survive Monday. Those things can absolutely support us. But regulation should not simply help us endure indefinitely. Sometimes returning to North means recognizing that something needs to change. A boundary, relationship, workload, expectation, definition of success, and a direction. That is why one of the later chapters in my book is called "Stop Building a Life You Have to Recover From." Because sometimes the most regulated decision you can make is not learning how to tolerate more. It is deciding what deserves to come with you. For the woman who holds everything together I wrote this book for the woman people rely on. The woman who remembers. The woman who anticipates. The woman who manages. The woman who keeps showing up. The woman who may have become so good at asking, "What does everyone need from me?" that she has forgotten she is allowed to ask another question. "What do I need?" You do not need to abandon the people you love. You do not need to stop being ambitious. You do not need to become a completely different woman. Maybe you simply need to become someone you include in your own life. That is what Return to North is ultimately about. Not becoming perfectly calm. Not eliminating stress. Not living in North forever. It is about learning to notice sooner. To listen with curiosity instead of criticism. To recognize what you need. To take one steady step. To trust yourself enough to change direction when something no longer fits. Because North is not the moment life becomes easy. It is the moment you can hear yourself inside it. Wherever you are today, you can begin there. You can always find your way back. Follow me on Instagram and visit my website for more info! Read more from Amanda L. Neiley Amanda L. Neiley, Founder of StillGrounded Labs & Creator of Return to North™ framework Amanda Neiley is the founder of StillGrounded Labs and creator of the Return to North™ framework. Drawing on more than two decades in education and leadership, along with her own experience of endurance training, burnout, recovery, and caregiving, she helps high-capacity women recognize what they need before stress becomes depletion. Her work focuses on self-trust, sustainable leadership, boundaries, and practical tools that help women care for themselves without stepping away from the lives and ambitions that matter to them.

Stacey Chillemi is the founder and CEO of Advisor Global Media, a 20-time bestselling author, and the award-winning host of The Advisor with Stacey Chillemi, a health and wellness podcast ranked in the top 0.1% worldwide. Living with epilepsy since childhood, she turned the setback of losing a job after a seizure at work into a mission, testifying before Congress and building a 25-year media career that began at NBC. In this interview, Stacey shares what hundreds of physicians and wellness experts have taught her, why high achievers so often sacrifice their health without realizing it, and the practical habits that help driven people protect their energy while building ambitious lives. Stacey Chillemi, Media Founder & Award-Winning Podcaster How has living with epilepsy shaped the way you think about health, ambition, and resilience today? I was a child when I learned that my body could change the course of my day without warning. One moment everything was fine. The next, it wasn't. That kind of uncertainty changes you. It teaches you to listen to your body long before most people think they need to. For years, I carried a quiet fear that people would see my diagnosis before they saw me. So I worked harder. I pushed past exhaustion. I tried to prove, over and over, that I was capable. What I didn't realize was that I was building my ambition on a foundation of fear. Eventually, I had to face a truth that changed everything. My health was never the obstacle to my dreams. It was the ground they stood on. Resilience isn't pretending you're fine. It's being honest about the hand you were dealt and choosing to play it anyway. "It's not the cards you were dealt, it's how you play the hand." Epilepsy was my hand. Learning to play it with honesty instead of fear made all the difference. What did your early years at NBC News teach you about communicating health information in a way people can trust and use? I started at NBC behind the scenes, working alongside the producers who put together the Today Show, Dateline, and News 4 New York. Being in that environment taught me lessons I still use every single day. The first was clarity. Television doesn't give you time to be vague. If a viewer doesn't understand a health story in the first few seconds, you've lost them. I learned to take complicated information and ask, "What does this mean for the person watching at home?" The second was accuracy. I watched how carefully the teams checked facts, verified sources, and pushed back when something didn't add up. Trust takes years to build and seconds to lose. The third was humanity. The stories that stayed with people weren't the ones packed with statistics. They were the ones with a real person at the center. That's why, on my podcast and in my writing, I always connect the science to someone's lived experience. People don't act on information. They act on information they believe applies to them. After 25 years in media, what separates a genuinely credible health voice from someone who simply has a large platform? A large platform tells you someone is good at getting attention. It doesn't tell you whether they deserve your trust. The most credible health voices I know share a few qualities. First, they're honest about what they don't know. Real experts say, "The research isn't settled yet," or, "That depends on the person." Be cautious of anyone who has a confident answer for everything and a product for every problem. Second, they point you to sources. A credible voice is happy to show you the study, the guideline, or the physician behind the claim. They want you to verify, not just follow. Third, their message stays consistent over time. Trends come and go, but the fundamentals of health, like sleep, movement, nutrition, stress, and connection, rarely change. Someone who reinvents their advice every few months to chase the algorithm is building a brand, not helping you. Finally, credible voices care more about your outcome than your attention. After 25 years in media, that's the quality I trust most. What have leading physicians and wellness experts on The Advisor changed your mind about when it comes to high performance and wellbeing? The biggest shift has been how I think about rest. Like a lot of high achievers, I used to see rest as something you earn after the work is done. Conversation after conversation with physicians, sleep specialists, and wellness experts changed that completely. Rest isn't a reward. It's part of the work. Your brain consolidates memory, regulates emotion, and recovers during sleep, and almost every expert I've interviewed has said the same thing in different words. You cannot perform at your best on a body that never gets to recover. I've also changed my mind about intensity. I used to believe that dramatic changes created dramatic results. The experts kept bringing me back to something less exciting but far more powerful. Consistency. Small habits practiced daily outperform extreme routines that last two weeks. Finally, they taught me that stress isn't just a feeling. It shows up in your sleep, your digestion, your hormones, and your decision-making. Managing stress isn't soft. It's strategic. Where do you think high achievers most often misunderstand the relationship between productivity and health? The most common misunderstanding is believing that productivity and health are a trade-off, that to get more done, something has to give, and health is usually the first thing to go. High achievers are very good at borrowing from tomorrow to pay for today. They skip sleep to finish a project, skip meals to get through meetings, and push through exhaustion because they believe they'll make it up later. The problem is that "later" rarely comes, and the debt keeps growing. What the research and the experts I interview consistently show is that health is what makes sustained productivity possible. A well-rested brain makes better decisions, focuses longer, and handles stress more effectively. An exhausted one makes more mistakes, takes longer to recover from setbacks, and loses creativity first. The real question isn't, "How much can I get done today?" It's, "How much can I keep doing for the next ten years?" When you start measuring success over the long term, protecting your health stops looking like a luxury and starts looking like the smartest business decision you can make. What early signs tell a driven professional that ambition is starting to come at the expense of their wellbeing? The early signs are usually quiet, which is exactly why driven people miss them. One of the first is sleep. You're exhausted, but you can't fall asleep, or you wake up at 3 a.m. with your mind already running through your to-do list. Another is irritability. Small things that never bothered you start to feel overwhelming. You snap at people you love or feel impatient with your team. A third is losing joy in the work itself. The goals that used to excite you start to feel like obligations. You're still achieving, but you're no longer enjoying any of it. Then there are the physical signals: frequent headaches, getting sick more often, digestive issues, relying on caffeine to start the day, and something else to wind down at night. My advice is to treat these signs the way you would treat a warning light on your car's dashboard. They aren't a sign of weakness. They're information. The sooner you listen, the easier it is to course-correct, and if symptoms persist, it's always worth talking with your doctor. What are a few practical habits entrepreneurs can use to protect their energy and health without losing momentum in their business? The habits that work best are the ones simple enough to keep doing on your busiest days. Protect your sleep window. Choose a consistent bedtime and wake time, and treat them like an important meeting. Consistency matters as much as the number of hours. Start your day before you start your inbox. Even ten minutes of movement, sunlight, or quiet before you check email sets the tone for the whole day. Schedule recovery, not just work. Put short breaks on your calendar between calls. A five-minute walk or a few slow breaths can reset your focus far better than another cup of coffee. Eat for energy, not just convenience. Keep simple, protein-rich options on hand, so you're not running on sugar and caffeine by mid-afternoon. Finally, have a hard stop. Decide when your workday ends and honor it most days. Momentum in business doesn't come from working every hour. It comes from showing up clear-headed and consistent, day after day, for years. How has turning your experience with epilepsy into advocacy changed your definition of strength? For most of my life, I thought strength meant no one could see you struggle. So I hid. I hid the diagnosis. I hid the hard days. I smiled through the fear that something might happen at the worst possible moment. Then it did. I had a seizure at work, and I lost my job. That loss hit me hard. It wasn't just a job. It felt like proof of everything I had been afraid of. I had two choices: keep hiding, or tell the truth and use it to help someone else. I chose the truth. That path eventually led me to testify before Congress, sharing my story out loud in a room where decisions are made that affect millions of lives. That's when my definition of strength changed. Strength isn't the absence of struggle. It's the courage to be seen in it. Every time I share my story, someone reaches out and says, "Me too." In that moment, neither of us is alone anymore. What is the one health principle you hope ambitious readers carry with them as they build the next stage of their careers? Your health is not something you'll get to after you succeed. It's what makes success possible. I know how easy it is to put yourself last. To promise you'll rest after the launch, after the deadline, after the next big goal. I told myself that story for years. But your body always tells the truth, and eventually, it insists that you listen. So here is what I hope you carry with you. You don't have to earn the right to take care of yourself. You are not less ambitious because you rest. You are not weaker because you need support. Protecting your health isn't stepping back from your dreams. It's how you make sure you're still standing when they come true. Protect your sleep. Listen to the quiet warning signs. Build small habits you can keep for years. If you'd like more practical, expert-backed strategies, I'd love for you to listen to The Advisor with Stacey Chillemi, follow my health column here on Brainz Magazine, and visit here to learn more about my work. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Stacey Chillemi