Today we dive into a common roadblock on the path of habit change: procrastination and resistance. Even with the best of intentions, we all face moments when our motivation wanes and avoidance takes over.

You know the moment. The project sits untouched for the fourth day in a row. The email stays in drafts. The dream you’ve talked about for years stays exactly that… a dream, perpetually one step from becoming real, never quite starting.

And here’s what frustrates me every time I watch it happen, to my clients and to myself: an entire industry exists to sell you the fix, and almost none of it addresses the actual problem.

The Industry Is Selling You the Wrong Fix

Influencers, books, digital programs, keynote speakers, entire corporate training departments… all of it circling the same territory. Goal setting. Productivity systems. High-performance habits. Time blocking. Morning routines. Accountability apps.

And I understand the appeal. These tools aren’t useless. But they all share the same blind spot: they assume the problem sitting between you and your goal is a strategy problem. That if you just had the right system, the right framework, the right five-step method, you’d finally start.

But I’ve sat across from too many brilliant, capable, deeply motivated people who have every strategy already memorized, and still can’t make themselves begin. Because procrastination was never a productivity problem.

It’s in our Parts.

What IFS Actually Reveals

This is where Internal Family Systems has changed everything about how I understand stuckness, in my clients and in myself.

IFS teaches us that the deepest Parts of us… the ones anchored in old wounds, old imprints, old fears… don’t just sit quietly in the past. They actively work, in real time, to keep us safe. Often by manipulating our actions in ways we’re not even conscious of. A Part that learned, once, that finishing something led to danger, judgment, or overwhelm doesn’t need your permission to hit the brakes. It just hits them. And you experience that as “I don’t feel motivated,” or “I just can’t seem to start,” or “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Nothing is wrong with you. A Part of you is doing exactly what it was trained to do.

Which means the fix was never going to come from a new app. It comes from being willing to see, acknowledge, and eventually heal the Part that’s driving the avoidance. Only then are you actually free to act.

My Own Parts Have Taught Me This

I’ve written before about the part of me that learned, very young, that being needed was the only reliable path to safety… that if I ever fully launched my own life, in its fullest expression, I might not be available anymore to caregive, to fix, to hold everyone else together. I didn’t understand it then, but I understand it now: that Part didn’t just show up in relationships. It showed up every time I sat down to build something fully mine. A book proposal. A program. This very newsletter, some weeks. Some quiet Part of me would rather stall than finish, because finishing meant fully launching, and fully launching meant, somewhere in an old belief system, danger.

I’ve also written about the Part of me that only knew one gear: all the way on, until total collapse. The Part that pushed my body past every reasonable limit because rest felt like failure. That Part taught a newer Part something important too… that starting things can be dangerous, because starting things, for me, used to mean not stopping until I broke. So now, decades later, a Protector shows up early. Before I can even open the document. It slows me down before I can push myself past the edge again. From the outside, that looks exactly like procrastination. From the inside, it’s a Part trying, clumsily, to keep me from repeating an old collapse.

None of that was ever going to respond to a better morning routine.

Three Reasons This Isn’t a Character Flaw

So if you’ve spent years quietly believing procrastination is a personal failing… a discipline problem, a motivation problem, a “just needs to try harder” problem… here’s what I want you to know instead.

● Procrastination is a Protector’s strategy, not a personality flaw. Every stalling behavior you’ve ever judged yourself for had a job. Somewhere, a Part decided that not starting, not finishing, not being seen yet, was safer than the alternative. That Part isn’t sabotaging you. It’s protecting a more vulnerable Part underneath, one that got hurt the last time things moved forward. Judging the Protector only makes it dig in harder. Understanding its job is what finally lets it loosen its grip.

● The task was never the actual threat. You don’t actually fear the email, the workout, the launch, the deadline. You fear what that task represents to an old wound… being seen and criticized, being needed and then discarded, succeeding and then losing your value once you’re no longer “needed,” failing publicly the way you once failed privately. I had a client once who couldn’t finish a single proposal for a promotion she was more than qualified for. Weeks of stalling. When we finally traced it back, it wasn’t the proposal she feared. It was what visibility had meant in her family growing up… that being seen meant being criticized, so staying small had once been the safer move. The proposal was never the threat. Being seen was. Until you find what the task is standing in for, you’ll keep trying to out-strategize a fear that was never about the task in the first place.

● Unburdening beats willpower every time. You cannot discipline your way past a Protector. You can only overpower it temporarily, which is why the same avoidance always creeps back, usually at a higher cost. Real, lasting movement happens when you go to the Part directly… witness what it’s been carrying, thank it for the job it took on, and show it that the danger it’s still guarding against isn’t the danger it used to be. That’s not a hack. That’s the actual work. And it’s the only thing I’ve ever seen create change that sticks.

What Becomes Possible on the Other Side

I think about how much energy I spent, for years, trying to out-discipline Parts that were never going to be moved by discipline. And I think about how different it feels now, on the other side of actually going to meet them.

Not because I never procrastinate anymore. I still do, sometimes. But now, when I catch it, I don’t reach for a new productivity hack. I get curious. I ask what’s being protected. And more often than I ever expected, the honest answer to “why can’t I start this” turns out to be a Part that’s been trying to keep me safe since long before I had any of these tools to understand it.

That’s not a flaw to fix. That’s a Part waiting to be heard.

A Question to Bring This Back to You

● What’s one thing you’ve been avoiding, that no productivity system has ever actually solved?

● If you got curious instead of critical, what might that avoidance be trying to protect you from?

● What would become possible if you unburdened that Part instead of trying to out-discipline it one more time?

I’d love to hear it. Tell me: which Part of you tends to hit the brakes first?

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I saw a quote recently on social media that stopped me mid-scroll:

“One of the saddest things in modern society is an immigrant apologizing for their accent to someone who only speaks one language.”

I don’t know who first said it. And I think it was most likely written about something specific… culture, immigration, the particular grief of straddling two homes and being made to feel small in both. That’s a real and important conversation, and it’s not mine to speak for.

But it landed somewhere else for me too. Somewhere I wasn’t expecting.

Because I’ve watched this exact dynamic play out in a completely different context, over and over, in myself and in almost every client I’ve ever sat across from: the quiet apology we make for having grown.

The Language We Didn’t Mean to Create

When you do the inner work… when you actually go looking for where your wounded imprints live, where your fears were formed, which Parts of you learned to Fight, Fawn, Freeze, Flee, or Faint… something happens that nobody warns you about.

You don’t just heal. You start speaking differently.

New vocabulary shows up. Words like regulation, activation, parts, capacity, Self-led. New listening shows up too… you start hearing the fear underneath someone’s anger, the old imprint underneath a coworker’s defensiveness, the exhaustion underneath a family member’s silence. You start noticing your own body before your own mind catches up.

And somewhere in the middle of all that expansion, you look up and realize the people around you… the ones you love, the ones you work with, the ones who knew you before any of this… are still speaking the language you used to speak. And you’re not anymore.

That’s not a failure of connection. That’s the actual evidence that the work worked.

I remember the exact moment I felt this most sharply. I was at a family gathering, gently trying to name a pattern I’d finally seen clearly in my own history… using language I’d spent years earning through therapy, through IFS work, through sitting with parts of myself I used to avoid. I watched the words land on blank faces. Not unkind faces. Just faces hearing a language they’d never been taught. I remember driving home that night feeling like I’d just visited a country I used to live in, and could no longer find my way around.

Why So Many People Quietly Refuse to Start

This, I think, is the real reason so many people resist doing deep work, even when they know they need it. Not because they doubt it would help. Because some part of them already senses what’s on the other side of it: a kind of loneliness that nobody prepared them for.

If I heal, will I still fit at the dinner table? If I stop performing the old role, will the people who loved that role still love me? If I start speaking a language built out of self-awareness instead of self-protection, will anyone here still understand what I’m saying?

That fear is not irrational. It’s actually accurate. Growth does change the shape of your relationships. Some of them stretch to meet you. Some of them don’t. And standing in that unknown, before you’ve found out which is which, is genuinely one of the scarier thresholds of this work.

But I don’t think the answer is to stay quiet in your old accent to keep the peace. I think the answer is learning how to keep moving forward, without abandoning the people you love in the process, and without abandoning yourself to keep them close either.

There’s also a grief in this that deserves to be named, not rushed past. You are allowed to mourn the ease of the old shared language, even while you keep choosing the new one. Growth doesn’t require you to pretend the loss isn’t real.

Here’s what I’ve learned about doing both.

Three Ways to Keep Moving Forward Without Losing Everyone Behind You

• Name what’s actually happening, so it stops feeling like betrayal. So much of the loneliness of this stage comes from believing something has gone wrong… that you’ve become distant, difficult, “too much,” or too different. Nothing has gone wrong. Your nervous system and your vocabulary have simply expanded past the coping patterns you used to share with the people around you. That’s not you leaving them. That’s you finally arriving somewhere you couldn’t get to before. Naming it this way, even just to yourself, takes an enormous amount of shame out of the process.

• Translate before you expect fluency. You didn’t learn this language overnight, and neither will anyone else. Leading with clinical or therapeutic vocabulary in a conversation with someone who’s never done this work is a little like speaking fluent French to someone who took two semesters in college… technically the same language, but it lands as noise. Find the plain-language version of what you’re trying to say. Trade “I need to regulate before I respond” for “I need a minute before I answer, so I don’t say something I don’t mean.” You’re not diluting the work. You’re building a bridge someone else can actually walk across.

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Look at the world right now. Look at your own workplace, your own family group chat, your own last difficult conversation.

Reactivity. Defensiveness. Blame thrown before anyone’s asked a single clarifying question. People leading teams, households, and entire institutions from a part of them that never got the chance to grow up.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think it’s the most visible proof we have of a simple truth: we are, collectively, leading from our wounds. And it’s costing us more than any of us can fully see from inside it.

A Council, Not a Single Voice

If you’ve been following the Oak Leaves Series with me, you already know the foundation I keep coming back to: an oak tree doesn’t grow strong from its trunk alone. It needs roots. It needs leaves. It needs every part working together to stay alive and expand.

So do we.

Every one of us is leading from a council of Parts, whether we’ve ever acknowledged them by name or not. Some of those Parts learned early to Fight… to defend, to correct the record before anyone could misunderstand us. I’ve written about mine here before — the part of me that became “quick to defend,” reacting before I’d even fully processed what was being said, because somewhere along the way I internalized that no one else was going to do it for me.

Other Parts learned to Fawn. To over-function. To perform at a high level while something inside was quietly breaking, because that felt safer than letting anyone see the cracks.

None of these Parts are the enemy. Every single one of them made an intelligent decision to protect you, once, in a moment when you needed it. The problem was never that they exist. The problem is what happens when they’re the ones holding the wheel of your leadership, your parenting, your relationships… instead of being a valued voice at the table.

What This Isn’t

Before I go further, I want to be precise about something, because this idea gets misunderstood constantly.

Leading from a healed place is not the same as taking responsibility for everyone else’s wounds. It is not absorbing your team’s dysfunction so they don’t have to face it. It is not smoothing over every hard conversation in your family so no one has to feel discomfort. That instinct… the one that says if I just manage everyone else’s experience well enough, harmony will hold… is not healed leadership. That’s a wounded part, too. Often a very tired one.

Owning it for other people isn’t healing. It’s just a more exhausting way of staying unhealed.

Leading from a healed, healing, or awakened part looks different. It has enough groundedness to hold a boundary without collapsing into guilt. It can sit in someone else’s discomfort without needing to fix it, rescue it, or make it disappear. It can be honest even when honesty isn’t comfortable, because it no longer needs everyone’s approval to feel safe.

That’s the actual shift. Not becoming responsible for more. Becoming regulated enough to be responsible for less, and clearer about which parts of the room are actually yours.

Why Your Environment Changes When You Do

Here’s what I’ve witnessed over and over, in boardrooms and living rooms alike: you don’t have to fix the people around you for a system to change. You just have to stop leading it from an unhealed place.

Systems organize around whoever is the most reactive person in the room. When that’s you, everyone else adjusts to manage your activation, whether they realize it or not… tiptoeing, over-explaining, walking on eggshells. When you become the most regulated person in the room instead, something shifts that no memo or new policy ever could. People stop bracing. They start telling you the truth sooner. The whole system recalibrates around a steadier center of gravity.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s what a regulated nervous system does to the nervous systems around it. It’s contagious in the same direction dysregulation is.

I watched this happen with a client not long ago… an executive who came to me convinced her team’s dysfunction was a hiring problem. Wrong people, wrong roles, wrong culture fit. Six months into our work together, she hadn’t replaced a single person. What she’d done was stop leading every difficult conversation from the Fight part that needed to win, and start leading from a part that could stay steady while someone disagreed with her. Her “underperforming” team didn’t change. She did. And the system reorganized itself around the new center of gravity, the way systems always do.

Three Things IFS Teaches Us About Leading From Healed Parts

So how do you actually do this? Not in theory, but in the actual moment where an old Part is reaching for the wheel. From an Internal Family Systems lens, here’s what I’d offer:

• Honor the Part before you try to lead past it. You cannot out-strategize a Part you haven’t acknowledged. The Fight response, the Fawn response, the part of you still trying to outrun an old story… they don’t disappear because you’ve gotten better at your job. They get louder the more you ignore them. Healing doesn’t begin when you feel strong enough to skip this step. It begins the moment you’re willing to see what’s true, name it, and understand where it came from. That single act of witnessing is often what finally lets a Part step back from the wheel.

• Learn to feel the difference between blended and Self-led. In IFS, “blended” means a Part has taken over so completely that you are the reaction… the correction, the shutdown, the over-explaining, with no space between you and it. “Self-led” feels different in the body. It’s calm instead of urgent. Curious instead of certain. Grounded instead of braced. The work isn’t eliminating your Parts. It’s building enough awareness to notice, mid-moment, whose hands are actually on the wheel… and enough trust in your Self to gently take it back.

• Honoring a Part is not the same as letting it run the whole show, or taking on what was never yours. A healed leader can hold compassion for the part of them that wants to fix, rescue, or defend, without handing that part the final decision. This is the line so many high-functioning people miss: honoring your Parts means listening to them, not obeying them, and it never means absorbing what actually belongs to someone else’s healing, not yours.

The World Is the Evidence

I don’t think it’s an accident that a world full of leaders operating from unhealed, unconscious Parts produces exactly what we’re seeing: institutions that defend instead of listen, families that fracture over who gets blamed, workplaces where everyone is performing wellness while quietly breaking down the way I once did.

We keep looking for the fix at the level of policy, strategy, or better communication training. But so much of what’s fracturing our workplaces, our families, and honestly our whole culture right now isn’t a strategy problem. It’s a leadership-from-the-wound problem, playing out at scale.

The oak tree doesn’t grow strong by pretending the storms never happened. It grows strong by understanding, witnessing, and healing the rings those storms left behind… and then, eventually, by offering shade to others from a place that no longer needs anything back.

That’s the leadership the world is actually starving for.

A Question to Bring This Back to You

• Which Part of you tends to grab the wheel first… Fight, Fawn, Freeze, Flight, or Faint? Where did you learn it was the fastest way to stay safe?

• Where have you mistaken “owning it for everyone else” for healed leadership, when it was actually an old Part still trying to earn its safety?

• What would change in your workplace, your family, or your own leadership if you led from your healed parts more often than your wounded ones?

I’d love to hear it. Tell me: which Part usually leads for you?

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I want to say something that might sound strange coming from someone who has spent three decades building frameworks, facilitating trainings, and handing people tools.

We don’t need more of those right now.

Not another app. Not another five-step system. Not another productivity hack promising to optimize the last un-optimized corner of your life. What we actually need, more than at almost any other point I can remember, is far simpler and far harder: connection. Communication. Space. Freedom. Creativity. And a regulated nervous system underneath all of it.

That’s it. That’s the list.

I sat across from a client not long ago… successful by every external measure, running a team of dozens, and utterly exhausted. She’d just finished telling me about the fourth new productivity system she’d installed that quarter. Time-blocking. Then a new CRM. Then a habit tracker. Then a “second brain” app to organize all the other apps.

I asked her a simple question: when was the last time you said something true out loud to someone, and let them see your face while you said it?

She couldn’t answer right away. And that told me everything the productivity system never would.

What We’re Actually Starving For

Look around at what’s being sold to us right now… more speed, more content, more optimization, more certainty, more sides to pick. Everywhere you turn, someone is offering you a tool to fix, hack, or automate your way out of discomfort.

But discomfort was never really the problem. Disconnection is the problem. And you cannot productivity-hack your way out of disconnection.

What actually moves the needle isn’t a new system. It’s a deeply felt, clearly understood sense of self. Self-leadership. Inner peace that isn’t dependent on the news cycle, your inbox, or whether the people around you agree with you. And every single one of those things is downstream of one thing: a regulated nervous system.

Without that, all the tools in the world are just noise dressed up as help.

Regulation Is What Makes Space Possible

Here’s the part I think gets missed the most.

You cannot hold space for anyone else… not your team, not your partner, not your kids, not a stranger with a different opinion than yours… until you can hold space for yourself first.m. It’s too busy scanning for threat, defending a position, or performing a version of you that feels safer than the real one.

Space is a nervous system state before it’s ever a relational skill.

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At 25, I backpacked across Europe for months with my best friend and no itinerary. We slept in hostels we couldn’t pronounce the names of, ate whatever the market stall pointed us toward, and let each day unfold instead of forcing it into a plan. For the first time in my life, I felt safe in my own body.

At 28, I was engaged to a man who told me I’d better get on the train before it left the station… a man who tried to control and stifle nearly every version of me that had come alive three years earlier. I felt like a caged animal tied to a tree, smiling for an audience that had no idea what happened behind the closed doors.

Same woman. Three years apart. Two completely different nervous systems.

For a long time, I told this story like it was about him. About the relationship. About picking the wrong person and wrong type of relationship.

It wasn’t.

It was about a belief I had been carrying since I was far too young to know I was carrying it: that anything good in my life came with a built-in expiration date. That I wasn’t “allowed” to have what other people had… not fully, not for long, not without paying for it later.

I know now that I wasn’t the only one who ever felt that. So let’s talk about why. Where the Phrase Came From

A while back, I watched a keynote by speaker and author Eric Edmeades, and he introduced a concept I have not been able to put down since: the Hindsight Window.

The idea, as I have come to understand it, is this: the sooner you can reframe something that once held you back into something that actually moves you forward, the sooner you get your life back.

Not by pretending it didn’t happen. Not by rushing past it. But by finally asking a different question about it than the one you asked in the moment.

He also named something I think most of us quietly know but rarely say out loud: trauma is sticky. It clings the way hot wax melts into fabric… it changes the texture of the thing permanently. We long to “go back to who we were before.”

But that person doesn’t fully exist anymore, not in the same shape. There’s a sticky note that’s followed me from office to office with a quote that says: “A mind, once expanded, can never shrink back to its original size.

The Hindsight Window is what opens up once you stop trying to shrink back. It’s the space where you finally get to look behind you and ask: what did this teach my system to believe, and is it still true?

I want to walk you through mine.

The Girl Who Learned Safety Meant Being Needed

I was the oldest. If you’ve been following my newsletter, you already know what that word tends means to me and my role in a family that Was always quietly cracking at the foundation: the one who holds it together.

The one who steps in when the adults can’t. The one who reads the room before she’s even old enough to read.

Somewhere in there, without ever choosing it consciously, I made a deal with myself. It went something like this: “my security, my worth, my place in this family and in this world, is tied to how needed I am. If I am not there to rescue, fix, hold emotional space for… then bad things will happen to those around me and I will no longer be safe.”

My nervous system could not handle if something ‘bad’ happened around me. So I had to be sure I was always available to fix and take care of everything (so I believed).

It was never about how happy I was or wanted to be. It was never about how free I am.

It ws about how needed I was, which meant I could control my own safety (ie. nervous system).

That deal doesn’t stay contained to childhood. It comes with you into every room you walk into as an adult, wearing a different outfit each time so you don’t recognize it. And nowhere did mine show up louder than in the relationships I chose.

Here’s what I couldn’t see back then, and can see so clearly now: I was unconsciously drawn to relationships that either had an expiration date built in, or that were never fully “real and present” to begin with.

The backpacking trip is a perfect example, and it’s a gentle one. It was never meant to be forever. It had a return flight already booked. Life living with a best friend surely had to come to an end, didn’t it?

Because it was temporary by design, some deeply buried part of me could finally exhale into it… because a season, unlike a whole life, doesn’t ask you to stay available to everyone else while you’re living it.

The engagement is the harder example. That one wasn’t temporary by design. It was supposed to be my whole life. But it required something of me that felt, underneath, strangely familiar: it required me to make myself smaller. To hand over my voice. To stop fully launching into the woman I’d started to become in Europe. And as much as that relationship hurt, some old, exiled part of me recognized the shape of it. Shrinking wasn’t safety. But it was known.

The Real Fear Underneath It

Here’s the part of this that took me the longest to uncover, and the part I think matters most for anyone reading this who leads people, teams, families, or businesses:

If I ever allowed myself to be in a real, present, fully-launched relationship… one that wasn’t racing toward an ending, and didn’t require me to keep myself small to survive it… some part of me was convinced that I would no longer be available.

I wouldn’t be available to caregive. To fix. To hold everyone else’s nervous system steady while quietly ignoring my own.

And if I was no longer available in that way, what would happen to the people who had come to rely on me being the strong one? What would happen to me, without that role to hide inside of?

This is the quiet, unspoken math a lot of high-functioning people are running without ever realizing it. We call it loyalty. We call it being a good daughter, a good partner, a good leader.

But underneath, for many of us, it’s actually a Fawn (people-pleasing) Trauma Response like Fight, Flight, Freezing and Fainting. (Check out my other articles to go deeper into the 5, not 2 types of innate trauma responses).

I was a professional at wearing a very respectable costume: If I stay useful, I stay safe. If I stay needed, I don’t get left. If I never fully arrive, I never have to find out what happens when I do.

So we pick the relationship with the return flight already booked. Or the one that needs us to be smaller so it can stay in control. Either way, we never have to test what happens if we simply… launch. Fully. Without an expiration date attached.

Looking Back Through the Window

This is where the Hindsight Window becomes so useful, because it doesn’t ask you to relive the pain. It asks you to reframe what the pain was actually protecting.

Looking back now, I don’t see a woman who kept choosing the wrong men. I see a woman whose system had made a very intelligent survival decision at a very young age, and who kept re-running that decision on autopilot until she was finally old enough, and safe enough, to question it.

The belief was never really about relationships. It was about whether I was allowed to take up my own life fully, without it costing me my usefulness to everyone else. It took years of inner work, of parts work, of sitting with the part of me that still believed good things expire, before I could finally answer that question differently.

I was allowed. I am allowed. So are you. What This Taught Me About Leadership

I don’t think this pattern stays confined to personal or intimate relationships. That’s just where it’s easiest to see, because relationships hold up a mirror we can’t look away from.

But I’ve watched this same expiration-date belief run quietly underneath boardrooms, founder journeys, and executive careers too.

The Leader who over-functions for a team that never quite reciprocates, because being indispensable feels safer than being replaceable.

The Founder who keeps the business just small enough to still control single-handedly, because scaling it would mean trusting other people to hold what she built.

The Executive who says yes to everything, not out of ambition, but because some old part of her is still convinced that the moment she stops being needed, she becomes disposable.

None of this is a character flaw.

It’s a nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do a long time ago, in a much smaller body, in a much scarier situation. The problem isn’t that the strategy worked. The problem is that it never got the memo that the danger is over.

This is the whole premise behind Living Oak Leadership. We don’t lead from the parts of us that are still bracing for an expiration date. We lead from Self… from the version of us that has gone back, met that younger part, and finally let her know she’s allowed to stay.

A Question to Bring This Back to You

Where in your own life have you unconsciously chosen the relationship, the job, the role, or the version of yourself with the built-in expiration date… because some part of you believed that was safer than fully arriving?

Where have you mistaken being needed for being safe?

What might change if you looked back at your own story, not to relive it, but to finally ask it a better question?

I’d love to hear it. Tell me: do you have a Hindsight Window of your own?

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To catch up on the series - CLICK HERE TO START WITH ARTICLE #1

In Article #8, we left off following the story of “Meadow” standing in the wreckage of a body and a betrayal. [CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT HER]

Eventually, “Meadow” found a way.

And somewhere in the rebuilding, a new 25-year “part” showed up to carry the next chapter. I call her “Grunge”.

She earned the name appropriately for the time. It was the mid-1990’s. Like the amazing time period it was, she was full of angst and aliveness, dread and hope…. all braided together the way only that decade could braid them.

This was before Columbine. Before September 11th. Before Oklahoma City and the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics. Before the world lost my precious Princess Diana and started to feel collectively, a little less safe.

As a society and a decade, we didn’t know yet what was coming. Either did I.

We just knew how to walk out our front doors without flinching. That ignorance was a gift I didn’t recognize as a gift until decades later.

Prior to meeting Grunge, “Meadow” had previously transferred to a new university. Built a circle of friends who are still life-long best friends to this day. She graduated.

After graduation, Grunge appeared. She launched a career. Traveled across Europe with nothing but a backpack and her best friend for company for months, no itinerary, no permission needed.

For the first time in my life, Grunge appeared and learned how to “breathe” fully in life, she experienced an unknown state of being…she felt a level of inner freedom, opportunity and autonomy she never had before or ever seen modeled by any adults in her previous life.

Sixteen-plus years of school and training. A childhood spent carrying her family through its darkest hours. A body she had spent years trying to disappear from. All of it finally, behind her.

Grunge got to try on new friendships, new relationships, new identities and feel safe doing it. Safe in her body. Safe in her house. Safe in the world outside her door.

She wanted the clock to stop right there. She would have stayed in that version of free forever.

Until she couldn’t.

The unraveling started with a business trip with an inappropriate boss she didn’t want to be on and couldn’t wait to get away from. On that trip she got the call, someone close to her, someone she had grown up with, had died.

She drove home for hours. Dropped one bag. Picked up another. Drove to the funeral. Said goodbye. Got back in the car.

She was driving home from that funeral on a gorgeous, hot spring Sunday when she turned onto her street and found her completely engulfed in flames!

The whole neighborhood was outside. Fire trucks. Smoke. Water gushing out the front door from a hole in the roof where the bucket truck was pouring water in through the roof. And no sign of her best friend and roommate anywhere.

It turned out the neighbor, a licensed electrician of all people, had overloaded a wall outlet. The fire burned through his unit first, sealed off with no oxygen, no one realizing it was happening. When it finally blew out the windows, the rush of fresh air sent it tearing through the units on either side. Mine was one of them. Four houses were lost that day.

Her best friend and her sister, who was visiting that weekend, were already safe. Neighbors had gotten them out before she arrived. But she didn’t know that at the time as she stood on that lawn absorbing the full trauma of an inappropriate business trip, a funeral and now watching her house and all her possessions disappear before her eyes.

She watched everything she had built in her newly healing life disappear into smoke, and she has never been able to fully process that feeling, even now. The rest of that day, and the weeks after it, still play back in slow motion.

Grunge and her best friend slowly rebuilt their lives. They found a new place, only this time it wasn’t a 50-50 rental, my best friend bought it, which meant at some point, it was clear I’d have to move out. (House loss #2 pending).

Grunge started getting the belief system that “ownership (in anything) was starting to look like something other people got to have…not her.

Around the same time, Grunge ended her relationship with an amazing boyfriend who adored her and treated her beautifully.

But… he had demons she could already see clearly, even young, and she knew she didn’t want to spend a lifetime inside them. Choosing to leave someone that good is its own particular grief because it doesn’t feel like relief, it feels like rejection you handed yourself.

(He passed away a few years ago, the way she had always feared he might. There is still a hole in the “Self” version of me shaped exactly like him.)

Within one short stretch of time, Grunge buried a friend, watched her home burn to the ground, and walked away from a man she loved because she couldn’t watch him choose substances over himself, let alone over me.

And then she watched the rest of it start sliding too.

Her best friend met someone serious. The rest of her college friends started getting engaged, one after another. Her career, which had felt limitless 18 months earlier, started showing her its ceiling. Everything she had only just begun to taste: freedom, safety, possibility was already, somehow, leaving.

That is when the belief took root.

The Belief That Everything in My Life Will Have An EXPIRATION DATE.

Not some things. Not the hard things. Everything. Money. Houses. Friendships. Partners. Jobs. Safety itself.

She believed it was all handed to her on a short-term lease, just long enough to get a taste, never long enough to keep. Just long enough to feel the loss of it more sharply than if she’d never had it at all.

She believed she was not built to be fully seen, fully chosen, fully wanted, or fully elevated. She believed suffering was simply her assignment in this life, and that anything resembling ease was a clerical error the universe would eventually correct.

So when a mutual friend introduced her to someone new and he told her (almost in passing, almost as a warning but trying to make a joke) that she’d better “get on the train because it was leaving the station”, she believed him.

Not because she wanted to be on that train. Because she was terrified of being left on the platform alone, again, the way she always seemed to end up.

So Grunge got engaged to him. (That’s a doozy of a story and it gets its’ own article). But here is the short version: for 3.5 years she shrank. She stuffed herself down the same way she had as a child, except now she was doing it as a grown woman who was supposed to know better.

She moved through the world like a smiling, functioning, emotionless version of a person while everyone around her believed she was happy and had it together.

He was the life of the party in public and a controlling, demeaning presence the second the door closed. A Marine. An accountant. A combination engineered, almost too perfectly, to clip the wings of a mid-20s woman who had only just learned how to fly.

She felt like a caged animal tied to a tree, no voice, no one watching or hearing her. She watching her friends build dual incomes and real partnerships while she white-knuckled her way through another day of walking on eggshells in a relationship that had already cost her budding voice.

Everyone had cheered for her comeback. Rehab. The college transfer. The new life. How had she ended up here, in seemingly worse shape than before, so fast?

She lived in that holding pattern of inertia and dissociation for 3.5 years. Frozen when she couldn’t run, running every chance she got….emotionally, if not yet literally.

How This Showed Up in My Life.

Grunge’s life experiences and new belief systems, showed up in my life and work as someone that played small, didn’t speak up for what they needed and wanted, accepted a “less-than” approach to life.

It caused me to do great work in my career, but also allow “Peak and Plummet” cycles by allowing opportunities, money, acknowledgement and relationships slip right through me because I didn’t believe I was allowed to keep anything I received…or have it at all.

It would take a Roger Waters concert, my fiancé, my best friend, and her own fiancé in the same crowd on the same night to finally crack it open.

(That story belongs to article in Article #10, so stay tuned.)

What “Grunge” Taught Me and What I Want to Hand to you.

1. When we don’t honor our own self-leadership voice, the world’s current will sweep us downstream without asking permission. We will mistake other people’s timelines for our own. We will accept a seat on someone else’s train because we don’t trust there’s another one coming for us.

2. There are 5 (not 2 as we’ve been taught in 8^th grade science class) default trauma responses the nervous system reaches for under threat: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn and Faint.

In this life chapter, mine were “Flight” braided with “Freeze”. Desperate to run, and when I couldn’t, shutting down completely instead. Naming that pattern and associated trauma response we gravitated to for survival, is not self-diagnosis.

It’s the first branch you grab in a raging river. It’s the difference between being swept away and finding your footing long enough to climb out.

This is the actual work of Living Oak Leadership: meeting the specific part of you that formed a belief in a specific season of your life and matching it to the specific trauma response(s) it built to survive that season.

Once you can see the belief, in this chapter mine was that everything good has an EXPIRATION DATE.

For Today.

I am still unlearning that belief today.

• Every dollar I allowed myself to receive without flinching.

• Every relationship I let myself stay in instead of pre-leaving it in my mind.

• Every win I let myself fully feel before I brace for it to be taken.

This is the work. That is the self-leadership voice finding its way back online, one decision at a time.

Grunge didn’t get her ending in this chapter. She got her undoing and the beginning of the woman who would eventually walk away for good.

Do you have parts of you that get in your way, hold you back, that you can’t fully identify yet?

Come Join me in our SKOOL Community [JOIN HERE] and be fully supported to elevate to the next level you deserve.

I know how to see (in someone else’s human ledger) the generational lineage of a person and how the inherited imprints, wounds, stories and belief systems, along with their own experiences created their view of money, wealth, worthiness, abundance and support.

I’m very good at seeing it in others. Seriously, I have learned to honor myself for being very good at what I do…. guiding and supporting others to see deep inside their wounds, imprints and stories.

But, I was profoundly blind to see it in myself.

That’s the thing about the deepest wounds. They hide in your highest strengths.

The Inheritance I Didn’t Know I Was Carrying

My grandmother had to find work in an era when being a woman in a business broke every social rule. Not by choice necessarily, but because my grandfather drank the family business into the ground and someone had to hold the household together.

She did it. She got into the business rooms she needed to earn a living. But not without constant struggle, judgement and lack of support or equality. (And decades later, women are still fighting to fully seen in business, but that’s a story for another day).

She built something from rubble. But the story that crystallized in large parts of the female lineage of my family was this: “Women, or at least our family, are not supposed to be in these rooms.”

My parents, however, both went to university. Both got advanced degrees and went into education and school administration.

The story that emerged for my parents became….get an education, do the right things, get the degrees, work hard and pay your dues and you will be rewarded with a career where you climb the ladder effectively.

In other words, in corporate life and especially in education, career and financially stability comes at a cost. It means you allow someone or something else tell you how much you can (ie. they will “allow”) you to earn.

For my parents, it was the school board, the voting public and newspaper announcements publishing their salaries because they were public servants.

The corporate world is no different. A job description, a boss and a performance management system that is the same for everyone like you at your level, will tell you what you are “allowed” to earn in the company based on how what they feel like paying you.

I followed the blueprint perfectly. College. Graduate school. Corporate life.

In addition to my corporate life, I started my own business over two decades ago. When I first opened my business it was meant as a “side-hustle”. It was clear as a single-earner, I needed extra income since I could only bank on my corporation “allowance.”

I replicated the generational pattern in a new form… by letting invisible glass boxes pop up everywhere in my life and work and never challenging them. Just work harder, more hours, more lines of income to earn more.

In reality, I was giving away my authority by believing that someone else would set a new ceiling that I would abide by. That felt safe and normal, at least on the surface.

I didn’t realize until much later that I had internalized a belief that money….real money, free money, chosen money….was for other people. The ones who owned blue-collar businesses because everyone needed them. The ones who didn’t follow the rules. The ones who were ‘much smarter’ than me and founded successful corporations or new how to invest and get a big pay-out.

I functioned as a worker-bee, being grateful I had any stable money coming in at all, then putting a little aside for rainy days. Even though, deep down, I knew I was divinely meant for more my human experience spoke otherwise.

CLICK HERE TO READ MY ARTICLE #2 ABOUT THE 5 YEAR OLD PART OF ME THAT KNEW HER WORTH

CLICK HERE TO READ MY ARTICLE

The Pattern I Couldn’t See in Myself

For years, I have taught my Executive Coaching and Leadership clients that money is not just money.

It is energy.

It is the physical expression of an exchange of power, creativity, authority, and presence moving through the world. When I watch a Leader constrict their financial life, I can trace it immediately to the place in their body where they stopped believing they were allowed to receive.

I teach this. I know this. I have helped hundreds of leaders break this open.

And yet…..

Every time someone I loved was struggling whether they were fighting addiction, drowning in consequences of decisions they kept making or simply unable to get out of bed to face their own life… I would step in.

Financially. Sometimes with cash. Sometimes through bank transfers. Sometimes anonymously, so quietly that no one even knew it was me.

I told myself it was love. Generosity. Spiritual practice.

“When you give, you receive good karma.”

“That is what family and friends do for each other,” (always a favorite mantra).

“You can’t take it with you, so might as well give it away to those who need it.”

I still believe in those things. That’s what made MY inner reality so hard to see clearly.

Because my personal truth was more complicated, and more honest, than any of that.

What I Was Actually Buying

Here’s what I know now sitting on the other side of a very expensive, very painful lesson: I was not giving from overflow.

I was giving from fear.

Every time I felt the familiar spiral….

• “What if they can’t get sober?”

• “What if they lose everything because of this bad financial decision they made?”

• “What if I have to watch someone I love in free fall?”

• “What if they can’t get out of depression?”

• “ What if there’s a conflict, what if there’s a tragedy?” And on and on and on.

What was happening was MY nervous system would go into immediate protective mode.

And the action that calmed it was simple: Give money. Solve the problem. Make the danger go away.

It wasn’t altruism. It was regulation….MY nervous system regulation.

I was using other people’s financial and personal crises (mostly the ones they caused themselves) to manage my own internal state.

The money wasn’t going to them.

It was going to the version of me that couldn’t tolerate sitting with the fear of what might happen next.

That is a profoundly different thing.

And here’s what I also know: in doing that, I was stealing something from the people I was trying to protect. I was taking the consequence from them.

The consequence that might have been the very thing that cracked them open enough to change. I thought I was loving them.

I was, in a real way, getting in the way of their healing because their pain triggered mine, and I could not let it sit there long enough to do its work.

2025: The Year I Could Not Look Away

Last year was the hardest year my business has faced since I started it. The economy shifted. Companies laying off in waves. The executives and organizations I serve facing their own financial uncertainty.

Because of that, there were months where my business account reflected several zeros fewer than it needed, yet I was still funding other households, while my bank account was hemorrhaging.

Paying for daily needs for people who had every capacity to meet their own. Bailing out situations that had been building for years, that no amount of financial intervention would actually fix.

Meanwhile, no one was bailing me out. No one was funding the legitimate business I’d spent decades building.

And I couldn’t even look at my own bank accounts. I spent months averting my eyes from my own numbers, terrified of what I would see. And because I wasn’t looking, I lost even more…..subscriptions I’d forgotten, merchant errors no one corrected, fees that should have been removed, packages never returned.

Fear is expensive. Avoidance costs more.

The Number That Made Me Sick

When I finally forced myself to sit down and look, I started the way you start when you can’t bear to see the whole thing: I started small. One account. Just Venmo.

Across that one platform alone, I had given away over $20,000.

And Venmo isn’t even where most of the giving happened.

When I totaled it, across cash, checks, card payments, transfers, everything …across the family members and friends who are adults with full agency over their own choices and who would not have been in those situations if not for those choices: it was close to over $100,000!!!

I sat with that number for a long time. It was grief. For me. For them. For the strange, painful way that loving someone can become a sophisticated mechanism for keeping yourself from having to feel what scares you most.

The Distinction That Changed Everything

There are real reasons to give money.

When my house burned down my neighbors and family and friends showed up without being asked.

That is what community is for. Cancer. Disaster. Crisis that no one chose and no one caused.

Giving to organizations fighting with everything they have to keep food, shelter, education and medicine available for humans and animals when billionaires decide to cut funding.

That is a perfect expression of the energy exchange money represents.

That kind of giving doesn’t deplete you. It expands you. It opens the channel wider.

This other kind…the compulsive kind, the fear-driven kind, the “I-can’t-tolerate-this-feeling-so-I-will-throw-money-at-it” kind… constricts your personal vessel.

It keeps you small.

It confirms the story that your abundance is meant for everyone else.

There is a meaningful difference between generosity and self-erasure dressed up as generosity.

I had confused the two for most of my adult life.

The Solo Earner Shame I Also Carried

There’s one more layer I have to name, because it sits underneath all of it.

Every friend I have is partnered. Two incomes, shared expenses, built-in backup. I have been a solo earner for my entire adult life.

When we’d travel together, when we’d share meals, when we’d celebrate the way people do when they’ve built good lives, I spent as if I was in the same position they were in.

Because I couldn’t let anyone see the difference. Because the difference wasn’t just about money.

It was about what I was afraid the money question would reveal: that I hadn’t figured out relationships.

That there were deep reasons why I’d cut myself off from human connection, and I didn’t want to face it, let alone explain it. So I just “paid” it.

I didn’t want to face that to let someone support me financially (or in any other way) I would have to learn how to receive. And not just receive, but hold what I receive. And receiving meant opening. And opening meant being seen in places I had spent a lifetime protecting.

The money, again, was never just the money.

What I Know Now

I can’t be the Leader, Coach or Advisor I am called to be if I refuse to go as deep into my own wounds as I guide my clients to go. That’s not a rule I follow. It’s a standard I hold because the work demands it.

This is what I found at the bottom of all of it:

I had given away my power….my energy, my authority, my right to receive without shame… in the same incremental, habitual, well-intentioned way that so many of the leaders I work with do.

Not all at once. Quietly. Compulsively. In ways that felt like love and landed as self-abandonment.

The glass ceiling I was fighting against was constructed by my own hands.

The shift isn’t a financial strategy. It’s not a budget or a savings plan or a new investment vehicle.

It’s a regulated nervous system.

It’s learning to sit with the fear of what might happen to someone I love without immediately purchasing my way out of the feeling.

It’s learning that receiving (really receiving and accepting the permission to do so) without guilt, without the compulsion to immediately give it back is not selfishness.

It’s the prerequisite for everything else.

You cannot pour from a vessel you keep draining to manage your own fear.

You cannot build the life you were meant for while quietly funding everyone else’s.

And you cannot teach receiving if you have spent decades being allergic to it yourself.

The $100,000 was expensive. The lesson is priceless.

I’m not done learning it. But I am finally, finally looking.

This is the work. Not the polished version. The actual work.

If something in this landed for you, I’d love to support you! Drop it in the comments, or simply sit with whatever it stirred. That’s where the real conversation begins.

Join Me and many amazing community members in the Living Oak Community on SKOOL

Let me say something that you might not agree with at first.

When most people say they want financial freedom, what they’re actually describing is an escape. An exit from a life they feel trapped in. A fantasy of quitting the job, paying off the debt, never checking the balance again.

And yes….if that’s where you are, I see you. That pressure is real.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand after decades of sitting across brilliant, accomplished, high-achieving leaders (including looking in the mirror!) who were quietly suffocating: financial freedom is the ultimate rebellion not because of what it gives you, but because of WHO it asks you to become in order to hold it.

And that becoming? That’s an inside job.

I know this not because I read it somewhere. I know it because I lived the opposite of it repeatedly until I finally understood what was actually happening.

We’ve Been Given a Very Small Story About Money.

The cultural script goes something like this:

work hard….earn more…save aggressively…build something impressive…and one day, yes one day from now you will arrive at freedom.

• Maybe that means millions in the bank.

• Maybe it’s the startup exit.

• Maybe it’s the investment portfolio that finally crosses a number that makes you exhale.

The story isn’t wrong, exactly. But it’s dangerously incomplete.

Because it treats money as a destination rather than what it actually is…an energy exchange.

A reflection.

A mirror held up to how much you believe you are allowed to receive, to expand, to take up space in this world without apologizing for it.

Money flows where energy is clear.

Where identity is aligned.

Where the container is strong enough to hold it without leaking it back out through self-sabotage, undercharging, over-giving, or making ourselves small to keep others comfortable.

Most of us have a ceiling and it’s not made of market conditions or economic circumstances.

It’s made of old beliefs that have been running us since before we knew we could question them.

I know this because sometimes I think I personally invented this story! I hit that ceiling more times than I care to admit.

And every single time, I was the one who built it.

The Peak and Plummet Cycle.

I had money. Real money. The kind that changes your posture when you walk into a room.

And then I didn’t.

And then I had it again.

And then I didn’t.

For years I told myself the story that most of us tell….bad timing, bad market, bad luck, one wrong decision that set off a chain reaction I couldn’t control.

And there was always enough truth in that version of the story to make it believable.

Until I stopped letting myself off the hook.

What I finally saw, through the kind of deep inner work that doesn’t let you look away, was a pattern.

A systemic, unconscious act I now call my “Peak and Plummet Cycle”.

I would allow abundance in. I would rise. I would feel it.

The momentum, the proof, the arrival.

And then, right at the edge of what I believed I was “allowed” to hold, something would shift.

A decision that didn’t fully make sense. A move I couldn’t quite explain in the moment. A crack that would spread until everything I’d built crashed down.

Not once. Repeatedly. For decades.

And the devastating truth is this: I was the one opening the trapdoor every time.

Not because I was reckless. Not because I was foolish. But because some “Part” (click here to start the series of meeting the various inner parts of me) of me….some old, unnamed wound buried beneath every accomplishment had decided there was an invisible ceiling on how much “someone like me” was allowed to keep.

And every time I approached it, that part of me found a way to enforce it.

This is the conversation that almost never happens in financial planning offices or business strategy sessions or even in therapy.

It definitely doesn’t happen in sessions with your career coach or professional mentor as you look to elevate your role or business to earn more.

Because it requires you to look at the pattern honestly and ask: What am I afraid would happen if I actually got to keep this?

That question broke me open.

And …it is what eventually set me free.

Kabbalistic Teachings That Changed How I See Financial Freedom.

I have been studying Kabbalah with David Ghiyam for several years. He speaks about something that landed in me like a stone dropping into still water.

He teaches that the things we desire…. the abundance, the love, the freedom….are not withholding themselves from us.

The universe is not closed off, waiting to see if we deserve it.

The light is already there, already prepared, already extended in our direction.

What blocks it is always internal.

It’s called our vessel.

The capacity inside of us to fully and completely receive.

And here’s the part that undoes you when you really sit with it: if your vessel has cracks, if it has been compromised by shame or unworthiness or the belief that wanting more makes you greedy or naive or dangerous, the light passes right through you.

The opportunity appears and you don’t recognize it.

The client says “yes” and you immediately wonder if you charged too little. The abundance arrives and you spend your energy waiting for it to be taken away.

Because on some level, you expected it to be.

My personal “Peak and Plummet Cycle” was not a financial problem.

It was a vessel problem.

I had not yet done the work of becoming someone who could hold the container of real abundance.

Not just receive it, but trust it, keep it, let it compound, let it change me.

And the crack in my vessel, like most cracks, traced back to the same source they almost always do: the worth (or lack thereof) I assigned myself when no one was watching.

The value I believed I brought or secretly doubted I brought.

The quiet, persistent question underneath every success: Do I actually deserve this?

What No One Tells You About Financial Freedom. It Begins With a Decision Not a Dollar Amount.

It begins the moment you decide to stop negotiating against yourself.

The moment you stop shrinking your price to make someone else comfortable with your value.

The moment you stop deferring the thing you know you should do because it feels too audacious. The moment you catch yourself about to say “I don’t want to seem greedy” and you pause, and you ask yourself: who taught me that desiring more was greed?

This is the work. The real work. Not the financial planning, though that matters.

Not the strategy, though that matters too. The work of becoming the version of you who can actually hold the container of financial freedom without unconsciously dismantling it the moment it starts to feel like more than you were told you could have.

Because I have watched brilliant men and women; executives, founders, leaders who run teams of hundreds, walk away from opportunities that would have changed their lives because they didn’t believe they were ready.

Because some part of them, some old wound that had never been properly tended, whispered: not yet. Not you. Not this much.

That whisper is not wisdom. It’s a wound wearing the costume of wisdom.

And the only way to know the difference is to go in.

So Let’s Talk About What Financial Freedom Actually Is.

Not the fantasy version. The real one.

It isn’t the absence of a bank balance notification. It isn’t a number. It isn’t a life without decisions around money, wealthy people make financial decisions constantly.

Financial freedom is time sovereignty. It is the return of your most finite resource to your own hands.

It is being able to sit with your child on a Tuesday afternoon without calculating what you’re losing by not working.

It is being able to say yes to the project that lights you up rather than the one that just pays well.

It is being able to show up to every conversation, every room, every relationship without the low hum of financial anxiety distorting your perception, narrowing your choices, cutting short your presence.

Time. That’s what we’re really talking about.

Every hour you are consumed by financial stress is an hour you are not fully present in your own life.

Not fully available to the people who need you. Not fully open to the idea, the insight, the pivot, the conversation that could change everything.

Financial freedom is the ability to be here. Fully here. For the texture of an ordinary Tuesday.

For the long dinner where nothing productive happens but everything meaningful does. For the season of grief, or rest, or reimagination without having to perform your productivity to justify your survival.

And then there’s the level beyond even that.

When you are no longer in survival mode, when the basics are handled and the anxiety is quiet and you have room, you become a different kind of person in the world.

• You begin planting seeds you’ll never see grow.

• You can fund the thing someone else believed was impossible.

• You can give your time to the conversation that doesn’t scale but trans

• forms someone.

• You can take the risk that protects a hundred people downstream. You can build something that outlives you.

This is what the Kabbalists understand that most wealth conversations miss entirely: the point of the vessel isn’t just to receive.

It’s to share.

The light that fills you is meant to illuminate others. Abundance that lives only in one place eventually stagnates. Abundance that moves and that is shared, invested, seeded into the world grows.

Financial freedom, at its deepest level, is not about having enough for yourself. (Despite what we see around us in the world today. No billions in the bank can bring this level of true freedom.)

It is about having enough that you can begin to change the conditions around you. The freedom to be a force.

A presence.

A planter of trees whose shade you may never sit under.

That is worth becoming for.

You don’t need another book. Another program. Another Manifestation Ritual.

You need to look honestly at your own Peak and Plummet cycle, whatever form it takes in your life.

The pattern underneath the pattern. The invisible ceiling you keep enforcing without knowing you’re the one enforcing it.

And you need to ask yourself…where are you still negotiating against yourself?

Where are you still performing smallness to keep others comfortable with your size?

Where are you still operating from an old story about what someone like you gets to have and what “someone like you” is required to give back before it gets taken?

And then, with real seriousness and real curiosity, ask yourself this:

What would I do with that freedom? Not for me. Through me.

Because when you know the answer to that question, when you feel it not as an idea but as a calling the receiving gets easier.

Not because the universe suddenly decided you were worthy.

You were always worthy.

But because you finally stopped arguing with it.

Financial freedom is the ultimate rebellion against every system, every voice, every wound that ever told you that you had to earn the right to take up space in your own life.

Rebel well my friends!

Does this ring a bell? Ready to break your own “Peak and Plummet Cycle”?

Come Join Me in our Living Oak Leadership and let yourself be guided towards true Financial Freedom. What do you have to lose, it’s FREE! CLICK HERE TO JOIN

Ang Onorato is the Founder of Living Oak Leadership and an Executive Coach, Leadership Advisor, and Human Capital Strategist with over 30 years of experience guiding leaders through conscious transformation. She works at the intersection of corporate expertise, spiritual intelligence, and trauma-informed leadership.

It happened on a Sunday morning.

I was outside, coffee in hand, half-present in the way you only get to be when the week hasn’t started yet. My neighbor was in her garden, and she called over to me the way neighbors used to do before we all got too busy to notice each other.

“Come look at these,” she said.

She was pointing to a cluster of Day Lilies…vivid orange, almost aggressive in their beauty. She started to tell me about the amazingness of this flower and other “day bloomers” like them, including a Morning Glory.

I’ll be honest with you. I knew of these flowers the way you know of most things you’ve never really looked at. I knew them by name, by category, by vague visual memory.

I had walked past Day Lilies and Morning Glories more times than I could count, but in speaking with my neighbor I realized I never experienced their existence.

I’m a member of Longwood Gardens, one of the most breathtaking and famous arboretums in the world, and it is embarrassingly, practically in my backyard. I have spent hours wandering those grounds.

And somehow, I had still never stopped long enough to actually see these flowers.

• Their growing patterns.

• Their bloom cycles.

• The quiet, extraordinary story they were telling the whole time.

My neighbor pulled up photos on her phone from her garden last summer. Morning Glory vines climbing the fence in long, reaching spirals and their blooms. That blue. It was the kind of blue that doesn’t look like it belongs in nature.

The kind that makes you think someone must have been there with a paintbrush, deciding that this particular corner of the world deserved something unreasonably beautiful.

I stood there with my coffee going cold and thought: how did I miss this?

“They only bloom once,” she told me. “One day. That’s it. Then they’re done.”

I stood there processing that longer than I probably should have. Something about that stopped me and hit me with a true life parallel. (I am a Corporate Hippie after all, this is how my brain works!)

I thought…

One day. Everything they have… all of that color, that fragrance, that striking presence only exists for one single day. It’s easy to miss if you are not intentional about observing it.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

The Lesson I Brought Back to My Executive Leadership Group

A few days later, I was facilitating one of my “Impact and Influence” Executive Group Coaching calls.

This a group coaching session with a room full of high-level and aspiring executive women who are brilliant, accomplished, and, if I’m being honest, chronically underestimating their own reach.

We had been working through the idea of how to create and leave a legacy of “Influence & impact” in all areas of our Self-Leadership. Not the kind that lives on a resume or gets celebrated in all-hands meetings. T

he quieter, more pervasive kind. The kind that moves through a room before you’ve even spoken. The kind that lingers in someone’s memory long after you’ve left the conversation.

I told them the story and my experience about the flowers.

I told them about the Day Lily and the Morning Glory and how these flowers don’t hedge their bets. They don’t conserve their energy wondering if this particular Tuesday is the right day to bloom.

They don’t worry about what comes after. They invest everything… every ounce of color, fragrance, and beauty into one single opening.

And then I asked the question I want to ask you right now:

What if we did the same thing?

We’ve Been Thinking About Impact All Wrong

Most of us were taught (explicitly or implicitly) that influence is a long game. That it’s built through repetition, longevity and visibility. That impact is measured in years, not moments.

And while consistency absolutely matters, I want to challenge the part of that belief that has become an excuse.

Because here’s what I see inside the leaders I work with: they are waiting.

Waiting until they have the right title. The bigger platform. The more established presence. Waiting until they feel ready enough, credentialed enough, certain enough to show up with their full voice.

And while they’re waiting?

The moments are passing.

The Day Lily doesn’t wait for better conditions. It blooms in whatever light it gets fully, brilliantly, without apology.

The Myth of Scale

Here’s something I hear all the time: “I want to make a bigger impact.”

What people usually mean when they say that is: they want to reach more people, influence more decisions, be recognized on a larger scale.

And I get it. I feel that pull myself.

But I’ve started to wonder if our obsession with scale is actually keeping us from depth.

Because the truth is, some of the most consequential moments of influence I have ever witnessed and experienced happened in small rooms.

In one-on-one conversations. In a single email that someone printed out and kept. In a meeting where one person stayed quiet until exactly the right moment, and then said the one thing nobody else would.

Those moments don’t look like “impact” from the outside. They don’t get slides in the quarterly review. Nobody writes a LinkedIn post about them.

But they seed. And the seeds grow long after the bloom is gone.

Ripple Theory: Why One Moment Can Last a Lifetime

Think about this for a second.

Think of someone….a mentor, a colleague, a stranger, a teacher whose presence changed something in you. Not over years of sustained interaction. Just once. One conversation. One observation they made. One moment when they saw you more clearly than you were seeing yourself.

Do they know they did that?

Probably not.

And that is the point I want every leader reading this to sit with:

Your impact does not need your awareness to keep living.

When you show up fully, when you choose to be intentional about the energy, the attention, and the truth you bring to a room or a conversation you set something in motion that you may never fully see.

You say one thing to someone that becomes the thing they repeat to themselves in a moment of doubt six months from now.

You ask one question in a meeting that shifts the entire frame of the decision.

You send one email with enough honesty and warmth in it that someone forwards it to a colleague who needed to read exactly those words.

The ripple moves.

One intentional moment

→ lands in someone’s nervous system

→ shifts how they see themselves or their situation

→ changes a decision they make

→ impacts a team, a family, an organization

→ echoes into a future you will never witness

You just have to bloom.

What Full Bloom Actually Looks Like

This is where I want to get practical with you, because “bloom fully” sounds beautiful and also a little abstract. So let me break down what it actually looks like in practice.

This is what I coach my leaders to recognize as a full-bloom moment.

It starts with being rooted.

You arrive settled. Not performing. Not managing how you’re being perceived before you’ve even sat down.

You know who you are before the room attempts to define you. That groundedness is not arrogance. It is Self-Leadership. It is the result of doing your inner work and understanding your triggers, your patterns, your places of reactivity so that you can be present instead of defended.

It requires conviction.

You speak from somewhere real. Not from rehearsal. Not from wanting to land the right way. When your voice carries weight, it’s because you believe what you’re saying and the people in the room can feel that you’re not asking for permission to believe it.

It demands actual presence.

Not performing presence. Not managing your image in real time.

Actually being there. Listening with your full attention, letting what is happening in the room actually matter to you, seeing people rather than scanning them.

When you are genuinely present with someone, they feel seen. And feeling seen is one of the most powerful things a human being can experience.

It asks you to bring what only you bring.

The room already has consensus. It already has the safe opinion and the expected perspective. What it needs and what it’s often missing… is you.

Your particular read on the situation. The thing you noticed that nobody else did. The question that nobody else thought to ask.

Distinctiveness is not a liability. It is, in fact, your most significant contribution.

And then you trust the residue.

What do people carry with them when they leave the room? What is the emotional imprint of your presence? That is your real influence metric.

Not how many people you reached. Not how loud you were. What stayed.

Sacred Brevity

I want to name something that I think is deeply important and that I don’t hear enough people talking about in the leadership space.

Some of the most powerful things you will ever do as a leader will not be remembered as leadership.

They will be:

• The quiet conversation in the hallway after the meeting ended.

• The moment you stayed when everyone else started gathering their things.

• The time you named the thing in the room that nobody else would touch.

• The email you sent to a loved one at midnight because something was bothering you and you decided to be honest about it instead of letting it sit.

These are not grand gestures. They are not viral LinkedIn moments. They are not keynote speeches or promotions or performance reviews.

They are blooms.

Brief, specific, complete.

The Day Lily doesn’t grieve that it isn’t a perennial. It doesn’t spend its one day wishing it were a rose that blooms all summer. It opens fully, completely, without withholding to exactly the light that’s available to it today.

That’s not resignation. That’s mastery.

The Opportunity You Haven’t Imagined Yet

Here is the part that I find most exciting and that I think about every single time I walk into a room, facilitate a group, take a call, write a word.

We cannot yet fathom the opportunities that open because of how we show up in any given moment.

That’s not a motivational statement. It’s a factual one.

The person you had a real conversation with at that conference 3 years ago, the one where you actually listened instead of waiting for your turn to talk, may be the exact person who recommends you for something you haven’t even thought of pursuing yet.

The junior leader you gave twenty minutes to, the one who felt invisible in that organization may go on to build something significant. And they will remember who saw them.

The moment you choose to speak up in a meeting, offer a perspective that’s inconvenient but true, model the kind of leadership you actually believe in.

That moment creates a data point in someone’s nervous system about what leadership can look like.

You are always influencing. The only question is whether you’re doing it on purpose.

Your Invitation

I want to leave you with the question I left with my group that day the one that landed in the room and sat there for a long beat before anyone spoke.

Where in your Self-leadership…. your voice, your presence, your relationships... have you been saving yourself for a season that may never come?

The Day Lily doesn’t do that. The Morning Glory doesn’t do that.

They open completely. Right now. With everything they have.

And they trust that one bloom. One single, magnificent, fully committed bloom is enough to change what grows next.

You don’t have to last forever to matter deeply.

You just have to show up….fully… in every way right now.

That’s the work. And it’s available to you today.

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About The Author:

Ang Onorato is the founder of Living Oak Leadership and a leadership coach, advisor, and executive search partner with over 30 years of experience guiding high-level leaders through conscious transformation. She works at the intersection of business mastery and expertise, spiritual & somatic intelligence, and trauma-informed leadership development.

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I had my coffee. I had my daily work plan. I had a full day ahead of me.

And then my phone rang at 11am. My father was being rushed to the emergency room. A TIA... what most people know as a mild stroke. The kind of event that carries the word “mild” in its name but feels anything but mild when it is your father and you are watching the clock and waiting for someone to tell you what is happening inside his brain.

I was good, I am the oldest Daughter and I knew how to hold it together. I made the calls. Talked to the doctors. I showed up calm and clear and gathered my siblings.

And then six hours later... at 5pm on that same Tuesday... my phone rang again.

My mother was ALSO being brought into the same hospital.

Active heart attack.

I made the clinical staff chuckle because my parents have been divorced for 45 years but still live across the street and still look out for each other. They couldn’t believe this was happening at the same time either.

By 2:00 am Dad was being transferred via ambulance and at 3:30am Mom was being airlifted to a trauma center equipped to do what the smaller hospital could not.

And just like that, my two sisters and I were living inside a 40-hour nightmare that I could not wake up from. Two parents. Two hospitals. Two life-threatening emergencies unfolding simultaneously in different locations.

No sleep. Not a single hour.

Because how do you sleep when both of your parents are fighting for their lives at the same time?

You don’t. You just keep moving. You answer the next call. You drive to the next hospital.

I drove the trauma hospital with the Medivac helicopter flying over my heard….surreal is an understatement.

You ask the next questions. You hold the next hand. You sign the next form. You sit in the next waiting room with the particular kind of fear that has no words for it, the fear of losing both of your parents on the same day, something you never once imagined was possible because the human mind is mercifully not built to go there on its own.

I had to sit with myself deeply with this whole moment because I had no choice but to.

There is no manual for this. There is no protocol. No roadmap. No amount of professional experience or personal development work that makes you immune to the gut-punch of that reality landing in your body all at once.

And yet... something held.

The Ground Beneath My Feet

Here is what I know about crisis.

It doesn’t reveal who you wish you were. It reveals who you have actually become.

And on that day, what I discovered was that the years of deep inner work I have done on myself... not just the work I teach and guide my clients through, but my own relentless, humbling, ongoing journey into my inner world had built something real inside me.

A grounding.

Not a ground that made me unfeeling. I felt everything. The fear was real. The helplessness was real. The grief of watching your parents become fragile in a single afternoon is a particular kind of heartbreak that no amount of coaching certifications prepares you for.

But I didn’t collapse. I didn’t spiral. I didn’t freeze.

I processed and I kept moving. That is not a personality trait. That is not luck.

That is the direct result of daily nervous system regulation work... the kind that most people think is optional, or a luxury, or something you do when things get hard.

But here’s the truth. You cannot access it on the hard days if you haven’t been building it on the ordinary ones.

Why Your Nervous System Is the Foundation of Everything

I talk about this constantly with my clients and I will say it here plainly.

Most of the dysfunction we see in our workplaces, our relationships, our leadership and honestly, most of the dysfunction we are watching tear our society apart right now... is not a values problem or an intelligence problem or even a moral failing.

It is a nervous system problem.

It is humans with dysregulated nervous systems coming into contact with other humans with dysregulated nervous systems... and the collision of all of that unprocessed fear, unhealed pain, and chronic stress playing out in our boardrooms, our politics, our dinner tables, and our comment sections.

A dysregulated nervous system cannot access empathy the way a regulated one can. It cannot pause before reacting. It cannot hold complexity or sit with discomfort or extend grace to someone who is different from them. It is too busy surviving.

And when we are all just surviving we become very, very easy to divide.

Daily nervous regulation and inner healing practice changes this.

Not because it makes you serene and untouchable. But because it builds the capacity to feel hard things without being destroyed by them. To stay present when everything in you wants to flee.

On the day both of my parents were fighting for their lives, I did not hold onto the terror. I processed it through my body as it moved through me. I breathed. I grounded. I let myself feel what needed to be felt and then I chose what needed to happen next.

I knew, in a very cellular way, that I was no good to anyone if I held onto it. Not to my parents. Not to the medical teams trying to communicate with me. Not to the other family members looking to me to hold steady.

Regulation was not self-indulgence that day. It was service.

What I Witnessed Inside Those Hospital Walls

Every single person who touched their care was extraordinary.

The facilities staff. The nurses. The physicians at both hospitals. The paramedics. The flight crew. The surgeons who performed my mother’s cardiac procedure. The home care team who followed up in the days after. Every hand that helped, every voice that explained something clearly, every person who looked me in the eyes and spoke to me like a human being and not just a liability to manage.

They showed up. Fully.

Now I know healthcare has a complicated reputation in the US.

And much of that reputation is earned. The systems are broken. The financial machinery behind healthcare is often predatory and soul-crushing. The bureaucratic weight that these professionals carry is obscene.

But that is not the people.

The people who chose these roles, the ones who show up exhausted and stretched thin and still find something inside themselves to offer genuine care, they reminded me of something I think we are in danger of forgetting.

We are all in this human experience together.

What Disappears When Life Gets Real

There is something that happens in an emergency.

The noise stops.

You don’t think about what political party your surgeon votes for. You don’t notice the race of the paramedic loading your mother onto a stretcher. You don’t care about the gender of the cardiologist reviewing the scan or the lifestyle choices of the nurse holding your hand in the waiting room.

All of it... gone.

What you are left with is something startlingly simple. A mother. A father. A daughter. A team of people doing everything in their power to hep.

And it struck me with a force I was not prepared for. How much of what divides us on an ordinary Tuesday is a construct. A manufactured separation. A story we have been handed, often without our consent, and conditioned to carry as truth.

Race. Political affiliation. Gender. Belief systems. All of it real in its history and its impact, yes. But also a layer on top of something far more fundamental. Something we only seem to remember when life strips everything else away.

Our shared humanity.

I watched strangers care for my parents like they were their own. I watched a helicopter crew run toward urgency with calm precision. I watched my mother’s surgeon walk toward me with tired eyes and a steady voice and explain what had just happened with more compassion than I had any right to expect from someone at the end of a very long shift.

And I thought... this is who we actually are.

This is what we are capable of when we stop performing division and just show up for each other.

What the World Is Trying to Do to Us

I want to say something direct.

There are systems, structures, and very deliberate narratives in this world that profit from our division. That are engineered to keep us afraid of each other, contemptuous of each other, suspicious of each other.

And it is working.

We are more divided, more anxious, more tribalized than we have ever been. And the cost of that... the human cost... is enormous.

And those narratives are landing in bodies that are already exhausted. Already dysregulated. Already depleted from years of chronic stress, collective grief, and the relentless pace of a world that never asks us to slow down and regulate.

That is the combination that breaks societies.

Not the differences between us. We have always had those. Difference is not the danger.

The danger is dysregulated humans, flooded with fear-based messaging, who have never been given the tools to process what they are feeling and who then turn that unprocessed pain outward onto each other.

I see this pattern in the leaders I work with. I see it in organizations. And I see it playing out on a global scale in ways that genuinely frighten me.

But here is what I also know.

The antidote is not a political solution. It is not a policy or a protest or a perfectly worded post.

It is this.

It’s in people who have done the inner work and have regulated nervous systems. It’s those who have processed their own wounds and built the capacity to remain human under pressure and show up in every interaction they have with every other human they encounter.

That is the movement that actually changes things.

That is the leadership that is needed right now.

The Leadership Lesson I Wasn’t Expecting

I coach leaders for a living.

I work with executives, founders, and organizations who are navigating complexity, pressure, legacy wounds, and the very real work of becoming conscious, self-aware leaders. The work I do through Living Oak Leadership is about building the kind of inner foundation that holds when everything outside is shaking.

And sitting in that hospital waiting room... I got my own reminder.

This is why the work matters.

Not just inside boardrooms or strategy sessions. Not just when we’re talking about performance or profitability or scaling a team. But in every interaction we have with every human being we encounter.

The care I witnessed from those healthcare professionals... many of them stretched thin, emotionally taxed, and still choosing to show up with warmth and competence reminded me that leadership is not a title. It’s a choice. Made over and over again. In the hard moments. In the tired moments. In the moments when no one is watching and everything in you wants to check out.

And it reminded me not to stop.

Not to shrink my work or second-guess its reach. My corner of influence may be a small spec on this planet, but it is mine.

And yours is yours.

And if each of us chose to lead from that place of basic humanity every single day, the ripple effect would be staggering.

But here’s what I know from both my professional work and from what I witnessed last week.

The division is not the truth of who we are.

It is a layer. A wound. A story being written for us by systems and powers that do not have our collective wellbeing at the center of their agenda.

The truth is that most people, when given the space and the safety to simply be human with another human, will choose connection over contempt. Will choose help over harm. Will choose to show up.

I watched it happen in real time. In a hospital. In a crisis. Between strangers.

And it reminded me that the antidote to the hatred and the angst and the manufactured separation around us is not a political solution. It’s not a policy. It’s not a protest or a post.

It’s this.

Seeing each other.

Three Things to Start Today

(I’m a Self- Leadership Coach. I can’t help myself. There’s always a practice.)

1. Build Your Regulation Practice Before You Need It

Do not wait for a crisis to wish you had the tools. Nervous system regulation is not a rescue strategy. It is a daily practice that builds capacity over time. Breathwork. Movement. Stillness. Whatever form it takes for you... do it today. Not because today is hard. Because one day will be, and you will need the ground you built on all the ordinary ones.

2. Treat Every Human Interaction as a Leadership Moment

You lead every time you choose how to treat another person. The colleague who is struggling. The stranger who is rude. The family member who is driving you crazy. Ask yourself in each interaction... Am I elevating or diminishing right now? That single question, practiced daily, will change you.

3. Notice When You Are Being Handed a Narrative of Division... and Pause

The next time you feel a surge of contempt for “those people”... whoever they are in your world right now... stop. Ask yourself whose story you are actually living in that moment. Because contempt is almost never about the present. It is almost always old pain, unprocessed fear, or a narrative that someone else handed you and you forgot to question.

Question it.

The Only Thing I Know for Certain

We are temporary visitors in this human experience.

All of us. Every single one.

And we get to choose what we do with the time we have here. We can use it to elevate ourselves and others. To extend the kind of basic humanity that I watched strangers extend to my parents on the hardest day of my recent life. To build the inner foundation that holds when the world shakes.

Or we can use it to create more fear, more fury, more separation.

My parents are recovering. My mother’s heart was repaired by hands that belonged to a stranger who will likely never know how much that moment meant. My father is home and resting and already trying to do too much, because that is simply who he is.

And I am here... reminded.

Reminded that my small corner of influence on this planet matters. That the work I do with leaders and organizations and every human being I come into contact with is not separate from the big problems we are facing. It is the answer to them.

One regulated nervous system at a time. One human interaction at a time. One choice, made consciously, to show up for each other.

That is enough. And it is everything.

If this resonated with you, share it with someone who needs the reminder today. And if you are ready to do the deeper inner work that makes this kind of groundedness possible... Come Join us in the Living Oak Leader

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Because right now… it’s a lot.

The pace. The division. The uncertainty. The constant noise pulling at our attention and our nervous systems.

And in the middle of all of it, many of us are asking, sometimes quietly sometimes urgently….what actually matters, what is my role in all of this, and where do I even begin to create impact when the world feels this complex.

In the chaos of life we often lose sight of profound truths. One of the most important is the impermanence and fragility of everything and the futility of trying to cling to things that were never meant to last.

Not just possessions or roles, but identities, control, and certainty. And when we cling, we don’t just exhaust ourselves… we often create unnecessary friction, disconnection, and even harm to ourselves and to others.

This is why the reminder I’m about to share feels so important right now. It invites us to zoom out, to remember who we are beneath the noise, to reconsider how we move through this world, and to reconnect with the value of our impact—not just what we do, but how we show up while doing it.

Below is a poem by contemporary author and poet James McRae that captures this perspective with clarity and simplicity.

Instructions Before Visiting Earth

In the event that you wake up
and find your soul separated from source
and manifest into material form,
don’t panic.
Your condition is only temporary.

You have been selected for the
opportunity of human incarnation.

This 3D simulation is designed
to break up the monotony of eternity
by giving you a fully immersive
experience as a distinct ego identity.

Your body will serve
as your physical avatar as you
navigate a dense and dramatic reality.
There will be many distractions
causing you to forget your true nature
and origin. You will experience
a range of emotions, from joy
to loneliness to despair.

But remember—no matter
what trials and traumas you encounter,
your soul remains perfectly safe.

At times you may feel lost or afraid.
This is totally normal.
If you ever need guidance,
simply slow down your busy mind
and bring your awareness
to the quiet place
inside yourself.

On this planet, nothing is permanent.
People and things will come and go.
You will fall in love and form sentimental attachments
only to lose everything you hold dear.

So cling to nothing too tightly, even yourself,
and when it’s time to let go, let go with grace,
for nothing is owned, only borrowed.

As you walk among
the people on the planet,
try to be a good guest.
Tread lightly. Remember
that you are only visiting.
Don’t make a mess.
Listen more than you speak.
Give more than you take.

Don’t keep your soft heart
locked inside a glass cage,
protected from wear and tear.

You’ll never make it out alive
and time passes quickly.
So come back with some battle scars
and good stories to tell.

Why This Matters - Especially Now

This poem lands differently depending on when you read it, but right now, in this moment in time, it feels less like poetry and more like instruction. We are living in a world where many people are operating from fear, scarcity, urgency, and disconnection. It is easy to forget that behind every role, every opinion, every conflict, there is a human being trying to navigate their own version of this dense and dramatic reality.

When we forget that, we start to move through the world as if we are permanent fixtures in it. Defending, controlling, accumulating, and protecting at all costs. But what if we are not here to grip so tightly? What if we are here to experience, contribute, and steward?

That shift changes everything.

The Value OF Your Impact in an Impermanent World

If nothing is permanent, then your value cannot be tied solely to what you build, achieve, or accumulate. Your value is in how you impact the experience of others while you are here. That’s the distinction so many high-achieving leaders miss. They focus on outputs, metrics, and milestones, but the deeper question becomes:

What is the felt experience of you in the lives of others?

When you pause and really consider that, it reframes how you show up. It’s no longer just about performance. It’s about presence. It’s about what shifts in others because you were in the room.

Let’s Ask Ourselves honestly:

• Do people feel seen in my presence?
• Do they feel safe in my leadership?
• Are they expanded by my thinking?
• Do they feel respected in my decisions?
• Do they feel energized after interacting with me?

Or…

• Do they feel managed but not understood?
• Directed but not valued?
• Impressed but not connected?

In a world that is increasingly driven by speed, automation, and performance metrics, the human experience is becoming the differentiator.

This is what I mean when I talk about the value OF your impact. It’s not just what you do. It’s what changes in others because you showed up.

Being a “Good Guest” in Leadership and Life

The line that stopped me most in this poem was simple: try to be a good guest.

Not a perfect guest. Not an impressive guest. A good one.

When you really sit with that, it invites a different way of leading and living. Imagine leading your team, your family, and your community from that mindset. A good guest respects the space they are in, pays attention to the energy they bring, leaves things better than they found them, and understands they are part of something larger.

This doesn’t diminish your power. It refines it.

Because true leadership is not about dominance or control. It is about stewardship. It is about recognizing that your role—no matter how big or small—is temporary, but your impact can ripple far beyond your time in it.

Letting Go Without Disengaging

One of the biggest misconceptions about impermanence is that it means detachment or indifference. It doesn’t. It means engagement without possession. It means caring deeply without clinging. It means showing up fully while understanding that everything is in motion.

This is the balance so many of us are learning in real time, especially in a world that feels unpredictable. Especially when we want to protect what we love. Especially when we have worked so hard to build something meaningful.

But the truth is simple.

You don’t create more impact by holding tighter.
You create more impact by becoming more conscious of how you show up within what you hold.

The Invitation

If this moment feels heavy, uncertain, or overwhelming, let this be a recalibration point. Not to step back from your life, but to step more intentionally into it.

To ask yourself:

How do I want to move through this world… knowing I am only visiting?

How do I create value not just through results, but through the way I impact others?
How do I contribute to healing, safety, happiness, and coexistence in the spaces I touch every day?

Because the world does not just need more output right now. It needs more conscious presence. More grounded leaders. More humans willing to bring both strength and softness into the same room.

That is your role.
That is your value.
That is your impact.

And in a world that feels like it’s pulling apart in so many directions, that might be one of the most important contributions you can make.

We are only visiting here.

So let’s leave something meaningful behind.

Not just in what we build…but in how we made people feel while we were here.

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These are the “Parts” of me… the ones that, together, tell the story of how this little Acorn, the “Self”, has grown over time into the Oak Tree that now stands in the world.

These are the “Parts” that make up the Oak Tree that I am.

The full tree that today shows up with presence and power… AND also with the quiet, invisible layers of wounds, hurt, trauma and subsequent trauma responses of Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn and Faint that shaped its growth.

This also represents the healing parts of my Tree that now allows to create impact, to offer shade, to hold space for others in ways it once needed for itself.

It begins by turning inward… by meeting these “Parts”, witnessing them, understanding them and gently unburdening what they have been carrying—often for decades or most of our lives.

These are the “Parts” that inherited unprocessed generational wounds from our lineage, the imprints formed through our environments and conditioning and the very real events that occurred as we moved through life. All of it lives within us, shaping how we respond, how we protect, and how we show up.

This happens because these individual “Parts” develop a job to do once they are impacted, to create protections so that the wounded part never gets wounded again. They don’t know has time has passed so they stay stuck in their individual wounds and imprints and they use different responses to that trauma to protect what is deeply exiled inside them….until they can be witnessed and released.

This entire series explores this inner landscape through the lens of IFS (Internal Family Systems) the life-changing modality developed over forty years ago by Dr. Richard Schwartz. Today, his work stands alongside the contributions of fellow pioneers Dr. Gabor Maté and Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, whose collective research has deepened our understanding of how trauma is not just remembered, it is embodied.

What you are reading in this series is not theory alone. It is the integration of that work with my own lived experience and decades of study across clinical psychology, spiritual and somatic practices, Kabbalistic teachings, Stoic philosophy, and even disciplines like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

This series is my attempt to bring all of that together… not as a framework you must learn first, but as a story you can feel into.

Each “Part” is introduced not as a concept, but as a character because that is how we experience them. Distinct voices. Distinct reactions. Distinct ways of moving through the world.

Through their stories, my hope is that you begin to recognize your own… to gently uncover, unpack, and ultimately unburden the “Parts” of you that may still be holding you back from the expansion, peace, and inner alignment you know is possible.

This is the foundation of what I now call Living Oak Leadership.

It is built on the metaphor that an acorn does not begin as something separate from the tree… it is born from it already influenced by the rings of growth that came before. The Oak Tree carries within it decades, sometimes centuries, of environmental conditions, storms weathered and seasons endured. And before the acorn ever touches the ground, it already holds within it the imprint of that history.

So it is with us.

We are shaped not only by what happens in our lifetime, but by what came before us, what surrounded us, and what we made those experiences mean.

This… is the baseline of our story.

While it may seem unusual to pause here, to offer an “introduction” in the middle of an unfolding narrative but this moment matters.

As we now step into Chapter 3—the Young Adult Years—I want you to understand not only what you are about to witness… but why it matters.

So let’s recap……(to read all the other articles in the series first – CLICK HERE)

Up until now, you’ve been meeting the earliest imprints of this story… the younger “ Oak Leaves” that first began forming long before I ever understood that they were shaping how I would move through the world.

You met 3-year-old “Curly”, the “Frozen One”, who learned in a single moment that when life becomes overwhelming, the safest response is to shut down… to Freeze… to go still in the face of something too big to process.

Then came 5-year-old “Lil Blu”, the “Knowing One”, who came into this world deeply connected to her voice and purpose, and who learned to Fight when that voice wasn’t honored… not from aggression, but from a deep inner certainty that she was meant to be seen and heard.

Moving on, we witnessed 8-year-old “Snowbird”, the “Confused & Grieving One”, who experienced a loss too early to understand, and in the absence of language or support, learned to Fawn… to become what others needed in order to stay safe and not abandoned.

After that, we got introduced to 10-year-old “Opie”, the “Unseen & Excluded One”, who experienced rejection in a way that disconnected her entirely from her body, defaulting to a lifetime of Fainting, leaving her body in order to survive what she couldn’t emotionally hold.

Then came the teenage years…

12-year-old “Huffy”, the “Spiritual One”, who felt deeply connected to something greater, but also learned to Fawn in order to maintain safety and belonging in a world that didn’t always understand that connection.

Then came 15-year-old “Cougar”, the “Victim One”, who oscillated between Fight and Flight, when trying to find footing in a world where she misunderstood and overpowered by authority when she had no self-sovereignty.

After her we saw 17-year-old “Boss”, the “Responsible One”, who carried the weight of everything and everyone, learning to balance Fighting and Freezing… standing strong when she saw injustice and no adults doing the right thing, but left her judged, publicly shamed and outcast.

These were the first two chapters of the story… the early growth rings of the Oak Tree. Each one shaped by moments that left an imprint. Each one adapting in real time to survive what was happening.

Now we arrive at a different kind of moment…

Chapter 3 is where we meet 20-year-old “Yellow Meadow”, the “Reluctant Healing One.”

She is different from the others, not because her experiences are any less painful, but because this is the first time life doesn’t just imprint a response… it invited a reckoning.

“Yellow Meadow” left home for college 2 years earlier. She was six hours away from everything she has ever known. What should have been a normal life transition…was anything but that.

On the surface, it looked like everything was normal. But underneath it, there is a quiet fracture already forming.

Her parents were in the middle of a divorce, her two younger sisters were still at home and for the first time in her life she was physically removed from the role she had unconsciously taken on… the one who held everything together for everyone.

What happens next is not one event… it is a series of them.

While she is away trying to navigate a new life, she loses two of her best friends in tragic car accidents.

She experiences her first serious relationship, and the heartbreak that comes with it. All while quietly battling an eating disorder, body dysmorphia, and an obsessive relationship with exercise that has become less about health and more about control.

And still… she performs.

She works two jobs.
She carries a full course load.
She makes the Dean’s List.

From the outside it looks like she is thriving. She is doing everything “right.” But internally, she is holding together a system that is already overloaded.

This is what so many high-functioning leaders understand intimately… the ability to perform at a high level while something inside is slowly breaking.

Until the day it finally does.

No warning sign that anyone else can see, but her body starts to give out. Severe illness and the mental toll of a raging eating disorder overcomes every aspect of her inner life.

For the first time in her life, after waking up on the floor of her dorm room from a passed out vodka binge, instead of adapting, instead of pushing through, instead of performing… she does something none of the earlier “Part” could do.

She calls home.
And she asks for help.

That moment changes everything.

It leads her first to a hospitalization for severe mono that effected her so severely she could not breathe for days. Then immediately after to a 30-day inpatient eating disorder facility, called “The Meadows.” And while the experience itself is difficult, it marks the beginning of something new… not perfection, not strength, but awareness.

For the first time she begins to see that what she has been doing is not just discipline or drive… it is a response. A pattern. A way of coping with something that was never fully processed.

When she leaves the facility, she is not “fixed.” She is not suddenly confident or whole. She is still fragile, still cautious, still trying to understand how to exist in a world that no longer feels entirely safe. But she is beginning to rebuild.

Through the support of family and friends, through a 12-step program and through small intentional steps she starts reintegrating into life again… this time with a different level of witnessing herself.

And for a brief moment, it feels like maybe… just maybe… things are stabilizing.

Until another moment reshapes everything again.

She attends a party with friends she has known her whole life. It is familiar, comfortable and supposed to be safe. But by the end of that night her sense of personal space, safety and sovereignty is violated.

She is harassed and physically overpowered by someone older, someone who assumes access to her without permission.

She questions and blames herself for even being out in the world and away from the safety of the Meadow rehab hospital. Wearing a yellow skirt she would never normally wear. That must have been the reason, she convinces herself.

The inner questions that quietly reinforce the idea that her safety was somehow her responsibility to manage… and her failure to do so is the reason it happened.

These moments for this “Part” do not just hurt… they create deep imprints.

It teaches her something at a very deep level. That even when you try to do everything right, you are still not guaranteed safety. And from that belief, she turns on more Flight and Freeze responses to life’s triggers.

She began to fear her own expansion.

Because showing up fully… being seen… taking up space… started to feel like something that could lead to loss and trauma again. Not just emotional loss, but physical, personal, and deeply violating loss.

This is also the “Part” of me that became hyper-aware of relapse. Not just into an eating disorder but into losing control of myself. Control had become synonymous with safety, and anything that threatened that control felt dangerous.

And perhaps most quietly, this is the “Part” of me that began to keep real relationships at a distance. Because intimacy requires vulnerability and vulnerability felt like exposure to an open door to something being taken again.

This is where the Living Oak Leadership Model Becomes Most Helpful.

Because what this story shows is not just a sequence of difficult events… it reveals a pattern.

From these experiences we develop (as previously mentioned) various default trauma responses to our lives… not as flaws, but as adaptive strategies that helped us survive in those moments. Until they are witnessed and released they will drive us unconsciously forever.

The challenge is that when those moments are not fully processed… the body remembers.

The mind reinforces. And the response becomes automatic, showing up again and again in situations that feel similar, even if they are not the same.

But here is the turning point…

The power is not in eliminating these parts or these responses. It is in uncovering them.

Because when you can begin to see….

The moment the imprint was formed + the pattern it created + the response it wired into your system, you create space for something new.

You create space for Self.

This is the foundation of Living Oak Leadership. The understanding that when we uncover our internal imprints and the patterns they created we are no longer unconsciously driven by them.

We can begin to lead ourselves… and ultimately others… from a place of conscious power rather than unconscious reaction.

“Yellow Meadow” was never weak.

She was the first version of me who became aware that something needed to change even if she didn’t yet know how to do it.

She stepped onto the path of healing not because she felt ready, but because something in her knew she couldn’t keep living the same way.

And even then she did it cautiously. Reluctantly. With one foot still rooted in protection.

And maybe that is the part of this story that matters most.

Because healing does not begin when you feel strong.

It begins when you are willing to see what is true even if it scares you.

And the moment you begin to see it… to name it… to understand it…is the moment you begin to take your power back.

And that is how our individual Oak Trees continue to grow. Not by avoiding the storms, but by understanding, witnessing and healing the rings they leave behind.

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click here to read articles 1-7 Here

I say “supposed to” because for the first time in a year… life got away from me. And before I knew it, the day had passed.

I felt it all day yesterday. That subtle but persistent inner dialogue telling me I had fallen short. That I had disappointed myself. That I had somehow let my readers down because I was now a day behind. It wasn’t loud, but it was there… familiar, practiced, automatic.

But then something shifted.

I caught myself mid-thought and asked a different question. Who says I’m behind?

And the answer came just as quickly. Not my readers. Not the work. Not the commitment itself. Just the parts of me that are wired to measure, to judge, to reduce my value down to a moment where I didn’t meet an expectation I created.

Because what if this moment isn’t about failure at all? What if it’s actually an invitation to see something I’ve never allowed myself to fully acknowledge?

For an entire year, I have shown up. Week after week. I have written, reflected, shared, and published. Not perfectly, but consistently. And maybe what matters more than the exact day something is sent is the integrity behind the commitment. The devotion to continuing. The willingness to keep showing up, regardless.

Two years ago, I couldn’t even imagine this version of myself. Writing about deeply personal experiences and putting them out into the world felt completely out of reach. And the idea that those words would resonate with people… that they would impact someone in a meaningful way… that felt even further away.

I’ve always known I bring value through the work I do. But writing? I never believed that was something I could offer. I didn’t see it as a gift I had. I didn’t believe I could create something through words that could last, that could matter, that could leave any kind of imprint.

And yet here I am, one year into doing exactly that.

Then it hit me. Before I write the next article to introduce you to another one of my inner “Parts” (the imprinted or wounded little parts deep inside) … I want to pause.

Because if you’ve been reading along, you might be asking yourself something I’ve asked myself many times over the years:

What’s the point of all of this?
What’s the point of witnessing the parts of ourselves?
Does it actually change anything?

I want to answer that directly.

It doesn’t just change something.

It changes everything.

The Truth No One Sells You

We are living in a world filled with noise.

Coaching programs.
Retreats.
Certifications.
Frameworks.
Influencers telling you who to be, how to heal, how to grow, how to “arrive.”

And listen… I’m not judging.

I’ve invested in many of them.
I’ve sat in the rooms.
I’ve done the work.
I’ve led others through it.

Heck, I AM one of them.

But sitting here today, with decades of experience and the last 8+ years of the deepest inner work of my life, I can tell you this:

None of it works if you don’t have the capacity to hold it.

You can learn every strategy.
You can say every affirmation.
You can visualize your dream life down to the last detail.

But if your internal world is still crowded with un-witnessed fear, judgement, grief, shame, or protection…

You won’t be able to receive what you’re asking for or to show the value of your impact.

Self-Witnessing Is Where It Actually Begins

Self-witnessing is not complicated.

It’s not flashy because it doesn’t sell well on social media.

It’s the quiet moment where you pause…
Take a breath…
And ask yourself, honestly:

What part of me feels stuck right now?
What part of me feels scared?
Unseen?
Unworthy?
Not ready?

And then instead of fixing it…You witness it.

No judgment.
No rushing it away.
No trying to override it with positivity.

Just presence.

Because here’s what I’ve learned:

The moment you can witness a part of yourself without abandoning it… is the exact moment Self-Leadership begins.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

Everyone wants to:

• Find their purpose

• Build the business

• Deepen relationships

• Feel fulfilled

• Expand financially, emotionally, spiritually

But very few people are willing to do the one thing required to actually sustain it:

Create a vessel strong enough to hold it.

Because expansion isn’t just about adding more. It’s about releasing what no longer fits.

The Part No One Talks About

This past week it got real for me when I judged and bashed myself for missing my own deadline.

I’ve been in it.

I’m not just teaching or packing it.
I’m personally living it.

I found myself stepping back and observing my own life in a way that felt almost surgical.

Where am I giving from an empty well?
Where am I overextending out of habit?
Where am I staying connected out of fear… not alignment?

And I’ll be honest with you, some of the answers were not what I wanted to see.

There were places… people… patterns…that I didn’t want to let go of.

But self-witnessing doesn’t lie.

It shows you clearly:

• What is nourishing you

• What is depleting you

• What is aligned

• What you’ve outgrown

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The Red Solo Cup Truth

Here’s the image that kept coming to me this week.

We’re all walking around with these tiny internal containers…like Red Solo Cups.

And we’re trying to build massive lives, hold big love, create impact, expand our wealth and deepen our purpose.

But we’re still gripping onto:

• Old identities

• Outgrown relationships

• Emotional patterns

• Fear of loss

• Cultural expectations

So what happens?

When hold on and don’t release what (and who) no longer serves us, it’s like there are dozens of tin pin-prick sized holes in the bottom of the cup. We keep pouring more in and it spills everywhere.

Because the container isn’t big enough yet.

Self-witnessing is how you expand the container.

But not by forcing it bigger, but by emptying what was never meant to stay.

The Hardest Realization

There was a moment this week where it hit me:

I feared letting go of these things….these patterns, expectations and attachments might make my life look quieter, smaller and maybe even lonelier.

Until something deeper landed. I’m not becoming more alone.

I’m creating space.

Space for:

• The highest version of myself

• The most aligned relationships

• The deepest wealth

• The fullest expression of my life

Self-Witnessing → Self-Leadership

This is the shift.

Self-witnessing says:
“I see what’s here.”

Self-leadership says:
“I choose what stays.”

That’s it. That’s the work. That’s the power. It’s that simple.

My One Message to Share With You

The world feels heavy right now. And if I could offer you one thing… it would be this:

You don’t need more information.
You don’t need another strategy.
You don’t need to become someone else.

You need to learn how to sit with yourself, to witness yourself and lead yourself from that place.

Because when you do, you stop chasing alignment and you start living it.

And from there…everything you’ve been trying to build, manifest, or become finally has somewhere to land.

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I experienced a personal resurrection on Easter Sunday.

And no, that’s not sacrilegious.

Because if you actually study the Bible deeply, you begin to understand something profound:

Following Jesus is not about worship from afar. It’s about embodiment. It’s about becoming. It’s about learning that through faith, surrender, and truth, we can break free from the mental, emotional, and even physical chains that keep us tethered to a life we were never meant to live.

This past week… I broke many of the chains that bound me to a version of myself and a way of life I was no longer meant to live.

And we can learn to do all of this, while honoring ourselves and others at the same time.

But not in the way you’d expect.

For the past year, I’ve felt something I don’t often admit out loud.

Tethered.
A little stuck.
Held just beneath the surface of something I knew I was meant to step into.

Which is confusing when your life’s work is literally helping others step into their next level of expansion.

Because the results are there.
The impact is undeniable.
The transformations I witness in others are real, deep, and lasting.

And yet… inside of me, there was still something waiting.

Waiting to be released.
Waiting to be seen.
Waiting to be surrendered.

So last week, I went inward (and upward).

I moved my body, because I know movement shifts energy.
I sat in the muck, because I know avoidance delays truth.
And I spoke directly to my Creator:

I am here.
I am ready to receive.
I am ready to hold the light of what comes next.
Show me what I am meant to surrender.
I breathe in your confidence, your strength, your focus.
I am ready.

And then… He answered.

Not with ease.

Not with quiet clarity.

But with people.
With conflict.
With pressure.
With truth.

Over five days, culminating on Easter Sunday, I experienced one of the most intense emotional weeks of my life.

Situations with friends.
With family.
With people I love deeply.

Some honored me.
Some celebrated me.
Some misunderstood me.
Some judged me.
Some accused me.
Some disrespected me.
And one even escalated to the point of threatening physical violence over something I did not do.

(Quick aside, getting wrongfully accused and publicly shunned is the exact topic I wrote about last week in Article #7 of my Oak Leaves Series. Click Here to Read it.)

It was heavy.
It was blatant.
It was, at times, breathtaking in its intensity.

And here’s the part that changed everything:

I didn’t react.

Not once in the way I used to.

And if you know me… if you know (or can imagine) Jersey, Italian, quick-trigger, loud-voice, ready-to-defend energy…

You know that’s not small.

That’s actual transformation.

Because in each moment, I saw something different.

Not an attack.
Not a betrayal.
Not even a problem.

I saw a gift.

I saw each person as a mirror.
I saw each interaction as a message.
I saw each moment as an answer to the prayer I had just spoken.

Show me what I need to surrender.

And there it was.

Over and over again.

This is where my Kabbalah learnings deepened everything for me.

There’s a concept called Tikkun. Your soul’s correction. The work you are here to do. The patterns you are here to transform.

And one of the most powerful questions we can ask is:

“Why is this in my movie?”

Not why is this happening to me.
But why is this happening for me.

Why is this scene, this person, this conflict… cast into my life right now?

Because nothing is random.

Every trigger points to a tether.
Every reaction reveals an attachment.
Every pain highlights a place still asking for healing.

And what I saw… clearly, undeniably… was this:

Each person was showing me where I was still holding on.

Where I was still over-explaining.
Where I was still over-giving.

Where I was still playing small.
Where I was still trying to be understood instead of simply standing in truth.
Where I was still leaving the door open for dynamics that no longer match who I am becoming.

And at the same time…

Each person was also showing me my strength.

My restraint.
My clarity.
My ability to hold space without losing myself.
My capacity to choose peace without abandoning power.

That’s the paradox.

That’s the work.

That’s what I created in Living Oak Leadership.

Because this isn’t about becoming untouchable.

It’s about becoming anchored.

Anchored in who you are.
Anchored in what you know.
Anchored in your relationship with the Creator or Higher Power of your belief.

So that when the storm comes… and it will come.

You don’t lose yourself in it.

You meet it.

You learn from it.

You rise through it.

As the sun set on Easter Sunday, I felt something I haven’t felt in a long time.

Not relief.

Not even resolution.

But certainty.

Certainty that something had shifted permanently.

Certainty that some relationships will change.
Certainty that some people will not like those changes.
Certainty that there may be distance, discomfort, even estrangement for a time.

And also…

Certainty that this is necessary.

Necessary for my expansion.
Necessary for my purpose.
Necessary for the next level of what I am here to bring into the world.

Because you cannot carry your past attachments into your future calling.

You cannot hold onto what you were while stepping into who you are becoming.

You cannot expand your life while shrinking your truth.

This was my resurrection.

Not a moment of light descending from the sky.

But a week of fire.

A week of mirrors.

A week of truth so undeniable that it stripped away every last place I could hide.

And in that stripping and breaking, I was freed.

So if you’re in it right now…if things feel heavy, chaotic, confronting…

Ask yourself:

What if this is not happening to you?
What if this is happening for your expansion?
What if every single person in your life right now is playing a role in your becoming?

What if this is your resurrection, too?

Because it doesn’t always look like rising.

Sometimes, it looks like breaking.

Until you realize that breaking was the doorway all along.

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Not a gray area. Not something open to interpretation. But a moment where you can see and feel that something about it is wrong, unjust….hypocritical.

Do you stay quiet and tell yourself it’s not your place? Do you rationalize it away, assuming someone else will handle it or that there must be more to the story? Or do you feel something rise up inside of you that doesn’t give you the option to look away, something that says, you have to say something?

What happens when you believe you’re doing the right thing and you trust that fairness and logic will prevail, only to find yourself on the other side of it… alone?

This is the part of the story we don’t often hear much about.

We talk about courage. We admire people who stand up for what’s right. We point to integrity and conviction as markers of leadership. But we don’t always talk about the cost that can come with it.

The quiet cost. The kind that doesn’t show up as an argument or a dramatic fallout, but as something slower, more subtle, and sometimes more painful.

I have seen this play out more times than I can count, both in my own life and in the lives of the leaders I’ve worked with over the years. People navigating career transitions who can’t quite understand how things unraveled so quickly after they spoke up.

Leaders who were once seen as strong and capable, suddenly labeled as difficult or disruptive because they challenged something that didn’t sit right. Individuals trying to reconcile how doing what they believed was right somehow positioned them on the outside looking in.

We see versions of this everywhere. In whistleblowers who take on powerful institutions. In people who leave relationships that no longer align with who they are. In those who speak truth in environments that aren’t ready or willing to hear it. There is often a moment of clarity, a decision to act in alignment with that clarity, and then a consequence that lingers far longer than the situation itself.

Those moments don’t just pass through us. They leave something behind. An imprint that shapes how we approach the next time we are faced with a similar choice. An imprint that can quietly ask, is it worth it?

This is where I want to introduce you to another “Part” of me, another addition to my “Oak Leaves” series that makes up the foundation of the Living Oak Leadership Model. This model is how I work with others to help them uncover the “parts” of themselves that often unconsciously drive the bus of our personal and professional lives.

Her name is “Boss”.

She is 17-years old. It was my senior year of high school, a time that is supposed to be filled with a sense of excitement and possibility. I was surrounded by friends I had grown up with (some since elementary school), a popular athlete and was beginning to look toward what came next. College was on the horizon, and for me, that meant leaving home and heading seven hours away into something entirely unknown.

I named her “Boss” because I had stepped into a role that felt necessary. It was a role I assigned to myself because it felt like someone had to take charge of the emotional landscape my whole family was moving through.

I became the one who tried to hold everything together. Holding emotional space for parents as they were navigating a divorce. I watched over my sisters with a kind of instinctive “Momma Bear” energy, making sure they were okay even when I wasn’t entirely sure what okay looked like.

At the same time, the environment I was in added another layer of complexity. My mother was the JV hockey coach where my middle sister played. My father was on the School Board, and I was co-captain of the varsity hockey team.

One Saturday night, my freshman sister and three of her friends did something that, at the time, was not unusual for high school kids. They snuck a few wine coolers in the woods at one of the girls’ houses. That same night, across town, there was a large party involving the football team, the soccer team, and the hockey team…including my best friends and I.

By Monday morning, however, only one story seemed to matter.

A comment was made in the girls’ locker room about the four freshman girls and their wine coolers. There was no real evidence, no investigation, just a narrative that began to take hold. The head hockey coach heard about it and made a swift decision. The four girls, including my sister, were kicked off the JV team. No conversation or even punishment, just banished.

What struck me immediately was not just the decision itself, but the inconsistency of it. Something that had not happened on school property, something that was based on hearsay, something that was clearly not isolated to just those four girls, was being handled as if it were.

When I heard about it, I didn’t pause. I didn’t weigh the long-term implications or consider how it might come back to me. I had already been living in a role where I felt responsible for protecting others, for stepping in when something needed to be addressed. And this felt like one of those moments.

At the subsequent open School Board meeting that was held because the situation had escalated. The room was filled with people, the kind of setting that already carries its own weight. My parents were there, sitting on opposite sides of the room, navigating their own separation in a very public way. I stood next to my best friend and co-captain, feeling the intensity of everything that had been building in my life.

When the moment came, I stood up and spoke in front of 300…in opposition to my co-captain and just about everyone else in that room.

I made the case that if this decision was going to stand, then it had to apply across the board. The football players, the soccer players, the hockey players…including me and my friends….because all of us had been at that party. If the issue was the behavior, then the consequence needed to be consistent. I laid it out in a way that I believed was logical, fair, and grounded in truth.

At seventeen, I truly believed that if something was presented clearly enough, people would recognize the inequity and correct it.

I didn’t yet understand that speaking truth and “doing the right thing” doesn’t always lead to the “right” outcome.

What followed was not what I expected, but it also wasn’t something I could easily name at the time. There was no direct confrontation with any of my friends or the rest of the athletes. No one approached me to argue or disagree. Instead, there was a quiet shift that began to unfold over the following days and weeks.

People stopped including me. Invitations that had once been the norm, were now happening behind my back. Plans were made without me, conversations happened around me, and there was a growing sense that I had been moved to the outside of something I used to be firmly inside of.

I went from a well-liked, socially connected student to someone who was now seen as a “narc.” A tattle-tale. Someone who couldn’t be trusted.

The most disorienting part was the lack of directness. No one said anything to me. No one expressed anger or even disappointment. It was as if I had slowly become invisible, someone who no longer occupied the same space in people’s lives, even though I was still physically there.

It was simply just… quietly public shamed.

I went from being someone who felt connected across different groups in the school to someone who felt entirely alone within it. To being the outcast.

I was still navigating my family falling apart, preparing to leave for college, and trying to make sense of a reality that no longer felt stable.

That moment imprinted something deep.

Initially, the situation activated my “Fight” trauma response. I stood up, I used my voice, I challenged what I believed was unjust. But what came after wasn’t a continuation of that energy. It was something entirely different.

At the time, I didn’t have the language for it, but years later I would understand it as a secondary response to this trauma, the “Faint” response. Not just freezing, but dissociating. Stepping away from the intensity of what I was feeling because it was too much to process all at once.

Just like 10-year old “Opie” first learned to handle emotional overload by checking out of her body (Click Here to Read this in Article #4), this was yet another example of how I learned to numb myself from emotion by dissociating from my body.

The loneliness, the confusion, the sense of being quietly publicly shamed and pushed out, all of it was more than I knew how to hold. And so I found ways not to feel it.

The years that followed reflected that. My focus shifted toward anything that could create a sense of control or numbness. An eating disorder began to take hold. Over-exercising became a way to channel what I couldn’t express. Alcohol helped quiet what was still there underneath the surface.

“Boss” didn’t disappear after that experience. She simply adapted to what she had learned.

She learned that speaking up could come with a cost that extended far beyond the moment itself. She learned that being visible, especially in challenging something larger than herself, could lead to being isolated. And she carried those lessons forward, shaping how I approached similar situations for years to come.

It took me decades to come back to her in a different way. To understand not just what she did, but why she did it. To feel the weight of what she was carrying at the time, and to recognize that her response made sense given everything she was navigating.

Because the truth is, “Boss” was never wrong for speaking.

She was doing exactly what she believed was right, in a moment where she felt responsible for protecting someone she loved and for standing up for something that didn’t align.

But the imprint that moment left stayed with me, influencing how I used my voice, how I assessed risk, and how I navigated situations that called for the same kind of courage.

It wasn’t until much later in my life, through the deep inner work that would eventually become the foundation of Living Oak Leadership, that I was able to come back to Boss.

This is the work of self-leadership and it’s the reason why I teach others how to find and embody their own unique Leadership Voice.

It’s not about erasing these parts of us or pretending those moments didn’t shape us. It’s about meeting them, understanding them, and learning how to lead them in a way that allows us to reconnect with our voice without being governed by the fear of what it might cost.

“Boss” is still with me because I did the work to find her deep inside, hold space for her and let her unburden and heal.

She still rises in moments where something doesn’t feel right. She still carries that instinct to step forward and speak.

The difference now is that she is no longer alone in doing it, she can hold big space for herself.

Now, she is not only self-led, she leads with certainty and confidence.

Ready to be part of a supportive community to do this inner work? Join us in the Living Oak Leadership Community.

Each of these parts carries a story, and each story reveals something deeper about how our inner world quietly influences our outer expression.

And how meeting your own “Parts” can do the same for you.

When You Were Blamed for Something That Wasn’t Yours

Think back to a time when you were blamed for something that wasn’t your fault or something you had no control over. Not a simple misunderstanding that could be easily clarified, but a moment where the accusation landed on you before you even had a chance to respond…or even when you did, you weren’t truly heard.

It Happens in Your Work

A boss or colleague accuses, insinuates, criticizes, or reprimands you for something that wasn’t yours or is completely lacking context. A narrative or tone about your work emerges that does not reflect reality.

In that moment, you are forced to decide: do you act on the urge to defend yourself immediately, correct the record and ensure others don’t walk away with the wrong impression? Or do you let it slide and stay quiet?

You become aware of how your defensiveness may be perceived (ie. you will be labeled aggressive, difficult or insubordinate). If you are too forceful you risk being labeled difficult or combative. Too restrained, and the story may take hold without your voice ever being fully heard.

It Happens in Your Childhood
You took the fall or blame for a sibling or something they did. You were accused of something you could not even explain your way out of.

It Happens in Everyday Events
Someone cuts you off in traffic and then flips you off.

What lingers is not just the moment itself, but the imprint it leaves behind. Over time, these experiences can subtly shape how we show up in our life and work. We may begin to over-prepare, anticipating misinterpretation before it happens. We may over-explain, attempting to close every gap in understanding. Or we may pull back, choosing caution over expression, silence over risk. Or we may fight back.

Somewhere along the way, a quiet agreement forms internally: I will never let that happen to me again.

Meet “Cougar”: The 15-Year-Old Who Refused to Be Misunderstood

There is a 15-year-old “Part” of me I named “Cougar”, after my high school mascot.

She was a sophomore on the varsity basketball team, a role I felt incredibly proud of. I loved being around the older girls, learning from them, studying how they carried themselves, and trying to rise to their level. I wanted to impress them, to belong, to be seen as someone who deserved to be there.

Being the youngest on the team felt like a gift. It gave me a sense of importance, as if my athletic ability had elevated how I saw myself. In many ways, it became a place where I could be seen, feel strong, capable, and valued….especially at a time when other parts of my life were beginning to unravel.

Cougar came to life during a time in my life that, until then, had been defined by stability and security in my family and homelife.

This was the year my parents announced they were separating.

I had two younger sisters, and while I did not consciously choose it, I found myself stepping into a role that required me to hold far more emotional weight than I was equipped to carry. I was trying to make sense of what was happening and hold space for my baby sisters. For my parents. For myself.

It is important for me to say that my childhood was not marked by what we often categorize as overt or “Big T traumas.” I was raised in a loving, stable, two-parent home. But when that foundation suddenly changed, when the structure I believed to be permanent because it was all I ever knew….began to shift, the internal impact was incredibly disorienting to my whole system.

As we’ve seen in the journeys of my other “parts,” our experiences aren’t only shaped by what we often label as “Big T” traumas such as abuse, neglect, or extreme adversity. We are just as deeply impacted by “Little T” traumas: shifts in our environment, moments of instability, or the stories and meanings we begin to form about the world around us.

It was within this context that an ordinary, everyday moment became something much more significant and left a deep imprinted wound on “Cougar.” Very much like the imprints that landed on my other parts we already met such as Curly, Snowbird, Opie and Huffy, Cougar was about to hold onto a deep wound.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE PREVIOUS ARTICLES INTRODUCING THESE PARTS

The Moment That Imprinted Everything

One morning, I needed to be at school early for a weekend basketball tournament. In the midst of everything happening at home, somehow our car keys were misplaced and we ended up running late to catch the team bus. The whole JV and Varsity teams and Coaches were forced to wait for me.

As a 15-year-old I had no control over the situation. I could not drive myself. I could not change the circumstances.

When I stepped onto the team bus, everyone was already seated. My teammates were relaxed, talking, laughing and having fun just hanging out as a team. But before I could even make my way down the aisle of the bus, the Head Coach stopped me.

What followed was not a question or an inquiry. It was a public reprimand. He raised his voice in front of the whole team and coaching staff and began yelling at me….listing off what he believed my “late behavior” represented.

He called me “undisciplined, unreliable, selfish, and insubordinate.” The words were delivered with certainty as though the narrative had already been decided. They landed on me in a way that made me believe the whole team would now reject me due to something I had no control over.

First, I was carrying the weight of what was happening in my family and trying to not make that situation worse for my parents by putting more pressure on them to get me to the bus, but now I was faced with dealing with this public shaming.

Something in me snapped and my Jersey-Italian girl came out.

I turned to him and said,
“Don’t you dare blame me. It wasn’t my fault. I don’t even drive.”

And he fired back, even louder: “STOP BEING A VICTIM.”

Standing there, I felt something rise in me that I could not contain. It was not just about being late. It was the accumulation of everything I had been carrying quietly at home: fear, confusion, responsibility, and a deep sense of instability. In that moment, all of it surfaced at once.

How could he blame me for something so trivial and not even listen to my explanation? How could he pass judgment on who I was as a person based on this one moment? Couldn’t he see everything I was already carrying, things I had no control over, let alone something as simple as finding the car keys any faster?

I just kept walking to the back of the bus and sat down, feeling the heat of embarrassment and anger move through my body. And then, as if to reinforce his message with another penalty, I was benched for the game.

Looking back, I can see that the impact of that moment extended far beyond that day. It was not just about what happened on the bus. It was about the meaning I made from it.

I internalized the belief that no one was going to defend me. That if I wanted to be understood, not blamed and given a “break” when I am handling so much (often for others) then I would have to ensure it myself. That I could not rely on others to see the full picture or to ask the questions that might reveal it.

From these beliefs, two primary responses began to take shape.

My Embedded Trauma Responses

The first was a Fight response. I became quick to defend myself, often reacting before fully processing what was being said. There was an urgency to correct, to clarify, to make sure that no one walked away with a version of me that wasn’t true.

The second was a Fawn response. If defending myself did not resolve the situation, I would shift into over-correction. I would work harder, communicate more and attempt to eliminate any possibility of misinterpretation moving forward.

Both responses were rooted in the same underlying drive: to avoid being misunderstood or wrongly blamed. That “I will never be seen as weak.”

These patterns did not remain confined to adolescence. They followed me into adulthood, into professional environments, into leadership roles. They influenced how I communicated, how I prepared, and how I responded under pressure.

What Cougar Taught Me About Leadership

It was only through deeper inner work, through taking the time to meet and understand this part of myself, that I began to see “Cougar” differently. She wasn’t wrong. She wasn’t overreacting.

She was protecting and keeping me (and all my other “Parts) safe. But she was also keeping me on high alert. She was responding to a moment where she felt unseen, unheard, and unjustly held responsible.

At the same time, I could also see the cost of operating from that place for too long. When we are constantly prepared to defend ourselves, we can lose access to something equally important: the ability to pause, to assess, and to choose our response rather than be driven by it.

One of the most meaningful practices that has emerged for me from this work is deceptively simple. In moments where I feel that familiar surge…the sense that something is being placed on me that doesn’t belong… I say to myself, “Pause. What a pleasure.”

It is not a dismissal of the situation, nor is it an attempt to minimize it. It is a reframe. A way of recognizing that the moment in front of me is an opportunity to respond differently than I once did. To observe what is happening without immediately absorbing it. To discern what is mine and what is not. To put up boundaries and deflect what is not mine to own and to communicate calmly with intent and impact.

This pause has changed the way I lead, the way I communicate, and the way I hold myself in moments that once would have triggered an immediate reaction.

A Question to Bring This Back to You

Where in your life or work are you still reacting to a moment where you were unfairly blamed or misinterpreted?

Where have you:

• Learned to defend yourself before fully being heard

• Taken on responsibility that was never yours

• Shifted your behavior to avoid being misperceived

And what would change if you paused just long enough to decide what actually belongs to you… and what doesn’t?

Because not everything that lands on you is yours to carry. And you can unburden this belief from your “Parts” by doing the deep inner work to bring more peace to your whole Self.

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Each article in this series tells the story of a different “leaf” on our own tree and how it impacts how we show up in our life and work.

• Some parts have imprinted and unconscious wounds.

• Some carry burdens that shaped how I moved through the world.

• Some possess the strength, instincts, and wisdom that I would spend decades rediscovering.

The work of Self-Leadership (and Self-Healing) is not only about understanding what hurts us.

It’s about remembering what strength already lived inside us.

Today’s story introduces another one of those impactful and strong parts.

Her name is “Huffy” and she is 12-years old. She’s named after the blue Huffy bike I rode almost every day of my child and young-adulthood.

Moving fast enough that it felt like I might take off. And in a way… I did.

But before we get to that part of the story, you have to understand something about who I was as a kid.

I didn’t really “play” the way many kids did.

There weren’t imaginary friends. There weren’t elaborate make-believe worlds.

Looking back now, I realize why.

I was the oldest child and one of the older kids in our neighborhood group. And like many kids growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, we were part of the first real generation of latchkey kids.

Our parents were both working. They left early and came home later. Which meant the neighborhood kids were largely raising each other.

And somewhere along the way, I naturally stepped into the role of the Responsible One.

I played sports constantly…hockey, basketball, skating, swimming, hiking anything that kept me moving.

I even started little businesses.

For example, one summer I created a homemade country fair in our backyard and sold tickets to neighborhood kids and their families. Another time it was a backyard circus complete with pony rides from the farm down the street.

Always moving people and things.

But more than that, I somehow became the neighborhood counselor.

• If someone was having trouble with their parents or siblings…

• If there was a bully at school…

• If someone had their first crush and didn’t know what to do with those feelings…

They came to me. Picture a 12-year-old girl sitting on the curb offering relationship advice.

That was me.

I also kept an eye on the younger kids. Made sure everyone was safe.

Fed the animals. Checked on things. Watched the neighborhood and other kids.

At the time, it was just natural responsibility.

Today we would probably call it hypervigilance.

And that would have an effect on me years later!

But there was one place where all of that responsibility disappeared.

My bike. That blue Huffy bike was freedom.

I rode it constantly.

I rode so fast up and down the hills, it felt like the wind itself was carrying me forward.

It was exhilarating!

And something extraordinary happened when I was riding alone.

That bike became the place where I felt closest to my version of God, my Creator.

Not in church.

Not in formal prayer.

But in motion.

When I was pedaling fast with the wind in my hair, something inside me would open.

I felt guided.

Encouraged.

Supported.

It was as if I was having quiet conversations with my Creator.

I didn’t have language for it back then, but the only way I can describe it now is that it felt like receiving messages.

Little nudges. Reassurance. A sense that I was safe and that my life had meaning and purpose.

Years later, during some deep healing work, a dream surfaced that made me laugh when it first came back to me.

In the dream I was riding my bike around my house in circles. Faster and faster.

And then the bike started lifting off the ground. Higher. Higher.

Until I was floating above my house, circling and protecting everyone in and around it.

It looked almost exactly like that famous scene in the movie E.T., when Elliot’s bike lifts into the sky and flies across the moon.

At first I thought… “well, that’s a strange dream.”

But then I realized something. That’s exactly what it felt like when I was riding that bike.

It felt like flying. Like being held by something bigger than me. Like being pushed upward and onward. Like I was meant for it.

It took me decades of inner work, healing and awareness but now I know the parallel of that time and image and how it showed up in my life.

It fascinates me now how much of that 12-year-old girl’s energy still lives in the work I do today.

Huffy was always moving.

And in many ways… that’s still my role in the world.

I help move people and processes.

• From one leadership job or company to another.

• From confusion to clarity.

• From one level of awareness to the next.

• From playing small to expansion.

Movement. Momentum. Transition.

It was all there long before I had the words for it.

But life doesn’t move in a straight line. Even when you sense your purpose early, there are still detours.

There are still seasons where wounded parts take over.

Earlier in this series I shared about my “Peak and Plummet” cycles, periods where I would rise quickly in life or business, only to fall hard again.

There were years when survival took center stage. Years where fear, trauma, and uncertainty drowned out that deep connection I once felt with my Creator.

Just like I abandoned my year 5-year-old part Lil’ Blu, who knew her worth so clearly…

I also stopped listening to Huffy. For decades.

I stopped letting myself feel supported.

I let myself feel and be small.

I stopped trusting the quiet guidance I once knew so naturally.

But one of the most powerful things about doing deep inner work is realizing this:

Those parts of us never disappear.

They wait. Patiently.

Until we remember them.

When I reconnected with Huffy through my own healing and “Parts” work, I realized something that has become central to how I lead and coach others today.

We are not only made up of the parts that were hurt. We are not only defined by trauma or conditioning or what we generationally inherit.

Inside every person there are parts that carry strength, courage, faith, and direction.

The work is remembering them.

Reconnecting with them.

Letting them guide us again.

Because when we do that, something powerful happens. We begin to move forward again.

Just like that 12-year-old girl on a blue bike.

Following a quiet sense of purpose she couldn’t fully explain yet, but somehow always knew was there.

Here’s the deeper reason I share these stories….and isn’t just nostalgia.

This is Leadership work….Self-Leadership to be exact. The thing we need BEFORE we can lead others in our work, communities and in our homes.

In today’s world where the labor market is shifting, industries are transforming overnight, and every leader is trying to find their voice above an endless stream of noise and AI, it’s easy to believe the next strategy, the next credential, or the next business pivot will finally unlock the clarity we’re looking for.

But in my experience working with Leaders across industries for more than three decades, that’s rarely where the real answers live.

The real answers live inside the parts of us we forgot we had, or that we needed to unburden and heal.

Every leader I work with has their own version of Huffy.

A younger self who carried courage before the world told them to doubt it.

A part who knew their instincts before someone convinced them they were wrong.

A part who moved forward with energy and conviction before fear, pressure, or trauma asked them to shrink.

The problem is that over time, other parts take over.

Parts that learned to protect.

Parts that learned to survive.

Parts that became hyper-responsible, perfectionistic, exhausted, defensive, or unsure.

Those parts helped us get through life.

But they aren’t always the parts that help us lead at our highest level.

The deeper work of Leadership, what I now teach through my Living Oak Leadership model, is about reconnecting with the parts that still carry our true north.

The parts that know how to move.

The parts that remember faith, courage, curiosity, and purpose.

Because when those parts come back online, something powerful happens.

Your voice gets clearer and your influence expands. Your decisions come from alignment instead of fear.

Better yet, your impact becomes something that people can feel, not just hear.

That’s the work.

Not becoming someone new.

But remembering who you were before the world told you otherwise.

And the truth is… sometimes the most powerful leadership strategy isn’t learning something new.

It’s remembering the part of you who already knew the way.

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This is the fourth installment in the story of what I call the “Parts Work” that ultimately formed my Oak Leaves Council within Living Oak Leadership.

Each article introduces you to a pivotal “part” (courtesy of the Internal Family Systems, IFS approach to inner healing) of me that carried the wounds, imprints, traumas and stories that shaped my life… AND the parts that hold strength, wisdom, and resilience.

This work matters because it is the foundation of everything I teach today. Living Oak Leadership was born from this journey, and it is the same path I now guide others through as they step into the level of leadership and impact they are truly meant for.

I am sharing these real, raw and vulnerable chapters in the hopes that it may resonate with others who are ready and willing to do the inner work…or even just be opened minded to learn what it’s about, to see how their inner world effects their outer impact.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE PREVIOUS ARTICLES

Let me introduce you to the 10-year-old part of me I call Opie.

I named her after the bathing suit she wore almost every day that summer.

It was teal and white.
A one-piece with a little white belt around the waist.
The brand name stitched across the front said Ocean Pacific.

For the first time in her life, she owned something that the other girls thought was cool, a real brand name article of clothing.

Until then, she hadn’t paid much attention to brands. She mostly ran around with the neighborhood boys, climbed trees, rode bikes, and followed my older friend Jon, whom you met as my de facto “older brother” in Article #3. Fashion didn’t exist in that world.

But by 10-years old, she was starting to notice something. The girls had rules.

• Brands mattered.

• Clothes mattered.

• Looking the right way mattered.

And Opie was beginning to realize she didn’t understand the game. But the Ocean Pacific bathing suit felt like a bridge from one world to another. After losing Jon (and my ability to feel confident in my own skin, this was an important realization.)

Maybe this meant she finally belonged, finally could make sense of how she felt in her own skin.

One summer day Opie’s “cousin” (not a blood relative, but one of her first friends ever so she felt like a cousin) came to swim at the pool in her backyard.

But that day, Opie’s “fake cousin” brought her real cousin with her. And something changed.

All day long, Opie noticed something she couldn’t quite understand. Her “cousin” barely spoke to her.

She didn’t swim with her.
She didn’t laugh with her.
She didn’t include her.

Her and her slightly older cousin completely ignored Opie. It seemed as if all they did was take advantage of Opie having a pool in her backyard, but Opie herself wasn’t really needed or wanted.

Instead, Opie watched her “cousin” follow her real cousin everywhere.

They whispered.
They giggled.
They disappeared into their own little orbit.

And Opie suddenly realized something painful. She wasn’t part of it.

At 10-years old, our nervous systems don’t know how to interpret social exclusion. It just know something hurts.

My Opie stood there on the deck outside the pool trying to figure out what she had done wrong. Why she was ignored. It felt a little like what her 3-yr old “Curly” part must have felt like. Although her 5-year old self, “Lil’ Blu” had all the confidence in the world, 8-yr old “Snowbird” part was still reeling from the grief of losing her de fecto older brother Jon.

So here she was, alone on the side of the pool watching…feeling the sting of the exclusion.

She looked down.

And that’s when it happened.

Her eyes landed on the white belt wrapped around her stomach, wrapped around that one-piece teal Ocean Pacific bathing suit.

That belt pulled slightly against her belly and it made the tiniest piece of her belly protrude out.

And in that tiny moment, something anchored into her body.

A voice appeared. Not a rational one. A survival voice.

A child’s interpretation of rejection.

It said:

They must be ignoring you because you’re fat.

Look at your stomach.

That’s why you can’t wear a two-piece like them.

You thought a brand name would make you cool.

But you’re still not chosen.

Something is wrong with you.

Don’t even try.

I am sure I (aka “Opie) weighed barely 55 pounds at this point.

Tiny. Petite. Slender.

But the imprint didn’t care about reality. It cared about making meaning.

And in that moment, Opie created a story that would quietly run my life for decades.

That afternoon was the beginning of something I would only understand much later.

• Body dysmorphia

• Disordered eating

• Over-Exercising

• Anorexia

• Bulimia

• Binge Eating

• Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

• Perfectionism

It took ten years before the consequences of that impactful day became serious enough that I was sent to an inpatient eating disorder program at 20-years old (more on that “part” later.)

But the seed was planted that day.

Not because of the bathing suit.

Not because two girls were cruel.

But because a 10-year-old nervous system tried to explain pain, abandonment, exclusion and fear.

It took me years, but developmentally it started to make perfect sense.

From birth to about age ten, children are primarily absorbing the world.

Language.
Patterns.
Behavior.
Belonging.

But around 10-years old, something shifts.

The mind begins forming interpretive stories.

Stories about identity.

Stories about worth.

Stories about safety.

Stories that can become the internal architecture of an entire life.

My Opie’s story became this:

If I am perfect enough…
If I take care of everyone…
If I never become a burden…
Maybe they won’t leave.

That story quietly shaped everything. It made me the Responsible One. The Over-Functioner. The Parentified Child who took on everyone’s problems.

The girl who tried to make everyone else’s life easier so that at the very least, she wouldn’t be abandoned.

But Opie carried something even deeper than that moment at the pool.

It took decades before I understood that part.

Because Opie didn’t just inherit her own story.

She inherited stories from the women before her.

Years later, as I learned more about my family lineage, I discovered decades of unspoken trauma among the women in my bloodline.

Physical abuse.
Sexual abuse.
Financial control.
Silencing.
Shame.

Women who had nowhere to process what happened to them. Women who survived but never got to heal.

In his groundbreaking work “The Body Keeps the Score”, Author and Doctor Bessel van der Kolk explains that trauma does not simply live in memory.

It lives in the body.

And modern research in Epigenetics now shows something even more profound.

Before our mothers were born, we already existed as cellular material inside our grandmothers. As they carried the eggs of what became our mothers and fathers, we were cellular material also.

Which means the emotional environments THEY lived through shaped the biology WE inherited. This is blame or an excuse or anger contained in a package of a social media influencer.

It’s just biological and energetic reality.

Unprocessed trauma changes cellular signaling.

Stress hormones alter gene expression.

And those patterns can be carried forward.

Not as destiny.

But as biological memory.

So when Opie stood there at the pool that day, she wasn’t just a 10-year-old girl feeling excluded.

She was a nervous system already carrying generations of bodily and public shame, survival, and silence.

Her young mind did the only thing it could do.

It created a story that explained the pain.

Meeting Opie during my healing work connected more dots than almost anything else in my life.

Suddenly the eating disorder made sense.

The body dysmorphia made sense.

The relentless drive to prove my worth made sense.

The fear of being left made sense.

But here is the part that matters most.

Opie wasn’t broken.

She was brilliant.

She was a ten-year-old strategist trying to protect me.

She believed that if she could fix the body…

Control the image…

Earn acceptance…

Then maybe the pain of being unseen would never happen again.

Today, Opie sits in my “Living Oak Leaves Council”, a relationship with my parts that help me navigate the world, that I can now summon when I am triggered …which brings me clarity and inner peace because I no longer react or operate from a place of fear and lack.

She’s no longer running the show.

But she still has a voice. And when I listen to her now, I don’t hear shame.

I hear a little girl who simply wanted to belong.

And honestly, don’t we all?

That’s why this is not a blaming or shaming of our parents or ancestry. It’s simply energetic technology that helps us understand the connective tissue of what makes up our inner ecosystem.

What I did not know then, but understand clearly now, is that Opie was never the problem.

She was the messenger.

She was the first part of me who tried to explain pain that my nervous system did not yet have the capacity to process.

In the language of Internal Family Systems, Opie was an exile.

A young part that absorbed the wound and carried the story so that the rest of the system could keep functioning.

But the moment she created that story, other parts immediately mobilized to protect her.

The Performer began to appear.
The Responsible One started working overtime.
The Achiever pushed harder.
The Caretaker tried to make everyone else happy so they would never leave.

The internal ecosystem of my Oak Tree began forming its rings.

And for decades, I lived from those protectors.

Many of us do.

We don’t realize that the voice telling us to work harder, look better, be stronger, prove ourselves, control everything… is often just a “Part” of us trying to make sure we never feel that moment of exclusion again.

For me, that protector system showed up as perfectionism, relentless over-functioning, body control, and an identity built around being useful, needed, and indispensable.

From the outside, it looked like achievement.

From the inside, it was survival.

But here is where the deeper work of Living Oak Leadership comes in.

Because the goal of this work is not to eliminate our parts.

It is to lead them.

That is the essence of Self-Leadership.

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Not a technique manual.
Not a strategy guide.

A book.

It was The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker.

If you’ve never read it, the premise is both simple and revolutionary: our intuition is a powerful survival signal. Fear—real fear, not manufactured anxiety—is a biological early-warning system designed to protect us from danger.

De Becker argues that most acts of violence are preceded by signals. Behavioral cues. Boundary violations. Subtle red flags.

But here’s the problem.

Most people ignore them.

We override our intuition to be polite.
We talk ourselves out of discomfort.
We rationalize the feeling in our gut.

And according to de Becker, that instinctive gut signal is often the very thing that could keep us safe.

So there I was, learning arm bars and choke escapes on the mat, reading a book about intuition.

And my instructor said something I’ve never forgotten:

“Jiu-Jitsu can teach you how to defend yourself and stay calm under pressure. But it can’t teach you how to listen to your intuition.”

At the time, I thought that was just a philosophical side note.

Now I realize it was the whole lesson.

Because today we’re living in a world that feels… chaotic.

Noise everywhere.
Information overload.
Fear pumped through headlines and social media.
A constant hum of uncertainty.

People tell me all the time that something feels “off.”

And they’re right.

But what most people don’t realize is that the problem isn’t just the chaos outside of us.

It’s that many of us have lost access to the quiet signal inside of us.

The signal Gavin de Becker was talking about.

Our intuition.

And here’s where I believe the conversation has to go one step deeper.

Because intuition doesn’t just disappear.

It gets buried.

· Buried under trauma.

· Buried under conditioning.

· Buried under parts of us that learned how to survive.

If you’ve done deep inner work, whether through Internal Family Systems, Somatic Work, Shadow Work, Breathwork or any other means by connecting with your inner world, you know exactly what I mean.

Inside each of us are parts that carry our experiences.

The protector parts.
The wounded parts.
The exiled parts.

The parts that learned to freeze.
The parts that learned to people-please.
The parts that learned to override the gut feeling in order to stay safe or accepted.

And those parts are often the very things blocking the signal of intuition.

Not because they’re broken.

But because they’re protecting something.

This is where my Living Oak Leadership model enters the conversation.

The oak tree is my metaphor for human development.

Every experience in life adds a growth ring.

Some rings represent wisdom.
Some represent resilience.
Some represent wounds that were never fully integrated.

But the core of the tree—the center—is always stable.

That center is what many spiritual traditions would call Self.

It’s the calm presence inside us.

The place where intuition actually lives.

The problem is that when our nervous system is dysregulated, when our internal parts are in conflict, when our bodies are constantly in fight-or-flight… that center becomes hard to access.

You can’t hear intuition in a hurricane.

You can only hear it in stillness.

Which means intuition isn’t just about instinct.

It’s about capacity.

The capacity to slow down your nervous system.
The capacity to notice what your body is telling you.
The capacity to differentiate between trauma-based fear and intuitive warning.

That distinction is everything.

Trauma fear says: Everything is dangerous.

Intuition says: Something specific is not right.

One is chaotic.

The other is precise.

When Gavin de Becker talks about the “gift of fear,” he’s talking about that precise signal.

The body whispering: pay attention.

But to access that signal, we have to do something most leadership models never address.

We have to create space inside ourselves.

Space to listen.
Space to notice.
Space to unburden the parts of us that have been carrying old survival patterns for decades.

Because when those parts soften, something remarkable happens.

The signal comes back online.

You start to feel subtle things again.

Energy in a room.
The intention behind someone’s words.
The difference between genuine opportunity and something that isn’t aligned.

This is not mystical.

It’s biological.

Your nervous system is constantly scanning the environment for cues of safety and danger. Psychologists call this neuroception.

Your body knows things before your conscious mind does.

The real leadership skill isn’t ignoring that signal.

It’s learning how to hear it.

That’s why the deeper work matters.

Not just the mindset work.

Not just the strategy.

But the inner work.

The nervous system work.
The parts work.
The unburdening of the old stories that taught us to override ourselves.

Because when those layers begin to clear, intuition becomes incredibly sharp.

You stop second-guessing yourself.

You notice the moment something feels misaligned.

You trust the quiet signal instead of the loud noise of the world.

And suddenly the teachings of Jiu-Jitsu, Gavin de Becker, and inner leadership all converge into the same lesson.

The greatest protection we have was never outside of us.

It was always inside.

Our bodies are speaking.
Our minds are listening.
Our souls are guiding.

But the signal only becomes clear when the space inside us is quiet enough to hear it.

And when that happens…

Fear stops being something to avoid.

It becomes what Gavin de Becker called it all along.

A gift.

Click Here to Check out the Previous Installments to Build the Full Story and Learn How It Helped Me Create My Business Today

There is a part of me I call Snowbird. She is 8-years old.

Picture this…. she has Wind-chapped cheeks. Snow pants. Boots soaked through from hours outside.

The kind of kid who only came inside when the sun disappeared.

Snowbird lived in a world that felt wide and alive.

I grew up in rural northwest New Jersey in the late 1970s and early 1980s (so dating myself). Far enough from New York City to feel like the real country, but close enough to the city to experience the excitement and opportunity that existed just over the horizon.

When people hear “New Jersey,” they imagine highways and industrial sprawl. But where I grew up, it was mountains, lakes, horse fields, and long winding backroads. Looking back, it truly was a paradise. It was safe and expansive.

Snowbird was an outdoor kid. Movement was her native language. Bikes. Skateboards. Swimming. Running. Football in the yard. Basketball on cracked driveways. Baseball in open fields.

If it moved… she wanted to be on it.

And at the center of that small childhood universe was a boy named Jon Petri.

Jon was only a year older than me, but when you are little, one grade ahead feels like a lifetime of wisdom. He lived about a half mile up the hill from my house on the same quiet backroad.

He entered my life when I was 5 years old.

That was during the era of Lil’ Blu, the part of me you met in the last installment. (CLICK HERE TO READ) The girl in corrective shoes and dresses she hated. The little person who somehow already knew who she was but was still soft clay in the hands of the world.

Jon showed up during that fragile window. As a first born of 3 girls, he was the “Big Brother” I always wanted but didn’t have of my own.

He walked me to the kindergarten bus stop every morning.

I remember feeling completely safe beside him. Not because he treated me like a helpless little kid…but because he didn’t.

He never treated me like just a girl in a dress.

He treated me like an equal.

Whatever the boys were doing, I was doing.

He stood up for me when needed. Included me when others might not have. But he never made a show of protecting me. It was effortless.

In a way I didn’t understand at the time, Jon gave Lil’ Blu something she needed at exactly the right moment in her development:

Validation of her strength.

With Jon around, I could just be. And by “being”, I could be me AND be safe doing it.

Over the next few years we were outside nearly every day together.

We rode bikes endlessly.
Skateboarded down driveways.
Played football, basketball, baseball.

I loved speed. I loved movement. I loved the feeling of my body in motion. And so did Jon.

By 8-years old I had even taught myself how to drive our ride-on lawn tractor. I figured out how to hitch a trailer behind it and haul my friends around the yard like we were running our own miniature farm operation.

Movement became a core feature of my life.
It still is.

That story of why movement matters so much to me, will unfold more in other parts of this Oak Leaves series. (Stay tuned).

But Snowbird was already learning it then.

And Jon was the safety net that made all of it possible.

He gave me the freedom to expand.

To explore.

To grow into a strange and wonderful childhood identity that was a little confusing but completely natural at the time. I sometimes wondered if I wanted to be Jon and always possess that masculine energy-type confidence… or simply be always just under his wing.

But really, it was neither.

It was simply a young girl discovering that strength and girlhood could live in the same body.

Jon made that feel normal. He was only a year older, but looking back, I believe he really was a divinely planted angel in my life.

Life with Jon was…

Easy.

Natural.

And then one winter day, everything changed. A huge snowstorm had come through.

The hill on our backroad was perfect for sledding, and we spent the entire day flying down it on sleds. Laughing, crashing into snowbanks, climbing back up and doing it all over again.

Eventually Jon’s parents called him home for dinner.

He left, promising we’d pick it back up the next day.

I remember feeling excited about tomorrow.

More sledding.
Cross-country skiing.
Snowball fights.

And one of our favorite childhood rituals… eating snow with maple syrup poured over it.

Yes, we did that in the 70’s before pollution, or maybe just us “hicks” did as we called ourselves.

When Jon got home, his mom was cooking dinner.

But he wasn’t done playing. (Because Jon loved “movement” just as much as I did.)

So he did what any adventurous boy would do.

He snuck out of the house while dinner was cooking and grabbed his sled to ride down the hill of his driveway one more time.

The snowbanks on both sides of his driveway were huge.

As he slid down, a car came up the backroad at the exact same moment. There was no way the driver could have seen him, the snowbanks were too high.

Jon was hit and killed instantly.

His parents ran out of the house just as it happened.

His father held him as he died.

His older brother Chris, just 10 or 11 years old himself, witnessed almost the entire thing.

I didn’t see the accident. But I was only a half-mile away and I swear to this day, I still feel it in the air.

From that moment forward, I carried the echo of it.

For years after, every time the Petri family drove slowly past our house and would wave, I could feel their grief from the road.

Even as a child.

Even before I understood what grief really was.

That night is burned into my memory…and in my body. I can still feel the energy of it.

I was in my bedroom trying to fall asleep. My mother sat with me, trying to comfort me the best she could.

I remember feeling grateful and safe she was there. But I also realized it was a different kind of safety now without Jon.

But what I remember most… was the radio.

Two songs (for some reason I still can’t explain to this day) played again and again that night on FM radio. (Sorry my younger readers, but go look up these songs, they are bangers!)

“Come Sail Away” by Styx.
“Baby Come Back” by Player.

To this day those songs can stop me in my tracks.

When I hear them, I am instantly transported back to that bedroom.

“I’m sailing away
Set an open course for the virgin sea
‘Cause I’ve got to be free
Free to face the life that’s ahead of me
On board I’m the captain
So climb aboard
We’ll search for tomorrow
On every shore and I’ll try
Oh Lord, I’ll try
To carry on

I look to the sea
Reflections in the waves spark my memory
Some happy some sad
I think of childhood friends and the dreams we had
We live happily forever
So the story goes
But somehow we missed out
On that pot of gold
But we’ll try best that we can
To carry on

A gathering of angels

Appeared above my head
They sang to me this song of hope
And this is what they said
They said, come sail away, come sail away”

Followed by….

“Baby Come Back, any kind of fool could see
There was something in everything about you
Baby come back, you can blame it all on me
I was wrong and I just can’t live without you”

Eight years old. Learning, for the very first time, what it means to lose someone.

I just had no way of knowing the deepest imprint, beyond the grief, that this would have on my life unconsciously for the rest of my life.

I remember silently begging him not to leave. To do like the song said and just “come back.”

And realizing slowly, painfully that he was never coming back.

In the years that followed, I think Snowbird carried something far bigger than she understood.

Jon had been more than a playmate.

He made Lil’ Blu feel powerful and validated in her own skin. At a time when things like corrective shoes and dresses I hated could have easily made a young girl feel small, bullied and traumatized.

When Jon died, that validation disappeared overnight.

At 8-years old, I had no language for grief.

No roadmap for loss.

And life didn’t pause long enough for me to learn.

The world simply kept introducing new challenges, new fears, new adaptations.

So Snowbird did what children often do.

She kept moving. But not always in the way Jon and I enjoyed as kids.

Snowbird kept moving by staying small and careful and learning to be the “responsible one” to make sure she was always safe and never felt that pain or loss again.

I hear those lyrics consciously and unconsciously over and over. Now at 8-yrs old without my “Big Brother” it meant I had to take on the world all by myself.

And I have spent the last 50 years doing that until I started doing the inner “parts” work to reconnect with this wounded imprint and unburden and heal little Snowbird.

Now at 56 years old, I can see something I could not see then.

Losing Jon left a deeper imprint on my development than I ever realized.

Snowbird’s Predominant Trauma Response and Survival Adaption

Snowbird’s story is a powerful example of Flight. The sudden loss of Jon, the person who made her feel safe, free, and fully herself created an imprint that love, safety and security could disappear without warning.

So she learned to leave first. She adapted. She flew.

First, she left herself. She slowly abandoned her own sense of safety in her body, disconnecting from the very aliveness she once knew, disconnecting from her body by no longer feeling safe or at home in her own skin. Then, over time, she flew from others, unconsciously choosing people and situations with built-in expiration dates.

If nothing lasted, she would never again be caught in that same depth of grief.

What looked like independence was actually protection. It was a carefully constructed protective moat. It became a quiet, unconscious strategy to outrun loss by never fully landing anywhere again, including within herself.

Without that early mirror reflecting back my strength, parts of me slowly began to stray away from Lil’ Blu’s self-leadership.

Not because the strength disappeared.

But because grief had nowhere to go.

It took decades—and eventually the practice of Parts Work (IFS work)—for me to understand just how profoundly that loss shaped my inner landscape.

And yet… there is another truth.

Jon’s story did not end with the accident.

In many ways, it continues through the work I now do in the world.

Because Snowbird carried the memory.

The love.

The loss.

The questions.

I know now that deep grief means “this thing and this person mattered. It has a legacy.”

And eventually that realization and that legacy led me to the inner exploration that has now become Living Oak Leadership.

I still think about Jon almost every day.

I miss him. I miss that feeling of protection and safety.

But without that moment in the snow…
without that first encounter with grief…

I might never have gone searching inside myself for the answers that became this work.

Sometimes the earliest fractures in our story become the very openings through which meaning enters.

Now I provide the “Self-Leadership” to myself that Lil’ Blu first introduced me to and Jon’s presence in my life guided me to live by.

Snowbird learned that lesson first.

This week, ask yourself: “What part of me may be stuck, frozen or is living in a way that doesn’t honor who and what you are here to do.?”

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Stay tuned for next week’s installment and meet another part.