Dubai, United Arab Emirates – August 4, 2026 – Forsa Talent Hub, a new UAE-based venture focused on graduate readiness and the transition from education into professional life, has launched its initial employer research phase across the UAE. Co-founded by Dr. Soha Chahine alongside a wider founding team, Forsa Talent Hub has been established to investigate a recurring gap within the regional talent continuum, the space between how individuals are prepared academically and how they are expected to think, contribute and operate once they enter the workplace. Dr. Soha Chahine is an organizational psychologist, multi-venture entrepreneur and the Founder and Managing Director of Forward Training & Consulting. She serves as Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Forsa Talent Hub, leading its strategic direction as the venture begins engaging organizations across the UAE. As the UAE continues to prioritize education, national talent, artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship and future industries, the question of how graduates transition into professional environments is becoming increasingly important. Students are largely evaluated through academic achievement. Once they enter the workplace, however, their contribution is assessed through a broader set of expectations, including judgment, accountability, communication, adaptability, initiative and professional behavior. Forsa Talent Hub has been created to examine what happens between those two environments. “A degree can open the door to an opportunity, but it does not automatically reveal how someone will operate once expectations become professional, ambiguous and consequential,” said Dr. Soha Chahine, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Forsa Talent Hub. “Before introducing another graduate-readiness framework or assuming that we already understand the problem, we need to listen to the organizations recruiting, onboarding, managing and developing emerging talent. Forsa is beginning with evidence.” Beginning with the employer perspective Forsa Talent Hub is currently engaging organizations across the UAE through an employer survey designed to understand how graduate readiness is experienced in the workplace. The research explores what employers expect graduates to demonstrate when entering professional environments, which capabilities matter most during the early stages of employment and where organizations observe differences between academic preparation and workplace expectations. It also examines how employers distinguish between academic potential and professional readiness, how graduates are currently supported during onboarding and which expectations are communicated clearly, or remain largely assumed. The initial research considers questions including: What does it mean for a graduate to be genuinely ready to contribute? Which capabilities matter most during the transition from university into work? Where do employers observe the most significant readiness gaps? Which professional behaviors influence early-career contribution? How are graduates supported as they enter organizational environments? Where do education and employment expectations align, and where do they differ? This first phase places the employer voice at the center of the research. Forsa’s future direction will be informed by evidence gathered from organizations rather than by introducing a predetermined model and asking the market to validate it. “We are not starting with a completed answer and asking organizations to fit inside it,” Dr. Soha Chahine said. “We are starting with the market. The language, direction and future work of Forsa must follow the evidence, not the other way around.” Connecting two ends of the talent continuum Dr. Soha Chahine’s decision to co-found Forsa follows more than 15 years of experience across human resources, talent management, organizational culture, behavioral science and leadership development. Through Forward Training & Consulting, she works with leaders, teams and organizations on the behavioral and organizational conditions influencing decision-making, accountability, culture, leadership and performance. Her work as an adjunct faculty/instructor at a leading university in the UAE also gives her direct insight into how students think about their future careers, interpret workplace expectations and prepare for the transition from academic life into professional environments. These two perspectives revealed a recurring disconnect. Through Forward Training & Consulting, Dr. Soha Chahine sees what organizations expect from people once responsibility becomes real. Through higher education, she sees how students understand the workplace before fully experiencing its expectations. Forsa Talent Hub emerged at the intersection of those two realities. “Organizations invest significantly in developing people after they enter the workforce, particularly when they move into management and leadership,” Dr. Soha Chahine said. “But professional capability does not suddenly begin at promotion. The graduate learning to exercise judgment today may become the manager expected to make difficult decisions tomorrow. The talent journey is one continuum, even when the systems surrounding it remain disconnected.” Forward Training & Consulting and Forsa Talent Hub are distinct ventures operating at different stages of that continuum. Forward works within organizations, supporting leadership capability, team effectiveness, behavioral change and organizational performance. Forsa enters at an earlier stage, examining how emerging talent is prepared for the professional realities it will encounter. The connection between the ventures reflects a wider belief that human capability should be understood across the full professional journey rather than addressed only when a gap becomes visible. Looking beyond academic achievement Forsa’s research explores graduate readiness beyond academic credentials and technical knowledge alone. It examines how employers experience the transition from education into professional life, including the expectations, behaviors and capabilities that influence how graduates adapt, contribute and grow within the workplace. At this stage, Forsa is not publishing a predefined readiness framework. The venture is allowing evidence gathered from organizations across the UAE to shape its language, strategic direction and future work. “Our responsibility is to listen carefully, examine what organizations are experiencing and allow the findings to reveal what genuinely matters,” Dr. Soha Chahine said. The venture does not position graduate readiness as the responsibility of one party alone. Universities prepare students through curricula and learning outcomes. Employers recruit, onboard and develop emerging professionals. Students enter the workplace with their own expectations and understanding of what professional contribution requires. Forsa views graduate readiness as a shared ecosystem conversation involving employers, educational institutions, students and the wider systems through which talent is prepared and developed. Its current employer research represents the first stage of that conversation. “The objective is not to blame universities, employers or graduates,” Dr. Soha Chahine said. “It is to make the expectations surrounding professional readiness more visible, so that the different parts of the system can respond more deliberately.” Supporting a future-ready UAE workforce Technological disruption and artificial intelligence are continuing to reshape how work is structured, how decisions are made and which capabilities remain distinctly human. While technical knowledge will remain important, organizations also require people who can adapt, communicate, exercise judgment, take responsibility and contribute effectively within increasingly complex environments. Forsa aims to support this agenda by generating evidence that can strengthen the conversation between the institutions preparing talent and the organizations receiving it. The venture is currently inviting UAE-based employers to participate in its graduate-readiness survey and contribute their experience of recruiting, onboarding, managing and developing emerging professionals. “Forsa means opportunity,” Dr. Chahine concluded. “But an opportunity becomes meaningful only when people are prepared to step into it, understand what it requires and contribute with confidence. That is the gap we are setting out to understand.” About Forsa Talent Hub Forsa Talent Hub is a UAE-based, research-led venture focused on graduate readiness and the transition between education and employment. Beginning with employer research across the UAE, Forsa examines how workplace readiness is understood and experienced across the talent continuum. Its work aims to support a more evidence-led conversation between employers, universities and emerging talent. About Dr. Soha Chahine Dr. Soha Chahine is an organizational psychologist, multi-venture entrepreneur and organizational leadership advisor with more than 15 years of experience across human resources, talent management, organizational culture and leadership development. She is the Founder and Managing Director of Forward Training & Consulting and the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Forsa Talent Hub. Dr. Soha Chahine is also a TEDx speaker, ICF Professional Certified Coach, adjunct faculty/instructor, global awards jury member and contributor to leading regional business publications. Media and partnership enquiries Contact: Raghda Ibraheem Title: Chief Communications & Media Officer Email: forsa@forsatalenthub.com Website: www.forsatalenthub.com

Written by Komninos Chatzipapas, Founder of Omicron AI Software Komninos Chatzipapas is a technology entrepreneur and software engineer focused on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. He writes about how AI is changing business, leadership, and the future of work, with an emphasis on practical, real-world applications. Imagine hiring a new employee, handing them the company card on their first morning, and telling them to use their judgment. There is no limit on the card. No purchases require approval. Nobody reviews the statements unless the balance becomes alarming. Most executives would reject that arrangement immediately. Yet businesses are beginning to give comparable authority to AI agents. An agent can call software services that charge per request, increase an advertising bid, approve a refund, purchase inventory, or send a discount to thousands of customers. Each action may look small in isolation. At machine speed, small decisions accumulate quickly. The spending limit is therefore one of the most important controls in an agentic system. It converts a broad instruction such as "improve sales" into a bounded operating mandate. The agent gains room to act, while the company defines how much exposure it will accept before a human must become involved. Autonomy creates exposure Traditional software follows paths that engineers specify in advance. An AI agent receives a goal, observes its environment, chooses tools, and decides which steps to take. That flexibility is the source of its usefulness. It also makes the final cost harder to predict. Consider an advertising agent asked to generate more qualified leads. It could raise bids, test new audiences, produce creative variations, and move budget between campaigns. If the objective rewards lead volume without accounting for lead quality or acquisition cost, the agent may satisfy the instruction while damaging the economics of the campaign. A customer service agent faces a similar problem. Refunds can improve satisfaction and close tickets quickly. If every refund counts as a successful resolution, generosity becomes the easiest route to a better support metric. The model may behave consistently with its goal even when the result is commercially absurd. This is why prompts cannot carry the full weight of financial control. Language such as "be careful" or "avoid unnecessary spending" leaves the important judgment inside a probabilistic system. A hard limit belongs in the surrounding software, where the agent cannot reinterpret or ignore it. Define the financial lane A useful spending policy starts with three numbers: the maximum value of one action, the maximum total over a period, and the amount that triggers human approval. Those numbers should reflect the workflow rather than a company-wide rule. A refund agent might issue up to $30 per customer and no more than $1,000 each day. A procurement agent might reorder a familiar item from an approved supplier but request authorization for a new vendor or any order above $500. An advertising agent might move 10 percent of a campaign budget, while a larger change waits for review. The policy should also state what counts toward the limit. Direct purchases are obvious. Paid model calls, data enrichment services, search APIs, credits, discounts, refunds, and commitments made to customers also have financial value. A narrow definition of spending creates blind spots that the agent can cross without technically breaking its budget. Time matters as well. A daily cap contains a sudden failure. A monthly cap keeps a system aligned with its business case. A cap for each customer prevents one unusual conversation from consuming the budget intended for an entire segment. Used together, these limits create a financial lane rather than a single emergency brake. Price the failure Every autonomous workflow needs a failure budget. The company should decide how many incorrect actions it can tolerate, what those actions could cost, and which mistakes require the system to stop immediately. Suppose an agent correctly resolves 98 percent of refund requests. That number sounds impressive. If the remaining 2 percent includes duplicate refunds, policy abuse, or refunds on high-value orders, accuracy alone says little about the financial risk. Ten minor mistakes may cost less than one confident mistake on the wrong account. The calculation should combine frequency and severity. Measure the value of incorrect actions, the labor required to reverse them, customer impact, and any downstream commitments. Then compare the total with the savings or revenue that the agent produces. This turns reliability into an operating question rather than a benchmark score. The NIST AI Risk Management Framework Core recommends continuous monitoring, defined human oversight, documented risk controls, and mechanisms for appeal, override, incident response, and recovery. A spending policy makes those principles concrete for agents that can create financial consequences. Watch the right metrics A budget can contain losses, but it cannot prove that the agent deserves to keep operating. The agent also needs a simple financial record showing what it spent and what the business received in return. For a sales agent, track qualified opportunities and revenue influenced alongside enrichment, messaging, and model costs. For support, compare avoided handling costs with refunds, credits, escalations, and correction work. For procurement, measure savings against ordering errors, rush shipping, excess stock, and staff review time. This extends the argument I made in AI Agents Need a P&L, Not a Prompt. An agent earns autonomy by improving a business line item. A spending limit gives that P&L a boundary and prevents a positive headline metric from hiding a negative economic result. Review should focus on trends as well as totals. A system may remain below its cap while its cost per successful outcome rises every week. That pattern can signal harder cases, degraded model behavior, poor routing, or an agent learning that an expensive tool is the easiest way to complete its task. Make limits dynamic New agents should begin with narrow permissions and low limits. As production evidence accumulates, the company can increase authority for the cases the agent handles reliably. This creates a path from supervised assistance to bounded autonomy. The limits should respond to context. A long-standing customer with verified payment data presents a different risk from a new account showing unusual behavior. An approved supplier with stable prices deserves a different threshold from an unfamiliar vendor. Confidence can inform the decision, but verified business facts should carry more weight than the model's own certainty. Limits should tighten automatically when error rates rise, data becomes stale, an integration changes, or spending accelerates unexpectedly. The safest response to uncertainty is a smaller action or an escalation. Continued operation at full authority turns a temporary problem into a larger incident. Keep humans accountable Human approval only works when responsibility is clear. Sending every difficult case to a crowded inbox creates the appearance of oversight while decisions wait or receive a careless click. Each escalation needs an owner, enough context to make a decision, and a deadline. The reviewer should see what the agent plans to do, the expected cost, the evidence it used, the relevant limit, and what happens if no decision is made. Approval should remain specific to one action instead of granting broad authority for the rest of the session. Overrides also need to become learning material. If humans repeatedly approve the same low-risk action, the limit may be too restrictive. If they repeatedly reject it, the agent may be using the wrong evidence or optimizing the wrong objective. A good approval system improves the operating policy instead of preserving permanent bureaucracy. Start with one workflow The practical starting point is one workflow with visible costs, frequent decisions, and actions that can be reversed. Map every way the agent can create expense or financial commitment. Set the single-action, time-based, and approval limits. Log every attempt, including blocked actions, and review the economics weekly during the first deployment stage. This may feel conservative compared with the promise of fully autonomous companies. In practice, boundaries make useful autonomy possible. Teams can give an agent genuine authority because they know how far that authority extends and how quickly they can intervene. AI agents will become more capable, faster, and easier to connect to the systems that move money. Those improvements increase the value of clear financial controls. Before asking what an agent can do, decide what it may spend, what result should justify that spending, and who takes responsibility when it reaches the limit. Follow me on LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Komninos Chatzipapas Komninos Chatzipapas, Founder of Omicron AI Software Komninos Chatzipapas is a technology entrepreneur, software engineer, and writer focused on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. His work sits at the intersection of technical innovation and practical business application. He writes about AI adoption, entrepreneurship, leadership, and the future of work, making complex ideas accessible to a broader audience. He is particularly interested in how new technologies reshape the way people build, work, and make decisions.

Written by Lidija Poth, Transformational Coach Lidija Poth is an AC-accredited transformational coach and founder of MyLifeCoachingHub, guiding women and leaders toward authentic living and relationship healing. With expertise in architecture, city planning, and TUDelft teaching, she facilitates transformative retreats and coaching for lasting freedom and joy. “A woman who cannot be kind to herself will eventually burn out trying to prove her worth to a world that was never designed for her.” As a transformational coach, I see this paradox every day. Many women in the 21st century have already developed strong self-compassion and lead with remarkable resilience. At the same time, far too many highly capable, caring women still find it extremely difficult to offer themselves the same kindness and understanding they so freely give to others. This is not exclusively a women’s issue. Some men struggle with self-compassion as well, but the pattern is more pronounced and consequential for women due to longstanding cultural and systemic forces. This theme surfaced clearly at the recent Women in Business MBA event at Rotterdam School of Management. Conversations about equal pay and taking space in leadership repeatedly returned to a deeper question: Why is self-compassion still so hard for so many strong women? The roots: Generational conditioning and systemic bias For generations, women worldwide have been socialised into a role of self-sacrifice. In her book "Fierce Self-Compassion," Kristin Neff describes how cultural norms have long taught women that their highest value lies in prioritising the needs of others, including partners, children, family, and community, often at the expense of their own.[1] This is not a personal failing. It is a deeply embedded social script. Research on “silencing the self” by Jack and later researchers shows that traditional gender roles encourage women to suppress their own needs, feelings, and voices to maintain harmony and avoid conflict.[2] Over time, this becomes an automatic pattern: putting others first feels virtuous, while prioritising oneself feels selfish or dangerous. These generational stigmas are reinforced by a second, equally powerful force: systemic bias. Medical research, clinical trials, workplace standards, and even many psychological models have historically been based primarily on male physiology and male experience. Women’s specific biology, including hormonal cycles, different stress responses, symptom presentation, and responses to medication, has often been treated as a variation of the male norm rather than a distinct reality. Samira Rafaela addresses this directly in her book "Let’s Talk About Our Bodies."[3] When external systems do not fully recognise or support the female body and female experience, it becomes harder for women to trust and care for themselves internally. The message, spoken or unspoken, is that their needs are secondary. Together, these old perspectives create a powerful chain of cause and effect: cultural expectations of self-sacrifice and systemic invisibility of female physiology lead to internalised self-criticism and guilt, which in turn contribute to lower self-compassion. The impact of old behaviours and stigmas on self-compassion A meta-analysis by Yarnell and colleagues found that men report slightly higher levels of self-compassion than women, with a small effect size of d = 0.18.[4] Later research by Yarnell and colleagues showed that gender role orientation, or how strongly someone identifies with traditionally masculine or feminine traits, explains more of this difference than biological sex alone.[5] In other words, socialisation plays a stronger role than biology. What does this look like in practice? When a woman has been trained to put others first, she often develops a harsh inner critic to stay “good” and productive. Self-criticism activates the same threat system in the brain as an external attack. The amygdala, the brain’s alarm centre, becomes more reactive, while the prefrontal cortex, responsible for emotional regulation, perspective, and wise decision making, is partially taken offline.[6] Chronic self-criticism keeps the body in a low-grade stress state, raises cortisol, and, over time, can contribute to burnout, anxiety, depression, and perfectionism.[7] The short-term cost is exhaustion, difficulty setting boundaries, and guilt when resting. The long-term cost is depleted resilience, reduced leadership presence, and a quiet erosion of joy. Old stigmas do not just shape behaviour. They shape the nervous system itself. Kristin Neff’s framework: Three pillars that counter old patterns Kristin Neff, a pioneer in self-compassion research, offers a clear and practical framework consisting of three interconnected elements.[1] Understanding these helps us see exactly where the gap lies for many women. Self-kindness versus self-judgment: Instead of being harshly critical when we fail or struggle, we treat ourselves with warmth and understanding. Many women have internalised the belief that self-criticism is necessary to stay motivated. In reality, self-kindness creates safety and supports sustainable growth. Common humanity versus isolation: This involves recognising that suffering and imperfection are part of the shared human experience rather than feeling alone in our struggles. Women often feel they must hide their difficulties to appear strong, which increases isolation and shame. Mindfulness versus over-identification: This means holding our painful emotions in balanced awareness without being overwhelmed by or denying them. Many women tend to ruminate on or suppress emotions, making it harder to respond with compassion. These three pillars directly challenge the old scripts of self-sacrifice and silence. They replace isolation with connection, judgment with kindness, and emotional overwhelm with presence. Small but transformative steps: Why they work Women in the 21st century are stronger, more aware, and more resilient than previous generations. The key is not to fight old patterns, but to approach them consciously and replace them with new ones supported by neuroscience and coaching practice. Pause on purpose, with 60 to 90 seconds of conscious breathing several times a day: This simple act activates the parasympathetic nervous system via the vagus nerve, as described within Polyvagal Theory.[8] It can help reduce physiological stress and create a small window of choice between stimulus and reaction. Regular pausing supports nervous system regulation and can make self-kindness easier to practise.[7] Speak to yourself with kindness: When the inner critic appears, ask: “Would I speak to a dear friend this way?” Brené Brown’s work on shame and vulnerability highlights the relationship between self-kindness, courage, and connection.[9] Research on emotional regulation and self-referential processing also suggests that kinder internal responses may help reduce habitual threat-based reactions over time.[6] Honour your body’s unique signals: Instead of pushing through fatigue, hormonal shifts, or emotional cues, pause and ask: “What do I need right now?” This practice builds interoceptive awareness, the ability to sense internal body signals, which research links to emotional awareness and regulation.[10, 11] It also directly counters the male default bias in health standards by teaching you to trust your own physiology. Permit yourself without guilt: Give yourself permission to take space, rest, or say no. This step challenges the generational stigma that self-care is selfish. Research on self-compassion has associated the practice with greater emotional resilience and life satisfaction, as well as lower levels of self-criticism and perfectionism.[12] Permission is not indulgence. It is the foundation of long-term capacity. These steps are small, but when repeated consistently, they can create meaningful change through neuroplasticity. Over time, repeated patterns of thought, emotion, and behaviour can strengthen pathways associated with greater safety, kindness, and self-trust. A new story is possible: The resilience of women Women have always been incredibly resilient. Across generations, we have adapted, endured, carried communities, and kept systems running, often at great personal cost. Today, we stand at a decisive turning point. We no longer need to accept the old perspectives that kept us small on the inside. By consciously practising self-compassion through self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness, we activate our innate resilience and create something new: a generation of women who lead from wholeness rather than self-sacrifice. This is not only personal healing. It is a quiet revolution. When women choose self-compassion, they model a different kind of leadership: powerful yet kind, ambitious yet sustainable, strong yet deeply human. They break cycles for themselves, for their daughters, for their teams, and for the organisations they serve. The gap is real, but so is our extraordinary capacity and our responsibility to close it. The future of leadership is not only more diverse. It is more compassionate, and it begins with how we treat ourselves. Footage made by Michelle Muus Fotografie at Suitehotel Pincoffs, made possible by the PUT-IT-ON platform. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Lidija Poth Lidija Poth, Transformational Coach Lidija Poth is a certified transformational coach (OTHM, level 7) accredited by the AC (UK), founder of MyLifeCoachingHub. With two decades shaping urban environments as an architect, city planner, and educator/mentor at TUDelft, she now channels that strategic insight into empowering individuals, executives, high-intelligence professionals, and those recovering from toxic dynamics. Her co-creative approach builds deep trust to unlock personal freedom, authentic leadership, and joy. Through 1:1 coaching, programs, and immersive retreats in Bali and Croatia, she guides clients to reconnect with their true selves and thrive sustainably. Her mission is to ensure no one is left behind in their journey to becoming their best, most aligned version. References: [1] Neff, Kristin. Fierce Self-Compassion. [2] Jack, D. C. (1991). Research on “silencing the self” and women’s suppression of needs, feelings, and voices. [3] Rafaela, Samira. Let’s Talk About Our Bodies. [4] Yarnell, L. M., et al. (2015). Meta-analysis examining gender differences in self-compassion. [5] Yarnell, L. M., et al. (2018). Research examining gender role orientation and self-compassion. [6] Davidson, R. J., & McEwen, B. S. (2012). Research relating stress, brain function, emotional regulation, and neuroplasticity. [7] Neff, K. D., & Germer, C. K. (2013). Research on self-compassion training and psychological well-being. [8] Porges, S. W. Research and theory relating to Polyvagal Theory and autonomic nervous system regulation. [9] Brown, Brené. (2018). Work relating to shame, vulnerability, courage, and connection. [10] Van der Kolk, B. (2014). Research and work relating to body awareness, trauma, and nervous system regulation. [11] Farb, N. A. S., et al. Research on interoception and emotional awareness. [12] Neff, K. D. (2011). Research and work on self-compassion, emotional resilience, wellbeing, and self-criticism.

Ebony McNeil is a leader, therapist, and founder of The Forge of Reading, an organization dedicated to helping men develop their identity, character, and purpose from the inside out. Through years of leadership experience, mental health work, and personal reflection, Ebony has explored the connection between identity, emotional intelligence, accountability, and the way men show up in their homes, workplaces, and communities. In this interview, Ebony shares the personal experiences and observations that led to the creation of The Forge, why identity must come before achievement, and why many men struggle to find spaces where they can be transparent, challenged, and supported. He discusses the importance of brotherhood, emotional growth, and redefining what healthy manhood looks like in today's society. Through his work, Ebony challenges men to look beyond expectations placed on them, understand who they truly are, and become intentional leaders who positively impact the people and communities around them. Ebony McNeil, Men's Mental Health Enthusiast, Life Coach and Non-Profit Leader What inspired you to create The Forge, and what need did you feel wasn't being met for men? During the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), I realized how much we were missing genuine human connection. I was fortunate to spend that time with my wife and family, but I also recognized how much I missed the exchange of wisdom, perspective, and accountability that comes from being around other men. It made me realize that this wasn't just a COVID-19 issue – it was something many men were already experiencing every day. Men need other men to help carry life's pressures. Too often, we avoid placing those burdens on our wives and children because we don't want to appear vulnerable or add to their stress. As I looked around our community, I saw countless organizations dedicated to supporting women and children, yet very few spaces intentionally created for men. Outside of church, there were almost no places where men could gather, grow, be challenged, or simply have honest conversations. Unless a man was fortunate enough to have a mentor, he was often left to navigate life's pressures and insecurities alone. That realization became the foundation for why I started The Forge. You've worked across corporate leadership, operations, and therapy-related environments; what lessons have shaped the way you approach men's mental health today? My journey through leadership and, especially, my work as a therapist gave me the opportunity to better understand the psyche of men. I realized that many men carry expectations and burdens they never asked for. Society places a unique weight on men, and while that isn't a complaint, it is a reality that often goes unrecognized. We spend a lot of time talking about communication and leadership skills, but we rarely talk about emotional intelligence or being secure in who you are. Throughout my leadership roles, I often had to put the needs of my organization and my team before my own. Those experiences, combined with working with clients, showed me that many men were struggling with the same internal battles. That became my mission: helping men become better versions of themselves so they can lead well at home, in their churches, in their workplaces, and throughout their communities. I believe effective leadership begins with identity. Until a man understands who he is, addresses his struggles, and develops emotional intelligence, he cannot fully become the leader he was created to be. You often talk about identity before achievement. Why do you believe that order matters? I believe identity comes before achievement for one simple reason: achievement without identity can lead you to succeed at things that were never meant for you. A person can earn awards, build a career, and accomplish great things, yet still feel unfulfilled because they were chasing someone else's definition of success instead of their own purpose. When someone understands their true identity, they begin to move with intention. They know what aligns with their values, what direction they should pursue, and how their decisions will impact those around them. Identity becomes the filter through which every opportunity and every challenge is evaluated. When we're not secure in who we are, we often make decisions based on applause, status, or expectations rather than purpose. Those choices may earn recognition, but they don't always bring fulfillment. That's why so many people experience a midlife crisis or emotional burnout – they realize they've achieved everything they thought they wanted, yet still feel empty inside. At The Forge, we believe identity must come first. When identity is established, achievement becomes meaningful because it's rooted in purpose, not just performance. Conversations around men's mental health have become more visible in recent years. Where do you think the conversation is moving in the right direction, and where is more work still needed? The conversation around men's mental health is definitely moving in the right direction, but I'd like to see a greater focus on how it impacts our young men. Many of the unhealthy beliefs and behaviors we see in adult men didn't start in adulthood – they were learned early and passed down from generation to generation. I believe we need to invest more intentionally in men over 35 by creating spaces where they can be transparent, heal, and break cycles they've been taught to carry their entire lives. At the same time, we must invest just as heavily in young men, especially those between 15 and 25, by giving them a healthier definition of manhood. Right now, too many young men are influenced by the manosphere and messages that reduce masculinity to status, money, or dominance. We need to flood the culture with a different image – one that celebrates character, integrity, emotional intelligence, accountability, and purpose. When young men consistently see examples of honorable men leading their families, serving their communities, and living with integrity, those become the role models they aspire to become. You describe brotherhood and accountability as essential to growth. Why are those elements often missing from men's lives today? True brotherhood, the kind of fellowship we cultivate at The Forge, naturally creates accountability. Unfortunately, both are often missing because many men fear being transparent. Without transparency, you can never fully see yourself or allow others to truly see you. Without that clarity, it's difficult to make the changes necessary for real growth. That's why it's so important for men to surround themselves with other men who are committed to growing and willing to be honest about their own struggles. Many men hesitate to have those conversations with their wives or children because they feel the pressure to maintain the image that they always have everything together. True brotherhood creates a space where the mask can come off. It's a place where men can openly discuss their fears, pressures, failures, and victories without judgment. More importantly, it's a place where they are loved enough to be held accountable. Accountability isn't about criticism; it's about care. Without it, we naturally drift back into the same habits and patterns that held us back in the first place. Growth happens when transparency, brotherhood, and accountability work together. For a man who wants to become a stronger leader at home, what's one habit you believe makes the biggest difference? A man who wants to lead well at home must first master his own identity and understand his value. Leadership begins with knowing who you are because that shapes how you respond to your family, your responsibilities, and life's challenges. He must be willing to communicate openly, take ownership of his decisions, and have the humility to apologize when he's wrong. Too often, people view apologizing as weakness, but I believe it's one of the greatest demonstrations of strength and maturity. A strong leader leads through discipline, consistency, and example, not pride. He must also learn to communicate when he feels hurt, disrespected, frustrated, or overwhelmed. Too many men suppress those emotions until they eventually explode, causing unnecessary damage to the people they love or leading to impulsive decisions they later regret. Healthy leadership at home isn't about being perfect – it's about being present, accountable, emotionally aware, and intentional. When a man is secure in his identity and communicates with honesty and humility, he creates a home built on trust, stability, and respect. When someone struggles to be vulnerable because they see it as weakness, where is a healthy place for them to begin? There may not be one specific place every man can turn, but I believe every man needs at least one trusted friend or a genuine men's group. Those environments create the openness, accountability, and support that many men have been missing for years. One of the biggest lessons I've learned through building The Forge is that far more men struggle with insecurities, fear, and vulnerability than most people realize. The difference is that many of them have simply never been given permission, or a safe place, to talk about it. When men feel isolated, they often carry those burdens alone until they make decisions that create even greater consequences. Sometimes all a man needs is someone willing to listen, challenge his thinking, and offer a different perspective before he makes a life-changing mistake. That's why building authentic communities of men is so important. When men know they are not alone and have people who will both support them and hold them accountable, they are far more likely to heal, grow, and become the leaders their families and communities need them to be. How has being a husband and father of four boys influenced your definition of strength and leadership? Leading my home as a husband and father has taught me several lessons that have shaped both my life and The Forge. First, it taught me that my actions affect far more than just myself. My sons are watching everything I do, and they will imitate my actions long before they imitate my words. That's why, when I make a mistake or overreact, I apologize to them. I want them to understand that apologizing isn't weakness, it's strength. It also teaches them to extend grace to others by first seeing it modeled in their own father. Second, leadership has taught me the importance of sacrifice. There are days when I'm tired or mentally drained, but showing up for the people you love isn't optional. A husband and father must be willing to put the needs of his family ahead of his own comfort. Finally, raising four boys has taught me the importance of allowing each person to grow into their own identity. As parents, we often have ideas about who our children should become, but our role is to nurture who they were created to be. That lesson has also shaped how I mentor men – helping them discover their identity instead of trying to become someone else's version of success. If every man walked away with one lesson from your work, what would you hope it would be? My hope is that every man discovers and grows into his true identity. I want every man to understand that becoming the best version of himself isn't something he has to do alone. It requires brotherhood, transparency, accountability, and the confidence to remain true to who he is, even when that means standing apart from the crowd. I also want men to know that they are not alone. So many men believe they have to carry life's pressures in silence, but healing and growth begin the moment they allow others to walk alongside them. Once a man is secure in his identity, everything else begins to change. He becomes a better husband, father, friend, employee, leader, and member of his community because his decisions are no longer driven by approval; they're driven by purpose. That's the vision behind The Forge: helping men discover who they were created to be and surrounding them with a brotherhood that will encourage them, challenge them, and walk beside them as they become the men they were always meant to be. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Ebony McNeil

Written by Madi Wend, Therapist, Author & Podcast Host Madi Wend is a therapist, published author, and the founder and host of Play Therapy Network®. She is known for her children’s and adult social-emotional mental health books and her advocacy for holistic health and wellness. Parenting has never been about perfection. Yet today’s world often convinces us that we should have all the answers, respond flawlessly, and raise children who never struggle. Social media showcases curated moments of family life while quietly hiding the tears, uncertainty, and countless second guesses that every parent experiences. The truth is that children do not need perfect parents. They need present ones. Parenting with purpose begins when we shift our focus away from controlling every outcome and instead become intentional about the kind of relationship we are building. Our goal is not simply to raise successful adults. Our goal is to raise compassionate, resilient, emotionally healthy human beings who know they are deeply loved. Purpose begins with connection Children remember how they felt far longer than they remember what was said. The bedtime stories, quiet conversations in the car, shared laughter over dinner, and comforting hugs after disappointment become the emotional foundation that carries them into adulthood. These ordinary moments often become the extraordinary memories that shape their confidence and security. Ask yourself, “Am I strengthening my relationship with my child?” When connection comes first, correction becomes easier. Children are more likely to listen when they feel understood rather than judged. Meaning is found in everyday moments Many parents worry about providing the perfect vacations, expensive activities, or elaborate celebrations. While those experiences can certainly create wonderful memories, children often treasure the smallest moments the most. A walk through the neighborhood, baking cookies together, watching a thunderstorm from the porch, or reading one more chapter before bed can become deeply meaningful experiences. These seemingly ordinary moments communicate something profound: “You matter enough for me to spend time with you.” Meaning is rarely created through grand gestures. It is built through consistent presence. The power of patience Patience is not simply waiting quietly. Patience is choosing understanding before reacting. Children are learning emotional regulation while simultaneously experiencing emotions that often feel overwhelming. Their developing brains are still learning impulse control, problem-solving, and communication. When we respond with patience instead of frustration, we become their emotional model. Healthy boundaries help children feel safe, and discipline is most effective when it teaches rather than punishes. Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with my child?” ask, “What is my child trying to communicate?” That simple shift changes everything. Mistakes are part of parenting Every parent loses patience. Every parent says something they wish they could take back. Every parent experiences moments of exhaustion. Purposeful parenting is not about avoiding mistakes. It is about modeling accountability. One of the most powerful lessons a parent can teach is found in two simple words: “I’m sorry.” Perfection creates pressure. Repair creates trust. Raising emotionally healthy children Children flourish when they know they are accepted, even while being guided toward better choices. Purposeful parenting nurtures emotional awareness, empathy, gratitude, problem-solving, responsibility, kindness, and confidence. These qualities develop over years of patient guidance, not overnight. The goal is not obedience alone. The goal is wisdom. Presence over performance Our culture often celebrates busy schedules and constant achievement. Yet children rarely measure love by accomplishments. They measure it by availability. They remember whether we looked up from our phones, listened without interrupting, celebrated their victories, and comforted their disappointments. Presence cannot always be measured, but its impact lasts a lifetime. A final thought Parenting with purpose means recognizing that every interaction is shaping not only a child’s behavior but also their view of themselves and the world around them. Meaning grows through connection, patience builds trust, and love provides the foundation upon which resilience is built. Years from now, your child may not remember every rule you enforced or every lesson you taught. But they will remember how safe they felt in your presence, how valued they were in your eyes, and how deeply they were loved. That is the lasting legacy of parenting with purpose. Visit my website for more info! Read more from Madi Wend Madi Wend, Therapist, Author & Podcast Host Madi Wend is a therapist, published author, and the founder and host of Play Therapy Network®. She is recognized for her children’s and adult social-emotional mental health books and her advocacy for holistic health and wellness. Drawing from both clinical practice and real-world experience, her writing emphasizes emotional connection, literacy, and mental well-being across all stages of life.

Written by Dina Baki, Designer and Co-founder of KYŪ Dina Baki is the co-founder of KYŪ, a design-led brand she built alongside her partner Rasha, translating cosmic inspiration into handcrafted objects. Her work explores the relationship between the universe, form, and material, redefining modern luxury through conscious design. Every KYŪ bag is born with its own celestial card. A KYŪ piece is not manufactured. It is born into existence. At the precise moment a bag crosses the threshold from the Sixth Plane into the physical world, the day, the hour, and the atmospheric conditions of its becoming, that moment is recorded. Not as a serial number. Not as a production code. As a celestial chart. Each celestial card documents the exact cosmological coordinates of a bag’s birth: the position of planetary bodies at the moment this specific object entered existence. It is the map of a moment that will never occur again. Two bags may share the same silhouette, the same material, the same hand. Yet their births are different. Their charts are different. Their identities are different. Luxury has traditionally defined rarity through material: the scarcity of the leather, the weight of the hardware, the count of the stitches. KYŪ defines rarity through time, through the irreversibility of the moment something became. The celestial card is not packaging, decoration, or an insert. It is the permanent record of a singular event, the exact moment this piece, and no other, came into existence. It belongs to the bag the way a birth chart belongs to a person. Permanently. Irreversibly. Only once. Time is the rarest material we use. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Dina Baki Dina Baki, Designer and Co-founder of KYŪ Dina Baki is a designer and co-founder of KYŪ, a contemporary brand developed in partnership with Rasha Abdallah. Her work is driven by an interest in how abstract forces, such as energy, structure, and alignment, can take physical form through objects. Working closely with local craftsmanship and available materials, she approaches design as a process of discovery rather than production. Through both her creations and writing, she explores new ways of understanding luxury, less as status, and more as intention made visible.

Written by Veronica Powell, PhD, LPC, PC, Founder and CEO Veronica Powell, PhD, LPC, is a Licensed Clinician, Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, and Communication Coach. As the Founder and CEO of Measures4Success Academy, she empowers individuals, leaders, and organizations to master communication through Kendall’s Life Languages™ Framework, also known as Communication Intelligence (CIQ). You did the right thing again. You told the truth when a lie would have been easier. You honored the agreement when the other side quietly broke theirs. You gave your best work, your honest word, and your steady presence, and you watched someone with none of it walk away with the reward you thought integrity was supposed to earn. So, a question shows up, usually late at night: “What is the point?” It is an honest question. Anyone who has tried to live with integrity in a world that does not seem to require it has asked a version of it. We look around and see greed rewarded, corruption normalized, and decency treated like a strategy for people who have not figured out the game yet. The evidence for cynicism is everywhere, and it is convincing. If good does not pay and evil does not cost, then holding the line starts to feel less like character and more like naivety. I hear this same question in my work, though it wears different clothes. Someone sitting across from me is learning to communicate with more clarity, patience, and respect. They are doing the harder, better thing, and the person on the other end of their effort will not budge. There is no change in tone, no reflection, and no attempt to meet them halfway. So, they ask me the same thing, worn down and honest: “What is the point of communicating well when the other person never will?” Here is what I have come to believe, and it is not the comfortable answer. The point was never the return. The math that breaks us We were taught, somewhere along the way, that good is an investment. “Do the right thing, and it comes back to you.” Remember the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” “Give your best, and you will be recognized for it.” It is a comforting equation, and it is wrong often enough to break your heart. The trouble is that we built our reason for doing good on a return that was never promised. So, when the return does not come, when the honest person is passed over and the manipulator is promoted, the whole structure shatters. If good was an investment and the investment failed, the logical move is to stop investing. That is where the cynicism comes from. Not from bad people, but from good people who ran the numbers and concluded that integrity is a losing position. There is a name for the reckoning at the end of that calculation. The psychologist Erik Erikson placed it at the final stage of human development, “integrity versus despair,” the point at which a person looks back and judges whether their life was worth living or was wasted. Integrity is the quiet acceptance that “it mattered.” Despair is the bitterness of deciding that “it did not.” Erikson saw this as something that rises from within, late and slowly, as a life nears its close. What many people feel now is different. It is despair produced on purpose and delivered early. Call it “engineered despair.” Psychologists have a name for the mechanism beneath it. Learned helplessness sets in when people face aversive conditions that seem beyond their control, teaching them to stop trying even when action is still possible. Maier and Seligman (2016) found that this passivity is not really learned at all. It is the default response to prolonged, uncontrollable hardship, and it is broken only when a person detects that control is possible. Engineered despair weaponizes that default.[1] When wrongdoing is displayed rather than hidden, done in plain view while little seems able to stop it, a message travels beneath the act: Your integrity is naïve, your effort is pointless, and your voice is a small cog in a machine too large to move. The despair is not a side effect. It is the product. A person who believes that their good does not matter stops doing good. They stop speaking, showing up, and eventually, they stop trying altogether. Disengagement is the aim, and despair is the means. This is why the question carries more weight than it appears to. When you ask, “What is the point?” you may not be voicing a private doubt. You may be arriving at the exact conclusion someone else worked to produce in you. I watch this same calculation happen in communication, and it is where my work lives. Someone comes to me worn thin by a relationship that will not improve. A colleague who twists every conversation. A leader who hears nothing. A family member who meets every honest word with defensiveness. They have learned to listen better, speak with more care, and seek first to understand before demanding to be understood. None of it is landing. So, they reach the same conclusion the cynic reaches: Why keep extending clarity to someone who only returns fog? Here is what I tell them, and it is the same thing I would say about doing good in a corrupt and greedy world. You are measuring the wrong thing. When you communicate with respect and the other person does not, you have not failed. You have revealed something. Communication Intelligence teaches that how a person responds tells you who they are, not who you are. Whether they are a Responder who feels dismissed, a Shaper who needs to control the frame, or a Contemplator who retreats into silence, each person is showing you their pattern, fear, and unmet need. Your job was never to force them to meet you. Your job was to stay clear and respectful and refuse to let their pattern rewrite yours. The moment you match their fog with your own, they have not won. You have simply stopped being who you were. That is the answer to “What is the point?” The point of communicating well was never that the other person would communicate well in return. The point was that you remained someone worth communicating with. The same act of doing good, held two ways. One breaks under a world that does not repay it. The other does not need repaying. What holding the line actually looks like None of this means much until it meets a Tuesday. The reframe is easy to nod at and hard to live, so it helps to name what it looks like in practice when you are tired and the other person is still not meeting you. Separate your conduct from their response. This is the discipline on which the whole piece rests. You decide how you will show up before you know how they will react, and you do not renegotiate it based on what they do. A leader I worked with kept getting interrupted and overridden in meetings by a peer who wanted the floor. Her instinct was to go quiet and stop offering ideas because they kept getting steamrolled. “What is the point?” Instead, we worked on a fixed standard she set for herself. She would state her point once, clearly and respectfully, and she would not escalate to match his volume. In some meetings, he still ran over her. But her contributions stopped depending on his behavior, and within a few months, the room had noticed which of the two was steady and which was loud. She did not win by changing him. She won by not letting him change her. Name the pattern without absorbing it. When someone meets your good with bad, the temptation is to make it mean something about you. You gave honesty and received manipulation, so you start to wonder whether you were foolish to be honest. Communication Intelligence offers a cleaner interpretation. The other person is running a pattern that predates you and will outlast you. The manipulator manipulated the last person, too. Seeing that clearly is not cold. It is what allows you to stay warm without being naïve and present without becoming a target. Meet people in the mode they actually receive. Doing good and communicating well both assume that the other person can take in what you are offering. The Life Languages™ Communication Indicators include a learning preference that shapes how a message lands.[2] Some people are visual and need to see it in writing, through an example, or in something they can picture. Some are auditory and need to hear it said, and they read tone as closely as words. Some are kinesthetic or physical and need to do it, move through it, and feel it before it becomes real to them. When your honest effort keeps missing, it is worth asking whether you have been speaking in a mode the other person cannot receive and then holding their silence against them. Seeking first to understand includes understanding how a person takes in the world. This is not lowering your standard. It is removing a false conclusion. The point was never that they would not listen. The truth is often that they never received it in a form they could hear. Decide what doing good costs you and pay it on purpose. Integrity is not free, and pretending that it is sets you up for resentment. Telling the truth can cost you a contract. Keeping your word when others break theirs can cost you the shortcut. The honest move is to look at the cost squarely and choose it anyway because the alternative costs more. A person who trades their character for a win will have to live with the person they became to get it. That bill comes due later, and it is larger. Let good be a statement about you, not a bet on them. This is the shift that holds when everything else wears thin. When you do the right thing, you are not wagering that the world will reward it. You are declaring who you are in a place that has forgotten. That declaration does not require an audience or a payoff to be true. It is upheld in a room where no one is watching, which is usually where it matters most. The point of doing good So, we return to the question that started this. In a land that too often rewards the greedy and shelters the corrupt, “What is the point of doing good?” The point is that character is not a strategy. It is not a move you make while expecting a countermove in return. Greed and corruption run on the belief that everything is a transaction and that every good deed is a trade waiting for its payout. The person who does good without that expectation has stepped outside the entire exchange. They cannot be bought because they were never selling. That is how you keep going. Not by convincing yourself that the world will come around, and not by waiting for the honest to finally get their due. You keep going because who you are was never up for a vote, and the moment you hand that decision to a corrupt world is the moment it finally wins. Seek first to understand. Keep your word. Tell the truth. Extend the respect no one returns. Not because it pays, but because it is who you are, and that is the one thing this land does not get to take unless you give it away. Your next step The path to better communication begins with one honest step: knowing how you are wired to connect. Start by exploring your primary language through the Free Life Languages™ Mini Profile. Take that step today, join a community devoted to the craft of communication, and help build a world where every message is not just heard but truly understood. The power to change how we communicate, and with it, our world, rests with you. Thank you, dear readers, for walking this road with me. Your support fuels a movement to cultivate effective communicators for humanity and global peace. Let us continue fostering understanding and harmony on this shared journey. Raise your Communication IQ to raise humanity, one conversation at a time. Key takeaways We were taught that good is an investment that pays us back. Yet that belief breaks the moment integrity goes unrewarded and gives birth to cynicism. The despair is logical, not weak. Good people who conclude that integrity is a losing position have simply run the math on a return that was never promised. The point of doing good was never the return. How others respond reveals who they are, not who you are. Communication Intelligence offers a cleaner perspective on conflict. When someone meets your clarity with fog, they show you their pattern rather than expose a flaw in yours. Part of communicating well is delivering your message in a mode the other person can receive. The Life Languages™ Communication Indicators point to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic preferences that shape how a message lands. Character is not a strategy. The person who does good without expecting a payout has stepped outside the transaction entirely, and that is the one thing a corrupt world cannot take unless you hand it over. Follow Dr. Powell on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and visit her website, and BlueSky handle for more insights and updates. Read more from Dr. Veronica Powell Veronica Powell, PhD, LPC, PC, Founder and CEO Veronica Powell, PhD, LPC, is a Licensed Clinician, Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, and Communication Coach. As the Founder and CEO of Measures4Success Academy, she empowers individuals, leaders, and organizations to master communication through Kendall’s Life Languages™ Framework, also known as Communication Intelligence (CIQ). Dr. Powell is a Senior Executive Contributor for Brainz Magazine and the creator of the Communication Matters Global Movement, where she teaches professionals how to build trust, empathy, and relational intelligence in every conversation. References: [1] Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2016). Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychological Review, 123(4), 349-367. [2] Kendall, F. & Kendall, A. (2019). Communication IQ: A Proven Way to Influence, Lead, and Motivate People. Life Languages™ International. New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House. [3] McLeod, S. (2026, July 22). Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development. Simply Psychology. [4] Puka, B. (n.d.). The golden rule. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [5] Nickerson, C. (2024, May 2). Learned helplessness: Seligman's theory of depression. Simply Psychology.

Written by Stoyana Natseva, Global Mentor, Bestselling Author, and Founder Prof. Dr. Stoyana Natseva is a Full Professor, psychologist, researcher, bestselling author, and founder of Happy Life Academy. She is the creator of the Direct Change Solution® (DCS) methodology and the Internal Autobiographical Map (IAM), helping individuals and organizations achieve lasting transformation through science-based education. When people hear that Happy Life Academy has been recognized by World Book of Records as Europe’s largest educational academy by number of trained students and certified specialists, they often assume this is a story about scale, marketing, or business growth. For me, it is a story about education. It is a story about what happens when a human being refuses to stop learning, and chooses to turn that learning into impact. For twenty seven years, I worked in the banking sector and held senior management positions. I had what many would call a “complete” life. A stable career, family, home, security, and professional recognition. From the outside, my life looked successful. Inside, my soul was asking for growth, meaning, and a deeper understanding of human potential. I was not looking for another title or a higher position. I was looking for depth. Books became my first teachers. Education became my path. Learning became my way of understanding not only the world, but myself. Over time, I immersed myself in psychology, leadership, human behavior, education, and transformation. Years of study eventually led to multiple doctoral qualifications, academic appointments, authorship, and international recognition. But the titles were not the most important part. The realization was. The greatest limitations in life are rarely external. They live in our thinking. In our beliefs. In the stories we keep repeating about who we are and what is possible for us. Most people spend years trying to understand the world around them. Yet many never take the time to understand themselves. You cannot truly love what you do not know. Once I truly understood this, education stopped being “more information.” It became a tool for inner change. I realized that the real power of education is not to fill the mind. It is to transform the way a person sees themselves and their future. Information alone changes very little. Applied knowledge, integrated with responsibility, changes lives. This became the foundation of everything that followed. Years ago, I created a small educational page called Happy Life Academy. There was no master plan and no ambition for records. There was a clear intention- to offer a different kind of education, one that combines psychology, personal growth, leadership, and practical tools people can apply immediately. People responded. The community grew. The programs evolved. Results began to multiply. Students started arriving from different cities, countries, professions, and ages. They were not simply looking for more content. They were searching for understanding, confidence, new skills, and new possibilities for their future. Over time, that small initiative grew into an academy with more than 100,000 participants in educational programs and thousands of certified coaches, consultants, trainers, mentors, and specialists. Many of them went on to create their own practices, businesses, educational projects, and communities. What inspires me most is not the scale. It is the multiplication. One person learns. That person helps another and influences a family. A family influences a community. Community influences society. This is how education transforms the world. Not through fear, pressure, and manipulation. The world changes when people change. A stronger individual creates a stronger family. Stronger family creates a stronger community. Stronger community creates a stronger society. Along the way, we developed original frameworks born from years of research and practice, such as Direct Change Solution (DCS) and the Internal Autobiographical Map (IAM). DCS helps people identify and transform recurring patterns and beliefs that limit their growth. IAM explores how key life experiences shape identity, behavior, decisions, and future outcomes. The purpose behind these methods is simple. To help people understand themselves more deeply and consciously shape the direction of their lives. One of the most important lessons I have learned is that personal development and business development are inseparable. Many people try to grow a business without growing themselves. That approach always hits a ceiling. A business rarely grows beyond the mindset of its leader. A person cannot create a larger future while holding on to smaller patterns of thinking. When leadership grows, organizations grow. When awareness expands, results expand. Personal transformation and professional success are not two separate paths. They are the same path. Today, Happy Life Academy organizes programs, certifications, events, conferences, retreats, and transformational experiences across different countries and online. Our educational initiatives have reached people around the world, and the wider mission, including our educational and public projects, has already touched more than one million people globally. The academy grew. Students multiplied. Methodologies evolved. Mission expanded. Yet the idea remained unchanged. Human beings are capable of far more than they realize. Everything we build begins with that belief. Because education does more than transfer knowledge. Education expands awareness. Awareness expands possibility. Possibility expands action. Action changes lives. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Stoyana Natseva Stoyana Natseva, Global Mentor, Bestselling Author, and Founder Prof. Dr. Stoyana Natseva is a Full Professor, psychologist, researcher, international educator, bestselling author, and founder of Happy Life Academy. She is the creator of the Direct Change Solution® (DCS) methodology and the Internal Autobiographical Map (IAM), and founder of the Happy Life Institute for Direct Change Science. Through her internationally accredited MBA and professional education programs, she has trained more than 100,000 students from over 50 countries. Her work has been recognized with international awards, a Guinness World Record, and multiple World Book of Records distinctions, while her research and educational initiatives continue to bridge science, leadership, and personal transformation worldwide.

Written by Michelle Scolaro, Therapist and Transformational Coach Michelle Scolaro is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Transformational Coach, and Retreat Leader with over 20 years of experience helping high-achieving women move out of burnout and into lasting personal transformation. She is the founder of Created Life Consulting, LLC, and creator of Thrive In Paradise Retreats. Self-care was supposed to help us come back to ourselves. But somewhere along the way, it became another standard to meet, another routine to perfect, and another place to wonder why we are not doing enough. For many women, the pressure to be well has started to feel suspiciously similar to the pressure that made them exhausted in the first place. When self-care becomes performance and why it stops working Self-care was never meant to become another thing to fail at. Yet for many people, especially women who are already carrying full lives, full calendars, full inboxes, full homes, and full emotional loads, self-care has quietly become one more expectation to manage. It is no longer simply about rest, nourishment, or emotional honesty. It has become something to schedule, optimize, track, purchase, post, and prove. That shift matters because once self-care becomes another performance, it stops being restorative. Instead of helping a person come back to herself, it can become another way she measures whether she is doing life correctly. The massage, the morning routine, the meditation app, the workout, the journaling practice, the green juice, and the perfectly curated Sunday reset can all become less about genuine care and more about keeping up with an image of wellness. I see this frequently with my clients. When self-care becomes another thing someone “should” be doing, it becomes an obligation. The person is no longer listening to what she actually needs. She is trying to comply with what she believes a healthy, balanced, emotionally evolved person is supposed to do. That is a very different thing. True self-care is not another standard to meet. It is not a performance of balance. It is a relationship with yourself. How self-care became another pressure point The World Health Organization defines self-care broadly as the ability of individuals, families, and communities to promote health, prevent disease, maintain health, and cope with illness or disability, with or without support from a healthcare provider. That definition is practical, grounded, and expansive. It includes real behaviors that support physical, mental, emotional, and social well-being. But popular culture has narrowed the conversation. Much of what gets marketed as self-care is surface-level: bubble baths, skin care, vacations, supplements, apps, retreats, routines, products, and aesthetically pleasing rituals. None of these things are inherently bad. A bath can be soothing. A walk can be regulating. A beautiful space can help someone exhale. The problem is not the practice itself. The problem is when the person is disconnected from the practice. Self-care becomes performance when it is guided more by image than by need. It becomes performance when the question shifts from “What would support me?” to “What should I be doing?” It becomes performance when a person feels guilty for not meditating, ashamed for not exercising, inadequate for needing rest, or behind because her life does not look like someone else’s wellness routine online. This is where self-care can quietly become self-abandonment in prettier packaging. The person may be doing all the “right” things while still ignoring her actual exhaustion, grief, anger, loneliness, resentment, or need for change. She may be performing wellness while still living in a way that is deeply misaligned. That is why self-care can look good from the outside and still fail to restore the person practicing it. Why surface-level self-care is not enough Surface-level self-care often focuses on temporary relief. It helps someone feel better for a moment, but it does not necessarily address why she is depleted in the first place. This is not a criticism of small comforts. Small comforts matter. Sometimes a quiet cup of coffee, a good meal, a walk outside, or a long shower can be exactly what helps someone get through a hard day. But temporary relief is not the same as restoration. A person can take a day off and still return to the same impossible workload. She can get a massage and still keep saying yes when she means no. She can go on vacation and still come home to a life where her needs are last on the list. She can meditate every morning and still be in relationships or work environments where she is constantly over-functioning, over-giving, and under-supported. This is why true rest is more than just taking time off. Time off gives the body a pause, but alignment gives the nervous system a place to settle. If a person is using time off only to recover enough to keep pushing her needs aside, the deeper pattern remains untouched. True rest requires asking better questions. What am I carrying that is not mine? Where am I pretending I'm fine? What part of my life requires me to keep overriding myself? Where have I confused being needed with being valued? Answering those questions is not always comfortable, but doing so moves self-care beyond maintenance and into honesty. The wellness industry and the pressure to optimize One reason self-care has become so complicated is that wellness is now a massive industry. People are constantly being told how to improve their bodies, minds, habits, homes, schedules, nervous systems, productivity, sleep, relationships, and emotional lives. Again, the desire to feel better is not the problem. The problem is that the message often becomes, “If you are still struggling, you must not be doing enough.” That message can be especially harmful for people who are already prone to perfectionism, people-pleasing, or over-functioning. Instead of experiencing self-care as support, they turn it into another arena for self-criticism. They wonder why they cannot stick to the morning routine, why they are not more consistent, why they still feel anxious after meditating, why they still feel tired after taking a weekend off, why they cannot seem to become the calm, organized, regulated person they think they are supposed to be. The irony is that self-care then becomes stressful. There is research exploring how self-tracking and wellness technologies can reinforce an ideal of the “responsible” or “productive” self. In overworking cultures, tracking sleep, steps, stress, calories, productivity, or habits can sometimes support awareness. But it can also increase pressure when people begin relating to their bodies as projects to manage rather than as living systems to listen to. This is a subtle but important distinction. Data can be useful, but it is not the same as wisdom. A sleep score can tell you something about your rest, but it cannot tell you whether you feel emotionally safe in your life. A meditation streak can show consistency, but it cannot tell you whether you are being honest about what hurts. A fitness tracker can measure movement, but it cannot tell you whether you are moving from self-respect or self-punishment. When self-care becomes optimization, the body becomes another assignment. When self-care becomes avoidance Self-care can also become a socially acceptable way to avoid deeper truth. A person may keep adding soothing practices without ever addressing the source of her depletion. She may keep trying to regulate herself enough to tolerate what is actually intolerable. She may become very skilled at calming herself down without ever asking whether she should keep living at the pace, standard, or level of emotional labor that keeps overwhelming her. This is where self-care can become a coping strategy that maintains the very life that is burning someone out. For example, a woman may schedule a weekly yoga class but never have the conversation with her partner about the unequal division of labor at home. She may take a mental health day but never acknowledge that her job has become unsustainable. She may practice gratitude because she feels guilty admitting she wants more support, more rest, more honesty, or more freedom. None of these practices are wrong. The issue is whether they are being used to reconnect with the truth or to bypass it. Self-care works when it helps us become more present to ourselves. It stops working when it helps us stay more comfortable with our own disconnection. The difference between performative self-care and restorative self-care Performative self-care is externally driven. It is shaped by comparison, image, pressure, and the need to feel like you are doing enough. It often comes with an inner voice that says, “I should be better at this.” It may look disciplined, but it does not always feel nourishing. It can become rigid, guilt-based, and disconnected from what the person actually needs. Restorative self-care is internally honest. It begins with listening. It may include ordinary practices like sleep, movement, therapy, nourishing food, boundaries, solitude, connection, spiritual practice, creativity, or rest. But the deeper quality is different. The practice is not being used to prove worth. It is being used to honor the person. Performative self-care asks, “Am I doing this right?” Restorative self-care asks, “What is true for me right now?” Performative self-care is often about appearing balanced. Restorative self-care is about becoming more aligned. This does not mean restorative self-care always feels easy. Sometimes the most caring thing a person can do is have the hard conversation, make the difficult decision, disappoint someone, ask for help, leave the room, reduce the workload, stop performing, or tell the truth. That may not look like the version of self-care that gets packaged and sold, but it may be the exact care the person’s life requires. Self-care cannot replace support Another problem with modern self-care messaging is that it can place too much responsibility on the individual. People are often told to manage their stress without enough attention to the environments creating that stress. This is especially true in workplaces, families, caregiving roles, and high-demand professions. Burnout, for example, is recognized by the World Health Organization as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. That framing matters because it reminds us that burnout is not simply the result of a person failing to take enough breaks, use enough vacation days, or download the right meditation app. Self-care matters, but it cannot compensate for chronically unsustainable conditions. A person cannot out-journal a toxic workplace. She cannot breathe her way out of constant overload without also addressing the overload. She cannot use gratitude to erase the impact of being unsupported, unseen, or emotionally overextended for years. The U.S. Surgeon General’s workplace well-being framework emphasizes protection from harm, work-life harmony, connection, mattering, and opportunities for growth. Those are not luxuries. They are conditions that support mental health. When those conditions are missing, self-care must include advocacy, setting boundaries, seeking support, and sometimes systemic change. This is where the conversation needs to mature. Self-care is important, but it should not be used to make people individually responsible for surviving unhealthy systems. What true self-care asks of us True self-care is not always glamorous. It often looks quieter than popular culture suggests. It may look like going to bed instead of proving you can push through. It may look like saying, “I cannot take that on,” without over-explaining. It may look like asking for help before you are desperate. It may look like eating lunch away from your desk, making the appointment you have been avoiding, crying instead of numbing, or admitting that something in your life no longer fits. It may also look like pleasure, beauty, joy, and play. True self-care is not meant to be grim and responsible all the time. But pleasure is different when it comes from alignment rather than escape. Rest is different when it is not being used as a quick repair before returning to self-neglect. At its deepest level, self-care is about honoring yourself. It is about living in a way that is more congruent with your needs, values, body, limits, relationships, and truth. It asks not only, “How can I recover from my life?” but also, “What kind of life am I asking myself to recover from?” That question can be uncomfortable, but it is also liberating. Because when self-care becomes performance, it keeps you focused on whether you are doing enough. When self-care becomes alignment, it brings you back to whether you are being honest. A more honest way forward The next evolution of self-care is not more products, more pressure, or more perfectly curated routines. It is a return to discernment. It is learning to ask what actually supports your well-being, not what makes you look well. It is recognizing that rest is not something you earn after exhaustion. It is a human need. It is understanding that boundaries are not selfish. They are part of emotional sustainability. If your self-care has started to feel like another obligation, that is worth paying attention to. The answer may not be to abandon the practice. The answer may be to remove the performance from it. Let it become simpler, more honest, and more responsive to your actual life. Ask yourself: What am I doing because I think I should? What am I avoiding by staying busy with self-improvement? What would care look like if no one else could see it? What would change if I stopped trying to appear balanced and started telling the truth about what I need? Self-care was never supposed to be another way to measure your worth. It was meant to help you remember it. If you are recognizing yourself in this article and want individualized support in moving from burnout, over-functioning, and performative self-care into a more honest relationship with yourself, you do not have to figure it out alone. At Created Life Consulting, I support women in rebuilding self-trust, honoring their needs without guilt, and creating lives that feel more grounded, aligned, and sustainable from the inside out. Reach out when you are ready for support that meets you where you are. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Michelle Scolaro Michelle Scolaro, Therapist and Transformational Coach Michelle Scolaro is a Therapist, Transformational Coach, and Retreat Leader with over 20 years of experience helping high-achieving women move through burnout and disconnection. Her work centers on self-care as a necessity and self-trust as the foundation for a fully expressed life. Her own experience of burnout and recovery shapes her work, deepening her commitment to helping women reconnect with themselves and create meaningful, lasting change. She blends clinical expertise with intuitive coaching to create meaningful, lasting change. Michelle is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor with a Master’s degree in Psychology. Her work has been featured in Viazara Retreats Magazine and on podcasts, including Time To Elevate.

Written by Janie Terrazas, The Mindfulness Coach Janie Terrazas is a Mindfulness Coach and creator of PazMesa, a self-mastery guide to help you access inner peace, joy, vitality, and prosperity through mindful living and unconditional loving. Few concepts have become as misunderstood and as polarizing as manifestation. Once associated with philosophy, spirituality, and human potential, the word has become entangled with magical thinking, materialism, and misconceptions that have caused many people to either embrace it unquestioningly or dismiss it entirely. For some, manifestation evokes images of vision boards, affirmations, and simply "thinking" a dream into existence. For others, it carries the stigma of pseudoscience, wishful thinking, or even something spiritually suspect. In some religious communities, the term itself is viewed with caution because it has become associated with occult practices or the belief that humans can somehow manipulate reality through supernatural means. Unfortunately, much of this misunderstanding stems from how the concept entered popular culture. The 2006 release of The Secret introduced millions of people to the Law of Attraction. While it inspired many to think differently about possibility, its message was often interpreted as though the universe functioned like a cosmic vending machine: think positively, ask for what you want, and it will simply appear. Around the same time, the teachings of Abraham Hicks further popularized the language of vibration and attraction. For many, these teachings were deeply empowering. For others, they reinforced the perception that manifestation belonged exclusively to the realm of the mystical or "woo woo." As a result, the conversation became polarized. Either you believed manifestation was magical. Or you dismissed it entirely. But what if there is another way to understand it? What if many of the practices associated with manifestation can be explained through the remarkable adaptability of the human brain? This is where Dr. James Doty's work offers a refreshing perspective, one that neither dismisses manifestation nor mystifies it, but instead grounds it in what we now understand about the brain, attention, compassion, and neuroplasticity. A neurosurgeon looks at manifestation Dr. James R. Doty was a Stanford neurosurgeon, neuroscientist, and founder of Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. Rather than approaching manifestation from a mystical perspective, he explored it through the lenses of neuroscience, attention, neuroplasticity, meditation, and compassion. In his book Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, Doty made an important distinction: Manifestation is not about controlling the universe. It is about learning how to intentionally shape your own mind. The "magic" is not supernatural. The magic is neurobiological. According to Doty, practices such as meditation, focused attention, visualization, intention setting, and reflection strengthen neural pathways that increase the likelihood of recognizing opportunities, making better decisions, and acting consistently with one's deepest values and goals. These practices leverage the brain's extraordinary capacity for neuroplasticity, its lifelong ability to reorganize and form new neural connections through repeated experience. While physics continues to explore profound questions about consciousness, observation, and the nature of reality, Doty's work wisely focuses on what neuroscience can demonstrate today: when we intentionally train the brain, we change how we perceive, respond to, and ultimately shape our lived experience. The universe isn't bending to your thoughts. Your brain is learning to perceive, choose, and act differently, and that often changes the life you experience. As your brain changes, your perception changes. As your perception expands, your behavior changes. As your behavior changes, your life often changes. That is a very different understanding of manifestation than magical thinking. Attention creates direction One of the central ideas in Doty's work is that attention shapes the brain. Every day, our brains receive an overwhelming amount of sensory information. We cannot consciously process all of it, so our brains continually prioritize what appears most important. When you repeatedly focus on a meaningful intention while in a calm, regulated state, you are effectively teaching your brain, "Pay attention to opportunities related to this." Neuroscientists sometimes describe this as increasing the salience of a goal. Through repetition, reflection, and action, the brain becomes more efficient at recognizing information that supports what matters most. Rather than reducing manifestation to magic or dismissing it altogether, neuroscience offers another perspective: intention influences attention, attention influences perception, perception influences behavior, and behavior profoundly influences outcomes. Why calm matters One of the aspects of Doty's work that resonates with the PazMesa philosophy is his emphasis on the nervous system. He explained that effective intention setting begins with relaxation. When we remain trapped in chronic stress, our brains devote more resources to detecting threats than imagining possibilities. By mindfully shifting into a parasympathetic, or "rest and digest," state through practices such as slow breathing and meditation, we regain greater access to executive functioning, creativity, discernment, and intentional choice. From this state, visualization and purposeful action become significantly more effective. This aligns beautifully with decades of neuroscience: A dysregulated nervous system narrows perception. A regulated nervous system expands perception. Peace is not merely a pleasant feeling. It is a biological condition that allows wisdom, creativity, and insights to emerge. The missing ingredient: Compassion Another important distinction in Doty's work is that manifestation is not meant to be driven solely by ego or material acquisition. He argued that intentions rooted in compassion, contribution, and service create healthier outcomes than intentions driven purely by status, fear, or accumulation. His framework consistently emphasizes that attention, meditation, visualization, and compassion work together, not in isolation. This shifts manifestation away from asking, "How do I get more?" toward a far more meaningful question, "Who am I becoming?" Where PazMesa aligns PazMesa shares much of this perspective. The goal has never been to promise that thoughts alone create reality. Nor is it to reduce life's complexity to simplistic formulas. Instead, PazMesa teaches that when we intentionally regulate the nervous system, cultivate mindful awareness, clarify our values, train our attention, and embody compassionate action, we become more capable of responding to life with wisdom rather than reactivity. As our inner landscape changes, our outer lives often change with it, not because we have overridden the laws of nature, but because we are participating in them more skillfully. PazMesa has never taught manifestation as a shortcut to acquiring more. It teaches manifestation as the natural byproduct of alignment. When your mind becomes clearer, your nervous system more regulated, your heart more compassionate, and your actions more intentional, your external reality often begins reflecting that internal coherence. In that sense, manifestation is less about attracting a new life and more about becoming the kind of person who can consciously create one. The practices of mindfulness, breathwork, emotional regulation, reflection, movement, and intentional living are not merely wellness techniques. They are methods of training the brain, calming the body, expanding awareness, and cultivating the inner conditions from which creativity flourishes, discernment sharpens, purpose becomes clearer, safe REALationships are built, and opportunities that once went unnoticed become visible. From self-improvement to self-illumination Perhaps the greatest gift of Dr. Doty's work is that it removes unnecessary mystique without removing wonder. It reminds us that the human brain is extraordinary enough without exaggeration. We do not need to diminish awe to embrace science. Nor do we need to reject science to preserve awe. The two can coexist. At PazMesa, this integration is at the heart of everything we teach and what I often call the Goldilocks spot of existence, where curiosity replaces certainty, science complements spirituality, and wisdom emerges through their integration. We believe self-mastery begins with self-understanding. As understanding becomes practice, "Practice becomes embodiment. Embodiment becomes transformation." Transformation gives rise to greater compassion, wiser choices, healthier, more authentic connections, and a deeper sense of peace within. Because perhaps the greatest manifestation isn't accumulating more things. It is remembering who you are beneath the conditioning, regulating the nervous system that has forgotten safety, and embodying the fullest expression of your humanity. From that place, peace is no longer something you pursue. It becomes the foundation from which you create, connect, contribute, live, love, and lead. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Janie Terrazas Janie Terrazas, The Mindfulness Coach Janie Terrazas, known as The Mindfulness Coach, transformed her media career into a life-coaching and wellness-advocacy mission after a spiritual awakening in 2011. As the creator of the PazMesa self-mastery program and the force behind Rise Above TV, she fosters balance and mindfulness in others. Her triumphs and trials deeply shape her coaching as she helps clients address stress and trauma and build safe relationships. Janie combines spiritual depth with actionable strategies to guide individuals toward a joyful, vital life. Her coaching transcends conventional methods, empowering clients to find peace and purpose within. Janie's empathetic and innovative approaches offer a safe roadmap for self-discovery and authentic living and loving.

Written by Tara Swann, Emotional Empowerment Coach & Author Tara Swann is an Emotional Empowerment & Embodiment Coach and three-time Author who guides women to alchemise emotional patterns, reclaim their inner power, and manifest a life that reflects their deepest truth. Recently, I decided to cancel a coaching program that I’d been planning for months. I’d poured so much into coaching, time, money, energy, but it had never really paid off financially, and to be honest, it was never really where my heart lay. I loved it, but it wasn’t my true passion. So, after seven years of trying to make coaching “work”, I decided to make the move into writing. This felt both liberating, and terrifying. Why pivoting in life is scary When we decide to pivot in our lives, whether because it makes sense logically or because it’s what our heart and soul desire, it can become really uncomfortable. The way you’ve been living becomes so familiar that it becomes your comfort zone, or more accurately, “safe” according to your mind. Your brain equates familiarity with safety, whether it's comfortable or not, sometimes even whether it’s actually safe or not. Anything unfamiliar then becomes “unsafe” because what’s on the other side of something unfamiliar is unknown and, therefore, could be dangerous. This is your brain still operating as the survival tool it is designed to be, potentially halting the expansion you truly desire. Your subconscious mind, shaped by your past experiences, controls the majority of your thoughts and behaviour until you make them conscious and choose a different story. Your nervous system adapts to repeated experiences, not what you want. This is why it not only feels scary, but also why you can remain stuck even when you know you want more. Your survival brain, subconscious, and nervous system, all deeply interconnected, can often work against your soul's desires, but not maliciously. I say this to build awareness, not create a war within yourself. The grief of letting go When I decided to make the move into writing, I had to grieve old parts of myself that were so attached to making coaching work for me. I had parts of myself attached to success, money, and validation as a coach. I had to let go of where I thought my life was going and recalibrate my body, mind, and nervous system to make this new way of living my new normal: relaxing as a mother, writing and creating around my children, and allowing myself to receive more and to be provided for. This, in itself, was scary for a woman who has had to navigate financial independence when leaving past unhealthy relationships. Although my present-day relationship is beautiful and safe, my body still held fear that if I didn’t have my own independent income, I could be at risk. When I decided to pursue my creative passions, I also started receiving opportunities, such as grants. In the shedding of the old came the new. I started following those opportunities, and self-doubt flooded in. Your doubts are your doorways I woke again at 3 a.m. Lying in bed, I started noticing negative thoughts creeping in, as well as old familiar feelings of depression. Since pursuing the grant opportunity, I have noticed myself feeling the need to write “better”, to include better excerpts and poetry in the application. I had thoughts like, “Your current writing isn’t good enough. This won’t compare to others applying. It needs to be better,” and I started pacing, wondering how I could make my application better, to stand out so that I would be “accepted”, even though I’d already decided that I would pursue writing, whether I was successful with the grant or not. The truth is, it wasn’t about the application, nor the poetry; it was old parts of myself wanting to pull me back into the familiar, a state of stress, of needing to achieve and succeed, of not feeling good enough, with the old beliefs of “you need to work harder to be worthy” and “you need to be perfect to be accepted”. I noticed and acknowledged that the ways I’d been thinking, acting, and feeling were all signs that my heart wanted to expand into a life my brain and subconscious weren’t ready for. But I was ready. Consciously, I know I want to live a life of flow, creativity, rest, and play, especially as a woman and mother of three, but subconsciously, I was in fear, and my brain was pulling me back to “keep me safe” because, again, familiarity equals safety to our brains. Expanding into more I lay there, loving on those old parts of myself, with my hand on my heart, telling them it’s safe and that I am here with them, as my Higher Self speaking to the younger parts of me in fear. I breathed into my body, creating safety and envisioning my body and nervous system expanding to hold more. More joy, more freedom and flexibility, more money, and more playful creativity, without the need for sacrifice and struggle. I allowed my body to catch up to what my heart and soul were longing for. That’s when I got up out of bed and started writing. You get to choose again Whenever you decide to move into something new, especially when following a creative passion or maybe starting a business that you don’t know is going to work, it feels like a huge risk, and it can feel terrifying. You may decide to do it anyway, and in that, you may notice old parts of yourself wanting to pull you back to “safety”, just as I experienced, in the old stories of the mind, in the thoughts you think, “It’s too risky”, “I’m not ready”, “The timing isn’t right”, “I’m not good enough for this”, and in the old patterns, like anxiety or feelings of depression, that were imprinted through living in those states for long periods of time. For me, I lived with anxiety and depression for 17+ years, so those feelings were very familiar to me. I chose again. I recognised the old thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. I acknowledged them, breathed into them, and then said to myself, “I give myself permission to live a life of joy, freedom, abundance, and creativity,” because I do. That is what I choose for myself now. Create your new familiar There are two main ways to change your subconscious patterns. The first is repetition: to repeat something over a period of time until it becomes familiar and, therefore, safe to your mind. The second is emotional processing: allowing the energy of the old story, belief, or feeling to move through the body by expressing and releasing it, and making space to invite in the new stories, beliefs, and feelings. For example, the story of “I am not good enough” holds energy. If I feel into my body, I can locate that energy. I can choose to be present with it, move with it, and express it through several different tools, such as emotional release, movement, sound, breath, and dance, to name a few, and then consciously choose again, “I am good enough. I am worthy of a life of joy.” Then I would make it a daily practice to further imprint this new belief through repetition. Visualisation is another great tool to make something familiar. The brain doesn’t know the difference between real and imaginary, so visualising your new life, career, relationship, or whatever it may be, repeatedly can expand your nervous system’s capacity to hold it. This is manifestation You create a new reality by expanding your comfort zone, expanding your nervous system’s capacity to hold more, to upgrade into a new way of being, a new life. Your mind may try to hold you back, but with awareness and loving presence, you can create enough safety for those old parts of yourself to integrate, alchemising fear into faith, and for you to expand into your new life before it arrives. When you embody the energy of the new, of financial abundance, of deeply connected, loving relationships, of following your creative passions, your actions follow, and you begin not only to create from this place but also to allow the Universe, God, to meet you there. It still amazes me what miracles can occur when you choose to upgrade your energy. Make the decision now You already know what you want. You already know which area of your life feels stagnant. You can already feel the discomfort in your existing comfort zone. This is your invitation to make a new choice. Expansion usually follows contraction, just as spring follows winter. This is nature’s intention, but winter is always more pleasant when you lean into it, nurture yourself by drinking hot tea by the fire, and indulge in beautiful essential oil salt baths when you’re cold and stressed, so gift your inner world the same nurturance. Love those terrified parts of yourself into safety, and expand into joy anyway, because life is ever evolving, and so are you. If you loved this article, you will love my books, You Don’t Have Anxiety and Becoming Her: The Woman You’ve Been Taught Not To Be. You can find them on Amazon worldwide or here. Visit my website for more info! Read more from Tara Swann Tara Swann, Emotional Empowerment Coach & Author Tara Swann is an Emotional Empowerment Coach, Author, and Speaker known for helping women alchemise emotional patterns into personal power. She guides women into deeper confidence, clarity, and self-connection through her unique blend of emotional mastery, feminine embodiment, and manifestation work. Tara is the author of You Don’t Have Anxiety, Becoming Her, and The Ocean Is She, and is currently deepening her expertise through formal Tantra Practitioner training. Her mission is to help women remember who they are and consciously create lives that feel aligned, expansive, and unapologetically alive.

Written by Bilyana Wharton, Integrative Psychotherapist and Hypnotherapist Bilyana Wharton is an integrative psychotherapist and hypnotherapist specialising in trauma recovery and relationship therapy. She works with adult survivors of childhood adversities, abuse, and relational trauma using the T.I.M.E. model of psychotherapy. Her mission is to change the world, one person at a time. When I was a child, I remember sitting with my grandmother on the veranda of their beautiful village house, admiring her garden. My grandparents were both keen gardeners. She would pick a flower, just the one, and then sit on the veranda, content and happy on an early afternoon, enjoying its essence, gently taking that long, light breath in, and then passing the flower to me. Her garden was full of fragrant flowers for every season, lily of the valley, hyacinths, lilac, roses, daffodils, chrysanthemums, lilies, philadelphus, and tulips. Since then, I have loved aromas, scents, fragrances, and essences, and I connect them to different times, feelings, and memories. If I want to change my mood, I can do that by simply choosing the right scent. What my grandmother taught me, and what is actually part of Balkan culture and many others across the world, is the ability to pause and enjoy a simple connection through just being in a moment of pleasure. In European cultures across the continent, people have a long morning coffee, just observing the world and others, or, in the evening, when everything quietens down, a glass of wine or beer, just the one, just relaxing and coming back to oneself. In Bulgaria, especially in the Plovdiv region, the effortless state of ease is what we call ‘Ilyak’. The Italians will call it ‘Dolce far niente’, the sweetness of doing nothing, and the Romanians would describe it as ‘a se hodini’, to rest in a way that nourishes the spirit. Japanese culture cherishes the moments of Ma, the intentional space of quietness, emptiness, and peace between things. The practice is about not filling every moment and simply allowing it to unfold, noticing and being present. The Japanese tea ceremony contains that soft presence in every movement and every sip. In the Arab tradition, there is Sukoon, meaning inner quietude, the moment found in the morning enjoyment of tea or in the shady courtyard in the afternoon, doing nothing but nurturing inner balance and reconnection with oneself. Wherever we look, in each culture, we can find the art of doing nothing. Those moments are essential for our overall wellbeing, and they act as a multisystem regulator. On a psychological level, doing nothing reduces mental overload and emotional overwhelm, allowing our attention and focus to increase and connecting us to the safety of a moment when everything is alright. On a neurological level, our brains need a period of doing nothing, where the brain’s background processing systems switch on only when we stop tasking. This is the activation of the default mode network, which is responsible for self reflection, meaning making, memory integration, integrating our experiences, and stimulating creativity. On a physiological level, in moments of doing nothing, our cortisol levels drop, blood pressure normalises, and heart rate slows down, allowing the parasympathetic nervous system to dominate, which leads to improved immune function. The body enters a state of physiological repair. On a relational level, countries with a tradition of ‘doing nothing’ routines have stronger social bonds, as reactivity is softened because presence is not rushed. These moments of calm allow space for attunement, emotional digestion, and increased empathy. Cultivating a daily practice of taking a moment just to be is easy: Slow down ritual: Every morning routine can become a ritual when you slow down and mindfully become present in the moment and in the action. Making the morning coffee, seeing every movement, feeling the weight of the cup, the scent and warmth, tasting the blend, it is a ceremony of presence. Take a pause: Take a pause and smell the roses, as the famous phrase goes. Or just allow yourself to expand the space of nothingness while the rest of the world disappears in it. Let that moment between tasks, chores, and duties be just a moment, empty, floating, yours. The still gaze: The still gaze is a moment to sit and look ahead without analysing, without looking for anything, just noticing and losing yourself in the horizon. There is no aim, no interpretation, just being with and in what is there in front of you. Creating moments in daily life to nurture the soul by just allowing oneself to be is not only pleasurable. Allowing life energy to flow freely allows us to process naturally, reset, and draw what is needed intuitively rather than in a directive manner. It is a moment of surrender to life as it is, and to who you are, in a way that frees obstructions to a higher level of being. It is the potent state of doing nothing, for that is where most creative notions can be born. When the mind and body stop organising, we reinstate our place in a higher existence. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, or visit my website for more info! Read more from Bilyana Wharton Bilyana Wharton, Integrative Psychotherapist and Hypnotherapist Bilyana Wharton is an experienced psychotherapist assisting clients to overcome the aftermath of trauma and abuse. Her therapy work encompasses conditions such as C-PTSD, Anxiety Disorders, Depression, and Relationship Issues. True to her instinctive and artistic nature, she has transitioned from a career in music and teaching to training as an integrative psychotherapist and hypnotherapist. Studying at Chrysalis Courses UK sparked an interest in the multi-model integrative therapy. Using the T.I.M.E. model, Bilyana utilises strategies and modalities of different therapy schools and theories, including CBT, Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, Attachment Theory, Parts Therapy, Relational Therapy, and Hypnotherapy.