Dan King is a spiritual conduit & medium, coach, author and international speaker who has been intuitively guiding people toward their greatest life for over 19 years. A pioneer of “spirituality with an edge” and dubbed the “Rated-R Avatar”, Dan has an unapologetic, controversial and contemporary delivery that oozes authenticity, commands attention and, ultimately, transforms the lives of those who experience his work. He has been called a “revolutionary force in the conscious living movement” and a “spiritual rock star”, as his fresh and brash approach to Life and spirituality merges inspiration, enlightenment, and entertainment while Dan reveals the answers to life’s big questions. Dan King, Spiritual Conduit & Medium, Author, Speaker and Coach What does “spirituality with an edge” mean to you, and why did you choose to approach spiritual work this way? It means authenticity. Authenticity is everything to me. It is the highest form of self-expression and the highest vibration any of us can exist in. It also happens to be the “secret” to life, so to speak. Only when we become the highest form of who we’ve incarnated to be can we experience the highest form of what we’ve incarnated to experience. Be who you’re here to be, you’ll do what you’re here to do, and you’ll get what you’re here to get. That’s the “Law of Attraction.” It should be called the “Law of Authenticity.” The “Law of Attraction,” as it’s been presented, is far from the truth, as are many modern-day spiritual teachings and approaches. I’m not so sure I “choose” to approach spiritual work this way, but rather, I choose to be my authentic self. I mean, if we’re not being who we truly are, what’s the point of even being here? After more than 19 years of spiritual guidance, what have you learned about the difference between receiving a message and creating lasting change? There is no difference. They are interconnected. My deepest desire is that, when I pass on channeled messages to my fellow souls on a human journey, they act on that guidance, which will naturally create lasting change, not only in their individual lives but, because we are all the same thing in the illusion of separation, in the world. Through me as a conduit, Spirit doesn’t fuck around. We get real. We get to the core of it all. The beautiful, sometimes hard truths, because without the truth, there can be no real change. If it’s not about creating change in the lives of others, if it’s not about healing, it isn’t the real deal. I feel anyone who calls themselves a “spiritual practitioner” of any kind should have the ultimate goal of creating genuine change in the lives of others and bringing people back to a state of emotional healing and self-love. Otherwise, what’s the point of the work itself? You’ve been a spiritual conduit, medium, spiritual coach, and speaker for over 19 years, all through word of mouth. Why are you only now releasing the SOULgasm book series and online course on a global scale? Well, for one, the book series and online course have only now been completed. My mission has always been not only to be a raw channel for Spirit for individuals and live audiences and to guide people on their specific paths, given their unique circumstances, but also to provide collective guidance through a broader avenue that achieves a wider reach. I’ve always known there was a way to provide such guidance on a more global scale. In order to do so, I had to feel as though I had been gifted enough information, connected enough dots, and found enough commonalities among humanity to have the accurate and impactful data required to complete the book series and online community. The goal has always been to guide everyone and anyone from all walks of life on a collective platform. That information is now more than sufficient. The creation is now complete. The time has now come. And as all things unfold and transpire in life, the timing could not be more “divine.” SOULgasm and its content are needed now more than ever. And the world is ready now more than ever. When a reading reveals a deeper emotional pattern or blockage, how do you help someone move from insight into action? It’s actually quite simple. Easy? No. Simple? It really can be. Throughout almost 20 years of doing this work, I’ve been able to see the commonalities among humanity and what connects us all, which is essentially that we all have a divine purpose, we all experience pain, pain feels the same no matter what brings it on, we all need healing, and there is a way to heal that applies to all people, traumas, and life experiences. Spirit has guided me and, therefore, those I work with to break the healing process down into a spiritually channeled method spelled out in an acronym that represents what we all truly yearn for: P.E.A.C.E. I’ve used it for myself and have taken my private and group workshop clients through this process with 100% results every time, no matter the circumstances or traumatic experiences, provided they do the work as guided, of course. This process is also available through my SOULgasm: Soul School Online Course and Community, hosted on the Skool monthly subscription platform and launching this fall. Why do you think traditional ideas around manifestation often fail to address what is really keeping someone stuck? Because traditional teachings are quite surface-driven and skip the vital step: deep emotional healing and the genuine energetic shifts that ensue as a result. Only when we release what happened to us and caused us to become who we’re not, in an effort to survive in this world and protect ourselves from further pain, can we become our authentic selves and “manifest” our true selves’ highest good. Our experiences are dictated by the frequency at which we exist at any given moment, not by what we envision or intend. We vibrationally align with what we believe we’re worthy of or what is familiar to us on an unconscious level, nothing more, nothing less. Those beliefs often come from how we were mistreated by others at some point in our lives. It’s imperative that we clear unconscious beliefs rooted in unworthiness before we can receive the gifts we’re truly worthy of. It also warrants mentioning that many, if not most, of us attempt to “manifest” from a place of fear or lack, which will align us with anything but abundance or desirable outcomes. Has modern spirituality become too focused on positivity and not enough on confronting uncomfortable emotions? Absolutely. To a detrimental, expansion-and-ascension-stunting fault. We must acknowledge and accept the presence of darkness in order to invoke our light. Everything has a purpose, including the darkness we experience in this world, both individually and collectively. From our unhealed trauma and the ways it causes us to live to the evil that runs our global system. Until we face what’s there, we cannot remove what’s there. Until we acknowledge what’s in the way of our individual and collective freedom, we cannot remove what’s in the way of our God-given right to true freedom. If we don’t acknowledge the wound, how the hell can we heal it? Denying something or diverting our attention away from it does not expel it. Only light expels darkness. Learning to invoke our higher, Soul-based perspective is the only way to be rid of lower, “dark” energies, experiences, and realities. When you walk into a room and flip on the light switch, darkness scatters. It cannot fight the light. The same goes for consciousness, including how we choose to live and direct our attention and energy, as well as the power of the higher perspective of the Soul within us all. How can someone begin identifying the unconscious beliefs that are shaping what they believe they deserve? It comes down to three simple yet not-so-easy-to-do things: Deal. Feel. Heal. That’s the process Spirit and I bring people through, but it begins with facing what has happened to you, which can be a real heart-wrenching, soul-sucking bitch of an experience. It starts with acknowledging where and when you’ve been hurt in life and by whom. Pinpointing the trauma, so to speak, because trauma is the core of all the world’s problems, both on an individual and collective level. And no, it’s not about “reliving” or “going back.” It’s about finally dealing with what’s always been there, unrecognized and perhaps dormant, yet directly affecting one’s life in negative ways. Again, only when we are aware of a wound can we heal it. Until we acknowledge our pain, we can’t do a damn thing about it. Rest assured, that pain has been buried deep within so that we could “keep on keeping on.” We all have trauma. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. And none of us deserved it. With that said, everything has a divine purpose, including our trauma, and that purpose always comes back to growth. Although none of our traumas are our fault, it can only be our personal responsibility to heal the respective emotional wounds within ourselves. Healing is an inside job, and it has to begin with facing what’s there to be healed. What does your “deal, feel, heal” approach look like when someone is working through a deeply rooted belief? Again, it starts with “dealing” with the trauma in our lives. From there, we must allow ourselves to feel and, most importantly, authentically express the emotions attached to that pain. The safest way to do so is through what I famously call a “soul puke,” in my eloquent fashion, sarcasm intended. A “soul puke” is when we privately express our raw feelings about an experience or toward those who have caused us pain on a piece of paper. Not typed out on a phone or computer, but organically written out with a pen or pencil in carnal fashion so as to transfer the raw emotional pain from inside us onto that piece of paper. Everything is energy, including our emotions, so when we do this exercise, we literally transmute the energy from within our being, releasing it onto the paper. We then tear up or burn the paper, giving the negative energy back to “God” and moving forward free of that energetic baggage. The healing has then begun but can only be completed when we shift our perspective on those traumatic, painful experiences. In my private sessions, INtensive workshops, and online course and community, Spirit and I provide expanded perspectives and understanding and bring people through exercises that completely free them from the cage of their traumas. This aligns them with their Soul and allows them to embody It, aligning them with the purpose they incarnated into human form to fulfill, the results of which are their most desired outcomes and realities, not to mention a more peaceful human experience in general. What does “coming back to yourself” mean in your own life, beyond the philosophy you teach others? Honestly, coming back to my own self and what I teach others are one and the same, in essence. I have to walk my talk because, again, it’s all about authenticity. I had to learn to heal my own shit in order to authentically guide others in doing the same for themselves. So there really is no difference between what I do for myself as an everyday human being and what I facilitate for others as a spiritual conduit and trauma-informed medium. There is really no discrepancy or separation between who I am, how I live for myself, and what I do for or how I portray myself to others. However, if you’re asking what “my own shit” was, I’m more than willing to share. In a nutshell, I had a “savior wound,” as it’s often referred to. A “Superman complex,” if you will. This was due to my own traumatic experiences, which, unfortunately, there isn’t enough space to sufficiently share within the limited scope of this interview but which I openly discuss at my live events and in my online community. Ultimately, I was an extreme overgiver in a quest to feel valuable and worthy of love. I also had deep betrayal wounds accompanying the “people pleaser” in me, which created a shit-show combination that fueled painful patterns when that overextension of myself inevitably led to being “turned on” by others. How did I “come back to me”? Literally through the methods and processes I’ve channeled over the years, which I provide to others. It’s a beautiful thing. I have such confidence and conviction in what I share with others because I’ve proven its validity, success, and impact in my own personal life. If someone feels they have tried every spiritual practice but still feels stuck, where would you tell them to begin? That’s easy. With me. With the Divine Consciousness and Spirit that work through me. With SOULgasm and the methods, processes, and guidance it contains. I know that sounds self-serving, but so be it. What I’m fortunate enough to do works for people. It’s worked and continues to work for me. It’s worked and continues to work for everyone and anyone who has come to me for guidance, support, and healing, provided they have the balls to stay committed to the process and do the work, of course. Spirit always has the necessary messages. Spirit always has the information required to align with one’s highest and best life. Spirit always has the answers. It comes down to whether or not the receiver of those answers and guidance is ready to take that divinely given ball and run with it. The good news is, once we’re guided by Spirit, we can never “unknow” the knowledge we’ve been blessed with or forget the divinity that we’ve been reminded of. Once the light is turned on, it can never truly go off again. Someone might not be ready to fully shine, but once that light is flipped on, it’s only a matter of time before the Soul within them forces them to. It’s our destiny to shine. There is no other way. We’re all here to bring light to darkness. Period. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Dan King

Written by Dr. Leslie Davis, Clinical Counselor and Relationship Expert Dr. Leslie Davis is the heart behind Eva Empowered, a movement dedicated to helping women around the world to break free from the cycle of toxic relationships and reclaim their worth. Dr. D is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor and award-winning Relationship Therapist. Have you ever found yourself stuck in a loop of “why” and “what if” when your relationship ended? Maybe you’ve found yourself scrolling through the text thread, the emails, and all the photos you took together, trying to find clues as to what went wrong. Maybe you’re questioning if any of it was real. Keep reading to discover how to find the closure your heart seeks without having all the answers. The questions that won’t let go It’s 11:49 PM. You should be going to bed, but you can’t let go of their last words said to you. The ones before “it’s over.” What did they mean? Were they being honest? Were they just afraid to commit? Were they cheating and didn’t want to tell you? Did you do something wrong? Were you asking for too much? Were you too much? As time passes, you tell yourself if you could just have an honest conversation, you could let it go. You need answers so you can move on. So you draft the text and have a friend analyze it to make sure you’re not saying anything that would make the situation worse. In the midst of preparing to click the arrow to send, you see three dancing dots, then they disappear, triggering a sense of panic. What was that? That’s the Three Dot Effect: an emotional response to digital communication that we receive, or the lack thereof, that triggers silent obsession. We are wired for connection Everyone has an essential need for belonging. When a relationship ends, the attachment is broken, and we instinctively seek connection, sometimes in the most toxic ways. We might choose to return to an abusive partner. We quickly reactivate our profiles on dating apps, hoping the next person will be different. We might engage in provocative behaviors to feel wanted and desired for just a moment, thinking we are numbing the pain. Underneath it all, the perfectionist in you can’t accept the failure of the relationship, at least not on their terms. Here’s the truth. Healthy attachments are designed to provide safety: emotionally, mentally, and physically. When connections break suddenly and without explanation, our brains register this as a threat. The unfortunate truth is that when we engage in unhealthy relationships, such as ones filled with violence and abuse, we always lack safety in the relationship. Yet, we seek to reconnect because the pain of their absence becomes a pain we don’t understand. When you find yourself reaching out to an ex-partner while everyone is telling you to let them go, you might experience social rejection. The ones who say they love you may begin to distance themselves, especially if they’ve seen this pattern before, as you endlessly return to a toxic partner. But your need for connection doesn’t disappear, so you may find yourself continuing to ruminate over the unanswered questions in secret. Or worse, you pour out your heart to your AI bestie for a false sense of validation and mental relief. Behind the open loop Our minds don’t operate well with unfinished business. When we try to move on, we somehow keep coming back to the unanswered questions. The emptiness can send us into a spiral with feelings of rejection, abandonment, and confusion. At times, our secret rumination might feel productive as we discover details about the person who ended the relationship. We might believe our obsession with finding the truth is fitting because it feels electric in the moment. The “aha” moments arrive, but what happens when the truth doesn’t close the door? It only creates a deeper wound. When the truth brings more pain Maybe you’ve spent hours, days, even months seeking the truth, and when you see it, you wish you hadn’t. Sometimes the truth hurts in ways the silence never did. The details you can’t unsee In seeking the truth, you discover the who, when, and how long. Now you’ve lost sleep and concentration as a new version of what you thought was the truth emerges, forcing you to sit with the lies you once believed. It was about you You always questioned if you were asking for too much, only to find that your ex-partner chose someone who appears to be more easygoing. And you tell yourself, there’s the proof… you’re the problem. Stories don’t align You finally had the conversation, but now you’re more confused because their version of the relationship doesn’t match yours. Now you’re left questioning your reality and wondering if you’ve been gaslit. A second rejection You finally sent the text to get answers, only to be left without a response, or you receive a cold-hearted reply. You hoped for another chance to connect, only to be met with rejection. You’ve been replaced You learn that they’ve moved on quickly with a new love, and you accept this as proof that you didn’t mean anything to them or proof that they were cheating on you. Each of these scenarios refreshes the loop with unresolved pain. It’s hard to accept that more information was never the answer you needed. So you deny yourself closure by telling yourself that the new answers can’t be true, and you keep digging for more. What closure really represents When clients tell me they need closure, I often question what closure will do for them. For some, closure often brings a sense of worthiness, control, validation, and hope. Hope sounds nice, but it’s often the key to keeping the door cracked, even when we need to shut the door on the relationship that introduced us to a pain that changed us. Authentic closure is acceptance of what the relationship was and who you will be now that the relationship is over. You already knew Here’s the truth we don’t want to admit: the closure we often seek presented itself long before the relationship ended. Be honest with yourself. You saw the signs. Communication was less frequent, less detailed, less fulfilling. Your body began to react to their presence in ways you didn’t before. In the beginning, your heart fluttered with excitement to be with your partner, but over time, excitement morphed into anxiety and fear. Your intuition always told you something wasn’t right, even when you didn’t have all the answers in the moment. You saw what was happening, but you refused to accept it as truth. In attempts to keep the relationship in survival mode, you leaned on your gift of empathy while trying to understand their behaviors toward you. You diagnosed and treated their pain without acknowledging your own, telling yourself, “If I just love them better, things will change and I won't hurt anymore.” But let me be the one to tell you, that’s toxic. The sudden end of the relationship actually wasn’t so sudden. Doors were being closed one by one, but your toxic empathy kept them open. So ask yourself, what did you see that you didn’t want to believe? When did you first feel the change? Why did their explanation carry more weight than your own truth? The answers you always had are the closure you’ve been seeking but refused to accept. Closure is a choice you make We are often taught that closure is something another person gives us. It shows up in an apology. It shows up in honest answers to our questions during a conversation. It sometimes shows up in repair with “let’s start over.” But what would change for you if closure was your decision to make? Closure can be the choice to move forward in life without all of the answers. It can simply be accepting that your experience was your own and their answers won’t change your truth. Closure can be accepting that another round of “why” won’t heal the brokenness but only bring more pain. So choose yourself. The door you close Your heart’s need for closure is evidence of how deeply you connect to others. It’s a gift that allows you to heal and love again. But the real gift is your ability to decide how closure appears in your life. I encourage you to believe in your heart that you don’t need someone to explain why the relationship ended for it to be over. Be empowered to close the door yourself. If you’re ready to stop staring at their texts and stop waiting for their reply, my TEDx talk “Three Ways to Stop Obsessing Over That Text” was made for you. Watch it here. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Dr. Leslie Davis Dr. Leslie Davis, Clinical Counselor and Relationship Expert Dr. Leslie Davis is the heart behind Eva Empowered, a movement dedicated to helping women around the world to break free from the cycle of toxic relationships and reclaim their worth. Dr. D is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor and award-winning Relationship Therapist who specializes in guiding high-achieving women and single mothers toward emotional freedom, deep healing, and healthier connections.

Written by Ben Miller, Sound Bath Educator Ben Miller is the founder of Zen with Ben and an educator specialising in the musical foundations of sound bath practice. With a degree in Music Production and a lifetime of musicianship, his teaching focuses primarily on crystal singing bowls, helping facilitators work with harmony, technique, pacing and structure more intentionally. If everyone who trained with me went away and created exactly the same sound baths I do, I’m not sure I would consider that a success. That might sound strange coming from someone who teaches practitioners. People often come to training because they connect with a particular approach. They like the way someone works, the sound they create, or the philosophy behind it, and naturally they want to understand how it is done. There is nothing wrong with imitation at the beginning. Musicians have always learned that way. Drummers learn other people’s grooves. Pianists learn pieces. Producers try to recreate sounds they admire. But eventually, something has to change. At some point the question stops being, “What would my teacher play next?” Becomes, “What does this moment need?” That distinction is central to how I think about sound bath education. A framework should be a starting point When somebody is new to sound practice, structure is useful. You need to understand your instruments, how sounds relate to each other, what happens when you layer them, and how harmony, dynamics, pacing and space can change the overall soundscape. But I do not want those principles to become a script. I want students to take what they have learned and develop it. Perhaps they begin creating their own harmonic journeys. They experiment with chord progressions, passing notes or major sevenths. Maybe they start applying the same musical thinking across crystal bowls, Tibetan bowls and gongs, finding ways for different instruments to connect through harmony and timbre. That is much more interesting to me than somebody simply reproducing something I have shown them. The purpose of a framework is to give someone a foundation strong enough that, eventually, they no longer need to rely on the framework. Creativity is not the opposite of knowledge There is sometimes an assumption that learning too much theory will make a sound bath less intuitive. I see it very differently. Knowledge gives intuition something to work with. A practitioner should be able to listen to what is happening and respond. Does this moment need more colour? Does the mood need to shift? Would another layer add something, or is the sound already full enough? Should another instrument come in? Or should something be taken away? Those are creative decisions, and they cannot all be made in advance. The room changes. The instruments behave differently. The participants are different. Even the practitioner arrives differently from one session to the next. That is why I do not think facilitation should become a memorised sequence that gets reproduced regardless of what is happening in front of you. A framework can prepare you for the moment. It cannot make the decision for you. Intuition should not mean guesswork Being responsive is not the same as being random. If I feel that a soundscape needs something different, I want enough understanding to act on that instinct. Maybe I want more tension. Maybe I want more space. Maybe I want to move from something dense into something simpler. The instinct might arrive first, but knowledge gives me options. Over time, those decisions become more natural. You stop consciously analysing every relationship because you have spent time listening, practising and understanding. That is true in music generally. Good musicians rarely look as though they are calculating while they play, but what appears effortless is usually built on years of accumulated understanding. I don’t want to create miniature versions of myself Every practitioner brings something different. One person may have a strong instinct for harmony. Another may leave far more space. Some will be drawn towards rhythm or texture. Others may eventually work with a large collection of instruments, while someone else might create an extraordinary session with very little. If I gave ten people exactly the same instruments, I would hope eventually to hear ten different sound baths. There should be strong foundations underneath them. I would hope the instruments are being listened to carefully. I would hope musical relationships are being considered. I would hope decisions are intentional rather than accidental. But beyond that, I want personality. Taste. Curiosity. Experimentation. Creativity cannot develop if every decision has already been prescribed. The participant remains at the centre There is another reason I am cautious about overly prescriptive teaching. For me, sound practice should remain participant-centred. I do not believe a practitioner should tell someone what they are supposed to feel, and I am particularly cautious about prescribing emotional outcomes or making healing claims. Two people can hear the same sound and respond completely differently. One may find it relaxing. Another may simply enjoy the music. Someone else may find a particular sound uncomfortable. The practitioner does not need to correct any of those responses. Our responsibility is to make thoughtful decisions about the environment we are creating. That means listening not only to the instruments, but to the room and the wider moment. Is the sound becoming too dense? Have I kept adding layers without leaving enough space? Would doing less actually improve what is happening? The answer will not always be the same. That is exactly the point. Good teaching should eventually create independence One of the most rewarding things for a teacher is when a student stops needing the answer. Not because they know everything. None of us do. But because they have enough understanding to explore the question themselves. I want somebody to leave training with strong foundations, curiosity and enough musical knowledge to develop their own voice. If somebody finishes training and can reproduce one of my sound baths perfectly, that is useful. But if, a year later, they are creating something thoughtful, musical and recognisably their own, I find that far more exciting. That is when education stops being imitation. Creativity begins. Follow me on Instagram and visit my website for more info! Read more from Ben Miller Ben Miller, Sound Bath Educator Ben Miller is the founder of Zen with Ben and an educator specialising in the musical foundations of sound bath practice. His teaching focuses primarily on crystal singing bowls, helping facilitators understand harmony, technique, pacing and structure. In his own sound baths, he draws on a wider palette of bowls, gongs, handpan, chimes and natural soundscapes. His articles offer practical, evidence-aware ideas for more intentional, musically informed practice.

Written by Maurice Smith, CTIE, Regenerative Travel & Hospitality Strategist Maurice Smith, CTIE, is a hospitality and travel strategist focused on regenerative tourism, place-based guest experience, cultural hospitality, and restorative approaches to travel. His insight has been sought by national travel, business, and consumer media outlets for perspective on luxury travel trends, destination value, sustainability, and evolving traveler expectations. Before asking people to believe in a vision for a place, a hospitality leader needs to understand what it will ask of them. The people who work there have to carry it through, while neighbors live with changes that a visitor may barely notice. Calling the work restoration means being clear about what is being preserved and whether the people already connected to that place will have a part in its future. Restoration, as I understand it, means recognizing what is worth carrying forward and addressing what has weakened it. My perspective comes from years in travel and the community work I am involved in now. I am still exploring what my future work in hospitality might look like, and I want those decisions to begin with an understanding of the people and places involved. I have come to value places where a guest can feel known and still have room to find their own rhythm. A beautiful room draws me in, though I also notice how it feels to spend an unhurried morning there or whether a conversation happens naturally. Those experiences are part of what draws me to hospitality at an intimate scale. That kind of care depends on the time and attention of the people doing the hosting. A person does not have to stay overnight to experience that care, and I am interested in places that become familiar enough for someone to drop in as part of an ordinary week. Clear directions and a comfortable place to pause matter to local people as well as visitors, helping a place become part of daily life rather than somewhere set apart from it. Choosing what belongs in a room or on a table also means deciding whose work a guest encounters. A meal or a piece made by hand can introduce someone to knowledge they would otherwise miss, especially when the people behind it have a say in how their work is represented and receive credit for their contribution. Those same people may be changing their practice in ways that do not fit a visitor’s expectation of tradition, and hospitality needs to leave room for that. Someone sharing a craft should be able to speak about where their work is going as well as where it began. Otherwise, preserving a place’s character can become a demand that its people remain as we imagined them. That responsibility feels closer to home in my environmental education work with children at William Walker Recreation Center, in the Atlanta neighborhood where I grew up. My connection to the neighborhood is part of why I care about the work, but my memories cannot tell me everything the children need from it now. I have to listen to the people working with them and let that understanding influence what I contribute. A guest may stay a few nights, while staff and neighbors live with a hotel’s decisions every day. For me, restoration requires that longer view. The kind of hospitality I want to help shape would extend the care offered to guests to the people who work there and the community around it. Their concerns should influence how a business develops, and its leaders should be willing to change course when a promising idea asks too much of the people expected to make it work. Understanding those demands also helps me decide which ideas to pursue. An opportunity can be appealing before there is a workable way to carry it through, and giving it time to develop is part of taking it seriously. I see patience as a responsibility of leadership, especially when enthusiasm makes it easy to overlook the questions that still need answers. Taking time to reflect has made me more deliberate about where I put my energy. An opportunity now has to make sense alongside the life I want to lead, including time for my family and the relationships that matter to me. I think about the attention the work will need and whether I can give it that care consistently, and that has become part of how I define success. Restoration asks me to consider what is worth carrying forward and whether I can give it the attention it needs. That is the judgment I want to bring to the work ahead, whatever form it takes. The people involved should understand what they can expect from me and be able to depend on it. Follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Maurice Smith, CTIE Maurice Smith, CTIE, Regenerative Travel & Hospitality Strategist Maurice Smith, CTIE, is a hospitality strategist, writer, and advisor whose work sits at the intersection of regenerative tourism, place-based guest experience, cultural hospitality, and restoration-centered leadership. His perspective is shaped by a belief that the future of travel will be defined not only by access, amenities, or aesthetics, but by meaning: how a journey connects people to culture, community, ecology, memory, and place. Recognized by leading travel publications and industry platforms, Maurice has built a career around luxury travel, destination expertise, sustainability, and purpose-driven hospitality. Through his writing and advisory work, he focuses on the future of travel as a more responsible, meaningful, and culturally connected industry.

Marianna D’Arcangelo, MBA, IT Management (Merit), BA (Hons) Product Design & Engineering, ACIM, is the Founder and CEO of Golden Fenyx Digital Consultancy, where she works at the intersection of engineering, digital innovation, business strategy and communication. With more than 20 years of experience spanning product design, AI, robotics, technology, manufacturing and marketing, she has built her career around understanding how different disciplines connect and what happens when they do not. In this interview, Marianna explores why technically strong businesses can struggle to communicate their value, how better connections between departments can improve commercial outcomes, and why simplicity does not mean compromising technical depth. She also shares her perspective on AI, creativity, leadership and the importance of keeping human judgement at the centre of increasingly automated businesses. Marianna D' Arcangelo, Founder & CEO of Golden Fenyx Digital Consultancy What led you to build Golden Fenyx Digital Consultancy around the connection between technology, business strategy and creative thinking? I have always been interested in what happens between disciplines. My background is in product design and engineering, and over the years I have worked across areas including AI, R&D, robotics, VR/AR, materials, manufacturing, technology, marketing and strategy. I also hold an ACIM qualification from the Chartered Institute of Marketing. What I noticed was that businesses often have excellent people, but the connections between those people are where things start to break down. A technically brilliant product can struggle commercially because nobody has translated its value clearly. A marketing team can produce excellent work without having a clear understanding of the business objective. A founder can be trying to hold all of those pieces together themselves. That is what led to Golden Fenyx Digital Consultancy Ltd. I wanted to work at the level where those pieces connect: understanding what the business is trying to achieve, identifying what is getting in the way, and then turning that diagnosis into something people can actually execute. For me, creative thinking is not separate from commercial or technical thinking. It is often what allows you to see the problem differently in the first place. This is why I studied a BA (Hons) in Product Design & Engineering first, and then moved into an MBA in IT Management (Merit). One gave me hands-on technical experience; the other gave me the strategy, marketing, commercial thinking and frameworks to put it all together in a way that delivers measurable results. You have worked across engineering, product design, gaming and marketing, so which part of that experience most influences how you solve business problems today? Probably product design, because it taught me to look at a problem from several directions at once. When you design something, you cannot only ask whether it works technically. You have to think about the person using it, the environment it sits within, what it costs, how it is manufactured, what problem it actually solves and whether people will understand its value. That way of thinking has stayed with me. Today, when I look at a business, I naturally start pulling those layers apart. What is technically strong? What is commercially viable? What does the customer understand? Where is the friction? What is happening internally that the customer never sees? My engineering background also means I am comfortable with complexity. I do not need everything reduced to a marketing-friendly version before I can engage with it. But I also know that complexity does not automatically need to be passed on to the audience. The most useful answer is often found somewhere between the technical reality and the human reality. When a technically strong company struggles to communicate its value, where do you usually find the real problem? Often, the problem is not the communication itself. It is that the business has not decided what it most needs people to understand. Technical teams understandably see the complexity behind what they have built. They may have spent years solving a problem that genuinely was not solved before. From inside the company, all of that detail feels important because it is part of the achievement. But different audiences are asking different questions. An investor may want to understand scalability and commercial potential. A customer may simply want to know what changes for them. A potential partner may be interested in viability or differentiation. That does not mean the technical detail is unimportant. It means you have to know when it belongs in the conversation and when it does not. I also think marketers need to approach engineers with humility. If I do not understand something, I ask. Engineers often love explaining what they have built. Then you can find the simplest accurate way of communicating it without making the technology sound simplistic. The aim is not to remove complexity. It is to remove unnecessary barriers to understanding. You have written about brands such as Haus Labs building community rather than simply promoting products, so what separates genuine audience connection from manufactured engagement? For me, the difference is whether the audience is being treated as people or as numbers. It is quite easy to manufacture activity. You can create more posts, more comments, more campaigns and more opportunities for people to interact. But activity is not necessarily connection. Genuine connection comes from understanding why someone would care in the first place. What do they value? What are they trying to solve? What do they want to be part of? What makes them trust a company enough to keep paying attention? That is why I am interested in what sits underneath communication. A brand can have a very polished presence and still feel strangely empty if everything is designed around the company talking about itself. The strongest examples usually make the audience feel that they are part of something rather than simply being marketed to. For technical and innovation-led companies, that can be particularly important. You may have something genuinely impressive, but people still need a reason to care about it. The technology earns attention; relevance and understanding are what turn that attention into a relationship. After managing one client's bilingual presence across 10 platforms, what did that experience teach you about adapting a brand without losing consistency? It taught me that consistency and repetition are not the same thing. When you are communicating across languages, platforms and audiences, it is tempting to create one message and simply reproduce it everywhere. But people do not consume information in the same way across every channel, and language itself carries context. The strategic idea has to remain recognisable, but the expression can change. Working across English and Italian, and across multiple platforms, made me much more conscious of that distinction. You need a clear centre: what the company stands for, who it is speaking to, what it wants people to understand and what action matters. Once that is clear, you have much more freedom in how you communicate it. It also reinforced something I see repeatedly in businesses: consistency becomes much easier when everyone understands the underlying strategy. Otherwise, different departments or channels start making their own decisions about what the brand means. The solution is not necessarily more guidelines. Sometimes it is simply giving people a clearer strategic foundation to work from. What should a company clarify before investing more money in content, SEO or advertising? What problem are we actually trying to solve? That sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly easy to skip. Companies can become focused on producing more content or increasing traffic before establishing what they want those activities to achieve. I would want to understand the commercial objective first. Who are we trying to reach? What do we want them to understand? Why would they choose this company rather than another? Where is the current bottleneck? And what happens after someone finds us? There is no point driving more people towards a proposition that they do not understand. This is also where I think businesses can accidentally create expensive complexity. They hire different specialists for content, SEO, social media, design and advertising, but nobody is necessarily responsible for connecting all of those activities back to the same commercial objective. Sometimes the answer genuinely is more content. Sometimes it is better search visibility. But sometimes the company needs to fix its positioning first. I would rather diagnose that before spending the money. With AI making content production easier, what parts of strategy and creativity should businesses resist automating? I would not start with what businesses should resist automating. I would start with what should remain human-led. AI is incredibly useful. I use it to accelerate research, analysis and iteration, and I believe businesses that understand how to use it well will gain enormous efficiencies. But there is a difference between accelerating production and replacing strategy, judgement and human design. AI can produce hundreds of pieces of content, but it does not automatically know whether they are saying the right thing to the right people, whether the positioning is correct, whether the real problem has been understood, or whether the result is original, aesthetically considered and commercially relevant. That is why I believe creative professions deserve protection via regulations as technology develops. Creativity is not simply producing an output; it is knowing what should be created in the first place. I see AI as an extension of human capability, not a replacement for it. The question is whether automation improves the decision, the quality and the impact. In my own work, all visual content, from graphic design to video, remains human-created. I design and produce it myself. Technology should give talented people better tools, not remove the talent from the process. How has moving between engineering precision and creative disciplines shaped your own way of thinking as a founder? It has made me quite comfortable with being uncomfortable. Engineering taught me to question assumptions, understand how things work and look for the underlying cause of a problem. Creative disciplines taught me that there is not always one correct route to an answer, and that perception can be as important as function. Running a business requires both. I can be very analytical about a problem and then realise that the answer requires a completely different way of looking at it. Equally, a creative idea still has to work commercially. It has to survive contact with the real world. I think that combination has also made me less interested in departmental boundaries. I do not naturally see marketing, technology, design, sales and business strategy as completely separate conversations. They influence one another. That is probably the biggest thread running through my career. I have repeatedly found myself in the space between disciplines, translating one side to another. As a founder, I have realised that this is not something I need to choose between. It is actually the perspective I bring to the table. What is one principle you believe innovation-led companies should protect as they scale? Keep the ability to understand the whole problem. As companies grow, specialisation becomes necessary. You need people who are excellent at engineering, sales, marketing, finance, design and operations. The danger is when specialisation turns into separation. People can become extremely good at their own part of the business without seeing how that part affects everything else. Then problems start moving between departments rather than being solved. I think businesses should protect curiosity about what happens outside your own function. Give people enough context to understand why their work matters, and make it safe to ask questions rather than assuming another department has everything covered. That does not mean everyone needs to become a generalist. It means someone needs to maintain the wider view. It is also something I try to apply to Golden Fenyx Digital Consultancy. I am less interested in producing another isolated piece of marketing activity than in understanding why the business is struggling to move forward and what needs to connect for that to change. For me, innovation is not only about creating something new. It is also about making sure a good idea has a chance to become something useful. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Marianna D' Arcangelo

Written by Dr. Lonna Gordon, Founder of The KNOBS LLC Dr. Lonna Gordon is a board-certified adolescent medicine physician and Enneagram-informed coach who believes every teen is navigating a threshold moment. She blends clinical expertise with the Enneagram to help young people and the adults who love them know their voice matters, and they're enough to become who they're meant to be. Teens rarely announce what they need. More often, they signal it through behavior, tone, timing, or the thing they don't say. Once you're familiar with the Enneagram as a lens, those signals can become easier to read, type by type. This matters especially for professionals working across large caseloads or classrooms, where it's tempting to read every teen's behavior through one general lens: Is this typical adolescent behavior, or is this a red flag? The Enneagram adds nuance to that question because "typical" looks different depending on a teen's core motivation. A quiet Type 5 teen going quieter may be a different signal than a chatty Type 7 teen going quiet. Same behavior, potentially different meaning and a different response. Type 1 teens may signal need through self criticism. "I always mess this up" is often a bid for reassurance, not agreement. Type 2 teens may signal need by overhelping others while quietly going unmet themselves. Watch the teen who's always managing everyone else's feelings. Type 3 teens may signal need through achievement that suddenly stops mattering to them. A drop in effort can be the first visible sign that something underneath has shifted. Type 4 teens may signal need through intensified mood or withdrawal into creative expression. Art, writing, or music that gets noticeably darker may be worth a gentle check-in. Type 5 teens may signal need by going quieter than usual. For a type that already runs private, further withdrawal may be the flag, not the baseline. Type 6 teens may signal need through increased questions or worst-case scenarios. Anxiety spikes can be their way of asking for reassurance. Type 7 teens may signal need by getting louder, busier, or more scattered. Constant motion can be a way of outrunning a feeling they don't want to sit with. Type 8 teens may signal need through pushing boundaries harder than usual. Testing control can sometimes be a way of testing whether the relationship can hold. Type 9 teens may signal need by going along with everything. Total agreeableness, with no visible preference at all, may itself be the signal. The throughline across all nine is this: the signal is rarely a direct request. It's a shift from a teen's baseline. That means the real skill isn't memorizing nine signals; it's knowing each teen's baseline well enough to notice the shift at all. This is particularly important since teens are still becoming, and thus their type may not be clearly identified or fully formed. They may, however, give us signals of who they are becoming; we just need to observe. That's a harder skill to build than it sounds, especially for professionals managing dozens of teens at once, which is exactly why pairing the Enneagram with a consistent framework for what to do next matters so much. This is where the Pause, Connect, Open, Secure (PCOS) framework and the Enneagram work together. The Enneagram tells you what to look for. PCOS tells you what to do once you see it: pause before reacting to the surface behavior, connect to what's underneath, open with curiosity instead of assumption, and secure the relationship regardless of what you find. Reading these signals accurately and knowing what to do next is exactly what individual coaching and team workshops are built to strengthen. Learn more here. Follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Dr. Lonna Gordon Dr. Lonna Gordon, Founder of The KNOBS LLC Dr. Lonna Gordon is a board-certified adolescent medicine physician with 15 years of clinical experience and leadership roles across academic institutions. She is also the founder of The KNOBS LLC, a coaching, speaking, and workshop practice for parents, teens, and the professionals who support them. Drawing on the Enneagram and her clinical background, she helps young people and the adults who love them navigate the threshold moments of growing up. She also hosts Tweens, Teens & Everything Between, a podcast exploring identity and connection during the teen years. Her mission is simple: to help every young person know their voice matters, their experience makes sense, and they are enough to become who they're meant to be.

Ann-Kathrin Petersen is a trauma-informed Healthy Love Coach, EFT practitioner and trainer, author, podcast host, and educator helping women elevate their lives, relationships, and standards after toxic love. She is the author of Ellavate – 7 Steps to Elevate After Toxic Love and the host of the podcast Team Ellavate, where she shares empowering conversations around healing, confidence, emotional regulation, conscious dating, healthy attachment, and creating love that feels safe, exciting, fulfilling, and deeply aligned. Ann-Kathrin Petersen, Healthy Love Coach & EFT Practitioner What first led you to focus your work on helping women create healthy love after toxic relationships? I believe love and relationships can be one of the most beautiful and empowering experiences we can add to our lives. But I have also seen and experienced how exhausting, miserable and even dangerous love can become when the relationship is unhealthy. What fascinated me was how complicated leaving actually is. "Just leave. He's bad for you." sounds logical from the outside, but it completely misses what can be happening underneath. Psychology, attachment, childhood experiences, hope, fear, biology, self-worth, all of it can become intertwined. Sometimes physically leaving is only the first step. My professional work in trauma, domestic violence and crisis support deepened that understanding. Becoming a mum added another layer. I want our children to grow up seeing that love doesn't require you to abandon yourself. So much of what we learn about relationships starts at home. That's why my work isn't just about recovering from toxic love. I want women to understand their patterns, trust themselves again and build a life where healthy love can actually add to their happiness. I don't believe in the Disney idea that Prince Charming comes along and finally makes your life good. Build your version of a happy life, and let healthy love add to it. Why can someone understand their unhealthy relationship patterns clearly and still feel emotionally drawn back to them? Because knowing something and feeling it are two very different things. You can understand attachment theory, identify every red flag and know perfectly well that somebody isn't giving you what you need, and still desperately want it to work. Our decisions in love aren't made by our rational mind alone. Previous experiences, attachment, our nervous system, self-worth, learned beliefs and expectations all play a role. Hope is huge. I call one version of this "dating potential": Maybe after the next court hearing. Maybe when work calms down. Maybe after the promotion. Maybe when he's healed. Maybe if I show him a little more how amazing we could be, he'll finally choose this. We can end up having a relationship with somebody's potential instead of the person and relationship that actually exist today. So telling a woman, "You know better," often doesn't help. She probably does know better. I'm much more interested in the question: If you know this isn't enough for you, what keeps pulling you back? That's usually where the real work starts. How do EFT tapping and nervous system regulation help create change that insight alone may not reach? I love understanding things. Psychoeducation can be incredibly empowering. But there is a point where a woman says, "I know all of this. I understand exactly what's happening, but I still feel it." That's where I find EFT and body-based work so valuable. I often describe the nervous system as our internal alarm and regulation system. It is constantly responding to what feels safe, threatening, familiar or unfamiliar. After prolonged stress or traumatic experiences, the body can react very strongly even when the rational mind understands that there is no immediate danger. EFT, or tapping, is one of the tools I use. It combines focusing on what you're experiencing emotionally with tapping on specific acupoints. What I like about it is that we aren't only talking about the emotion; we're working with what is happening in that moment. The goal isn't to never feel anxious, triggered, sad or attached again. The goal is to be able to feel something without automatically having to act from it. There is a huge difference between "I feel this" and "therefore I have to do something about it." Creating that space can change a lot. Why can secure, emotionally available love sometimes feel unfamiliar to someone who is used to intensity or inconsistency? Because familiar doesn't automatically mean healthy. If you're used to relationships with uncertainty, chasing, withdrawal, intense connection and then distance, you can start associating that activation with attraction. You're thinking: Does he want me? Why hasn't he texted? Did I do something wrong? Is he pulling away? And all of that intensity can make the connection feel incredibly important. Then somebody comes along who is consistent. He calls when he says he will. His interest is clear. There isn't a constant puzzle to solve. Strangely, that can initially feel less exciting simply because it is unfamiliar. I don't like the idea that healthy love is supposed to be boring. I don't believe that at all. Healthy relationships can have chemistry, sex, passion, adventure and depth. You just don't need instability to create those things. So I encourage women to stop using intensity as the main measurement for connection. Look at consistency. Reciprocity. Emotional availability. Communication. Shared values. Pay attention to who you become around that person. Sometimes butterflies are attraction. Sometimes they're anxiety. Learning to tell the difference is important. What do you see high-achieving women struggle with most when their relationship standards do not match the standards they hold elsewhere in life? The difference can be fascinating. A woman can manage a team, raise children, build a business, earn degrees and solve incredibly complicated problems, and then spend three hours analysing a two-word text from a man who has been inconsistent for six months. I don't say that with judgement. Being intelligent or successful doesn't make us immune to attachment. But high-achieving women are often used to effort producing results. At work, persistence, problem-solving and working harder can be rewarded. In relationships, that can become: If I communicate better, understand him more, give him enough space, become more attractive, stay patient or love him well enough, maybe I can make this work. But another person's emotional availability isn't a project you can successfully manage. One of the biggest shifts is going from "How can I make this work?" to "What is actually being offered to me here, and does it match the relationship and life I want?" You can have compassion for somebody's circumstances without building your future around their potential. What is one sign that someone is genuinely breaking an old relationship pattern rather than simply avoiding another painful relationship? For me, it's when you can stay open to love while remaining loyal to yourself. Avoidance can look very powerful from the outside: I don't need anyone. I'll never let somebody hurt me again. The second something feels uncomfortable, I'm gone. But that isn't necessarily security. Sometimes it's protection. Actually breaking the pattern looks different. You can really like someone without immediately building an entire future around them. You can feel chemistry without ignoring incompatibility. You can tolerate some uncertainty without chasing reassurance. You can communicate what you need and then watch what the other person actually does with that information. You can leave something that isn't right for you without needing to turn the other person into a monster. One of the clearest signs of change for me is this: your standards remain intact even when you're emotionally attached. It's easy to have amazing boundaries when you don't care. The real test comes when you really want someone and can still say: I want you, but I'm not going to abandon myself to have you. When someone starts dating again after toxic love, what should they pay attention to beyond obvious red flags? First, create a life you actually like living, or at least start creating one. Know what you enjoy. Have hobbies. Have a few real friends. Have something in your work or future that matters to you. Build routines and interests that don't disappear the second an exciting man walks into your life. Then, when you're dating, don't just look for obvious red flags. Watch patterns. Do his actions match his words? Is the effort reciprocal? Can he communicate when something is uncomfortable? Is he curious about you? Do your values and ideas about the future actually match? Pay attention to what happens to you. Do you remain yourself? Or does your entire emotional world suddenly start revolving around whether he texts, what he thinks and whether he chooses you? Are you still working out whether you actually like him, or are you mostly trying to work out whether he likes you? Dating isn't an audition. You're not trying to perform well enough to be chosen. You're finding out whether two real people are compatible enough, available enough and willing enough to create something healthy together. What does "elevating after toxic love" mean to you beyond healing from what happened? This is really what ELLAVATE means to me. Toxic love doesn't stay neatly contained inside the relationship. It can have a ripple effect across your whole life. Your self-esteem changes. You start doubting your judgement. Friendships can suffer. Your career, finances or health can suffer. Even when you're highly successful, keeping everything together on the outside while hiding what's happening at home is exhausting. Afterwards, there can be so much shame: How did I let this happen? Why didn't I leave earlier? How could I have been so stupid? I don't want the end goal to be, "I'm finally over my ex." Elevating means using what happened as a catalyst. Understanding yourself without shaming yourself. Rebuilding self-trust. Finding your friends again. Your ambition. Your body. Your joy. Your identity. Creating peace where there used to be chaos. For me, toxic love can become the catalyst towards a much more self-led life. The relationship might be the reason you started the journey. But eventually, it isn't about him anymore. It's about you choosing your life. What is the most important thing you want women to understand about creating love they will not need to recover from? That you have a choice about where your energy goes. The 90/10 rule originally came from my work around breakups. There is a phase after a relationship ends where analysing him can almost become a full-time job. What did he mean? Why did he do that? Does he miss me? Was any of it real? Your friends have listened, analysed the messages with you and probably had the same conversation with you ten times. There is a place for that. We need to process what happened. But at some point, continuing the spiral isn't helping you heal anymore. That's when I use 90/10. Bring 90 percent of the focus back to you. Your healing, health, friendships, finances, career, business, education, children, well-being, fun, your life. The aim isn't to suppress what happened. It's to stop giving him the majority of your life force. Over time, I realised I want women to understand that 90/10 applies before the breakup too. It applies in dating and relationships, particularly if you know you tend to emotionally attach very quickly. Instead of constantly asking, "What does he mean? What does he need? How can I make this work?" Him, him, him, come back to yourself. Keep building your life. Let the man come towards you. Give him space to initiate, invest and show you who he is, rather than doing all of the emotional work for the relationship. The energy behind that matters. "I want him to lead because I need somebody to save me and make me happy" is very different from "I'm responsible for creating a life that makes me happy, so I don't need to chase or control this. I can give you space to add to it." That isn't selfish. I believe it actually creates more space for healthy love. You can deeply want partnership, marriage and a family and still refuse to put your life on hold while you're looking for them. Focus on your finances. Build the business. Study. Heal. Get strong. Look after your health. Invest in your friendships. Create things. Have fun. Love can be incredibly important without becoming the centre around which everything else revolves. Create the life. Let the right relationship add to it. Follow me on Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Ann-Kathrin Petersen

Written by Bre Bicknell, Perimenopause & Menopause Expert Bre Bicknell empowers women to age powerfully. She is a Certified Personal Trainer, Nutrition Specialist, Health Coach, and Menopause Coach. She delivers practical, science-backed methods to gain muscle, boost brain health, and ignite purpose in the second half of life. Last weekend, during an intense two-day workshop, I watched others perform one-arm pushups and pull-ups. I kept telling myself, 'It’s okay, I’m not there yet. I’m healthy, and I will get stronger.' A year ago, I signed up for the StrongFirst Bodyweight Certification led by Coach Karen Smith. To pass this certification as a woman, you must complete a one-arm pushup, a pistol squat, and a pull-up, all in perfect form. The group was small and elite, with eight people, six men and two women. I was the least physically strong person in the group. I passed the pull-up and pistol squat but did not pass the one-arm pushup. Why did I invest $1,300 for two days of exhausting work? Why did I commit 11 months to extra training, my own strength coach, physical therapy, chiropractic adjustments, acupuncture, and massage? The answer is simple. I refuse to lose my capability and strength as I age. I understand deeply what muscle does for my body and the consequences of not building muscle in midlife. To be honest, my father is a huge motivator. He passed away four years ago at 70. Diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome at 41, after 29 years of suffering, he chose to end his life. He was driven and adventurous. As a forester, he worked hard, managed teams, supported his family, and pushed himself relentlessly. He didn’t just burn out, he torched out. He pushed his already stressed body beyond its limits, always saying yes to others and putting their needs before his own. Ultimately, he felt like he had a constant bad cold. Daily activities like grocery shopping, yard work, and travel left him exhausted for days. His quality of life declined sharply. He showed up as best he could. At 50, he studied qigong and taught others this gentle way to move and reduce stress. He moved to Loreto, B.C.S., Mexico, for a drier, warmer climate. He retired early, tried acupuncture and reiki, simplified his life, and said no more often. But it was too late. He had pushed his body beyond its limits. A weakening took over his body and his life. Chronic fatigue syndrome prevented him from living fully. He couldn’t attend his grandkid’s graduation or walk me down the aisle at my wedding. Before he died, he wrote to his family: 'What still remains with you is the vibrant me with the good and positive energy that was once here. Live on in hope and love, and be at peace with yourself and those closest to you.' His struggles and those words keep my head up and my eyes forward. I am at peace when I feel grounded and mentally calm. Working out and spending time with my people accomplish that for me. When I lift, I escape my busy mind and connect with my body. By keeping my phone away and committing to movement, I feel better and more capable in every way. I fiercely protect my time, my sleep, workouts, moments with friends, date nights, and Sundays with my husband. When I maintain these priorities, I feel centered and stronger and show up at my best. My father didn’t want to merely take up space, and neither do I. I’m here to feel alive, not just to exist. I have the knowledge and resources to grow stronger as I age. I have a healthy, capable body. At 47 years old, I have no injuries, chronic pain, or illness. That is remarkable! My dad showed me the consequences of neglecting the body, lack of rest, ignoring strength training, and pushing beyond limits. This is why I remain a student and why I enrolled in the StrongFirst Bodyweight Certification (SFB). I want to keep learning how to get stronger with fewer setbacks and enjoy life more. We know too much now to be unaware of how to care for ourselves. When my dad was in his mid-40s, he didn’t have access to the information I have today. Groundbreaking doctors are bringing research and education to the public. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon has taught me that “muscle is the organ of longevity”, not just to live longer, but to enjoy life more as we age. In her book, Forever Strong, she proves that strength training grows new brain cells, builds stronger bones, and boosts the immune system. “Your body is your best supercharged 401(k) plan,” says Dr. Wendy Suzuki, a pioneering neuroscientist researching the brain-changing benefits of exercise. Thanks to top sleep specialist Dr. Andrea Matsumura, I have the knowledge and resources to maintain great sleep rituals that allow my body to repair, build muscle & boost my brain health with high-quality sleep. Thanks to Dr. Lisa Mosconi, neuroscientist and director of the Women’s Brain Initiative, I understand that as a woman in perimenopause, my brain is less protected due to lower estrogen. Even though I am on full HRT (estradiol patch, progesterone pill, testosterone gel, and vaginal estradiol cream), I must prioritize sleep, strength training, nutrition, and stress reduction. My father worked hard and sacrificed greatly for me. He sent me to a private high school, made college possible, and supported me through tough times. He empowered me to be the student and coach that I am today. I will not live in vain with this ability to enjoy life more as I grow older. I will not keep these resources to myself. I believe I am here to empower others to shift their energy daily so they can positively impact those around them. Coach Karen can expect to see me again at my next SFB. In the meantime, I will keep training for the one-arm push-up. I will keep doing pull-ups to the best of my ability. I will keep jumping on boxes and skipping rope. Most importantly, I will keep sharing how others can build muscle for themselves. We know too much not to show up for ourselves. Life on earth is a high-sensory experience, and I am determined to enjoy it fully with a stronger body and sharper mind. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Bre Bicknell Bre Bicknell, Perimenopause & Menopause Expert Bre Bicknell is a perimenopause and menopause expert. After 20 years in the fitness industry, anxiety & depression hit her hard at age 44. After fighting to get on HRT, she dedicated herself to understanding the effects of perimenopause on the female brain. She leads women's groups and online training programs that help women gain muscle so they can age powerfully.

Written by Safiya Abidali, Neuroscientist & Professional Coach Safiya Abidali is a neuroscientist and professional coach specialising in behaviour change, resilience, and emotional regulation. She takes neuroscience research to develop practical tools for sustainable habits and mental well-being. We have spent the last two decades engineering friction out of everyday life. One-click purchasing. Autoplay. Instant replies expected within minutes. Every app on your phone has been designed by people whose job is to remove the tiny pause between wanting something and getting it. The assumption underneath all of this is simple and rarely questioned: friction is the enemy of a good life, and convenience is always progress. That assumption is quietly costing us the very thing it promises to protect: our ability to regulate ourselves. The neuroscience of impulse control Between an impulse and an action, there is a gap. It might only last a second or two, but it's in that gap that the prefrontal cortex gets a chance to weigh in: to override, delay, or redirect what the brain's more reactive systems want to do immediately. Remove the gap, and you remove the opportunity for regulation to happen at all. The behaviour doesn't become more disciplined. It becomes more automatic. This is the same reason a habit performed on autopilot collapses the moment life gets stressful: there was never any real engagement behind it, only repetition. Friction is what forces that engagement. It's the structural pause that turns a reflex into a choice, and it's a core mechanism behind sustainable self-regulation and behaviour change. Friction vs. restriction: Why the distinction matters "Friction" and "restriction" get used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing, and the difference matters for anyone trying to build lasting self-control. Restriction is an external no, applied without explanation, often abandoned the moment no one is watching. It manages behaviour without ever engaging the reasoning behind it. Friction is different. It's a structural pause that assumes the person will eventually take over the regulation themselves. Restriction says "you can't." Friction says "wait, and notice what you actually want." One produces short-term compliance. The other, given time, produces genuine, internalised self-regulation. Friction is meant to work as temporary scaffolding: support that holds a behaviour in place just long enough for the brain to build its own regulatory capacity, until the pause is no longer something imposed from outside but something the person does for themselves. Why high-achieving adults are the most exposed This distinction matters for adults at least as much as it does for anyone still developing self-regulation skills, arguably more, since most professionals have spent their adult lives systematically removing their own friction in the name of efficiency, then wondering why their self-control feels thinner than it used to. Consider how the average high-achieving professional operates day to day: email answered from a lock screen notification, purchases completed in a single tap, decisions made in the sliver of time between meetings because there's no built-in pause to slow anything down. None of this is inherently bad. Convenience has real value. But when every friction point gets optimised away, we lose the space in which considered decisions are made, and end up reacting our way through days that feel, by the end, entirely out of our control. The irony is sharp: the people most likely to pride themselves on discipline and self-regulation are often the ones who have unknowingly engineered the most frictionless and reactive environments for themselves. Who this applies to This isn't really a parenting concept or a productivity hack; it's a principle that shows up anywhere self-regulation matters, which is to say almost everywhere. It applies to the professional who checks emails compulsively between meetings, mistaking constant availability for diligence, when what's missing is simply a pause long enough to respond with intention rather than reflex. It applies to anyone who has tried to break a habit through sheer willpower alone, whether screen time, spending, snacking, or scrolling, and found that motivation holds for a few days before the old pattern reasserts itself. Willpower is unreliable, especially under stress or fatigue; friction is structural, which is why it tends to outlast good intentions. It applies to leaders and decision-makers whose environments have been optimised for speed: one-click approvals, instant replies, back-to-back meetings with no white space between them. The absence of friction here doesn't just erode personal regulation; it shapes team culture, modelling reactivity as the norm rather than the exception. It applies, just as much, to anyone raising or mentoring someone younger, where the goal was never simply to control behaviour in the short term, but to build the internal capacity for self-regulation that outlasts any external rule. The common thread isn't a demographic. It's anyone whose environment has quietly removed the pause between wanting something and acting on it, which, in a culture built on convenience, is nearly all of us. How to reclaim a bit of friction Build a pause before decisions that matter. A simple rule works well here: nothing gets purchased, sent, or agreed to in the same minute the impulse appears. Sleep on financial decisions above a set threshold. Draft the email, then close the laptop before sending it. Make the easy path require a beat of intention. When a behaviour needs to change, willpower alone rarely sustains it. Restructure the environment instead, so the default requires one small extra step. The goal isn't to make the behaviour impossible, just to make it require a genuine moment of thought. Treat friction as scaffolding, not punishment. Any structural pause introduced deliberately, in a habit, a routine, or a relationship with technology, isn't meant to stay in place forever. It's meant to hold long enough that regulation stops being external and starts being self-generated. Naming that shift explicitly, when it happens, reinforces it. The most effective path to lasting self-regulation isn't more willpower; it's rebuilding the small, structural pauses that give the brain room to choose. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Safiya Abidali Safiya Abidali, Neuroscientist & Professional Coach Safiya Abidali is a neuroscientist and professional coach specialising in behaviour change, resilience, and emotional regulation. With a background in social anthropology and applied neuroscience, she bridges brain science and behaviour with lived experience. Safiya writes about motivation, uncertainty, habit formation, and mental resilience. She is the founder of Neuropath Coaching, a neuroscience-informed coaching practice.

When you’re booking a full truckload, the trailer type decides almost everything about how the freight moves. When it comes to FTL freight services, there are two choices that show up: dry van and step deck. At first glance, dry van and step deck might look the same, but dry van and step deck actually solve different problems. Transport Topics reported that FTR Transportation Intelligence tracked dry van and refrigerated van trailer orders falling year-over-year in 2025, while flatbed and other vocational segments held up comparatively well even as overall production declined. That kind of demand split reflects a deeper operational reality – dry van and step deck trailers serve very different freight profiles, and choosing between them comes down to whether the load needs weather protection or extra vertical clearance for taller cargo. What a dry van actually gives you A dry van is the closed box most people picture when they think of a semi in FTL freight services. The common 53-footer gives you roughly 53 feet of floor, a bit under 102 inches of width, and about 110 inches of height inside. You can put 26 standard pallets on it and load 42,000 – 45,000 pounds. Its loading doors are at the rear, its flooring aligns with the docking system, and after closing the doors, it is protected from bad weather as well as theft. That is why it is used for carrying the bulk of cargo that comes every day, which includes anything packed in boxes or pallets. How a step deck works differently A step deck works the opposite way in FTL transport. It is an open trailer with a step in the middle. The front section sits about five feet off the ground. The longer back section drops to around three and a half feet. That drop is the whole point. On the deck, you can usually stack freight up to ten feet high and still stay under the legal overall height of thirteen feet six inches for FTL loads. The length is 48 or 53 feet total, the width stays 102 inches. The weight capacity is close to a regular flatbed – mid-40,000s. You can load from the side, the top, or drive equipment on with ramps. Tarps cover it when rain is a concern. Making the call The choice is rarely complicated once you measure the load. If the freight fits inside a standard box and needs to stay dry, take the dry van. If it is too tall for a normal flatbed deck but does not need a full lowboy, the step deck usually solves it without permits – a decision FTL freight services can help guide based on your specific load requirements.

Nile tours are done by tourists riding in a big boat. They travel to see the temples in Luxor, Edfu, Kom Ombo, and Aswan, and then leave having taken some decent photographs. The Nile River Cruises do this well, and they work best for travelers seeking comfort and convenience. But the problem with Nile Cruises is that the river is merely seen in the background. This guide will show you how to incorporate small boats, villages, and local transportation into your Nile experience. The information provided below addresses the common concerns of tourists about the Nile. Why the usual cruise leaves gaps There are 100 or more passengers on a big Nile boat, and there is not much docking room available at Luxor and Aswan. The ships are docked one beside the other; hence, you will walk through two or three other ships in order to reach the land. There is a scheduled visit plan for the temples; hence, you will have to share Karnak and Edfu with hundreds of others in the same period. The ship should also navigate through the Esna lock, where the ships queue for hours. The distance between Luxor and Aswan is 210 km on land, and the voyage usually takes three to four days. This is a very short duration when you look at the rivers that Egyptians have been cultivating for thousands of years. Farms, fishing boats, and the Nubian homes pass by your window, but only a few passengers leave the ship. You can do so by either opting for a small boat or by keeping the ship and increasing land duration. Slow boats that put you closer to the river It is worth noting that Egyptian culture features traditional sailboats. There is a choice between a dahabiya and a felucca. In turn, a dahabiya is characterized by its cabins and the crew, who cooks. A felucca is an open sailboat with one sail and a very basic structure. Both are rowed at the pace of the current of the river. Dahabiya trips between Esna and Aswan Dahabiya is a boat with two sails. It accommodates not more than 20 people. Its shallowness makes it able to moor at a tranquil bank away from any port. One of the routes starts from Esna and ends in Aswan, covering about 155 km on the river. The itinerary includes El Kab, the ancient town of Nekheb with its tombs in the rocks, and Daraw, where camel caravans from Sudan used to stop. Some itineraries also visit Gebel el-Silsila, which was a sandstone quarry that provided the stones for the construction of numerous temples. Large ships do not visit this place. Nile River Cruises usually follow this itinerary with village tours and tranquil stops instead of a busy port. The wind determines the speed of the trip. If there is no wind, some boats use a tugboat. Overnight Felucca trips Felucca is the inexpensive choice. Most journeys will take two days from Aswan to Kom Ombo, traveling roughly 45 km downstream. The passengers will be sleeping on mattress sheets on the deck, and the crew will be preparing basic food on a stove. There is no cabin, just a very basic toilet facility. In winter, the temperatures can dip down to around 8 to 10°C at night, so you must pack a warm coat. A one-hour Felucca ride Should spending an entire night onboard not be your cup of tea, try one hour in a felucca in the Aswan corniche. One popular route will take you to Elephantine Island, home to the historical Nilometer used to measure the annual floods of the Nile, as well as Kitchener’s Island, featuring a botanical garden. It is best to visit when the sun sets. The cost is based on the boat, not on the passengers. Ways to meet the Nile on land One does not necessarily have to disembark from one’s boat to move closer to river life. There are just a few quick stops on land that will completely transform the whole experience. Such stops should be inexpensive and easy to organize through one’s hotel or local tour guide on the very day of the cruise. Nubian villages near Aswan The Nubian villages are scattered on the islands and banks near Aswan. Gharb Soheil is an interesting place to visit; Siou and Koti are some of the villages near Aswan that are found on Elephantine Island. Some Nubian families have had to vacate their land, which is now submerged in Lake Nasser due to the construction of the High Dam in the 1960s. Tea can be offered by families in their homes. Luxor's West Bank farmland The city of Luxor has a strip of green land used for farming on its western side, close to the temples. Cross the river using a ferry and hire a bicycle at the point of departure. You will travel through sugarcane, banana, and corn farms, with water buffalo grazing near the canals. You should start early since the temperatures during summer exceed 40°C in Luxor. Early morning balloon flights give you a bird’s-eye view of the same farmlands. Practical tips for common concerns The ideal time is between October and April, as the day is warm and the night is cool. Between May and September, Luxor and Aswan reach 40°C. You will find it difficult to be comfortable without air conditioning on the small boats. In the summer season, you need to take a ship and an air-conditioned dahabiya to do the land tours at early hours. Drink bottled water and carry sunscreen and a hat. Solo travelers and families will find dahabiyas easy to manage, since the group is limited and the staff is around them. Make sure there are life jackets and a radio set in your boat. Get to know the cost. Book dahabiyas and felucca tours beforehand during November to March because of fewer cabins in the small boats. Final thoughts The Nile is not just the road connecting the temples. The best journeys are those that combine some days of slow journeying with brief stops along the way, leaving enough time for tea in a Nubian house or an hour of tranquility during sunset. The first voyage can take place in three to five days on a dahabiya from Esna to Aswan. One hour by felucca and half a day in a Nubian village will give you the whole journey covered, including the river, the temples, and the local way of life.

Written by Markella Kaplani, Parenthood and Relationship Coach & Psychologist Markella Kaplani, Master of Arts (M.A.), is a licensed psychologist specializing in parenthood and relationship dynamics. With over 16 years of experience, she brings a holistic, compassionate approach to mental and emotional wellness, helping parents reconnect with themselves, their partners, and their dreams so the entire family system can thrive. You are a capable, functioning adult. You handle deadlines, manage relationships, raise children, and pay bills. Yet, in certain moments, when someone criticizes you, when you feel left out, when your partner raises their voice, when your child's tantrum triggers a wave of rage you do not understand, your throat tightens, your thoughts spiral, and you react in ways that feel automatic, disproportionate, and deeply familiar. A much younger part of you takes over the steering wheel. It is your inner child trying to be heard, that part of you that still carries the unprocessed emotions, unmet needs, and survival strategies of your earliest years. In this article, you will learn what inner child work actually is (beyond the Instagram oversimplification), how your inner child shows up in your relationships and your parenting, and 5 ways to begin the work of listening. What is the inner child? The inner child is not a cute metaphor. It is a clinical concept with roots in multiple established therapeutic traditions, including attachment theory, developmental psychology, schema therapy, and Internal Family Systems. It refers to the younger parts of our psyche that formed during childhood, parts that carry the emotional memories, beliefs, coping strategies, and unmet needs from our earliest years. These parts do not disappear when we grow up. They go underground. They become the silent operators behind your adult behavior: why we people-please, why we shut down during conflict, why we cannot tolerate criticism, and why we feel like a fraud even when the evidence says otherwise. Our inner child is not a relic of the past. It is an active, present force in your daily life, influencing how you think, feel, relate, and react, especially under stress. In Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, these younger parts are called "exiles", vulnerable parts that were pushed out of awareness because the emotions they carried were too painful or too dangerous to express in the family environment. Other parts of the psyche, called "protectors" and "managers", developed specifically to keep these exiles suppressed. The perfectionism, the control, the emotional numbness, the chronic busyness–these are not character traits. They are protection strategies, built by younger parts of you, to keep the most wounded parts from surfacing. If you are interested in learning more about IFS, I highly recommend the book No Bad Parts by Dr. Schwartz. It is written simply but comprehensively, and it includes exercises you can do yourself, along with guidance on when a case might warrant support from a professional. Why inner child work matters for adults Most adults who struggle with emotional reactivity, relational patterns, or a vague sense that something is "wrong with them" despite having a functional life are not dealing with a present-day problem. They are dealing with an old wound that never received adequate care. The adult brain developed workarounds, such as coping mechanisms, defense structures, or identity constructions, that allowed them to function. But functioning is not the same as thriving. Eventually, the workarounds start to cost more than they protect. This is especially true during major life transitions. Starting a new relationship, getting married, becoming a parent, losing a parent, and facing a career crisis are all examples of events that activate the inner child with particular intensity because they involve the same core themes that shaped childhood: Am I safe? Loved? Enough? Will I be abandoned? When the answer to any of these questions was uncertain in childhood, the adult carries that uncertainty into every significant moment of life until it is addressed. The evidence base for this work is growing. Clinical research on IFS has shown that 92 percent of participants with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) no longer met diagnostic criteria at one-month follow-up after treatment. A 2025 scoping review described IFS as a promising therapeutic approach for PTSD, depression, and chronic pain. Reparenting protocols within schema therapy have demonstrated significant reductions in core schema activation and improved emotional regulation. These are not soft outcomes. This is measurable clinical change, produced by engaging with the younger parts of the self that traditional talk therapy often cannot reach. How your inner child shows up in daily life Your inner child does not announce itself. It does not say, "Hello, I am your seven-year-old self, and I am terrified of being rejected." It communicates through the body, through emotional reactions, and through patterns so familiar you have stopped questioning them. Here are some of the most common ways: You over-apologize: You say sorry for things that do not require an apology, for having an opinion, for taking up space, for existing in a way that might inconvenience someone. This often traces back to a childhood environment where your needs were treated as a burden. You cannot tolerate conflict: The moment tension arises, you either shut down entirely or scramble to fix it immediately. Your nervous system reads disagreement as danger because, in childhood, conflict may have been unpredictable, explosive, or a precursor to emotional withdrawal. You need constant reassurance: Despite evidence of your competence, you seek validation from others, like your partner, your boss, your friends, or social media, because the internal sense of being "enough" was never securely established in childhood. You parent reactively: Your child's behavior triggers responses in you that feel bigger than the moment. Their defiance activates your fear of losing control. Their neediness activates your resentment. Their tears activate your helplessness. These are not reactions to your child. They are reactions to your own childhood, replaying through the only available channel. You feel like a fraud: You have built a life, a career, a family, and yet, somewhere underneath, you feel like you are pretending. That if people saw the real you, they would leave. This is not imposter syndrome in the corporate sense. It is a younger part of you that learned early on that acceptance was conditional and could be revoked. Your inner child in your relationship Intimate relationships are the arena where inner child wounds play out most intensely because romantic attachment activates the same neural circuits as childhood attachment. Your partner is not your parent, but your nervous system does not always know that. The way you respond to your partner's criticism, distance, distraction, or anger is shaped by decades-old patterns that were wired before you had words. The partner who becomes clingy during disconnection often carries a child part that learned love could disappear without warning. The partner who withdraws into silence during conflict is often protecting a child part that learned that visibility meant vulnerability, and vulnerability meant pain. The partner who controls everything–the schedule, the finances, the social life–is often managing a child part that never felt safe enough to let go. When two adults bring their unexamined inner child wounds into a relationship, the result is two people reacting to each other's ghosts. He is not ignoring you. He is protecting a part of himself that learned that emotional demands were suffocating. You are not being needy. You are carrying a part that learned that love required pursuit. The fight is between two children who never got what they needed, wearing adult bodies and using adult words. Your inner child in your parenting If intimate relationships activate inner child wounds, parenting detonates them. No faster route to your unprocessed childhood material than caring for a small human being going through developmental stages you once went through yourself. When your child has a tantrum, and you feel an overwhelming urge to scream, it is often because their loss of control activates a younger part of you that was punished for losing control. When your child clings to you and you feel suffocated rather than needed, it may be because your own needs for comfort were dismissed, and you learned that neediness was shameful. When your child defies you, and you feel a flash of rage that frightens you with its intensity, you may be experiencing your own parent's reaction, a pattern so deeply embedded that it emerges before your rational brain can intervene. This is where inner child work becomes not just personal healing but a generational intervention. When you recognize that your reaction to your child is really a reaction to your own childhood, you create a gap, a small but critical space between stimulus and response. In that gap, you can choose. You can meet your child's behavior with the response they need, rather than the response your history dictates. That choice, repeated thousands of times, is what breaks a generational cycle. Here are the 5 ways to start listening to your inner child: 1. Notice the disproportionate reactions The most reliable signal that your inner child is active is an emotional reaction that does not match the situation. A wave of shame over a minor mistake. Rage that erupts over a small frustration. Panic when someone does not respond to a message quickly. When this happens, do not try to argue yourself out of the feeling. Instead, get curious. Ask: How old do I feel right now? What does this remind me of? The answer will rarely be about the present. It will be about a much older story. 2. Speak to the part, not about it One of the most powerful IFS practices is addressing your inner child directly, with curiosity and compassion, as you would a real child who is frightened or hurting. This isn't visualization for its own sake. It engages the neural pathways that process attachment and care. Instead of "why am I so reactive?" try "I notice a part of me that feels very scared right now. What does it need me to know?" This shift from analysis to relationship is what makes inner child work different from simply thinking about your childhood. One person I worked with had spent years understanding, in exquisite detail, why she over-functioned. The insight never changed the behavior. The shift came in a single session when, instead of analysing, she turned inward and said to the exhausted little girl who'd been holding everything together: "You don't have to do this alone anymore." She wept. For the first time, the over-functioning loosened its grip. 3. Identify your protectors Before you can access the wounded child parts, you need to understand the parts that are working to keep them hidden. Your perfectionism, people-pleasing, tendency to over-intellectualize emotions, and humor-as-deflection are all protectors. They developed for good reason. They kept you safe when you were small. Recognizing them with gratitude rather than frustration is the first step toward a different internal relationship. A protector that feels respected is far more willing to step aside than one that feels attacked. 4. Practice reparenting in real time Reparenting is the process of providing your inner child with what it needed and never received, not retroactively, but in the present moment. When you notice a child part activated, pause and offer what a loving, attuned parent would. If the part feels ashamed, offer acceptance. If it feels scared, offer safety. If it feels invisible, offer attention. This can be as simple as placing a hand on your chest and saying internally: "I see you. You are safe. I am here now." This may sound simplistic, but research on self-compassion and somatic regulation consistently shows that these practices create measurable changes in nervous system activation. 5. Get professional support You can do inner child work in small, everyday ways. But if your childhood involved significant neglect, abuse, or emotional deprivation, going deeper without professional support can be destabilizing. A therapist trained in IFS, schema therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), or attachment-focused approaches can provide the safety and structure you need to access your most wounded parts without being overwhelmed. This is not a sign that you are “too damaged” to do it on your own. It is a sign that the work is serious enough to deserve a skilled guide. Why this work is not optional for parents If you are a parent, inner child work is not a luxury or a nice-to-have addition to your personal development. It is the most direct path to breaking the patterns you do not want to pass on. Every time you react to your child from an unexamined wound, you risk encoding a new version of that wound in them (read more about [inter]generational trauma in this article). Every time you pause, recognize the reaction for what it is, and choose a different response, you are rewriting the script. This is not about being a perfect parent. Perfection is itself a protector. It is about being a parent who knows where their own pain lives, who has a relationship with the younger parts of themselves, and who can distinguish between what their child needs right now and what their own childhood needed decades ago. You are not born with that discernment. It is something you build through the willingness to look inward, not just at the polished, competent adult, but at the child who was there first. The child who was there first If something in this article stirred a recognition you cannot quite name, i.e., a tightness, a sadness, a memory that flickered at the edges, that is your inner child, asking to be seen. You do not have to have all the answers to begin. You just have to be willing to listen. As a psychologist and parenthood and relationship coach, I help individuals, parents, and couples connect with the parts of themselves that drive their most painful patterns and build a new relationship with those parts based on compassion rather than control. Visit here for resources and programs, or email me to book a free discovery call. The child who was there first is still waiting. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Markella Kaplani Markella Kaplani, Parenthood and Relationship Coach & Psychologist Markella Kaplani, M.A., is a multi-passionate, restless soul passionate about discovering the depths of the psyche and what makes us whole. In her quest to support people along their journey to better mental and emotional health, Markella is a dedicated lifelong learner. She holds an M.A. in Clinical-Counseling Psychology and specializes in child psychology, special education, couples therapy, and motherhood psychology, giving her a holistic perspective on the family system, both internally and externally. With her non-judgmental, culturally sensitive, and compassionate approach, she combines facts with each person's unique experience to create interventions that speak to their individuality.