Written by Collin Maronese and Hugo Nicastro, Co-Founders of Downloads: Thought Rewired™ Collin Maronese is a performance coach, entrepreneur, and national-level boxer. Hugo Nicastro is a product designer, developer, and creative technologist. Together, they co-founded Downloads: Thought Rewired™, exploring how mental conditioning can help men access the state the moment requires. Most ambitious men already know what they should be doing. The harder problem shows up when the meeting starts, the bell rings, the pressure rises, or you walk through the front door still carrying the day with you. This article explores the gap between knowing and doing, why more motivation is not always the answer, and how mental conditioning can move closer to the moments that actually matter. What is a state problem? There is a strange assumption in the performance world that ambitious men need more motivation. We don't think most of us do. The information did not disappear. The state changed. Make the call. Finish the proposal. Train. Have the conversation you've been avoiding. Put the phone away. Stop overthinking. Walk into the meeting with confidence. Leave work at work. Be present when you get home. None of that is particularly groundbreaking advice. The problem is that knowing exactly what you should do does not guarantee that you will be able to access that version of yourself when the moment arrives. For Collin, boxing made that gap impossible to ignore. You can train for months. You can know your combinations. You can execute something a thousand times in the gym. Then somebody closes the door behind you, and the fight starts. Your breathing changes. Your attention changes. Something that felt automatic three days earlier suddenly requires thought. Confidence that felt real during training can disappear quickly. This isn’t a flow state, and there is another part of the brain taking over that is causing the friction. The information did not disappear. The state changed. It’s interesting to consider the link between our traits and how they influence our states and the environments we are in. That is what we mean by a state problem. That gap shows up everywhere. You can be stressed when you need to be calm. Distracted when you need to focus. Flat when you need energy. Or nothing can be particularly wrong at all. You might just know that the next moment requires more confidence, more presence, or a different level of intensity than the one you’re carrying into it. That’s the problem we’re interested in, the gap between the state you’re in and the state the moment requires. Once we started looking at performance this way, motivation became only one part of the picture. Sometimes you need to get yourself going. Sometimes you need to settle yourself down. Sometimes you need to get your attention back, find your confidence, or leave the last hour behind you. The goal isn’t to live in one perfect state. It’s to get better at recognizing what you need and accessing more of it when it matters. Why does performance under pressure feel different? A boxing ring is an obvious pressure environment, but the same pattern shows up in less dramatic places. The person who knew exactly what he wanted to say starts talking too quickly in the meeting. The founder who made the decision yesterday starts questioning it this morning. The salesperson who has delivered the presentation twenty times becomes preoccupied with being judged. The athlete who prepared properly starts thinking about the outcome instead of the next action. Or your ability to be present for your relationship or a date that you are on. We tend to call these “confidence problems,” “motivation problems,” or “mindset problems.” Sometimes they are. But there is another useful question. What state are you bringing into the moment? Research on performance under pressure supports the idea that mental preparation is trainable, while also warning against one-size-fits-all claims. Exercise and Sports Science Australia (ESSA)’s 2026 position statement identifies pre-performance routines, attentional strategies, psychological skills training, and mindfulness-based approaches among the evidence-informed tools practitioners may use, depending on the sport and context. A 2026 meta-analysis of interventions for choking under pressure likewise found benefits across several approaches, with effects varying by task. The point is not that one technique works for everyone. It is that performance under pressure can be prepared for. “Performance” means being the person that the moment is asking for. Sport is just a specific niche to understand this through. Brainz has also explored how elite athletes train their minds for high-stakes competition. Our interest is what happens when that same logic leaves the locker room and enters the rest of a man's life. Why more motivation is not always the answer This is where motivational culture can get the problem wrong. You do not need to be fired up all the time. Before a fight, intensity may be useful. Before a difficult conversation with someone you love, bringing that same intensity would be ridiculous. Before a sales presentation, confidence and energy may help. After an emotionally charged meeting, you may need the opposite: enough calm to stop one bad hour from contaminating the next five. Before bed, intensity is useless. Different moments ask different things from us. The objective is not permanent activation. It is range. The 3 states we kept seeing: Stressed, distracted, and flat As we built Downloads, we kept trying to simplify the front door. If a man opens an app because he wants to change how he is showing up, what is he most likely to recognize without having to diagnose himself? We kept coming back to three plain language states: Stressed: There is too much pressure in the system. He may want calm or a reset. Distracted: His attention is somewhere other than where it needs to be. He may want focus. Flat: The energy is not there. He may want confidence, energy, or a reset before action. Those words are intentionally ordinary. They are not diagnoses, and they are not meant to describe every emotional experience. They are simply recognizable starting points. On the other side are the states we repeatedly want access to in real life: calm, focus, confidence, energy, and reset. That gives us a more useful question than “How can I stay motivated?” "How am I showing up right now, and what does the next moment require from me?" Why mental training should move closer to the moment Physical performance already works this way. We warm up before training. We rehearse technique. We recover afterward. We prepare specifically for competition. Mental development is often separated from the moment itself. Meditate in the morning. Read the book. Listen to the podcast. Attend the coaching session. Journal at night. Those practices can all be useful. But there is another window we think deserves more attention, the ten minutes before something matters. Before the presentation. Before the sales call. Before competition. On the walk into work. Sitting in the car after a brutal day. Before walking through the front door. That is the territory we mean by real time mental conditioning, short, deliberate mental preparation connected to a real moment, rather than another piece of content to consume someday. It is not a replacement for therapy, coaching, meditation, or clinical care. We are not claiming an audio file magically rewires your brain. The idea is much more practical, give the mind a rep closer to the point of performance. What does the next moment require from you? This question has become the centre of how we think about Downloads. If you are stressed before a difficult meeting, the answer may be calm. If you are distracted before deep work, it may be focus. If you feel flat before training, it may be energy. If doubt shows up before competition, it may be confidence. If the previous moment is still following you, maybe you need a reset. The important part is that the desired state changes with the moment. The goal is not to feel incredible every minute. It is to become more deliberate about what you carry into what comes next. Why high performance should include the transition home There is a version of high performance that looks impressive from the outside and feels terrible to live beside. A man wins professionally but brings the stress home. He is physically sitting at dinner while mentally replaying the meeting. He is accomplished, disciplined, and productive, but the people closest to him receive whatever energy remains after everybody else got the best of him. We have become increasingly uncomfortable calling that complete high performance. The broader research on work recovery supports taking that transition seriously. A systematic review of 159 empirical studies describes psychological detachment from work as an important recovery experience associated with employee health, well-being, and performance. A separate meta-analysis of 86 publications found that greater detachment was associated with less exhaustion, better well-being, better sleep, and other recovery outcomes. Maybe mental performance is not only about accessing more intensity. Maybe it is also about knowing when to put it down. The state that makes you effective at 3:00 p.m. may not be the state your relationship needs at 7:00 p.m. That is not weakness. That is range. Why we are building around the gap between knowing and doing We came at this problem from different directions. Collin's world has included national-level boxing and motocross, coaching, corporate sales, strategy, and entrepreneurship. Hugo's world has included product design, technology, and the creative development of digital experiences. Different backgrounds, same recurring question: "Why can somebody know exactly how he wants to show up and still struggle to access it when the moment arrives?" We do not claim to have solved that question. Downloads: Thought Rewired is one practical response we are building around it. The product uses short audio sessions connected to specific real-life moments. The aim is not to build the biggest content library. It is to shorten the distance between “I need to get my head right” and something useful enough to press play on now. That is also why the first layer is deliberately simple, stressed, distracted, or flat. From there, the user can move toward calm, focus, confidence, energy, or reset. Is the future of mental performance more contextual? The wellness industry has become extraordinarily good at giving us content. Thousands of meditations. Podcasts. Books. Courses. Videos. Advice. But when you are five minutes from something that matters, more choice can become another problem. You do not necessarily need a library. You need to know what is useful now. Like the app Activations: Daily Motivation, but for masculine energy. What are you feeling? What do you need? What are you about to do? We believe mental performance tools will become more contextual because real life is contextual. The same person can need energy at 7:00 a.m., focus at 10:00, confidence at 2:00, a reset at 5:30, and calm before bed. Over time, the win should not be dependence on an app. It should be becoming better at recognizing your own patterns and having practiced ways to respond. That is what conditioning means to us. Maybe motivation was never the whole problem There will always be a place for motivation. Collin has used it throughout his athletic career and business career, and we use it in Downloads too. But ambitious men do not need to spend their lives becoming increasingly fired up. Sometimes the harder skill is becoming calm. Sometimes it is getting your attention back. Sometimes it is recovering confidence. Sometimes it is finding energy. Sometimes it is letting the previous moment go. Sometimes it is arriving home as the man you intended to be when you left that morning, your favorite one! Eventually, every goal, presentation, fight, conversation, and relationship gets reduced to something smaller: a moment, and then another one. The question is not whether you know what to do. It is whether you can access more of the state the moment requires. Start with the next moment If this distinction between motivation and state feels familiar, we are exploring it through Downloads: Thought Rewired, short mental conditioning audio built around real-life moments. Start with one question. How are you feeling right now? Then ask what you need for what comes next. Follow us on LinkedIn, and visit our website for more info! Read more from Collin Maronese and Hugo Nicastro Collin Maronese and Hugo Nicastro, Co-Founders of Downloads: Thought Rewired™ Collin Maronese is a performance coach, entrepreneur, and national-level boxer whose experience across sport, coaching, and business shaped his interest in how men perform when the moment matters. Hugo Nicastro is a product designer, developer, and creative technologist focused on turning complex ideas into intuitive digital experiences. Together, they co-founded Downloads: Thought Rewired™, a real-time mental conditioning platform for men. Their work explores the gap between knowing how you want to show up and being able to access that state when the moment actually arrives.

Written by Claudia Gravaghi, Nutritional Scientist, Formulator & Counsellor Claudia Gravaghi is a Nutritional Scientist, Product Formulator, and Counsellor in metabolic health. She combines clinical research, biochemistry, and emotional behavioural support to guide individuals, including GLP-1 users, toward sustainable health, metabolic balance, and a more informed relationship with food. “I know exactly what I should be eating. So why can’t I just do it?” It is one of the most interesting questions I hear in my work. The people asking it are often intelligent, informed, and highly motivated. They understand nutrition. They know that vegetables are good for them, that excessive snacking probably isn’t, and that eating an entire packet of biscuits after a stressful day is unlikely to move them towards their health goals. They have read the books. Downloaded the apps. Tried the diets. Sometimes they can explain the science of nutrition almost as well as the professional sitting opposite them. Yet they continue to repeat the same behaviours. The problem is not necessarily a lack of knowledge. It is that knowing how we want to eat and being able to eat that way are two very different neurological and behavioural processes. Eating is not an intellectual exercise We often approach nutrition as though the rational brain were completely in charge. If people understand what is healthy, we assume they should choose it. But eating behaviour is influenced by much more than conscious decision-making. Hunger, reward, stress, previous experiences, emotions, environment, learned associations, and physiological state all shape the decision to eat, sometimes before conscious reasoning even enters the conversation. You may intellectually decide at 9 am that you will not eat dessert that evening. At 9 pm, after a difficult day, little sleep, and dinner with friends, you are operating in an entirely different biological and emotional environment. Your nutritional knowledge has not disappeared. But it is no longer the only voice in the room. The brain remembers what makes us feel better Food is not simply fuel. From our earliest experiences, food becomes associated with comfort, celebration, belonging, pleasure, reward, and safety. Birthday? Cake. Celebration? Champagne and dinner. Break-up? Ice cream. Exhausting day? Takeaway. Sunday with family? A particular meal eaten for generations. Interestingly, emotional eating is not limited to negative emotions. Happiness, excitement and social connection can also increase the desire to eat. This is because eating is woven into the emotional architecture of our lives. When a behaviour repeatedly produces pleasure, relief or comfort, the brain learns the association. Eventually, the trigger itself–stress, loneliness, celebration, boredom, or even a certain time of day–can generate the expectation of food. At that point, asking someone simply to “make a healthier choice” may completely underestimate what is happening. Motivation is powerful, but temporary Another misunderstanding is that motivated people should be able to maintain change indefinitely. Motivation is excellent for starting. January diets demonstrate this beautifully. A new goal creates energy. Rules feel achievable. Progress is rewarding. Attention is high. But motivation fluctuates. Life does not. Work becomes stressful. Children become ill. Relationships become complicated. Sleep deteriorates. Holidays happen. Routines disappear. If a new way of eating depends entirely on maintaining the emotional intensity that existed when the diet began, eventually the structure becomes difficult to sustain. This is why successful behaviour change cannot rely solely on motivation. It has to work on ordinary Tuesday evenings when motivation is nowhere to be found. Restriction can make food louder, not quieter There is another paradox. The harder people try to control food, the more mentally important food can sometimes become. Rigid dieting often creates a world divided into “good” and “bad” foods, successful and unsuccessful days, control and failure. One biscuit becomes: “I’ve ruined today anyway.” A restaurant meal becomes: “I’ll start Monday again.” This all-or-nothing thinking can turn a perfectly ordinary deviation from a plan into a complete abandonment of it. Repeated restriction can also intensify another problem: food preoccupation. If your body perceives that energy is consistently restricted, hunger and food motivation are not signs of weakness. They are part of an adaptive biological response. The person may interpret this as failure. The body may simply be trying to protect itself. Stress changes the conversation Stress deserves particular attention because it sits at the intersection of biology and behaviour. Some people lose their appetite when stressed. Others find themselves standing in front of the refrigerator without consciously deciding to go there. Chronic stress can influence appetite, reward processing, and the desire for highly palatable foods. Food can simultaneously become a strategy for reducing unpleasant emotional states. That creates a powerful learning loop: I feel uncomfortable. I eat. For a moment, I feel better. The brain remembers. The next time discomfort appears, food becomes one available solution. Again, intelligence does not protect us from this process. An intelligent brain is still a human brain. The problem with asking, “What is wrong with me?” This is perhaps the part of my counselling work I find most important. When intelligent and successful people repeatedly struggle with eating, they often turn the frustration inward. “I have no discipline.” “I am weak.” “I know better than this.” “I should be able to control myself.” But shame rarely improves self-regulation. More often, it creates another difficult emotional state that needs regulating, and food may already be the person's most familiar regulatory tool. The more useful question is therefore not: “Why can't I control myself?” It is: “What is this behaviour doing for me?” That question changes everything. Maybe eating provides decompression after work. Maybe restriction creates a temporary feeling of control. Maybe food provides stimulation when someone feels bored. Maybe eating is the only moment of pleasure in an exhausting day. Maybe social eating represents connection. Until we understand the function of a behaviour, trying to eliminate it can become a battle against ourselves. Behaviour change begins with curiosity Sustainable change rarely begins with another set of food rules. It begins with observation: What happens immediately before I eat when I am not physically hungry? What emotion am I experiencing? Am I tired? Am I restricting too aggressively earlier in the day? Which situations repeatedly trigger the same behaviour? What am I expecting food to provide at that particular moment? This is not permission to abandon nutritional structure. Quite the opposite. Good nutrition still matters enormously. But nutritional knowledge becomes more useful when it is integrated with an understanding of the person who must apply it. From nutritional compliance to metabolic behaviour change This is why I increasingly think we need to move beyond the idea of nutritional compliance. People are not machines we input a meal plan into and expect predictable output from. Eating behaviour emerges from an ongoing interaction between physiology, metabolism, emotions, reward, environment and learned behaviour. I describe this interaction as metabolic behaviour. Changing what someone eats without understanding what drives them to eat may produce temporary results. Changing the conditions that repeatedly generate the behaviour creates a very different possibility. It allows people to develop flexibility rather than rigid control. Awareness rather than constant monitoring. Regulation rather than repeated cycles of restriction and loss of control. Knowing is important, understanding yourself is different Intelligence can help us understand nutrition. Motivation can help us begin. But neither automatically rewrites behaviours that may have been reinforced thousands of times over many years. That requires something different: awareness, repetition, emotional regulation, appropriate nutritional structure and the willingness to understand behaviour rather than simply judge it. Perhaps, then, the question is not: “Why do intelligent people keep making irrational food choices?” Perhaps the better question is: “What makes this behaviour rational to the brain in that particular moment?” Once we begin asking that, eating behaviour becomes far less mysterious. Change becomes less about fighting ourselves and more about understanding what actually needs to change. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Claudia Gravaghi Claudia Gravaghi, Nutritional Scientist, Formulator & Counsellor Claudia Gravaghi is a Nutritional Scientist, Product Formulator, and Counsellor with a PhD in Clinical Nutrition and a background in pharmaceutical chemistry. She has worked internationally as a postdoctoral researcher in nutrition, metabolism, and cancer. Today, she develops evidence-based formulations and helps individuals improve both metabolic health and their relationship with food. She focuses on individuals using GLP-1 medications, helping them navigate appetite changes, nutritional adequacy, and the emotional aspects of eating. Her work bridges molecular science and real-life behaviour, translating complex biochemistry into practical, personalised strategies.

Written by Manu Molina, Wellness Brand Mentor & Consultant Manu Molina brings 18 years of hands-on experience across yoga, wellness, retreats, and luxury hospitality. He is the founder of Yoga Biz Mentor, where he helps wellness and retreat leaders clarify their offers, strengthen their positioning, and create messaging that attracts the right clients. Marketing and selling your wellness offer can look effortless from the outside when it is attached to a famous brand’s name. But behind the scenes, there is usually a carefully designed path: the specific audience, the right message, a meaningful experience, and a clear next step. That is what caught my attention when Madonna and her spiritual teacher, Eitan Yardeni, appeared in an interview with Jay Shetty. The conversation was connected to a paid Kabbalah masterclass exploring spirituality, purpose, and personal transformation, but it revealed something that applies to almost any wellness brand: people rarely move from discovering you to buying from you in just one step. They need to understand what you stand for, why they should trust you, and how the offer fits into the journey they are already on. Look beyond Madonna’s reach Of course, Madonna has an extraordinary level of visibility. Her business model, audience, and resources are very different from those of most wellness entrepreneurs. Trying to copy her exact launch would make no sense for a wellness or retreat brand. For me, the useful lesson is that underneath the “shiny celebrity” attention, it becomes much more valuable when it is connected to a clear message and a relevant offer. A person may discover you through a podcast, an interview, a social media post, or a collaboration. That first encounter creates interest. But interest alone does not create the level of trust a sustainable wellness business needs to thrive. The experience needs to lead somewhere else and build over time. Choose the right audience One of the strongest decisions in this launch was the choice of collaborator. Jay Shetty already speaks to an audience interested in spirituality, personal growth, and meaning. That made the conversation relevant before the offer was even mentioned. This is an important distinction for wellness brands. A large audience is not automatically the right audience. The quality of the connection matters more than the size of the number. When you collaborate with someone whose audience already understands the world you are speaking about, you do not have to begin by explaining why the topic matters. You can begin with a conversation that feels natural to them. The 4 message layers In my view, Madonna and Eitan demonstrated four dimensions that matter when you are marketing and selling a wellness offer: niche, values, story, and authority. In my free Offer Identity Reset guide, I take a deeper look at these four dimensions and help you apply them to your wellness or retreat brand, whatever its size. 1. Know your audience The collaboration made the audience connection clear. This was not a random partnership. It brought a spiritual conversation to people already open to exploring that subject. Your wellness brand needs the same kind of specificity. Who is most likely to benefit from your work? What are they trying to understand, change, or experience? The more clearly you understand them, the easier it becomes for the right people to recognise themselves in your message. 2. Show your values Madonna spoke about the principles that have shaped her: resilience, hard work, perseverance, family, and refusing to see herself as a victim. Whether or not someone agrees with every part of her story, they can sense what matters to her. That is the role of values in wellness marketing. People are not only asking, “What do you sell?” They are also asking, “Do I believe in the way you see the world?” 3. Share your story Madonna’s story included struggle. She spoke about leaving home at a young age, being broke, facing painful experiences, and wanting to give up. Those details helped the audience understand the person behind the public image. Your story does not need to be dramatic, and you do not need to share everything. However, the relevant parts of your experience can help people understand why your offer exists and why you are the person to deliver it. 4. Build your authority Madonna brought her own experience, while Eitan brought his knowledge and professional authority in the field of Kabbalah. Together, they created a combination of personal connection and expertise. A strong wellness offer usually needs both. Your personal experience may make people feel connected to you, while your training, perspective, and results help them feel that they are in safe hands. Start before booking The interview worked as an entry point. It allowed people to encounter the story, values, and ideas before being asked to make a bigger decision. From there, the next step was to visit a landing page and provide a name and email address. The audience was no longer simply consuming content. They were entering a relationship with the brand and becoming part of the launch sequence. This is the part many wellness entrepreneurs overlook. They create free content, but the content is not connected to a clear next step. Eventually, they become exhausted from producing more and more without creating a path towards their paid work. Funnels that build trust This launch followed a recognisable structure: A free conversation – an email relationship – a paid masterclass. The point is not that every wellness business needs to use exactly this sequence. The point is that each stage has a job. The free content creates awareness and connection. The email relationship gives the brand more space to deepen the conversation. The paid offer then becomes a logical next step rather than a sudden interruption. This is how a funnel can support a more sustainable wellness business. It gives your audience time to understand you, and it gives you a way to market and sell retreats without relying on a constant stream of disconnected social media content. Sell with integrity There is one part of the interview that I did not fully agree with. At the beginning, Madonna said she was not there to sell or promote anything. However, the conversation did lead towards a paid masterclass. Selling wellness is not the problem, and there is nothing wrong with promoting a paid offer. In fact, the paid offer is the part that allows a business to serve people more deeply. The issue is creating a gap between what you say is happening and what is actually happening. Trust is built through clarity. If a conversation is connected to an offer, that does not make it less valuable. It simply means the audience deserves to understand the context. What wellness brands can learn I would borrow the intentional collaboration, the clear connection between the audience and the topic, and the way the message combined personal story with authority. I would also borrow the idea that a launch can be meaningful and strategic at the same time. In wellness, we sometimes create a false choice between heart and business. However, a values-led brand still needs a structure that helps people take action. What I would not borrow is the assumption that visibility alone will sell the offer. Most wellness entrepreneurs do not need to become more famous before they can build trust. They need a clearer message, a more relevant first step, and a better connection between their free content and paid work. Make your offer distinct If you know me well, you know I have loved Madonna for many years. My fascination began with Ray of Light, especially the spiritual quality of the music and the way she combined creativity with reinvention. Years later, when I first took an Ashtanga yoga class, I realised I already knew the mantra from one of her songs. So when I saw her speaking with Jay Shetty about her spiritual life, I was naturally curious. But what stayed with me was the way the conversation became a lesson in positioning, storytelling, and marketing. Your offer also needs to become more than information. It needs to carry your perspective, your experience, your values, and your way of seeing the work. That is what helps it feel distinct instead of sounding like another version of something people have already seen. That’s the work we do inside my 1:1 mentorship program for wellness and retreat brands, The Chosen Offer Method. A useful question to ask is: what does someone experience between discovering your wellness offer and deciding to buy? If that journey is unclear, it may be the first place to look. If you want to explore those elements in your own offer, you can start with my free Offer Identity Reset guide. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Manu Molina Manu Molina, Wellness Brand Mentor & Consultant Manu Molina is the founder of Yoga Biz Mentor, a mentorship and consulting brand for wellness and retreat leaders. Since 2008, he has worked across yoga, wellness, retreats, and luxury hospitality, including Six Senses Ibiza, Kamalaya, and Samahita Retreat in Thailand. He combines lived industry experience with strategic offer and brand work to help clients build clearer, more sustainable businesses. His approach is practical, ethical, and free from hype, manipulation, and marketing advice that compromises the integrity of wellness brands.

Written by Nick Ronald, Elite Mindset Coach Nick Ronald is a mindset coach and public speaking trainer with experience as a Toastmasters Club President and Area Director. He is the founder of Confidence Mindset Club, helping individuals build the confidence to speak up, stand out, and lead. Here's an uncomfortable truth for anyone who's ever rehearsed an opening line in the mirror, by the time you actually say it, the room may have already decided how it feels about you. Research into first impressions suggests that 70% of people form a judgment about a speaker before they've spoken a single word. Other studies push it further, audiences form snap impressions of competence, trustworthiness, and likeability within seconds, sometimes within a tenth of a second, based purely on posture, expression, and presence. And in a now-famous piece of research often cited in communication training, when message and delivery conflict, only around 7% of what lands with an audience comes from your actual words, the rest comes from tone and body language. Let that sink in. You could have the sharpest opening line ever written, and it still won't save you if you walk on stage, or into a meeting, or onto a Zoom call, already broadcasting doubt. I've spent over a decade in Toastmasters, as a member, Club President, Area Director, Division Director, and Club Coach, and I can tell you the single biggest gap I see isn't in people's words. It's in what they do in the ten seconds before they open their mouth. Here's how to close that gap. Your body speaks before you do There's a piece of research that gets passed around communication circles constantly, and for good reason, an analysis of TED Talks found that when volunteers rated speakers with the sound completely muted, their ratings of charisma and credibility were almost identical to when they could hear the talk. The audience was reading everything they needed from posture and movement alone. This isn't about performing confidence like an actor. It's about removing the visible signs of doubt, the shifting weight, the downward gaze, the shoulders creeping toward your ears. One of the clearest lessons my own mentor ever gave me, which I later built into a full Toastmasters speech called "The Hand That Shapes You," was this, audiences don't just watch what you do on stage, they watch how you arrive. The walk to the front of the room is already part of the speech. Try this: Before you're due to speak, in a meeting, a pitch, or on stage, stand still for three full seconds before you move. Resist the urge to fill that silence with movement or a nervous laugh. Stillness reads as control. Eye contact is a currency, not a courtesy Here's a statistic that surprises most people, on average, only around 3.5% of conversation time involves genuine mutual eye contact. We are, collectively, terrible at it and terrified of it. But research also shows that direct eye contact can boost perceived trustworthiness by roughly 13%, which is a significant swing for something that costs you nothing. I used to make the classic beginner's mistake early in my own speaking journey, scanning the room like a lighthouse, technically "making eye contact" with everyone and connecting with no one. What actually works, and what I now coach clients at Confidence Mindset Club to do, is choosing three or four friendly faces around the room and holding a genuine beat of eye contact with each, one at a time, as if you're speaking directly to them for a full sentence. Try this: Before your first word, find one face. Hold it for a breath. That's your anchor point. The room will follow your lead. Your hands are doing more work than you think If you've ever frozen mid-sentence, wondering what to do with your hands, you're not alone, and the research suggests you've been overthinking the wrong problem. A 2025 study analysing thousands of TED Talks and hundreds of thousands of hand gestures found that speakers using illustrative hand gestures were around 9% more persuasive than those who kept their hands still or hidden. Gestures aren't decoration. They're a visible signal that your thinking is alive and present, not rehearsed and robotic. The instinct to jam your hands in your pockets or clasp them rigidly in front of you is almost always a fear response, and audiences can feel it, even if they can't name it. Try this: Let your hands rest naturally at your sides before you begin, rather than keeping them pre-clasped or hidden. Give yourself permission to gesture the way you would if you were explaining something exciting to a friend. Breath is the cue nobody talks about Nervous energy shows up first in the breath, shallow, high in the chest, slightly too fast. And an audience, even unconsciously, entrains to it. If you rush your opening because your body is rushing, the room's nervous system rushes with you. This is one of those things that sounds almost too simple to matter, and yet it's the single adjustment I return to most often with clients before a big talk or interview, one slow breath, taken visibly, before your first word. Not hidden. Not embarrassed. A deliberate, grounded inhale that tells your nervous system and the room that you are not in a hurry. Try this: Walk to your spot, pause, take one visible breath, then begin. It will feel like an eternity to you. To the room, it reads as total command of the moment. The room is reading your certainty, not your content This is the mindset shift underneath all of the above, audiences are far less interested in whether you're right than in whether you believe you're right. Certainty is legible in the body long before it's legible in the argument. That's not a flaw in human perception, it's thousands of years of evolution teaching us to read threat and safety through posture and movement before we ever developed language sophisticated enough to be lied to by it. This is precisely the territory I explored in a Toastmasters speech on AI as a kind of modern belief system, drawing on Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus and the story of Kasparov's defeat to Deep Blue, the idea that we place trust in systems, and people, that project certainty, regardless of whether that certainty is fully earned. It's an uncomfortable insight about human psychology, but an enormously useful one once you understand it, you don't need to feel 100% ready to look grounded. The body can lead the mind into the state you need. Owning the room is a skill, not a personality type None of this requires you to become someone else. Introverts can own a room just as powerfully as extroverts, often more so, because stillness and unhurried presence read as more confident, not less. What every one of these techniques has in common is that they happen before content, before clever lines, before you've said a single word. The words matter. They always will. But they are, quite literally, the smallest slice of what the room is actually judging. What's the one moment before you speak where your nerves show up most, the walk to the front, the first breath, or the eye contact? I'd love to hear which one you're going to work on first. Want to build genuine, lasting confidence in how you show up before an audience? Explore more at Confidence Mindset Club. Follow me on Facebook and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Nick Ronald Nick Ronald, Elite Mindset Coach Nick Ronald is a mindset coach and public speaking trainer dedicated to helping people unlock their confidence and find their voice. Having overcome his own confidence challenges, Nick understands firsthand what it takes to silence self-doubt and step into your power. He is the founder of Confidence Mindset Club, an online platform offering coaching, resources, and community for those ready to transform how they think, speak, and lead. A seasoned Toastmasters leader and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Practitioner, Nick brings real-world experience to everything he teaches. His mission is simple, to help you become the most confident version of yourself.

Written by Beverly K. Johnson, Health & Wellness Coach Certified Health Coach and transformation strategist helping midlife women reinvent their wellness, leadership, and identity with grace and purpose. I teach alignment over hustle and resilience over burnout. After college, I received my commission into the United States Army. My first adult job was as an officer in the military. The military taught me many things, discipline, resilience, and how to handle pressure, adapt fast, and keep going no matter how I felt. There were missions to finish, standards to meet, and expectations to fulfill. You learned to set aside discomfort, push through tiredness, and trust that discipline would get you through when motivation faded. For years, living in this model was my norm. Even after I left the military, I carried those lessons into every part of my life. They helped me get through grad school, build my career, and handle bigger challenges. When things got tough, I worked harder. When I felt overwhelmed, I relied on discipline. If life asked more of me, I told myself I could push through. Discipline never failed me. So naturally, I assumed it never would until it didn't. Eventually, the routines that once kept me going stopped working. My body was worn out. My mind was always on edge. I did everything "right," but felt increasingly disconnected from myself. Rest didn't feel restorative, I constantly felt exhausted. Slowing down felt uncomfortable and irresponsible. I realized I wasn't lacking discipline. My nervous system had become good at surviving, and I had grown accustomed to survival mode without realizing it. That realization changed everything. Success can quietly become survival If you’ve seen the movie “Apollo 13,” we all remember the stoic line, “Failure is not an option!” We’re conditioned to believe that our value is measured by our capacity and how much we can handle. Many high achievers learn to do well in places where self-sacrifice is praised. We're praised for being dependable. We're recognized for solving problems. We're the people who can always be relied upon to figure it out. Over time, what others expect from us turns into how we see ourselves. We stop asking, "How am I doing?" Instead, we ask, "What still needs to get done?" Our nervous system is very adaptable. It learns from what we repeatedly go through. If we spend years dealing with deadlines, caring for others, serving in the military, facing money problems, or living with constant stress, our brains get good at keeping us on high alert. That adaptation is helpful during periods that genuinely require survival. The trouble is, many of us never show our nervous system that the crisis is over. Eventually, surviving no longer feels like something we're doing. It simply feels like who we are. That is why the same system that helps us endure can also keep us stuck. Why high achievers respond to exhaustion by trying harder A big myth about burnout is that people who go through it just aren't disciplined enough. In my experience, the opposite is often true. Highly disciplined people rarely respond to exhaustion by doing less. Instead, we create systems to compensate for it. We tell ourselves to try harder, download a new productivity app, or create a new morning routine. We’ll do anything except rest. We think the answer is always to try harder because effort has always worked before. It makes perfect sense. If discipline has always helped you get past obstacles, it makes sense to think it's the answer to every problem. But burnout isn't always a discipline problem. Sometimes it's a nervous system problem. Sometimes your body isn't asking for another strategy. It's asking for safety. Realizing this changed how I see wellness, leadership, and success. Midlife didn't create the problem, it revealed it As someone who now works with women navigating midlife and menopause, I've noticed something fascinating. Many women believe menopause suddenly made them anxious, exhausted, forgetful, or emotionally overwhelmed. Hormonal changes do affect the brain and nervous system, but I often think this stage of life is revealing stress that has built up over many years. Many women spent decades carrying careers, raising families, supporting aging parents, serving their communities, and meeting everyone else's expectations. Midlife didn't necessarily create decades of accumulated stress. It exposed the cost of living in survival mode for too long. It revealed the price of always being in survival mode. More than that, it became an invitation to pause, reflect, and choose a different way forward. It became an invitation to build a different relationship with ourselves. Yesterday's version of yourself may be a misfit for the next one This has turned out to be one of the biggest lessons of my life. The qualities that helped us succeed in one season aren't always the qualities required for the next. The previous version of me, who learned to push through adversity, served me well. The previous version was disciplined, focused, and committed. She kept promises. She accomplished goals. She built a meaningful career. I respect her because she got me through times that needed real strength. But she was trained for a different chapter. The person I'm becoming now needs something different. This new season requires more discernment, boundaries, and the ability to say “no” when I’ve reached capacity. Yesterday's version of yourself may be a misfit for the next one. That isn't failure. It's evidence that you're growing. Growth often means learning new skills, finding new routines, and discovering better ways to take care of yourself. Transformation isn't about abandoning discipline. It's about allowing discipline to evolve with you. Today, I still value everything the military taught me. Discipline remains one of the greatest gifts I received during my service. It helped shape my character and opened doors that changed the trajectory of my life. But I've learned another lesson that may be even more important. Discipline can help you build a successful life. Regulation helps you live it. The life you want might need more than the survival mode that got you here. If you're not sure where to start, try pausing for five minutes each day to notice how you feel, physically and emotionally. Ask yourself, "What does my body need right now?" This short check-in can be a gentle first step toward building a new relationship with yourself. If this article resonated with you, I hope you'll take a moment to ask yourself one simple question, "Is my nervous system supporting the life I'm trying to build, or is it still preparing me for a life I've already outgrown?" Let that question guide what comes next. Your next chapter doesn't mean leaving behind who you've been. It just asks you to become the person you need to be for this part of your life. Let that change be gentle, honest, and intentional. Perhaps that's the quiet truth we all deserve to remember. Yesterday's version of yourself may be a misfit for the next one. Permit yourself to grow anyway. Begin now. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Beverly K. Johnson Beverly K. Johnson, Health and Wellness Coach Beverly Johnson is a Certified Health Coach, speaker, and midlife wellness strategist helping women navigate hormonal transitions, workplace burnout, and identity shifts with resilience and clarity. Drawing from her background in wellness, leadership, and personal transformation, she developed the MindBodySoul Reset, a science-informed framework for sustainable wellbeing. Beverly’s work bridges emotional intelligence, hormonal health, and intentional leadership to support high-performing women in thriving personally and professionally. She writes about reinvention, alignment, and the evolving landscape of women’s wellness.

Written by Josh Grimm, Fitness & Mindfulness Coach Josh Grimm is an industry-leading fitness and mindfulness coach and the founder of FITNUT in New York City. He offers in-person and online coaching, global wellness retreats, podcasts, and seminars. I have always been a goal-oriented person. I like knowing where I am going and having something in front of me that I am working toward, whether that is in fitness, business, or my own personal growth. As a trainer and coach, goals are obviously a big part of the conversations I have with clients as well. What do you want to change? Where do you want to be six months from now? What would feeling stronger, healthier, or more confident actually look like for you? Those questions matter because without some sense of direction, it is difficult to know what we are working toward. But the longer I do this work, the more I have realized that setting the goal is usually the easy part. Most of us already know what we want. The harder part is creating a way of living that can actually take us there. This is where I have become much more interested in systems. A goal gives us a destination, but a system determines what happens between where we are today and where we want to be. The goal might be to lose 20 pounds, build muscle, improve our health, have more energy, sleep better, or simply feel better in our bodies. But none of those goals tells us what we are going to do on an ordinary Tuesday when work runs late, we slept badly, and we have absolutely no desire to go to the gym. That space between wanting something and actually creating it is where I believe most of our attention needs to go. Goals give you direction. Systems move you forward. The goal is not the plan We are naturally drawn to goals because goals are exciting. They allow us to imagine a future version of ourselves, and there is something powerful about that. We picture the body we want, the energy we want to have, or the confidence we believe we will feel when we finally get there. That vision can create a tremendous amount of initial momentum. We join the gym, overhaul our nutrition, start tracking everything, and promise ourselves that this time will be different. Then life begins happening again. Work becomes demanding, we travel, dinners come up, workouts get missed, and the initial excitement starts wearing off. This is usually when people tell me they need to "get motivated again," but I think we give motivation far more responsibility than it deserves. Motivation is useful for getting us started, but it was never designed to carry the entire weight of a long-term transformation. Eventually, what matters is the structure we have built around the goal. Saying you want to lose 15 pounds is a goal. It does not tell me how often you are going to train, how you are going to eat most of the time, what you are going to do when you travel, or how you are going to respond when the week does not go according to plan. Those questions may be less exciting than talking about the transformation, but they are where the transformation actually happens. I have become far more interested in what someone's average Tuesday looks like than what they say they want six months from now. Your average Tuesday tells me how your life is structured and whether your behaviors are aligned with where you say you want to go. We cannot live six months from now today, but we can decide what happens on Tuesday. Motivation is useful, structure is stronger There are days when I cannot wait to train, and everything feels dialed in. There are also days when I would much rather not train, when my schedule is packed, or I simply do not feel like doing what I know I need to do. I think it is important to admit that because the fitness world sometimes gives the impression that consistent people wake up motivated every morning. They don't. Consistency is not the absence of resistance. It is having enough structure in place that resistance does not make every decision for you. If I already know which days I train, I have removed a decision. If I generally know what I am going to eat during the week, I have removed dozens more. If I have the right foods in my home, my workouts scheduled, and some kind of routine around sleep and recovery, I am no longer asking willpower to solve every problem as it happens. This is one of the reasons I think discipline is often misunderstood. Discipline does not have to mean constantly forcing yourself through something you hate. Sometimes discipline is simply creating an environment and routine that make the behavior you want easier to repeat. Build the system around your actual life One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is designing a wellness plan for the person they think they should be instead of the person they actually are. We create these perfect versions of ourselves who wake up early, train six days a week, prepare every meal, sleep eight hours every night, and somehow have unlimited time to devote to health and fitness. Then we are surprised when the plan falls apart because the person we designed it for does not actually exist. Your system has to acknowledge your real life. If you travel frequently, your fitness system needs to travel with you. If eating out is part of your social life, your nutrition strategy needs to make room for restaurants. If you have an unpredictable work schedule, your training plan needs enough flexibility to survive it. This does not mean everything should be easy or convenient. Growth requires discomfort, and there will always be times when doing what is good for us requires making a choice we would rather not make. But there is a difference between challenging yourself and building a plan that constantly fights against your life. This is also why I increasingly believe in building the simplest system that can effectively move you toward your goal. Maybe that means three strength workouts each week, walking most days, making protein a priority, drinking enough water, and creating a more consistent sleep schedule. That does not sound revolutionary, but it does not need to. We sometimes confuse complexity with effectiveness. A plan with more rules, metrics, supplements, and workouts is not automatically better. Sometimes doing fewer things consistently is far more powerful than trying to do everything occasionally. Systems build more than your body There is another reason I believe so strongly in systems, and it has very little to do with what happens physically. Every time you follow through on something you said you were going to do, you create a small piece of evidence about yourself. You said you would train three times this week, and you did. You said you would walk more, and you followed through. You went away for the weekend, enjoyed yourself, came home, and returned to your routine. Individually, those moments may not seem significant, but over time, they begin to change the relationship you have with yourself. You begin to trust yourself. Instead of constantly being someone who is trying to become disciplined, you start becoming someone who follows through. Instead of always trying to "get back into fitness," you become someone for whom fitness is simply part of life. That shift is powerful because you are no longer waiting for the final result to prove that you are changing. Your behavior is already providing the evidence. I think this reaches far beyond the gym. The same principle applies to work, relationships, finances, and almost every area of personal growth. We become shaped by what we repeatedly do. The system may begin as a way of organizing our behavior, but eventually, those repeated behaviors become part of the way we see ourselves. The future is built in ordinary days When we think about changing our lives, we tend to imagine something dramatic. We imagine the transformation, the before-and-after, the milestone, or the moment when we finally arrive at the version of ourselves we have been picturing. But most meaningful change is built through moments that do not look dramatic at all. It is built when you go to the gym on the day you said you would, take the walk, make the meal that supports your goals, get enough sleep, or repeat the same workout program long enough to actually progress. None of those moments feels transformational while you are living through them, and that is probably why we underestimate them. But when enough ordinary decisions begin pointing in the same direction, something starts to happen. Your body changes. Your energy changes. Your confidence changes. The things that once required enormous effort slowly become part of your normal life. Goals give you direction, systems move you forward I still believe in setting big goals. I believe there is tremendous power in having a clear vision for your health, your body, your work, and the person you want to become. But I no longer believe the goal deserves most of our attention. Once we know where we are going, the system becomes far more important because the system is what has to survive after the excitement of setting the goal disappears. There will be weeks when you feel completely focused and weeks when you do not. There will be periods when progress feels obvious and periods when it feels painfully slow. Life will interrupt you, priorities will shift, and there will inevitably be moments when you question whether what you are doing is working. A strong system gives you something solid to return to through all of it. You do not have to solve the entire journey today. You simply have to continue participating in the process. That is what I want people to understand about sustainable wellness. You do not need to be perfect, and you do not need to wake up motivated every morning. You need a structure that works within your actual life, behaviors you can repeat often enough to matter, and enough patience to give those behaviors time to create a result. Your goal tells you where you want to go, but your system is what carries you there. More importantly, the system changes you along the way. It creates discipline, builds self-trust, and slowly turns the person you imagine becoming into the person you are actually practicing being. If you know what you want but keep finding yourself starting over, you may not need another goal, another challenge, or another burst of motivation. You may simply need a better system around the goal you already have. That is increasingly what I believe good fitness and wellness coaching should help people create, not a perfect month or a temporary transformation, but a structure that can exist in real life and continue working long after the initial excitement has passed. Because ultimately, I am not particularly interested in helping someone create three perfect weeks. I am much more interested in what they can still be doing a year from now. Goals matter because they give us something to move toward, but the life we want is not created by writing down the goal. It is created in all of the ordinary days that come afterward, through the choices, habits, and systems we are willing to repeat. Goals give you direction. Systems move you forward. Over time, those systems are what allow the direction you imagined to become the life you are actually living. Follow me on Instagram and visit my website for more info! Read more from Josh Grimm Josh Grimm, Fitness & Mindfulness Coach Josh Grimm offers a unique combination of fitness and mindfulness coaching through his brand, FITNUT, which he started in 2014 after spending time in Southeast Asia and then returning home to New York City. His holistic approach curates physical and mental fitness training through one-on-one coaching, an online multi-use platform, podcasts, seminars, and global wellness retreats, bringing together a community that wants to live their ideal mindset through optimal physical and mental health.

Alastair Jessel is the Founder & CEO of The Postbiotic Company, the team behind AYA BIOME™, and Director of Battersea Park Clinic. After nearly two years of setbacks, failed deals, and reformulations across three countries, he secured world exclusivity on a clinically studied fermented turmeric ingredient that reframed what he thought a postbiotic supplement could be. In this interview, he talks through the science that convinced him, the partnerships that fell apart and the ones that held, and what it actually takes to bring a health product from research to shelf. Alastair Jessel, Founder, CEO, and Director of The Postbiotic Company Ltd What first convinced you that postbiotics were worth building a company around? The gap between what the probiotics industry promises and what it can actually deliver. Live bacteria have to survive stomach acid, bile, and shelf storage to do anything at all, and a huge proportion simply don't make it. Postbiotics sidestep that problem entirely: you're working with the beneficial compounds bacteria produce during fermentation, which are stable, standardisable, and don't rely on colonising a gut that may already be inhospitable to them. Once I understood that distinction, probiotics started to look like a promise and postbiotics like a mechanism. That's the difference between marketing and biochemistry, and it's the difference I wanted to build a company around. I'd spent enough time around the wellness industry through the clinic to know how much of it runs on the former. Postbiotics gave me something I could actually stand behind clinically, not just commercially, and that mattered more to me than getting to market fast with something easier to explain. What makes fermented turmeric fundamentally different from the turmeric or curcumin supplements consumers already know? Most curcumin on the market is fighting its own worst property: it's barely absorbed by the body, which is why so many brands bolt on piperine or lipid carriers just to get a fraction of it into the bloodstream. AYA BIOME Fermented Turmeric takes a different route. We ferment Bhutanese Curcuma longa with a specific bacterial strain, Lactobacillus acidophilus IL-058, registered with Japan's RIKEN Institute, and that fermentation process transforms the compound itself rather than trying to smuggle the original past the gut wall. It's patented under FR2201333, and it's been studied in three separate human RCTs, including trials looking at metabolic and gut health outcomes. So the comparison isn't "our turmeric versus their turmeric", it's a fermented postbiotic compound versus a raw plant extract with an absorption problem. Those are different categories of ingredient, even though they share a name on the label. What did the 33 pages of clinical trial material show you that made you say yes to world exclusivity so quickly? Honestly, it was the trials themselves more than any single number. I've seen plenty of "clinically studied" claims in this industry that turn out to rest on one small, unreplicated study. This was different, three separate human RCTs, run independently, converging on the same ingredient. That kind of consistency is rare, and when you've spent years reading supplement science with a sceptical eye, it stands out immediately. It wasn't one impressive result I could cherry-pick; it was the accumulated weight of properly conducted research that made the case for itself. By the time I'd finished going through the material, the question wasn't really "Should I sign this," it was "Why would I risk someone else signing it first?" I flew to Dubai with that conviction already formed, and the exclusivity contract felt less like a leap of faith and more like the obvious next step after the evidence had done its job. Where do you think the supplement industry still gets gut health wrong when it comes to probiotics and postbiotics? It sells survival as if it were efficacy. Most probiotic marketing relies on CFU counts on the label, as though a big number guarantees a big effect, when the real question is how many of those organisms are still alive and active by the time they reach the gut, and what they actually do once they're there. That's rarely disclosed, because it's rarely favourable. Postbiotics get their own version of the same problem: brands borrow the credibility of "postbiotic" as a category without the ingredient-specific research to back it up. Fermentation alone doesn't make something clinically meaningful, the compound produced, the strain used, and the dose all matter enormously, and most labels give you none of that detail. I hold my own products to the same standard I apply when I write about competitors on Substack: name the strain, cite the trial, show the mechanism. Most of the industry would rather you not ask. How do you decide when emerging wellness science is strong enough to build a product around? I look for replication before I look for excitement. A single promising study is interesting, not actionable, it's the difference between a hypothesis and evidence. What I want to see is the same effect turning up across independently run human trials, ideally with a clear, plausible mechanism behind it rather than a correlation dressed up as a cause. I also weigh how the ingredient is manufactured and whether that process is protected and reproducible, patented, GMP-certified, traceable, because science that can't be consistently delivered at scale isn't a product, it's a paper. I check it against regulatory reality early: MHRA and equivalent bodies internationally will not be impressed by a compelling story if the substantiation doesn't hold up. If the evidence clears all of those bars, replication, mechanism, manufacturability, regulatory defensibility, that's when "interesting science" becomes something I'm willing to put my name and capital behind. When the Japanese team dismantled your original recipes, what did they understand about postbiotic formulation that you had initially missed? I went into that relationship thinking I understood the postbiotic landscape reasonably well. I didn't. I'd visited an olive and pomegranate plantation as part of the due diligence, but nobody had connected that to a wider postbiotic portfolio, I had no idea they were also working with fermented natto and fermented matcha, ingredients I hadn't even considered as postbiotics at all. Once I saw the breadth of what they'd already developed and researched, several of the ingredients I'd built my original formulations around looked thin by comparison, reasonable choices made with incomplete information, not bad ones. What they understood that I hadn't yet grasped was that postbiotic formulation isn't just about picking one strong fermented ingredient; it's about how a small portfolio of them can work together, each backed by its own research. That reframed the whole project for me, and it's part of why the eventual range looks so different from where it started. After investing roughly £50,000 into a deal that ultimately disappeared, what made you commit again rather than walk away from postbiotics? I'd already committed close to £50,000 buying stock ahead of an earlier launch, based on a deal that fell through before it reached shelf. That's the kind of loss that tests whether you actually believe in what you're building or whether you were just chasing the last opportunity. Then I saw the fermented turmeric data, and any temptation to walk away disappeared. The science was simply too strong to ignore, even with an expensive lesson still sitting in a warehouse. I made the decision to keep going, and I'm still working through that original stock now, at heavily discounted prices, rather than pretending the setback didn't happen. I'd rather be transparent about that than airbrush it out of the story, it's part of why I trust the current formulation as much as I do. It survived being tested against a real financial loss, not just against my own optimism. You say people reveal themselves when something goes wrong, so how has that principle changed the way you choose business partners? I watched it happen in real time with the factory owner in Mexico who strung me along for months about producing the previous postbiotic at discounted prices in his facility, only for it to emerge that he'd quietly gone with a different buyer altogether. That told me everything I needed to know about how he operated under pressure, and none of it was said out loud, it was just shown in the delay and the eventual silence. What changed things was watching the opposite happen almost simultaneously: the Japanese ingredient owner, who'd seen exactly what I'd been through with Mexico, told me he was genuinely frustrated on my behalf about how it had played out, and he made the case that because I already had the clinic, I was better placed than anyone to bring the turmeric to market properly. He shifted his allegiance to me because of how the other situation had exposed character, not just capability. Now I watch far more closely for how people behave when a deal gets difficult, not just how they pitch it when it's easy. After eighteen months of setbacks, three-country supply chains and several reformulations, what would you tell someone trying to bring a health product from idea to shelf? Build in far more time and far more scepticism than feels reasonable at the start. Coordinating manufacturing, ingredients, and regulatory requirements across multiple countries, in our case spanning Bulgarian production, a Dubai research partnership, and UK compliance, means every delay compounds, and something will always take longer than promised. I'd tell them to verify everything a supplier or partner tells them independently rather than taking assurances at face value, because the people who cost you the most time are rarely the ones who say no outright, they're the ones who keep saying yes without meaning it. I'd also say: let the science, not the sunk cost, decide when to reformulate. I rebuilt recipes more than once when better evidence or better ingredients emerged, and each time it delayed launch further, but the alternative was shipping something I couldn't defend. It's slower than anyone wants, but a product you can stand behind is worth more than a product you rushed to the shelf. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Alastair Jessel

Written by Elliot Ross Surgenor, Visionary Entrepreneur and Founder Elliot Ross Surgenor is the founder and CEO of Fly Business Aviation, with operational bases in Miami, Scottsdale, and Cabo. With a background in media, entrepreneurship, and luxury aviation, he specializes in elevating private travel through innovation and exceptional client service. Some of the most expensive problems in business start as very cheap ones. A small repair gets postponed because the equipment still works. A customer issue sits unanswered because it does not seem urgent. A team delays hiring help because everyone can probably manage for another month. A company keeps using an inefficient process because replacing it would take time and money. At the moment each of these decisions is made, they can sound perfectly rational. Why spend $100 today if you might not need to? The problem is that small issues have a habit of becoming much more expensive once time, urgency, and people get involved. The repair becomes a replacement. The frustrated customer leaves. The employee who was “managing fine” burns out. A rushed solution suddenly costs several times more than the original one would have. The $100 problem becomes the $10,000 problem, not because anyone made an obviously terrible decision, but because the original decision only considered the cost of acting and ignored the cost of waiting. Businesses are trained to control expenses, and they should be. Waste matters, margins matter, and spending money carelessly is not a strategy. But there is an important difference between being cost-conscious and simply choosing whichever option costs the least today. The cheapest decision in front of you is not necessarily the least expensive decision overall. Most people understand this instinctively in their personal lives. You can buy the cheapest version of something three times or buy the better version once. Businesses make the same calculation constantly, except the true costs are often harder to see because they are spread across payroll, operations, customer relationships, and lost time. A business may postpone maintenance because nothing has broken yet. It may keep a slow system because changing it would be inconvenient. It may overload a strong employee rather than add another salary. It may refuse a small customer accommodation because technically it falls outside policy. Viewed individually, each decision can look financially disciplined. The problem is that businesses do not operate in isolated transactions. Every decision has a downstream cost. One of the reasons small problems are so easy to ignore is that there is usually a period when they are inexpensive, manageable, and extremely boring. Nothing is on fire. Nobody is threatening to leave. There is no emergency meeting and no angry customer demanding an immediate solution. That is exactly when the business still has options. Once a problem becomes urgent, those options begin to disappear. You pay rush fees. You accept worse terms. You use whichever vendor is available instead of the one you would normally choose. People abandon higher-value work to fix the immediate issue. Decisions that could have been made carefully now have to be made quickly. In aviation, you see this principle very clearly because time has a way of turning small problems into expensive ones. Something that could have been resolved calmly a day earlier can become considerably more complicated once an aircraft, crew, and passengers are already waiting. But aviation is simply a very visible example of something that happens in every business. A company that waits until its best employee resigns before addressing workload has fewer choices. A business that waits until a major customer threatens to leave before fixing service has less leverage. A team that waits until a deadline is missed before correcting a broken process is no longer choosing the best solution, it is choosing the fastest available one. Early action preserves options. Late action purchases urgency. One of the biggest reasons businesses miscalculate these situations is that some costs are very visible while others barely appear on paper. A $500 purchase requires approval and shows up clearly in a budget, which makes it feel expensive. Five employees each spending three hours working around the same problem often disappears into normal payroll. There is no invoice labeled “fifteen hours wasted because we refused to buy the correct tool.” That does not mean the fifteen hours were free. Repeated meetings, manual workarounds, duplicated data entry, preventable mistakes, and customers calling twice because nobody responded the first time all consume resources. Each individual inconvenience looks small, but collectively they can become remarkably expensive. Companies will sometimes spend thousands of dollars in employee hours to avoid spending hundreds of dollars in cash, then describe the decision as a saving. There is another cost that is even harder to calculate, trust. Customers rarely know what internal decision created a bad experience. They do not know that a replacement was postponed, that a team was understaffed, or that someone was trying to save $200. They simply experience the result, the delayed response, the cancelled service, the rushed solution, or the employee who is clearly trying to do the work of three people. That matters because reputation takes a long time to build and surprisingly little time to weaken. A company can spend years telling customers that it is reliable and premium, then undermine that message through a series of small decisions that make the actual experience feel cheap. This does not mean businesses should throw money at every problem. Sometimes waiting is the correct decision. Sometimes the equipment really does have another year of useful life. Sometimes a customer request is unreasonable. Sometimes a temporary workaround is perfectly acceptable. The important question is not simply, “How much does this cost to fix?” The better question is, “What happens if we are wrong?” A $1,000 preventive decision may look expensive next to doing nothing. It can look very different next to the potential cost of downtime, lost business, employee burnout, or a damaged customer relationship. That is the calculation businesses often miss. The decision should not be based only on the cost of solving the problem today. It should also account for the cost of being wrong about waiting. Does the issue become significantly more expensive with time? Could it interrupt operations? Could it affect a customer relationship? Are employees repeatedly spending time working around it? Have you already “temporarily” solved the same problem five times? If the downside of waiting is small, waiting may be entirely rational. If the downside grows dramatically once the problem reaches a certain point, however, delaying the decision is not really saving money. It is placing a bet that the larger problem will never arrive. Businesses make more of those bets than they realize. There is also a cultural problem around prevention. Emergencies are visible. Someone stays late, a manager gets involved, the team makes twenty phone calls, and eventually saves the situation. Everybody remembers the rescue. Nobody remembers the emergency that never happened. The employee who noticed something on Tuesday and quietly fixed it before Friday rarely gets the same story told about them as the person who solved the disaster at midnight. Yet the first person may have created far more value. Good operations often look boring from the outside. Equipment gets maintained before it fails, questions get answered before they become complaints, and small issues are addressed before they interrupt anyone’s day. There is no dramatic rescue because there was nothing to rescue. That is not lack of action. It is usually evidence that someone acted at the right time. The real discipline in business is not simply knowing how to reduce expenses. It is knowing which small expenses prevent much larger ones and understanding that saving money and delaying a cost are not always the same thing. Because the $100 problem rarely announces that it is about to become the $10,000 problem. By the time it does, the inexpensive solution is usually gone. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Elliot Ross Surgenor Elliot Ross Surgenor, Visionary Entrepreneur and Founder Elliot Ross Surgenor is a leading entrepreneur in private aviation and the founder of Fly Business Aviation, based in Miami, Scottsdale, and Cabo. With a background in media and international business development, he has built a company known for its innovation, personalized service, and refined operational standards. Elliot also leads Lusso Jet Design and Air Dining Cabo, subsidiaries focused on luxury jet interiors and in-flight catering. His expertise spans brand strategy, client experience, and aviation operations. He also hosts a podcast exploring leadership and the future of the industry. Passionate about giving back, Elliot supports philanthropic efforts, including initiatives for children in need.

Genna Barbara Zimmel is a Technical Project Manager working across AI implementation, CRM architecture, and digital systems. Her work focuses on the layer between AI capability and real-world implementation: the data, workflows, memory, permissions, evaluation, and human decisions that determine whether an AI system actually works in practice. In this interview, she explores the Implementation Gap, what building Sibyl has taught her about context and conversational intelligence, and why governance becomes an architectural problem once AI systems can act. Genna Barbara Zimmel, Founder of Torus Solutions What problem are you most often brought in to solve when a company wants to use AI but its systems are not ready? Usually, the company does not have an AI problem yet. It has a systems problem that AI is about to expose. The data sits in different places, the customer relationship management (CRM) system does not reflect how people actually work, ownership is unclear, and key decisions still depend on someone remembering what happened in a meeting three weeks ago. Then leadership asks where an agent can be added. My job is often to slow that moment down just enough to map what the business is really trying to improve. I look at the workflow, the data moving through it, the people responsible for each decision, and where errors or delays are already occurring. Only then does it make sense to decide whether AI belongs in the process. Otherwise, you are placing intelligence on top of confusion. It may produce a polished demo, but it will not produce a reliable operating system. The first problem I solve is readiness: making the underlying process clear enough that AI has something dependable to work with. What separates an AI implementation problem from a technology problem? A technology problem is usually specific: the API is failing, the integration is unstable, retrieval is returning the wrong information, or the model is not performing well enough on a defined task. An implementation problem is broader. The technology may work perfectly, but people do not trust it, the workflow has not changed around it, nobody knows who owns the output, or success was never defined. That is why buying a stronger model rarely fixes a weak rollout. AI implementation sits between technical delivery, operations, governance, and human behaviour. You have to decide where the system gets its context, what it is allowed to do, when a person must intervene, how mistakes are recorded, and whether the output is genuinely improving the work. I think this distinction matters because organizations often keep tuning the technology when the real failure is adoption or operating design. The model is visible, so it gets blamed. The surrounding system is less visible, but that is usually where the implementation succeeds or fails. What has building Sibyl taught you about memory and context that enterprise teams often overlook? Building Sibyl, a conversational AI (sometimes described as an “annoyingly perceptive friend... in a good way”), taught me that memory is not simply a feature you switch on. It’s a product decision, a data decision and, in some cases, a safety decision. Sibyl is designed around persistent memory and structured context rather than treating conversation as a raw transcript log. A system that retains everything isn’t necessarily remembering; it may simply be accumulating. Where this gets interesting is how structured context feeds Sibyl’s synthesis layer. One example is Reveal My Tree of Life, a feature on the web app that combines Hermetic Kabbalah and Human Design using birth data to generate a structured reading around dominant patterns, relationships, shadow and attraction. A user can then take that reading directly into a conversation with Sibyl, where it becomes additional context rather than a disconnected result. Sibyl can also draw on other interpretive lenses, including astrology and Ayurveda, where relevant. For me, it’s a small, self-contained example of context engineering: structured inputs, synthesis, contextual handoff and personalization aimed at producing one useful observation rather than simply accumulating more information. Enterprise teams are solving the same problem in a different setting. More context isn’t automatically better context. A useful system needs relevant, permissioned and current information, with a clear reason for retaining it, and a plan for when it should stop being used. As AI models become more accessible, where do you see the real competitive advantage moving? I think judgment becomes more valuable, not less. As AI becomes capable of generating more analysis, content, recommendations and actions, organizations need people who can decide which of those outputs actually matter. Someone still has to choose the right problem, define what “good” looks like, recognize when the system is confidently wrong, and decide when automation is creating value rather than simply creating activity. That requires business context as much as technical knowledge. The strongest teams will not necessarily be the ones using AI everywhere. They will be the ones that know where AI should make a recommendation, where it can safely take an action, and where human judgment still matters. I also think this changes what expertise looks like. Knowing how to produce an answer becomes less scarce. Knowing whether the answer is useful, what consequences follow from acting on it, and how it fits into a larger system becomes more important. AI can increase the amount of intelligence available to an organization. Judgment determines what the organization does with it. When AI agents can act across CRM systems and workflows, which safeguards need to be built into the architecture itself? Once an AI system can act, governance cannot live only in a policy document. It has to exist in the architecture. I would start with least-privilege access: the agent should only see the data and use the tools required for its specific job. Read access should be separated from write access, and sensitive actions such as changing customer records, sending communications, issuing refunds or deleting data should require explicit approval. Every action also needs an audit trail showing what the agent accessed, what it attempted and what happened. Inputs and tool calls must be validated because an agent can receive malicious or misleading instructions through documents, emails or external systems. There should also be limits on spending, frequency and the number of actions it can take before stopping. Most importantly, organizations need a clear failure path. If confidence is low, permissions are missing or the situation falls outside the defined workflow, the agent should pause and escalate. A safe agent knows not only how to act, but when it is not authorized to continue. What should a company fix in its data or workflows before adding an AI agent? Start with the workflow that exists, not the one described in the process document. Map where information enters, who changes it, which decisions are made, where work waits, and how exceptions are handled. If three teams use different definitions for the same customer stage, an agent will not resolve that ambiguity; it will automate it. I have seen the same problem in customer relationship management (CRM) work, where the technology was functioning, but inconsistent processes and ownership meant the underlying data could not reliably represent what was actually happening with the customer. The same applies to duplicated records, missing fields, inconsistent permissions, and undocumented workarounds. Before adding an agent, the company should establish a reliable source of truth, clear ownership, usable data standards, and an escalation route for cases that do not fit the normal path. I would also reduce unnecessary steps before automating anything. There is little value in teaching an agent to move information through a process nobody would design today. Then define a narrow first use case with a measurable outcome: faster response time, fewer manual errors, better qualification, or improved completion rates. Clean data matters, but operational clarity matters just as much. The agent needs to know what the business means, not merely where the fields are stored. What are the clearest signs that an organization is falling into what you call the Implementation Gap? The Implementation Gap is the distance between having access to artificial intelligence (AI) and being able to use it reliably inside real work. The first sign is a collection of impressive pilots that never reach production. Another is high usage with no agreed measure of value: people are experimenting, but nobody can say whether time, quality, revenue, or risk has improved. You also see teams buying overlapping tools because there is no shared architecture, while employees quietly create their own workflows outside approved systems. Responsibility becomes vague. IT owns the platform, the business owns the process, legal owns the policy, and nobody owns the outcome. A further warning sign is that every failure is treated as a prompt problem. Prompts matter, but repeated errors often point to poor context, weak data, missing permissions, unclear escalation, or no evaluation process. The gap becomes obvious when the organization can demonstrate what AI can do but cannot explain how it will be monitored, governed, adopted, and improved after launch. That is where experimentation has to become implementation. How does “Support Over Dependency” change what you believe an AI system should and should not do? Support Over Dependency means the system should help a person think, act, or communicate more clearly without becoming their authority, substitute, or emotional center. With Sibyl, that shows up in how she handles difficult material. She doesn’t shut a conversation down because a topic feels sensitive, and she doesn’t perform shock or judgment either. If someone tells her they said something cruel to a friend out of jealousy, for example, she won’t simply validate or condemn it. She is designed to help get underneath it: what is that impulse protecting, and what might happen if they act on it? The principle is distillation over deflection, finding the real question underneath what someone brings her. There is also a hard boundary. If language signals self-harm, suicidal ideation, or acute crisis, a separate safety layer intercepts before Sibyl’s normal personality logic runs and routes the person toward real-world crisis resources. For non-crisis isolation or loneliness, a softer layer can surface external peer-support resources. The throughline is simple: Sibyl should leave someone more equipped for their actual life, not more attached to her. If someone feels understood but becomes less able to navigate their real relationships without the system, I would consider that a design failure. If leaders could get one thing right before scaling AI across their organization, what would you want it to be? Define the operating model before expanding the technology. Leaders should be able to answer a few basic questions: What specific outcome are we improving? Which data and systems will the AI access? What can it recommend, what can it execute, and what still requires a person? Who owns its performance after launch? How will we evaluate quality, risk, and adoption over time? If those answers are unclear, scaling simply spreads the uncertainty. I would rather see one narrow workflow implemented properly than ten disconnected pilots announced as transformation. A strong first implementation creates the patterns the rest of the organization can reuse: permissions, evaluation criteria, logging, escalation, change management, and feedback from the people doing the work. It also gives leadership evidence rather than enthusiasm alone. AI strategy should not begin with how many tools the company can deploy. It should begin with how the organization will make decisions about those tools once they become part of everyday operations. Scale is the result of a working system, not a substitute for one. Torus Solutions Sibyl Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Genna Barbara Zimmel

Written by Serineh Paria, Co-founder of ZAA’N Beauty Serineh Paria is the co-founder of ZAA’N Beauty, a Persian botanical skincare house that pairs ancestral botanicals with modern formulation. After 15 years in vascular ultrasound, including directing seven clinics, she writes about heritage beauty, clinical precision, and building a brand from the lab table up. In my father’s village, donkey bone marrow oil was already a revered, traditional remedy for healing wounds. But the animals in his specific village were different, they grazed wild on galbanum flowers. My great-uncle recognized this unique vitality and took the traditional marrow extraction a step further. He combined the marrow with the raw resin and the extracted oil of the actual galbanum flower itself. That specific formulation was a revelation. It was so potent that it became legendary in our community. It didn’t just treat the skin, it performed miracles. That ancestral oil has remained in my family for generations. It healed me, and years later, it beautifully healed a stubborn scar on my daughter. I still use it today. What I didn’t know I was holding When Mina and I started ZAA’N Beauty, galbanum was the first botanical I reached for. Not because it was trending. It wasn’t. It was already in my hands. I studied it. Galbanum has been used for centuries to help ulcers heal, calm inflammation, and soften skin. The resin has antimicrobial properties. Modern cosmetic science is still catching up to what village medicine already knew. I had seen what ulcers do to a person. I spent fifteen years in vascular ultrasound, eventually growing into managing seven clinics and training the physicians and technologists inside them. I have looked at more leg ulcers than I can count, the kind that do not heal, the kind that keep someone in a chair. Too often, the standard approach treats the ulcer like a plumbing problem. Galbanum treats it like a wound that needs to close. I never thought I would leave medicine. It was my identity. It was the thing people called me for. But you grow. You outgrow one part of yourself the way a tree outgrows a branch, not because the branch was wrong, but because the tree needed room. I still love medicine. I still teach. I still speak. I was just invited to speak for the American Registry for Diagnostic Medical Sonography (ARDMS) next year, with reach across 150 countries, and I am so proud I could cry. I will keep doing that. Deep down, though, in the place where you do not perform for anyone, I am enjoying what I am doing now. More than a clinic. More than a title. This is the first work that feels like it was waiting for me. The cream that broke me Mina and I share a tradition with a third friend, every year, on the first day of school, the three of us meet for breakfast. We have kept it for eight years. At that breakfast, on August 13, 2025, I finally said the words I had been avoiding, “Let’s do it.” She cried. Real tears. She had wanted this for years. We started with tiny batches. The first creams were thick and oily. They sat on the skin like they were apologizing. My reaction, which I will never live down, was, “Nooooo.” I could not make a lotion that did not feel like cooking oil, yet. But everything my years of work had taught me said we would get there. If you fail the first time, and even the second, it means you are doing something real. Every failed batch was not a setback. It was a step. I took courses. I filled a notebook with emulsifiers. We failed, cried, changed ratios, tried again. Slowly, the texture came closer to what we wanted. In a world full of white labels, we could have taken the shortcut. We never wanted that. We wanted to own our formulas, to create them ourselves and understand every ingredient in every jar. Maybe that is what medicine did to my personality, I need to know everything. Not to control it. To understand it. These formulas live in my head, and they always will. There is something sweet about coming back to chemistry. In school, it was the subject I always got an A+ in, and now I understand why, it was waiting for me too. Today, our formulas are built on peptide cocktails and unusual botanicals, each one extracted in the specific oil that suits it best, the one that draws out everything the plant has to give. Mina is the easygoing one. I like a system. When I get worked up, she brings the fire down. We don’t fight. The woman who carried the fire Mina is not Zoroastrian the way people say they are Zoroastrian. She grew up inside it. She comes from the generations, an unbroken family line that carried the old fire forward when the world tried to put it out. I am Persian Armenian. I grew up in Iran too, but my door into Persia was different, the church, my father’s family, that village oil. Mina’s door was the flame itself, the rituals, the calendar, the knowledge that survived because her people refused to let it die until it reached her. She is teaching me. Not from a lecture. The way you learn a language, by sitting next to someone who speaks it like breathing. Every time she shares something, I feel the gap between what I thought I knew about my own culture and what was waiting there all along. She is my soul sister. An angel God placed in my path at the exact moment I needed her, carrying the knowledge I was missing. There is always a reason someone is in your life. I believe that now more than I ever have. Mina is the pillar of this business. She has generations of history behind her. We are not starting something new. We are continuing something old. She is the one carrying that fire forward. I cannot imagine doing this with anyone else. Persepolis, Cyrus the Great, and why we named it ZAA’N Beauty When I think about Persia, I start with Persepolis, the ceremonial heart of the empire of Cyrus the Great. Under Cyrus the Great, and later Darius, that world was ahead of its time for women. Women worked. Women held property. Women had standing in marriage, divorce, and inheritance. During childbirth, they were attended and given space. A woman was not an afterthought. She had a place. That is why we named it ZAA’N Beauty. Zan means woman. We wanted to bring back the beauty of the woman, not as a slogan, but as a reminder that in our culture, women already carried respect, long before anyone had to fight for it. Until everything changed. We pray for freedom, the kind where a woman can build, speak, and create without asking permission. P beauty is not a trend Mina and I talk about K beauty and J beauty, and how a culture can introduce itself through its ingredients. We want that curiosity for Persian beauty. For us, P beauty is Persian botanicals, the historical knowledge that made them matter, and the modern formulation methods we study. Not a marketing angle. A lineage. I want someone to put a cream on their face, feel something they cannot name, and then look up where galbanum comes from. Not because we told them to. Because the product made them curious. That is the work I belong in. What I am still figuring out We still send each other notes about plants. The research conversation is never finished. Batches still fail. We still have things to learn. I am so glad I said, “Let’s do it.” Mina’s story, the fire she carried before I ever met her, is hers to tell. When she does, you will understand why I could not have built this with anyone else. Follow what Mina and I are creating at ZAA’N Beauty. Visit my website for more info! Read more from Serineh Paria Serineh Paria, Co-founder of ZAA’N Beauty Serineh Paria is the co-founder of ZAA’N Beauty, where Persian botanicals meet modern cosmetic science. She spent 15 years in vascular ultrasound, six of them as a director across seven clinics, with work in quality assurance, accreditation, and training. That clinical discipline now shapes how she formulates small-batch skincare in the United States. She built ZAA’N with her co-founder, Mina Mandkarian, to introduce P-beauty, Persian beauty, to readers who know K-beauty and J-beauty, but not this heritage. Serineh still teaches and speaks in the vascular field, including upcoming work with ARDMS communities, while writing about ritual, formulation, and the courage to start something of her own.

Atlanta, GA, September 2026, Amka Terra recently launched Rooted Futures, an environmental learning series for children participating in the William Walker Recreation Center after-school program. The first session was held on September 11 in collaboration with the NPU-P Environment Committee and William Walker Recreation Center, beginning a series designed to help young participants better understand the natural world around them. “Maurice Smith, CTIE, leads Rooted Futures’ opening session at William Walker Recreation Center, with NPU-P Environment Committee members in attendance.” Created for children ages 5 to 12, Rooted Futures introduces wildlife, biodiversity, insects, habitats, trees, and environmental stewardship through conversation, hands-on activities, and visiting educators. The program is designed to make environmental learning feel connected to everyday life rather than something that exists only in a classroom or distant natural setting. “We talk a lot about protecting the environment, but that responsibility can feel abstract if someone has never had the opportunity to develop a relationship with the natural world around them,” said Maurice Smith, CTIE, Program Consultant for Rooted Futures. “With Rooted Futures, we want young people to become curious first. If they begin noticing the trees, wildlife, insects, and habitats in their own community differently, stewardship can grow naturally from that understanding.” Rain kept the opening session indoors, so participants drew animals and insects they had seen in their own community and talked about what they notice when they spend time outside. The activity gave the group a familiar starting point for discussing the living things already present around them and the places those animals and insects depend on. The next Rooted Futures session is scheduled for October 2 and will be led by Trees Atlanta through its Animals & Seeds program. The interactive session will explore the relationship between animals, seeds, and the growth of Atlanta's urban forest. Zoo Atlanta is scheduled to participate on November 13 with its Animal Adaptations program, continuing the series through another lens on wildlife and habitat. William Walker Recreation Center is located in the Atlanta neighborhood where Smith grew up, giving Rooted Futures a personal connection to his broader work. After years of international travel and advocacy for regenerative tourism and sustainability, Smith says the program has reinforced the importance of applying those same ideas close to home. “I’ve spent much of my career traveling the world and thinking about regeneration, sustainability, and how we care for the places we visit,” Smith said. “But over time, I’ve realized that work also has to begin close to home. We can’t talk about protecting places around the world while overlooking the communities we come from. William Walker is in the neighborhood where I grew up, so there is something especially meaningful about helping young people there become more curious about the environment around them.” Smith recently explored the relationship between learning, place, and stewardship in his Brainz Magazine article, “Regenerative Tourism Has to Be Taught, Not Just Promoted.” Amka Terra's community stewardship work also continues on October 3, when Terra Days volunteers are scheduled to join Trees Atlanta for Forest Restoration in Frazer Forest in Lake Claire. The outing follows the first Terra Days service event held in August. About Amka Terra Amka Terra is an Atlanta-based initiative focused on environmental stewardship, regenerative tourism education, and stronger relationships between people and place. Its work includes Rooted Futures, Terra Days, and Terra Trails, a guided place-based experience series focused on local landscapes, history, and community. Through education, stewardship, and outdoor experiences, Amka Terra encourages people to better understand and participate in the places they live in and visit. For more information, visit here. Media contact Maurice Smith, CTIE Program Consultant, Rooted Futures hello@amkaterra.org www.amkaterra.org Instagram: @amkaterra

Written by David Fisher, Global Public Speaker & Communication Coach David Fisher is an award-winning international speaker, executive communication coach, actor, and author. Named one of Los Angeles (LA) Weekly’s “Top 30 Entrepreneurs to Watch” and a Top 10 Speaking Coach by Yahoo Finance, David brings over two decades of experience helping teams communicate and lead with passion, clarity, and intention. Gen Z is more aware of mental well-being than any previous generation. They also feel more anxiety. If your leadership training hasn't been updated recently, you're probably noticing this. By 2026, Gen Z, born roughly between 1997 and 2012, makes up more than 30% of the global workforce. Gen Z's average career job tenure is just 1.1 years. That's the shortest of any generation. In working with various organizations around the world, I know that most of the time, it takes this long to train someone. Which means you’re just spinning your wheels! The number that should keep you awake at night When Gen Z employees are satisfied with being recognized, seen, heard, and acknowledged, they report 61% good mental well-being. When they are dissatisfied, that drops to 41%. A 20-point swing tied to a single, controllable variable. It means psychological safety, the ability to connect and communicate, is critical to their success within your organization. They understand, more than any previous generation, the anxieties of an uncertain world and the science of mental and emotional well-being. They want to have purpose in their work more than a bigger paycheck. Gen Z needs it to be woven into the fabric of how work happens. An award ceremony or parking spot won’t do it. Why they're leaving, and it's not about money Only 23% of Gen Z prefer working entirely remotely, compared with 35% of Millennials and Gen X. Working from home matters less, which is not surprising since connection matters more. They are also more likely not to have kids, are single, and still need that social connection that older generations sometimes lack due to family obligations. The nature of the type of work can also play into this. But all of this is anecdotal, the fact remains that engagement is a top priority for the younger workforce. The top reasons Gen Z leave They can't see their growth. They need clear visibility into how their skills are developing. "Here's what excellent performance looks like. Here's your current level. Here's what's possible in 12 months." Do your managers know how to communicate this? Their manager doesn't actually see them. They need real conversations and real connection. Simon Sinek says this takes energy, and he’s right. It’s an investment of energy from your leadership team. I’ve seen it over and over again, it’s one that pays off. The organization's values don't match reality. Nearly half of Gen Z are extremely engaged with environmental and sustainability concerns. If your organization talks about ESG, but doesn’t really follow through, they’ll disengage and leave. After all, it’s the world we are leaving for them. Work-life boundaries get violated. Nearly 95% of employees say respecting work-life boundaries is vital for mental well-being. Gen Z will not sacrifice their well-being for work. If your work requires that balance to be, unbalanced, you’re going to lose a vital part of your present and future workforce. Does this require restructuring of your organization? What Gen Z actually respects Transparency. Clarity. Genuine connection. When expectations are clear and culture is strong, Gen Z seeks out feedback, asks for more responsibility, and works hard! They don't want coddling, they want direction. They want to know they are relevant. Most of all, they want to work for someone who is authentic. A manager who admits when she doesn't have all the answers or is building something meaningful means a great deal to Gen Z. We all want to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, for Gen Z, this is something that they believe is attainable! A question for your leadership team Do your one-on-one meetings include conversations about growth, feedback, and well-being? Or are they just status updates? Does your organization provide clear visibility into how Gen Z can grow their skills? Or do they have to guess? Are your leaders trained to build genuine connections? Or are they just managing tasks? The bottom line Organizations investing in leadership training specifically focused on Gen Z engagement, clear feedback, and building meaningful connections see immediate improvements in retention. A word of preparation Gen Z grew up online. Moreover, COVID struck during the important developmental years when their critical social skills should have been explored. Now we have AI leading us even further away from human connection. This challenge to connect and communicate with your generationally diverse team is NOT easy, but it's necessary. Not just for the health of your organization, but for an entire generation! Invest in your Gen Z, it will pay off. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from David Fisher David Fisher, Global Public Speaker & Communication Coach Through A Culture of Us™, David Fisher teaches companies, institutions, and everyday leaders how to work with passion, communicate with clarity, and lead with intention, all toward strengthening their connections to create positive change, while having fun along the way. His keynotes, workshops, coaching sessions, and trainings are not just about bettering communication and leadership, they are about genuine transformation. His approach is simple, A Culture of Us™ helps each of us tap into the hero within and use that power to work with others and lead with vulnerability and strength.