It’s been well over a month since I wrote to you, and you know what? I think we all get it. Life can be a lot.

One of my favourite sayings is “life is wild and crazy, but mostly amazing,” and lately, all three have been very true! And apparently I’m not the only one... 2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse and, ummm... well, let’s just say that she has taken the assignment very seriously.

Things seem to be moving for so many of us. Relationships. Work. Plans we thought were certain. Things we want now that we didn’t want six months ago.

And when life becomes A LOT, we tend to assume we need to figure it out and like, right now. So we go looking for more information. Google it. Listen to a podcast about it. Pull a card. Ask at least five friends (I see you including ChatGPT here, haha!).

And hey, listen, I love information like anyone else! Curiosity is basically one of my main personality traits at this point. But more information doesn’t always make things clearer. Sometimes it just makes it harder to hear yourself.

Because maybe you’re not confused. Maybe you’ve just heard so many other people’s opinions that you can’t hear your own anymore.

Maybe your body has been trying to get your attention while your brain is really just not ready to hear it yet.

The tightness or irritation you keep brushing off…those tears that come from nowhere…the excitement you immediately talk yourself out of? The tired you? The unsure you? She's the you who wants something different and can't explain why. Trust me when I say she's not the problem. She's the one telling the truth.

Not every “negative” feeling needs to be fixed or shifted into something more “positive”. Sometimes that shit just needs to be felt, man. Treat it like information and a message trying to come through to you. Because it is.

So, stop asking “what should I do?” and start asking:

What am I noticing?

What do I need?

What do I already know?

Which brings me to this meditation I’ve created for you…

I originally created it for the women in my in-person circle. We needed a moment to slow everything down... to get out of our heads and back into our bodies. And after I recorded it, I thought... oh. More women need this right now. So I’m sharing it with you too.

It’s an immersive guided meditation that starts with relaxing into your body, then slowly moves through the chakras as places to pause, breathe and notice. Not because we’re trying to spiritually optimize ourselves. (For the love of all that is holy- one less thing to work on, please!) But because sometimes moving your attention through your body helps you notice the things your mind has gotten very good at talking over.

And eventually, it brings you back to your heart. To you. Not the next version of you. Not the more healed, productive, fall-reset version of you. The woman who’s already here.

Come Back to Yourself - An Immersive Meditation

Grab your journal + a pen, and then find somewhere comfortable and give yourself a little uninterrupted time. You don’t need an answer, a revelation, or to do anything with what comes up. Maybe you cry. Maybe you write down the messages you’ve received from yourself. Maybe you feel peaceful. Maybe your brain keeps wandering to what you’re having for dinner. All fine.

Just notice... and see what happens when you stop trying to figure yourself out for a minute and spend some time with yourself instead.

And if you want more spaces like this... that’s what my Hey Silly Rebel Virtual Women’s Circle is. It isn’t about becoming another version of yourself either. We talk business, money, relationships, spirituality, life... whatever is actually happening. But underneath all of it is the thing I care most about: creating enough space to hear ourselves again, surrounded by other women doing the same.

And maybe that’s part of why I don’t feel particularly bad about disappearing from here for a month. I was living. Because life is wild and crazy... but mostly, it’s pretty fucking amazing.

If the Virtual Women’s Circle is giving you a little hmmm... tell me more feeling, you can learn more here:

Learn More

We start September 1st, and there is only one spot left.

High fives + positive vibes from your girl,

Stace

Subscribe now

A whole year. Because... how??!

At the time, I thought I was selling a business. Looking back now, I think I was letting go of an identity, even though I couldn’t see it then. I thought Europe was just a trip. I thought navigating a separation most people wouldn’t understand was just its own chapter. I thought buying a house would simply mean a new address. I thought writing a book was just another project.

Now I can see they were all connected. And can we say “Hellooooo, fire horse season?!!” lol

And every single one of those moments was asking the same question…Stace, whose life are you actually living here? Do you like the experiences you’re having in life?

Not in a dramatic, burn-it-all-down kind of way. In a real, uncomfortable, and honest kind of way.

As painful as it is to look at, I can tell you that most of us aren’t living lives we consciously chose. We’re living lives we slowly inherited.

We’re handed ideas about what success looks like, what a good career is, how much money is enough, how visible we need to be, how busy we should stay, what our business should become. And before we know it, we’re chasing goals we’ve never stopped to question. Not because they’re wrong. But because they might not actually be ours.

That realization has changed everything for me, and it’s changed the conversations I have with the women I work with too.

Because once you know what’s actually true for you, something shifts. The decisions get clearer. The marketing gets easier. The money feels less tangled. The boundaries stop being up for debate. Life starts to feel like yours again.

That’s really what all of my work has become about, whether we’re talking about business, money, confidence, visibility, or simply figuring out what’s next. It almost always comes back to the same thing: learning to trust yourself. Not because someone gave you permission, but because you finally gave it to yourself… ’cause you’re a badass.

If you’re in that kind of season, too, here’s how we can work together:

Hey Silly Rebel Women’s Circle: Virtual

The Circle exists for women who are craving more than another networking event or another Zoom full of surface-level conversation. It’s a small group of incredible women who are building businesses, navigating change, asking bigger questions, and choosing to do it alongside people who genuinely want to see them win.

Thoughtful. Honest. Practical. There’s strategy, mindset, laughter, embodiment practices, accountability, and probably a few moments where someone says exactly what everyone else has been thinking but hadn’t quite said out loud yet.

We keep it small on purpose, because that’s where the real stuff happens! Ten seats total, four already claimed, which means six spots left before I even fully launched this one!

If you’ve been craving community that actually feels like community, tap the button below to learn more. We start September 1st!

Hey Silly Rebel Women's Circle: Virtual

Sacred Money Archetypes Private Reading

If money has been feeling complicated lately, confusing, charged, or just kind of... uugghhh, this might be exactly what you need. A Sacred Money Archetypes reading reveals the unconscious patterns and beliefs driving your relationship with money, so you can stop fighting yourself and start making decisions that actually feel aligned.

It’s one of the most clarifying, game-changing sessions I offer, and honestly one of my favourite conversations to have! Curious? The first step is to take my free quiz to discover your archetypes…

Sacred Money Archetype Quiz

1:1 Coaching

Sometimes you don’t need a group. You need one conversation. The kind where someone asks the question nobody else has thought to ask, the one that helps you untangle what’s actually yours from all the noise you’ve picked up along the way.

If you’re navigating your business, a big decision, or just that feeling that something needs to shift, this is the work I am here to do with you. No pressure, no awkward sales call. Just a real conversation to see if we’re the right fit.

Free 30min Consult

Your girl,
Stace

More from Hey Silly Rebel:

Podcast Episode 12 — Sarah Wildeman, leadership and relationship dynamics coach and founder of Our Common, joined me to unpack the story we love to tell ourselves: I have to. Spoiler, you don't. You're choosing to. We got into the radical out, why resentment is a flag and not a flaw, and how to actually ask for what you need instead of just announcing that you're drowning. Listen here →

Podcast Episode 13 — Teri Hofford, body image coach and retreat host, came back for our quarterly check-in and we skipped the small talk entirely. We talked outsourcing your intuition, the hundred-year-old saloon piano that found her for free, and why your ecosystem is going to shake when you start trusting yourself... and why that's not your problem. Listen here →

Too Much Panic. Not Enough Disco. — This probably deserves more than a footnote, but finally, as of today, I have finished the full foundational draft of my upcoming book! Stay tuned for a sneak peek of this bad boy ;)

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is a former boudoir photographer turned body image coach and retreat host who built her whole business on following intuition instead of strategy. She was on the show four months ago, and this is our quarterly check-in…and trust me when I say we skipped right past the pleasantries and drove straight into confessional mode. That’s the deal we all make when we hang on this podcast, haha!

And get this…

Teri’s lucky number 13 (she’s got the tattoo on her foot to prove it); this episode is #13, we recorded this on May 13th, and we didn’t even pretend to ease in. Straight into “Did the last four months go anything like either of us thought they would?!”

Mine certainly didn’t!

I said a year off social media like it was a fact instead of an experiment I was already white-knuckling the outcome of. Four months in, I’m back on Instagram. And the first night back, I scrolled until 10:30, felt the algorithm still somehow knew me, and got hit with a wave of comparison so gross I didn’t recognize myself in it.

Teri’s version of the same four months looked different on the outside (she archived her whole account in December, came back January 1st), but underneath, it was the same lesson wearing a different coat.

“I call it outsourcing my intuition to other people.”

That's the phrase she used for it. Money decisions, business strategy, what to post and when — anywhere she felt insecure, she'd go find someone else's system and borrow their certainty instead of her own. Which is the whole thing, isn't it. You don't even notice you've handed the wheel over until you're exhausted from driving someone else's route.

The Piano

I’ll recap this, but you need to listen to the episode for the live telling of this story alone! So, Teri had been looking for an upright piano since October, and she found a gorgeous hundred-year-old one for $600 and talked herself out of it because, well, there were free ones out there, so why pay, right? Then come January, that same piano turned up free. Turned out it used to be a self-playing piano in an old saloon! Because how cool is that?!

She sat down at it before it was even tuned and cried.

“I remember what it felt like to see it. It was like part of me came home.”

What got me wasn’t the piano, but it was that she could feel it that fully. She said a version of herself from six years ago would’ve clocked it as “cool, got a piano” and moved on with her day. The only reason the full-body yes landed this time is that she’s spent years practicing the unglamorous, uncomfortable work of actually feeling things instead of narrating them. The joy only hits as hard as the grief you’ve stopped avoiding.

The Part Nobody Warns You About

Because here’s the cost side of that same coin: when you start actually listening to that compass (the yes, the no, the full-body chill), it doesn’t just rearrange your Tuesday. Oh no, my friends…it rearranges who’s still standing next to you, and that shit can be hard.

“Your ecosystem is going to shake. And you might have some people fall off to the sides, because they were not ready to change.”

Teri’s been sitting with the difference between belonging and acceptance lately. Belonging, she said, is the safety pocket — the community you keep because leaving it feels like risking being alone. Acceptance is rarer and scarier: being fully seen and still wanted. She’s choosing to build the second kind now, even though it costs her some of the first.

“That’s not your problem, that’s their problem.”

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I caught myself doing the thing where I said “I’m doing this for myself, but I also feel grief about it”, and Teri stopped me. Swap the but for an and. Both things are true at the same time. It’s good and it’s bad. And that’s allowed.

Toward the end, Teri walked us both through something she does when a feeling gets loud: find the one place in your body that’s neutral right now…no tension, no buzz, nothing. Hers is her right wrist. Mine turned out to be the bottom of my feet, which surprised me more than I expected it to.

So here’s what I’d leave you with. Next time something in you goes off…the good kind of loud or the bad kind, and don’t rush to explain it. Just find the neutral spot in your body first. Then ask what you’d have to feel to actually trust the thing you already know.

If this is hitting home for ya, our Hey Silly Rebel Women's Circle is the room where we do this work in real time, together. Our next virtual Circle starts Tuesday, September 1st and runs for 6 months, and there are only 6 spots left out of 10!

It's a small, peer-level space for the woman who's tired of carrying it all alone and ready to practice the ask.

Learn More

Show Notes & Links

Guest: Teri Hofford — former boudoir photographer, now a body image coach and retreat host, and someone who built her whole business on following intuition instead of strategy.

Find Teri: Instagram @terihofford

Mentioned in this episode:

• Teri’s Body Image Bootcamp

• Cringe to Compassion, Teri’s live (not self-paced) online course

• Embodied, her new retreat series — first stop is Ireland this October, already sold out

• Teri’s TEDx talk (2024) on body image

• Sue Bryce, Tori Dunlop, and Brina — mentors and friends referenced in the conversation

• Ryan Muirhead - the photographer Teri took the film photography workshop with, and where she learned the story behind why you post what you post

Curious About Me?

I’m a former marketing agency founder and CEO, current Silly Rebel, and someone who has built four businesses in the last 12 years that looked great on the outside and quietly ate me alive on the inside. So yeah, I’ve been there.

This year I opted out. No social media, no hustle-for-visibility games, no building a life around platforms that don’t love you back. Instead, I’m writing honestly about money, business, and what it actually takes to build a sustainable life… not just a scalable one.

This Substack is where the thinking lives. The questions, the experiments, the unpolished truths. Honest thoughts for women who are tired of performing and ready to just actually live.

If you enjoyed this content, please like, comment or share this post so more Substack users can find it ♥️

Share

I have to.

I have to take the kids to their activities. I have to keep the house at a level of cleanliness nobody actually requested. I have to make this much money because of the mortgage and the life we’ve built around it.

Sarah Wildeman shared a tool with me in this episode that I have been simultaneously carrying with me as a mental check buddy and sharing with my clients ever since…

We were chatting about my in-person Circle, and I shared how the first thing I asked our group was what they’d take off their plate to make room for one meeting a month. Sounds easy, but it’s something we all hit a wall with. Not because we can’t think of anything, but because of the resistance that comes up at the idea that we have a choice at all.

“That’s a story we love to tell ourselves. I have to.”

She doesn’t say it to scold us. She says it the way a good friend tells you the truth, because she’d want you to tell her.

The Radical Out

Here’s the part that’s so good...Sarah gives herself what she calls dramatic permission. The radical out. You could sell the house. You could quit the job. You could leave the group you signed up for and never go back. Not because you should, but because naming the option, fully and out loud, lets you feel what comes up. And then you finally get to see the thing for what it is.

“If we choose to stay with the thing, we know that it’s a choosing.”

Try it though, because it gets strange fast! Because when it actually lands in your bones that this is a choice, that you do have control, it’s exhilarating and honestly a little terrifying at the same time. I said that to her. The exhilaration is obvious. The terror is the sneakier part... if it’s a choice, then you have to own it. There’s no external villain holding you hostage. There’s just you and the life you keep saying yes to.

She called it victim mode. We like it down there, she said, it’s comfortable. I told her I’d be the first person to swear I don’t do that, full instant resistance, and then I went quiet, because. Well. Maybe in that one instance, I really was. Damn.

The Flag

And then there’s resentment, which she treats as the clearest signal you’ve got.

“Resentment is such a sign that your giving has shifted out of alignment. Period.”

And it’s not a sign you love anyone less! Sarah feels it toward her own kids sometimes and says so without flinching, because the question resentment asks isn’t should I leave? It’s where did I blow past my own boundary, and what do I actually need here that I never asked for?

Which is the thing underneath all of it. The asking. Sarah teaches that naming a need out loud is a skill, an actual learnable one, and most of us were never taught it. We’ll announce to a whole room that we’re drowning and somehow never shape it into a request. She catches it with her own kids when they tell her their bag is heavy, and she asks them, gently, is there a question in there?

We went a lot further than this in the actual conversation, into re-villaging your life, intentional community, the whole question of why asking for help got so hard in the first place. If any of this is landing, go listen to the full episode. It's worth the hour.

And what I want to leave you with is…

Next time you hear yourself say I have to, stop for a second and check whether there’s a choice hiding in it. And next time you feel that hot little flash of resentment, instead of swallowing it, ask what the message it’s trying to tell you.

If this is hitting home for ya, our Hey Silly Rebel Women's Circle is the room where we do this work out loud, together. Our next virtual Circle starts Tuesday, September 1st and runs for 6 months, and there are only 6 spots. Doors open this week - stay tuned!

It's a small, peer-level space for the woman who's tired of carrying it all alone and ready to practice the ask.

Learn More

Show Notes & Links

Guest: Sarah Wildeman, leadership and relationship dynamics coach, community builder, and founder of Our Common.

Find Sarah: Website + Instagram @our__common + her personal account (mostly garden photos, and we love that.)

Mentioned: Sarah’s TEDx talk + her free Relationship by Design workshop and relationship ecosystem mapping tool, both on the free resources page of her site.

Curious About Me?

I’m a former marketing agency founder and CEO, current Silly Rebel, and someone who has built four businesses in the last 12 years that looked great on the outside and quietly ate me alive on the inside. So yeah, I’ve been there.

This year I opted out. No social media, no hustle-for-visibility games, no building a life around platforms that don’t love you back. Instead, I’m writing honestly about money, business, and what it actually takes to build a sustainable life… not just a scalable one.

This Substack is where the thinking lives. The questions, the experiments, the unpolished truths. Honest thoughts for women who are tired of performing and ready to just actually live.

If you enjoyed this content, please like, comment or share this post so more Substack users can find it ♥️

Share

Back in the day, he showed up to his first-ever client pitch in his dad’s suit, carrying his mom’s iPad, sixteen years old, heart fully leaving his body.

He’d gone viral on Facebook by accident, created a fake event as a joke, accidentally saved a local restaurant from closing, and then thought, logically, “I should probably pitch them my services”. So he borrowed the suit. Walked in. Got the client.

So, that’s who we’re talking to in this one!

is Australian, lives part-time in Buenos Aires (his version of “slowing down,” which we got into later on in our chat), has visited 66 countries, built multiple seven-figure businesses, and has been fully off Instagram since his accounts got deleted in March. Not by choice at first. And then very much by choice, once April came around and turned out to be his biggest business month ever!

We talked for almost an hour and covered a genuinely wild amount of ground, including Nietzsche, his Christian upbringing, pure joy at a festival in Holland at nineteen, and what it actually means to build a business that doesn’t depend on an algorithm to survive.

The business stuff alone is worth the listen. But honestly? The other stuff is we talked about it pretty kickass, too!

The Hard Truth

I asked Jay near the end of our conversation what he’d say to someone who’s been doing the same thing for years, grinding organic social, following the rules, quietly living a life that doesn’t feel like theirs. And he paused and said:

“It sounds like it hasn’t got painful enough for them yet.”

No softening. No pivot to encouragement. Just, yeaaahhh, that’s probably what’s happening.

I laughed, and then I felt it, because he’s right, and it’s one of those things that sounds harsh until you realize it’s actually just kind, in the way that honest things are kind.

He’s not someone who grew up in the box and then had to fight his way out of it. He was getting kicked out of schools in his teens, starting a marketing agency from the back of a classroom, and leaving before they could expel him one last time. Courage wasn’t something he had to find. It was just how his family worked. His dad was an Australian boxing champion, and the thing he modelled for him, over and over, was how to walk toward the hard thing without flinching.

“Show me the mountain. Show me where to jump. I’ll do it.”

Jay knows that’s not everyone’s story. And he said that too, generously. But he also said he thinks most people don’t lack intelligence, and rather, they lack the courage to bet against consensus. To let go of a belief that’s kept them comfortable, to walk a path that looks lonely from the outside.

“To let go of what you think you know, that’s terrifying. You see why people hold onto beliefs that don’t serve them for so long. Because to let go of those beliefs would be to stand naked in the world and be all alone.”

Jay’s also been in two genuinely dark places in his life, deep nihilism, once when he left Christianity and lost the whole framework he’d been using to make meaning, and once after he’d hit the milestones and found out they didn’t do what he thought they would. His newest book, Art Is The Only Way Out, came out of the second one. It’s a meditation on Camus and Nietzsche, and the question of how humans make meaning when the old structures don’t hold anymore, and his answer is, essentially…you make art. You create. And that’s how you do it.

I hadn’t heard of it before the morning we recorded, and I was immediately annoyed that I hadn’t, haha! (I may have quietly ordered the book while we were recording.)

The Business Model

Jay doesn’t post organically. He runs paid ads to a book. The book, priced at $20, covers the cost of the ad on day one, so he can scale without bleeding money while he waits for clients to convert. He’s currently selling around 100 books a day. A book he helped write for another business in 2021 sold 2,600 copies last month. His email list is his, nobody can take it, and it gets a 40% open rate versus the 10% reach you’re probably getting on Instagram if you’re lucky.

He calls it the shift from creator economy to author economy. The content game is a volume game, post more, stay relevant, chase the format that’s working this week, build on land that doesn’t belong to you. The author game is different. Quality over volume, assets that compound, and distribution you own, baby!

“The book funnel frees you to be more free in your expression without needing to bastardize your message to get it in front of people.”

I’m not saying drop everything and write a book tomorrow (or maybe I am?!), but I am saying this conversation will have you think differently about what “building an audience” actually means, and what we’ve all just accepted as the only way to do it.

The question I want you to ask yourself is, “What would I do differently if playing it safe stopped feeling like the safer option?” Because, isn’t that interesting…

Show Notes & Links

Guest: Jay | Website + YouTube + Substack

Book mentioned by Jay: Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously by Osho

Jay’s books: Real Growth + Art Is The Only Way Out

Curious About Me?

I’m a former marketing agency founder and CEO, current Silly Rebel, and someone who has built four businesses in the last 12 years that looked great on the outside and quietly ate me alive on the inside. So yeah, I’ve been there.

This year I opted out. No social media, no hustle-for-visibility games, no building a life around platforms that don’t love you back. Instead, I’m writing honestly about money, business, and what it actually takes to build a sustainable life… not just a scalable one.

This Substack is where the thinking lives. The questions, the experiments, the unpolished truths. Honest thoughts for women who are tired of performing and ready to just actually live.

If you enjoyed this content, please like, comment or share this post so more Substack users can find it ♥️

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And it turns out the point I proved was not the one I had in mind, and honestly, I find that hilarious.

I recorded a little voice note for you below with the full update, including the 10:30pm scroll spiral, what my friend Teri said about it that absolutely hit home, and the tip that has genuinely been epic!

The short version is that sometimes it’s allowed to be easy. And you can change your mind. And neither of those things means you failed, because the experiment that is our lives continue ;)

Your girl,
Stace

More from Hey Silly Rebel:

Spiritual Gym next Tuesday, May 19th — sisters Karen and Cathy Stephenson are taking over, and trust me, you want to come to this one! One is a certified sound therapist, the other a physical therapist with a master’s in acupuncture, and together they’ve built something called the Quantum Activation Method. Sound as an actual nervous system tool, your elemental type, a gratitude practice that rewires. We go live at 9am PDT on Zoom. Learn more →

Podcast Episode 10 — Markus Raivio, Finnish social entrepreneur and founder of 25 culture houses, joined me to talk about what he calls the third dimension: the space beyond sick and healthy, where the real question isn’t how you’re feeling but whether you can still do something that matters despite how you’re feeling. It’s one of those conversations that shifts your life. Listen here →

Best of Kamloops — someone nominated me for Best Podcast and Best Career Coach, and my co-working society, Standard Office Space, for Best Non-Profit, and honestly, that means the world to me! Thank you, whoever you are.

Women’s Circle: Kamloops — the in-person cohort is officially full and underway! If you’re on this list and you missed it, you’ll be the first to know when the next one opens. Stay close! Learn more →

Women’s Circle: Virtual — big news here, friends! The Virtual Circle is moving to the same cohort format as Kamloops, and applications open next month. If you’ve been curious, this is your heads-up to get ready!

Regulated Retreat — last weekend, 21 women from 11 communities across BC showed up at Lac le Jeune Resort, tired and brave and ready for something to be different. Workshops, movement, writing, nature, a bonfire by the lake, and the kind of connection that doesn’t need an icebreaker. It was such a good weekend that we’re doing it again in the first week of October, and you’re going to want to mark that now! 😉 Check out the vibes →

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Go refill your mug of caffeine of choice and get comfy, mmk?

Because I want to tell you a bit about this place…

I’m Stace, a business and money mindset coach, writer, podcast host, and what happens when a serial entrepreneur spends twelve years building businesses and eventually goes “wait, why are we doing it like this again?”

That question is basically what Hey Silly Rebel is.

The women who end up here are usually building something real and starting to wonder why the whole thing feels so heavy. Not burnt out exactly, just done with the performance of it all. Done shrinking. Done hustling toward a version of success that was never really theirs to begin with.

If that landed, you’re in the right place, gf.

Every week, there’s a letter in your inbox, the stuff I’m actually thinking about, a lil’ business, marketing, money mindset, building a life that's actually yours, not the polished version.

Plus, the Hey Silly Rebel Podcast, real conversations with entrepreneurs doing it differently, and solo episodes where I share what I'm working through and occasionally laughing at myself about. Because there have been a few, not going to lie, haha!

Speaking of which, if you want the full, slightly embarrassing origin story of how I quit social media, learned the ‘wrong’ lesson entirely, and came back very much amused about it all, that’s here.

New here? Subscribe below, and the free Silly Rebel Money Decluttering Guide lands straight in your inbox.

Subscribe now

Before adding more to your plate, first clear out the shit that’s weighing you down (and costing you money!) with only one hour a week, one section at a time. Small moves compound, ask anyone who’s ever cleaned out a junk drawer and then somehow reorganized their entire kitchen.

Here is to less panic, and more disco!

Your girl,

Stace

If you enjoyed this content, please like, comment or share this post \so more Substack users can find it ♥️

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He was talking about Finland, the happiest country in the world for the ninth time running, and the paradox that sits right underneath that. Because Finland also has some of the highest rates of depression, loneliness, and suicide in the Western world. And rather than explain that away or smooth over the contradiction, Markus leaned into it.

"Even though I'm so lonely and depressed, I can still be happy. There's some kind of paradigm on that."

He called it the third dimension.

Not sick. Not healthy. Something else entirely. A place where the real question isn’t how are you feeling, but can you do something meaningful despite how you’re feeling? Can you live? Can you love? Can you still move, even when it hurts?

Wait, Who Is This Guy?

is a Finnish social entrepreneur, the first-ever Ashoka Fellow elected from Finland, and the founder of Kukunori — an organization that has quietly built 25 culture houses across Finland, where people living with mental health challenges don’t go to be treated. They go to lead. To teach joke groups and conduct choirs and run poetry circles and farming workshops, side by side with professional staff, as peer tutors and group leaders. Seventeen thousand people and counting have moved through these spaces.

Oh, and before all of this? He was a record producer. Five hundred records. Songs on the radio. A touring musician who would lie on his couch for two or three hours doing absolutely nothing, and then sit down and work for ten straight without stopping. (He suspects ADD. His mother had it too. His daughter calls it the Zero Zone, which is honestly the best name for anything I’ve ever heard!)

He came to social entrepreneurship sideways, the way most good things arrive…not because he planned it, but because he followed his curiosity long enough that it brought him somewhere surprising. Sound familiar?

Oh, and one more thing! Markus is my first ever male guest on this podcast, which feels like it deserves a mention, haha! We met at the Radical Health Festival in Helsinki this past January, where we ended up sitting next to each other on a panel. It was instant friendship. He’s one of those people whose energy just pulls you in, and you immediately think…damn, I need to know this person more! I’m so glad he was brave enough to say yes and come hang out with us ;)

The Idea That Started on a Tour Bus, After a Couple of Beers

The culture house idea didn’t come from a whiteboard or a strategic plan. It came from a guitar group in a hospital, and a phone call Markus had to take.

He asked one of the guys in the group, someone who’d been showing up for a year, to just lead the session for ten minutes while he stepped out. He came back and stood outside the door, listening. The guy was doing it. Quiet, comfortable with the silence in a way Markus wouldn’t have been, and completely fine.

“I was thinking, this guy could actually conduct this group in the first place.”

Train people to train people. Not around their diagnosis, around their interests. What do you want to do? What would feel meaningful? Because when Markus surveyed 150 young adults about what they needed most, the answers were almost identical across the board.

First: I want to do something meaningful.

Second: I don’t want to be alone anymore.

Nobody — not a single person — said they wanted more therapy or more clinical services.

What it tells you, I think, is that the third dimension isn’t a clinical concept. It’s not a treatment modality or a wellness framework or a five-step program. It’s something older and more basic. It’s the difference between being the object of care and being a person who gives something to the world.

There was a man in one of Markus’s groups. Young. On permanent disability pension by twenty-one, diagnosed with schizophrenia, basically written off by the system. He led the joke group. Three or four people every session, laughing, trading jokes back and forth. And at some point he said to Markus:

“When I tell a joke to someone, and he tells a joke to someone, and he tells a joke to someone… Marcus, that makes me immortal.”

You’re In The Right Place

We spent a lot of time talking about connection, because Markus is insistent that it isn’t soft or secondary. It’s structural. It’s the first move, the thing that makes everything else possible.

“The first 15 minutes have such a big impact on how the next 15 years are gonna go,” he said. Whether that’s a new client, a new patient, a new member of a group you’re trying to build. If someone doesn’t feel like they’re in the right place in those first fifteen minutes, the rest of it barely matters.

He has a red carpet at the entrance to his organization. Big letters. You’re in the right place.

Markus explained to me that the most common first question on mental health helplines isn’t “can you help me?” It’s “did I call the right place?” People have been told they’re in the wrong place so many times, by so many systems, that they’ve learned to pre-apologize for existing.

The red carpet is Markus’s answer to that. And honestly? I want one for everything.

On Self-Trust (And Why It’s the Harder One)

Toward the end of our conversation, we landed on agency and self-trust, and I told him that self-trust feels like the harder one to me. Not agency, which at least feels actionable. Self-trust, in a world saturated with information and experts and voices telling you how to do the thing you’re trying to do…how do you trust yourself when you can’t even be sure you’re asking the right questions?

Markus’s answer was characteristically un-self-helpy. He said he didn’t think we have a mind of our own, not really. That everything happening in our minds is actually relational — it lives in the space between people — and the expectations we carry about who we should be, how we should be, what we should be doing? Those came from that same relational space. So the way back to yourself has to start there, too.

Connection first. Then maybe hope. The small kind, the lottery ticket kind, the “I don’t know what happens next week, but something good might” kind. (His mum bought a lottery ticket every week for 30 years and never won a thing. She said she didn’t care. She just loved the feeling of not knowing what next week held. I think about that a lot.)

Then, slowly, the question of what you could be good at. Not what you’re already good at. What would you love to be good at? What do you want to try? “Even if you’re shit at it at the very beginning,” I said, and he agreed completely, “isn’t that also part of the experience?”

And somewhere in that process, without forcing it, identity starts to shift. Not because you decided to become someone new, but because you kept moving…and one day you looked around and realized you were already different.

If You Don’t Move, Nothing Hurts. But Nothing Grows.

“If you don’t move, nothing hurts,” Markus said near the end. “But nothing grows. That’s the saddest situation. When you see that somebody hasn’t been moving for five years.”

He meant it literally, as a clinician who has actually seen that. But it landed for me in a much more ordinary way, because I think a lot of us have spent time in rooms we didn’t leave. Not hospitals. Just…lives. Jobs, relationships, versions of ourselves we’d outgrown but stayed in because staying felt safer than the uncertainty of the door.

The third dimension isn’t reserved for people in crisis.

It’s available to anyone willing to ask…what would I love to be good at?

And then, simply…can I start there?

The reflective question I’m sitting with after this one: where have you been waiting to feel better before you let yourself begin?

Show Notes & Links

Guest: Markus Raivio, social entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and founder of Kukunori

Kukunori: kukunori.fi — a Finnish nonprofit combining culture and mental health, with 25 culture houses across Finland and growing internationally

Ashoka Fellowship: World’s leading network of social entrepreneurs. Markus was the first elected Ashoka Fellow from Finland (2022). ashoka.org

Music: Markus was a record producer for 15 years before transitioning to music therapy and social entrepreneurship. Still makes ambient music. You can find him on YouTube, Spotify and Instagram.

Culture Houses: Diagnosis-free spaces where people living with mental health challenges participate in, and lead, cultural and creative activities. Now operating in Finland, Sweden, UK (London, Wales), Slovakia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kenya, and expanding to Portugal and Greece.

Concept mentioned: The “third dimension” of mental health — beyond sick/healthy, the capacity to live meaningfully despite struggle

Curious About Me?

I’m a former marketing agency founder and CEO, current Silly Rebel, and someone who has built four businesses in the last 12 years that looked great on the outside and quietly ate me alive on the inside. So yeah, I’ve been there.

This year I opted out. No social media, no hustle-for-visibility games, no building a life around platforms that don’t love you back. Instead I’m writing honestly about money, business, and what it actually takes to build a sustainable life… not just a scalable one.

This Substack is where the thinking lives. The questions, the experiments, the unpolished truths. Honest thoughts for women who are tired of performing and ready to just actually live.

If that’s you, you might also love the Hey Silly Rebel Women’s Circle, my virtual community for ambitious women who want real connection, honest conversation, and a little breathing room while they build. No performing required. Come find us.

If you enjoyed this content, please like, comment or share this post so more Substack users can find it ♥️

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And for a while, it really did feel like the best decision I’d ever made!

But last week, something shifted. And if I’m being honest with you, it’s a little stingy to admit…

It started on an airplane.

Last fall, flying to speak at a retreat in Phoenix, something just dropped into me with total clarity…do the no-social experiment.

Not a thought, not a plan. Just crystal clear intuition.

So, I listened and stepped onto the path.

What I also did, immediately, was decide what it meant. I put on blinders and tried to control the experiment from the very beginning, thinking I already knew the outcome.

Here’s where it gets a little painful to admit…

I am a marketer. I have spent years building marketing strategies for other people’s businesses. I know, better than almost anyone, that when you remove a tactic that’s working, you replace it with something else.

I didn’t replace it with anything.

I did find Substack and started my podcast, which I am loving! But then I just... didn’t do the rest. The gap stayed a gap. And I kept writing and talking about how you don’t need social media to build a business, while quietly not building much of anything in its place.

Which, let’s be honest, is funny, not funny, but still funny. (Legit lol’ing to myself right now even as I write this.)

I let that sit for a while. Longer than I’d like to admit, honestly. The kind of sitting where you know something isn’t quite adding up, but you’re not quite ready to look at it directly yet, because it’s a little too painful.

Also, recently I’ve had some preeeetty big life variables shift that changed the whole shape of this experiment. And then, I finally let myself see it…social media actually worked for me. After 12 years of building my presence online, it not only worked well, but I was good at it. I even enjoyed it.

I gave up something that worked for me because I was so committed to proving a point.

The point wasn’t wrong, by the way. You genuinely do not have to be on social media to build a successful business. There are other ways. I believe that completely, and I’ll say it until I’m out of breath.

But that wasn’t actually my lesson. I just thought it was.

My lesson, the one I was apparently always meant to learn from this, is the exact thing I sit with other women and work through every single time…

You get to decide. And then you get to change your mind. And neither of those things means you failed.

We’re all running experiments. All of us, all the time, whether we call it that or not. You look at the variables, you test something, you look at the results, you adjust. There’s no wrong answer, only what’s working right now, with the life you actually have, with the variables currently on the table.

Mine changed. So I’m changing the experiment.

I’m going back on Instagram.

Probably going to try some other things too, because that’s just how we do it around here ;)

Consciously, on my terms, with my wellness the priority, and genuinely curious about what this version will look like. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll look at the variables and tweak it again. Maybe I'll try no-social again next year. Maybe something else entirely. I’ll let you know.

That’s not inconsistency. That is the whole point, my friends.

The reason I’m sharing this, messy and unresolved as it still feels, is because this is exactly the kind of conversation I wish more women in business got to have. Not the polished version where the lesson is already learned and packaged. The actual one, where you’re a little embarrassed, trying to figure out what comes next, maybe worried how others might judge you, and choosing to trust yourself anyway.

That’s what we do inside the Women’s Circle. Show up with the real thing, not the highlight reel version. Witness each other without judgment. Make decisions based on what’s actually true for us, not someone else’s rules or expectations or timeline.

If that sounds like your kind of room, book a chat with me here asap to apply for one of the few remaining spots left! Our first meetup is just over a week away!

But for now, that’s my soul share. Flat on my face, but still chuckling, because isn’t life just freakin’ hilarious.

Big love from your girl,

Stace

More from Hey Silly Rebel:

Women’s Circle: Kamloops — Only four spots left out of 10. Starting May 6th. If it’s been on your radar, now’s the time! Apply here →

Free Workshop — Join us in the Virtual Circle for our free Positive Intelligence Workshop next Tuesday! Discover your “Saboteurs” and how your mind can work for you instead of against you. Grab your spot →

Regulated Retreat — If your nervous system has been through it lately (I mean, whose hasn’t?!), then this one’s for you. A retreat designed around actual regulation, not just rest. Learn more →

Podcast Episode 9 — A truly eye-opening conversation with menstrual cycle coach, Kelsey Cobbe, about cycles, seasons, and the things nobody told you about PMS. Listen here →

Are you a Humanist Entrepreneur? — I wrote about what that actually means. It might be the most you thing you read today. Read it →

Lemonade Day — The sweetest event for young entrepreneurs in Kamloops! Worth knowing about and worth supporting. Check it out →

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You just don’t know that you know it.

Let me explain…

Kelsey and I spent nearly an hour talking about menstrual cycles, cyclical living, and what it actually means to run a life (and a business) in a body that operates more like a season than a spreadsheet. And the whole time, I kept thinking, this is obvious. Why does this feel so obvious? And why am I only hearing it now?!

Kelsey is a yoga teacher, menstrual cycle coach, and what she calls, brilliantly, a domestic engineer. She runs Elderberry Mother Care and works with women, particularly mothers, to reconnect with their bodies, their energy, and the rhythms that already exist inside them. She spoke at the Fullest Table event earlier this year, and I walked away with my brain doing that thing where it tries to reorganize everything it thought it understood.

And I invited her here because I think you need to hear this, too…

The Message Most of Us Received

“Deal with it, plug it up, shut up.”

That’s how Kelsey described the cultural script most of us were handed about our periods. Said out loud like that, it’s bleak. And it’s accurate. Most of us cycled for twenty-plus years before anyone offered us a framework that wasn’t just “here’s a tampon, good luck!”

The shame starts early, often not explicitly but implicitly, through silence. Nobody talked about it, so it must be something to be uncomfortable with and something to deal with in private. Alone. Or maybe with a book that might help you.

What Kelsey traces from there is a thread most of us have never been shown, which is that menstrual shame leads to body shame, which leads to sexual health shame.

And it doesn’t stop at the period.

It’s one long continuum, she said, right through pregnancy, postpartum (which gets “kind of skipped over”), and into menopause.

We were never given the full picture. This conversation is part of filling it in.

The Four Seasons You Actually Live In

Here’s the framework I wish someone had handed me as a young teen…

Your cycle has four phases, and Kelsey maps them as seasons. Winter is your bleed, day one, when hormones are at their lowest, everything goes quiet, and your intuition, historically, speaks loudest.

Spring is the follicular phase, hormones rising, creative energy building, the time Kelsey says to record yourself, do the interview, put yourself out there.

Summer is ovulation, peak expression, the phase she describes as “the sun glowing fully.” And then there’s autumn.

Autumn is the luteal phase, and it gets a bad rap. But here’s Kelsey’s reframe, and it’s the one I keep coming back to…autumn is your truth-serum phase. Your truest self trying to protect you. The job that’s draining you, the relationship that’s off, the thing you’ve been quietly tolerating? Autumn, oh, she notices! Autumn will tell you.

“That’s not a monster that inhabits your body and then disappears. That’s your intuition.”

The next time you find yourself dismissing how you felt during that phase, saying that wasn’t really me, or that was just hormones, I want you to sit with that for a second.

Because what if it was exactly you, and what would that mean?

The Part That Made Me Actually Angry

Did you know that men’s hormones run on a 24-hour clock? They reset overnight. Every morning, more or less the same.

And guess what?

Women’s cycles run on 28 days, and that means our hormones follow that cycle as well. So here we are, being handed productivity books written for the 24-hour clock and told to follow them, to be “consistent”, then burn out and wonder what was wrong with us.

“We are cyclical beings, but the world is linear.”

Girl, you don’t need me to tell you this, but I’m going to anyway…

Nothing is wrong with you.

You’re trying to maintain summer in winter. Of course you feel like shit or “fail” trying to follow the popular productivity structures!

Oh, but the part that genuinely floored me?!

Women’s reward system runs on oxytocin, connection and bonding, not dopamine.

The way we do our best work, the way we feel motivated, the way we actually get things done, is through community. Through being in a room with other women and feeding off that energy. Which means working alone, performing like we don’t need anyone, pretending we have it handled? That’s not independence. That’s just deprivation.

In this episode, Kelsey also dropped the stat that 80% of all autoimmune disorders are suffered by women.

Did your jaw just hit the floor too?! K, cool. I’m not alone.

She connects it directly to a structure that was never built around women’s health, the constant performance, the absence of rest, the loss of the community systems that used to exist around mothers and women, not as a luxury, but as just how life was organized. A matriarchy, she explained, centers the vulnerable. Children, new mothers, the elderly. Healthy adults form a ring around them. A patriarchy is top-down.

Basically, we’ve been trying to thrive inside a structure that wasn’t designed with our bodies in mind. That’s not a personal failing. It’s just context.

The Menopause Drop

I thought I knew the three life stages. Maiden, mother, crone.

Kelsey introduced me to a fourth: the Mega, or wise woman, roughly ages 50 to 75.

The phase that gets quietly erased, possibly, she suggested, because a woman in this phase is hormonally set up to lead. Estrogen, the hormone of accommodation and self-sacrifice, drops at menopause. What comes in its place is a woman who is done accommodating. Done self-sacrificing. Ready to step fully into her own life.

There’s a reason, Kelsey said, that divorce rates spike during this phase. It’s not crisis. It’s biology, finally clearing the path.

“You just kind of have to be really unapologetic about it.”

She said that about stepping into your power, whenever that is for you. I didn’t want to follow it with anything. So I won’t.

One Question to Sit With…

So much of this conversation kept circling back to the same thing…we are not built for the pace we’re keeping.

The burnout isn’t a willpower problem.

The PMS isn’t a personality flaw.

The exhaustion isn’t weakness.

It’s information.

So ask yourself…where in your life are you trying to live like it’s summer when your body is clearly, insistently telling you it’s winter?

Show Notes & Links

Guest: Kelsey, menstrual cycle coach, yoga teacher, and founder of Elderberry Mother Care

• Instagram: @elderberrymothercare

• Website: (coming soon!)

Resources mentioned:

• Jane Hardwick Collins, wise woman elder and educator, Australia-based podcasts and courses

• “The Fourth Trimester” - Kimberly Ann Johnson (5 universal postpartum needs)

• Gloria LeMay, wise woman way doula training

• Angela’s podcast episode on redefining consistency

• The Fullest Table

• Community Futures business boot camp

Curious About Me?

I’m a former marketing agency founder and CEO, current Silly Rebel, and someone who has built four businesses in the last 12 years that looked great on the outside and quietly ate me alive on the inside. So yeah, I’ve been there.

This year I opted out. No social media, no hustle-for-visibility games, no building a life around platforms that don’t love you back. Instead I’m writing honestly about money, business, and what it actually takes to build a sustainable life… not just a scalable one.

This Substack is where the thinking lives. The questions, the experiments, the unpolished truths. Honest thoughts for women who are tired of performing and ready to just actually live.

If that’s you, you might also love the Hey Silly Rebel Women’s Circle, my virtual community for ambitious women who want real connection, honest conversation, and a little breathing room while they build. No performing required. Come find us.

If you enjoyed this content, please like, comment or share this post so more Substack users can find it ♥️

Share

Which is honestly a very funny place to figure out a very human thing.

We were going back and forth trying to find a word for what I do. Not my job title, or my elevator pitch (which I’ve always kind of sucked at), and not the tidy little list of ventures I run. Which is quite a few, to be honest. But the actual thing. The reason of it all. The depth of who I am, how I move through the world, what I’m building, and why I’m so damn stoked to be alive every single day, even when the world feels heavy.

We tried social entrepreneur. Creative entrepreneur. Culture entrepreneur. Human architect. Ecosystem builder. Every single one got close and then didn’t quite hold.

And then it landed: Humanist Entrepreneur.

I didn’t sit with it. Didn’t wonder if it was true or just pretty. It hit me somewhere in the gut and I just knew. That’s it. That’s the one.

Renaissance humanists believed in something very specific: realizing a person’s full potential, for their own good and for the good of the society in which they live.

I mean. Come on. That’s just it, isn’t it?

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So what is a Humanist Entrepreneur, exactly?

A Humanist Entrepreneur builds businesses, communities, and ways of working that keep the human at the centre. On purpose. As a philosophy, not a feature.

Not as a marketing angle. Not as a value you put on your website and then quietly ignore every time a real decision has to be made. As the actual organizing principle of how you build, what you build, and why.

For me that looks like Standard Office Space Society, my co-working space in North Shore Kamloops, built around the idea that entrepreneurs do better work when they’re not isolated. A Women’s Circle that exists because women need spaces where they’re not performing. Writing here that keeps coming back to the same stubborn idea underneath every topic…that you don’t have to hollow yourself out to build something real.

It looks like trying to go offline on Fridays, because the people in my life deserve a version of me that isn’t half somewhere else. (Full disclosure, though: I love my work so much that I haven’t fully nailed this yet, so TBD.) It looks like leaving social media for a year, because I got tired of optimizing my life for an algorithm that has zero interest in whether I’m actually okay.

None of that was a strategy. It’s just who I am, and I finally have a name for it. Not just a name, actually, but an articulation for a way of being. And a way of explaining what I’m building, and why it all belongs in the same sentence.

Okay. I know what some of you are thinking…

You used AI to figure out your humanist identity?!

Yeah. I did. And honestly? I think that’s kind of the whole point.

Using AI as a thinking tool is not the opposite of being human. Nobody gives you a hard time for driving a car instead of riding a horse to work. The car didn’t make you less present in your life, it just got you somewhere faster so you could actually be present for the things that matter. AI, used well, does the same thing. It helped me think out loud. It pushed back. It offered language I hadn’t found yet. And then I took what resonated and left the rest.

That’s the line, by the way. Not whether you use the tool. Whether the tool is doing your thinking, your feeling, your genuine perspective for you. That’s where it gets complicated. That’s the conversation worth having.

Can we just skip past the shame spiral already? You use AI. I use AI. And if you don’t, genuinely, that’s cool too. But I’m not going to pretend otherwise in 2026, because that would be its own kind of performance, and I’m pretty tired of performing things. AI is here. These are the tools we have. The question isn’t whether to use them. The question is how we use them in a way that makes us more human, not less.

And hey, I’m clearly still figuring that out, and that’s ok.

A note on how this piece was actually made, since we’re being honest…

I talked through this entire article out loud. Wandered around. Made bad jokes. Changed my mind multiple times. Spoke my ideas and my perspective and my half-formed thoughts into a conversation with Claude, and it helped me find the shape of them. The ideas, the voice, the slightly inconvenient way I’ve chosen to live? All mine. I didn’t ask it to write my thoughts for me. I spoke my thoughts, and used it to help me hear them more clearly.

That, right there, is what using AI in a humanist way looks like to me. You bring the human. The tool helps you find the words for it. Maybe that’s useful for you too.

Here’s what Humanist Entrepreneurship is not.

It’s not anti-technology.

(See above, re: Claude, cars, phones, and the extraordinary things humans can build with good tools.)

The Renaissance humanists weren’t anti-progress either. They were pro-human in the middle of enormous change. That’s a meaningful difference and I think about it a lot right now.

It’s not religious. I’m not interested in doctrine or dogma. But I do believe everything is energy. I believe in the kind of knowing that doesn’t fit in a spreadsheet. And I find it genuinely fascinating that science keeps catching up to what spirituality has known for a long time, we just finally have better language for explaining why. Whether you believe in God, Buddha, the universe, or something you haven’t named yet, honestly, I think it’s probably all pointing at the same thing. That’s my belief. Take it or leave it. It’s all good and all the love, man.

And all of this? It’s not a rejection of ambition. Humanist entrepreneurs build things. Cool things. We take risks. We care about revenue and sustainability and making something that actually lasts. We just refuse to do it at the expense of the humans inside it, including ourselves.

And here’s the part where I get a little vulnerable.

I’m excited to share this. I’m also a little nervous, because naming something this clearly invites people to poke at it. To find the contradictions. And there are contradictions, I’m not going to pretend there aren’t. I’m a humanist entrepreneur who uses AI. Who’s still working on the offline Fridays thing. Who is building all of this in real time, imperfectly, while also co-parenting and running a nonprofit and trying to remember to water the garden. Eep!

But I’m also hopeful. And energized. And genuinely happy to have this conversation out in the open instead of just rattling around in my head.

So if this landed for you, if some part of you read Humanist Entrepreneur and thought, wait, that might be me too, go ahead and use it! Seriously. Embody that shit! That’s the whole point of naming something.

And if you want to argue with me, pull up a chair, because that’s cool too. I do love a good intellectual banter ;)

Drop it in the comments and let’s talk about it!

Because this is exactly the kind of conversation that makes being human worth the trouble.

Your girl,

Stace

Hey Silly Rebel is written by Stacey Owen, a Humanist Entrepreneur and Silly Rebel based in Kamloops, BC. She co-founded Standard Office Space Society, leads Women’s Circles, coaches entrepreneurs, always says yes to public speaking opportunities brave enough to book her, is a girl-mom, avid vintage hoarder, and is four months into a year of no social media. She also has chickens, which has nothing to do with any of this but felt worth mentioning.

Did you read the newsletter earlier this week and get that little flutter, you know the one, where something sounds so good that you immediately start talking yourself out of it?

Yeah. I see you ;)

Here’s what I want you to know…

Rozalind, Kayla, and I built this circle for exactly that woman. The one who’s capable and driven and a little bit tired of doing it all in her own head. The one who keeps saying “I should really find my people” and then gets busy and forgets to actually do it.

That woman deserves a seat at this table. And we genuinely cannot wait for her to be in the room with us!

So here’s the deal…

Ten spots (now only 8!), 6 months, a gorgeous downtown Kamloops meeting space and two incredible Fullest Table style brunches. Application-only. A couple are already spoken for, which means if something in you has been quietly saying, “this one’s for me,” now is the time to stop letting it be a tab you keep meaning to open!

The next step is just a conversation. A quick chat to see if it’s a fit, no pressure, no weirdness, because nobody’s got time for that BS! Because Roz, Kayla and I want the right women in this room, and we have a feeling you might be one of them.

So, let’s chat…

Book Your Consult Here

Big love from your girl,

Stace

P.S. Know a woman in Kamloops who needs a table like this? Forward it to her. She’ll owe you one ;)

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I stepped away because I knew there had to be another way, and I knew I wasn’t going to find it while I was still performing for the algorithm. What I hear from women in business constantly is the exhaustion of building in public, the way the performance slowly starts to replace the actual work, the hunger for something that feels real.

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So I went looking for the real thing….

And I called two women I trust.

I called . You may know her as the woman behind The Fullest Table, a gathering series that is somatically structured to build genuine, deep connection between women, and somehow manages to be one of the most beautiful rooms you’ll ever walk into. As a certified somatic practitioner, she has spent years learning how to create spaces where women actually arrive, not just attend. That skill is rare. I wanted it in the room.

Then I called my girl, Roz. Rozalind and I go back over a decade, we co-founded Kamloops’s first boudoir studio together a million years ago, which tells you everything you need to know about how much we trust each other. We’ve been through the full arc of what it means to build something as women in business... the excitement, the hard seasons, the pivots, the lessons that only come from having skin in the game. When I thought about who I wanted at this table, she was one of the first names I wrote down!

What do we actually want?

When the three of us got honest about that question, we kept coming back to the same thing…ambitious women in Kamloops are building in isolation. Smart, capable, visionary women doing it alone, online, in a performance. And they’re freakin’ tired, man. We wanted embodiment. Real masterminding at a peer level. The kind of connection that goes deeper than a business card and a LinkedIn request you’ll never follow up on.

We wanted a table. So we built one.

First, Rozalind will be hosting us at her beautiful downtown Kamloops studio! She’ll be co-leading some sessions with me, which means this circle has two women at the front of the room who have genuinely been in it, not just studied it.

And then Kayla said yes to something that made the whole thing even better.

Twice over the six months, she’ll bring her At The Table: Women & Business Brunch into the mix for circle members, and then open it up to an additional ten women from her own community. It’s networking that actually goes somewhere. Beautiful food, intentional space, real conversation. Very Fullest Table, if you know what I mean ;)

Hey Silly Rebel Women’s Circle: Kamloops

Ten women. Six months starting May 6th. Two in-person sessions a month at Roz’s downtown studio, one grounded in embodiment practice, one built around masterminding that goes deeper. And because the work doesn’t stop when you leave the room, every woman in the circle also gets access to Hey Silly Rebel Women’s Circle: Virtual to stay connected in between.

You know the Virtual Circle, the weekly online sessions for women building on their own terms, wherever they are in the world. This is that, but with the gift of being in the same room. The energy of women who can look each other in the eye, sit in the same space, and go even deeper together. It's a different thing. A rare thing, honestly.

With only 10 spots in the circle, it’s application-only, and one woman per industry. The room only works if everyone in it can feel safe to be fully honest and met where they’re at.

If you’ve been quietly wanting a room where your business gets deeply supported, this was built for you. Not the performance of you. The actual you, with the actual questions you haven’t said out loud yet.

Applications are now open. Want to know if it's a fit? Let's chat.

Book Your Consult Here

And if you know a woman in Kamloops who needs a seat at this table, forward this to her. Because that’s what love is ;)

Your girl,

Stace

More from Hey Silly Rebel:

Book Rec — You Turn by Ashley Stahl, if you feel like something is missing in your career.

Podcast — My interview with a Victoria, BC sock company founder, where she shares her “Good Lazy over Bad Busy” ethos.

Quick Read — You don’t have to live like everyone else.

Regulated Retreat — There are a few spots left to join us May 3rd-5th!

Speaking — Book me to speak at your event about women, self-trust, money and entrepreneurship.

Hey Silly Rebel Women’s Circle: Virtual — Join the virtual Circle, with weekly sessions, wherever you are.

There’s something nobody really says out loud about building a business.

It’s lonely. Not in a dramatic way. Just in that end-of-the-week way where you did all the things and somehow still feel like you’re doing it in a vacuum. Like everyone else has a room they’re building from and you’ve got… a desk.

Yep. Been there. Still visit sometimes.

Here’s what twelve years in has taught me though…it’s not a you problem. The way most of us were taught to build, heads down, hyper-independent, just keep going, is actually dysregulating our nervous systems. And a dysregulated nervous system doesn’t build well. It just survives.

This is exactly why I built the Hey Silly Rebel Women’s Circle. And why tomorrow, I’ve asked to join us.

Kayla is a somatic practitioner, nervous system coach, and the founder of Fullest Table. She’s coming to talk about something I think you need to hear: community isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s infrastructure. She’s bringing the actual science behind why isolation makes building harder, and a somatic practice you can use before any moment that makes your chest go tight.

I’d love to see you there, so your first session is on me. Nothing to lose and an entire Circle of incredible women to gain!

Tuesday, March 31st at 9am PDT on Zoom.

Subscribe to access your 7 day free trial and snag your free session tomorrow. Cancel anytime, no strings attached.

Learn More + Subscribe

Your girl,

Stace

P.S. Details on the in-person Circle “At The Table” drop this week! Limited spots, two very exciting collaborations involved. Any guesses? ;)

Hey Silly Rebel Women's Circle

For ambitious women who are done following rules that were never theirs to begin with. Weekly sessions for embodiment, honest conversation, business strategy, and money mindset with other women who get it.

By Stacey Owen | Hey Silly Rebel

“Do less better.”

Crystal wrote it on a piece of paper last week. In big letters, and then left it where she could see it.

That’s the whole episode, honestly.

But how she got there is the part that you’re going to want to listen in on with this conversation. Trust Stacey (hi, that’s me if you’re new here.)

Subscribe now

How She Actually Grows This Thing

Crystal runs Good Lazy, a sock company out of Victoria, BC. The name is a mantra she gave herself when she walked away from a genuinely enviable career at John Fluevog Shoes, not because anything went wrong, but because the pace was eating her alive. She needed to call it something that made the slowing down feel okay, so she did.

Five years later, the business is almost entirely offline. Her partner, Tim, wanders into stores and makes friends, no pressure, and Crystal cruises through once a relationship is established. They do markets, the ones with wifi and a bathroom specifically, because that’s a hard requirement now... same. Word of mouth, real people, everyone she actually knows by name.

A Note From Your Fellow Elder Millennial

She burned off 40% of the moisture ducts in one eye from prolonged phone use, by the way. Her optometrist showed her the scan at 42, and she thinks her generation is going to be the ones who find out what these devices actually did to us. Oof. As a fellow elder millennial, this has me eating an extra handful of chips in the evening as pure comfort, out of fear of discovering god knows what at my next check-up. Yeesh.

She Has a Piggy Bank for That

She also bought a piggy bank for February, the dead zone in sock sales, and just started shoving money in it every year. I dig it. She overthinks things until she goes and gets a donut and walks somewhere pretty, and the answer shows up anyway. She’s not figured out, by the way, and she’ll be the first to tell you. The business covers about a third to half of her income, and she keeps a regular job because she refuses to let pressure ruin the thing she loves.

That’s not a consolation prize. That’s a choice.

The Part I Needed to Hear

“Good lazy is not bad busy,” she said. And then: “If it’s too crazy in your head, just get rid of some of it. You can invite it back later.”

Yeah. Not going to lie…that one was for me.

So Here’s the Thing...

I’ve been building businesses for twelve years, and I know what the sprint feels like when everything’s firing, and you’re like, “I’m alive! I’m doing the thing!” hitting every dopamine centre... and then it just... isn’t... anymore. That ride lasted about three years for me. It felt fun at the time, and then it really, really wasn’t.

What Crystal is doing looks different, slower definitely, but five years in, she can open an intermediate piano book and just play now. Starter plants of everything, she called them. She’s also building toward an employee-owned company because she’s that tired of pretending hierarchy is normal, and honestly, I find that fascinating. If you know someone already doing this, drop it in the comments because I need to interview them.

What would you build if the timeline were yours to set? Not the five-year-expiry-date version everyone seems to be running on, but the actual one, the slow burn, real life, winning at life version.

Crystal’s proof it’s possible, and she makes it sound kind of fun. I’m into it... are you?

Show Notes & Links

Guest: Crystal, founder of Good Lazy

• Website: goodlazy.ca

• Instagram: @goodlazy.ca

• Promo code: Use heysillyrebel for 25% off your order

Resources mentioned:

• John Fluevog Shoes, fluevog.com

• Fullest Table / Kayla Brazier, mentioned from Episode 7

Curious About Me?

I’m a former marketing agency founder and CEO, current Silly Rebel, and someone who has built four businesses in the last 12 years that looked great on the outside and quietly ate me alive on the inside. So yeah, I’ve been there.

This year I opted out. No social media, no hustle-for-visibility games, no building a life around platforms that don’t love you back. Instead I’m writing honestly about money, business, and what it actually takes to build a sustainable life… not just a scalable one.

This Substack is where the thinking lives. The questions, the experiments, the unpolished truths. Honest thoughts for women who are tired of performing and ready to just actually live.

If that’s you, you might also love the Hey Silly Rebel Women’s Circle, my virtual community for ambitious women who want real connection, honest conversation, and a little breathing room while they build. No performing required. Come find us.

If you enjoyed this content, please like, comment or share this post so more Substack users can find it ♥️

Share

The first one is kind of a big deal…

On Wednesday, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in a landmark lawsuit. The plaintiff is a 20-year-old woman named Kaley who started using YouTube when she was six years old. By her teens, she had anxiety, body dysmorphia, and suicidal thoughts. The jury ruled that the platforms knew their design was dangerous, failed to warn users, and caused her real harm. They awarded $6 million in damages, split 70/30 between Meta and YouTube. (Source: NBC News, March 25, 2026)

The day before, a New Mexico jury had ordered Meta to pay $375 million for violating child protection laws. Two juries. Two verdicts. Two days. Meta’s week has been no bueno.

The lawyers for Kaley called it “a referendum from a jury to an entire industry.” I’d call it the moment the dam finally cracked!

Here’s the part that really gets me though…these companies have always hidden behind Section 230, the legal provision that says they aren’t responsible for what users post on their platforms. But this case wasn’t about content. It was about design. The algorithm, autoplay, and the notifications engineered specifically to make stopping feel impossible.

The product wasn’t broken. It worked exactly as intended.

And if that doesn’t make you stop and think about your social media usage, well, I don’t know what to tell ya.

Or wait, maybe I do ;)

Read on, my friend…

Okay, so. Second thing.

You know about FX’s Love Story, the Ryan Murphy series about JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette? I’ve been hearing about it all week and honestly, it has had me thinking. Apparently everyone wants Carolyn’s entire wardrobe (I mean, I get it.), but the thing that’s been be-boppin’ around in my head isn’t the fashion or the tragedy… it’s the waiting.

What I’ve heard about it so far is that this feeling of waiting woven through the whole show. Two people trying to reach each other, be with each other, figure each other out, and they just can’t always get there right away. They have to sit with the not-knowing. There is actual space between them. And watching it in 2026, that space feels almost radical.

Boston Globe columnist Kara Baskin captured it perfectly in her “Parenting Unfiltered” column earlier this month. She watched her teenage son head out to an open gym to meet friends, only to come home five minutes later. His plans had evaporated via a Snapchat group thread while he was en route. No showing up and wondering if you’d been no-showed, but also no possibility of anything. Just a lil’ life adventure cancelled, before it started.

“We thought we were just killing time back then — hoping someone would call, wondering who might show up. But time, full of silence and static and possibility, was the magic.” (Source: Kara Baskin, “Parenting Unfiltered,” Boston Globe, March 6, 2026)

And let’s face it, who can’t use a little extra magic in their lives right now.

I have been off the main social media platforms for three months now. January through March. Substack only, and yes, before you say anything, I know Substack is technically also social media now. Gaaaddddamn it.

And I’ll be honest with you because two people asked me today, separately, how the experiment is going and whether I’d go back after the year is up.

Sometimes I think yes. I do. There’s still this pull, this underlying pressure to keep up. To stay connected. To stay relevant. If you’re building a business, you know exactly what I’m talking about. That voice that says you’re falling behind if you’re not posting, not visible, not in the algorithm. And yeah, not going to lie, I still hear it even three months in.

But then I slow down again. I get out of my head, come back to being present, and take a good look around at how I’m being in my life right now. Who I’m becoming as an active participant in this world. And the honest answer is… probably not. I don’t think I’m going back.

Yes, it’s still a battle, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. The technology is genuinely amazing. And it genuinely also tells us we need to do more, be more, show up more. Every single day. And I want to opt out of that. I get to choose where my attention goes, not because the algorithm tells me to.

So for you, specifically, the woman reading this who is out there building something.

You’ve probably been told, in some form, by someone, that you have to be on social media to grow your business. That consistency is everything. That the algorithm rewards those who show up. That if you’re not posting, you’re invisible.

But here’s the thing the verdict this week confirmed, officially, in a court of law: the emptiness you feel after scrolling isn’t a bug. It’s not you. The platforms were designed to keep you a little hollow, a little hungry, and absolutely hooked. And honestly? It’s designed to work on all of us.

And if you’re still on it, that’s completely your call and I respect that.

Because you are building a life right now. Like, this is actually it. This is the actual thing! You are alive right now, and what do you want that experience to be? Because you get to decide that in a way that most of us never stop to actually claim.

My friend Crystal, who makes the most incredible wool socks through her company Good Lazy out of Victoria, BC, has built her entire business almost completely offline. No Instagram strategy. No content calendar. Her partner Tim walks into stores, makes real friends, drops off socks. Crystal sells them out of her purse at the gym. She told me: “Every single connection I make with the socks is real. That’s a real person in my life.”

She’s not behind or invisible. She’s doing less, but better.

And, hey man, I’m not saying burn it all down and go live in the woods! Tempting as that might be sometimes (or wait, is that just me?!), that’s not the point.

The point is that you have more power here than the platforms want you to believe. You get to write your own rules. You get to decide how much of that system you want in your life, on your terms.

That’s a choice you get to make.

The Love Story piece framed it as nostalgia for the 90s, and sure, I get that. But I don’t think it’s really about wanting to go back. It’s about recognizing what we quietly traded away, and deciding whether the trade was worth it.

For Kaley, the jury said no.

For me, three months in, the answer is getting clearer every week… even on the days it’s still a battle.

The silence is the point. The friction is the feature. The unplotted afternoon where you don’t quite know what’s next?

That’s where you actually live.

So let’s go do that, eh?

Your girl,

Stace

P.S. Two people asked me today if I’m going back to social media. Are you in the middle of this question too? Drop me a note below, tell me where you’re at and what you’re feelin’… I read every single one.

Curious About Me?

I’m a former marketing agency founder and CEO, current Silly Rebel, and someone who has built four businesses in the last 12 years that looked great on the outside and quietly ate me alive on the inside. So yeah, I’ve been there.

This year I opted out. No social media, no hustle-for-visibility games, no building a life around platforms that don’t love you back. Instead I’m writing honestly about money, business, and what it actually takes to build a sustainable life… not just a scalable one.

This Substack is where the thinking lives. The questions, the experiments, the unpolished truths. Honest thoughts for women who are tired of performing and ready to just actually live.

If that’s you, you might also love the Hey Silly Rebel Women’s Circle, my virtual community for ambitious women who want real connection, honest conversation, and a little breathing room while they build. No performing required. Come find us.

If you enjoyed this content, please like, comment or share this post so more Substack users can find it ♥️

Share

Okay, so…

The last two weeks kind of ate me alive. In the best, fullest, most “this is what living looks like” kind of way... but still. The podcast content was light. The writing was light.

Wait…did I say light? I meant non-existent.

I think the universe was just making sure I was paying attention to actual life for a minute. Presence over productivity. Wild concept, I know.

I’m willing to bet you’ve had a season like this too. Where life just gets full and something has to give, and the thing that gives is the thing you were “supposed” to be doing. And somehow the world didn’t end. Funny how that works.

Anyway. I’m back, I’ve got a lot to share, and we’re getting into all of it.

A personal voice note from me to you:

The BIG Pitch 2026 Was So Damn Good

On March 13th, I had the honour of judging The BIG Pitch for the second year in a row, hosted by Community Futures Thompson Country right here in Kamloops.

Dozens of entrepreneurs showed up to Kelson Hall with their ideas, their nerves, and a shot at a $10,000 grand prize. And I’m telling you, the energy in that room was something!!

First, massive congrats to the winner this year Quanah George of Deer Tracks and Fawns!

But, second, here’s what I want you to know about events like this, whether you were there or not. Every single person who walked up to pitch had to do the thing that most of us avoid our entire careers. They had to say this idea is worth fighting for out loud, in front of people, sometimes even before they had proof it would work. That’s not a small thing. That’s actually everything.

If you’ve got a business idea that’s been living rent-free in your head, I want you to sit with that for a second.

And while I was up front judging, the Standard Office Space Society (SOSS for short) crew was holding it down at the tradeshow — and Ryan From Kamloops were representing our booth, and yes, we absolutely coordinated outfits. (The From Kamloops tees Ryan got us were clearly a very good call, haha!) I co-founded SOSS, which is coming up on its third birthday, and seeing it represented in a room full of early-stage entrepreneurs felt pretty full circle.

If you’re an early-stage entrepreneur in the Thompson Country region, mark your calendar now for next year. You want to be in that room.

See The Event Recap Here

What I'm Reading

Rich Relationships by Selena Soo

This one was gifted to me by my friend and mentor, , and honestly, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect.

If you’ve ever felt like traditional networking is either uncomfortable or exhausting, or like building a business shouldn’t require performing for strangers online every single day… read this book.

Rich Relationships is written for people who cringe at the word “networking”… which, hi, hello, that was me before. And is probably you too. Selena Soo’s whole approach is about depth over breadth, building a small number of genuinely meaningful connections that actually move your business and your life forward, rather than collecting contacts or trying to be everywhere at once.

It’s not about avoiding social media specifically. It’s about something bigger than that. It’s about building a network rooted in real generosity, real intention, and real relationships, the kind where people genuinely want to see you succeed and will open doors for you because they actually care. One rich relationship, she argues, is worth more than a hundred casual connections.

Two and a half months into my no-social experiment, this one was a winner.

Highly, highly recommend.

What I'm Thinking About | The Decade Ahead

I came across this essay by of The Wake Up Call newsletter yesterday, and I still can’t stop thinking about it.

It’s called How to Prepare for the Next Decade, and if you’ve been feeling the pressure to keep up, to do more, to stay visible, to optimize everything while somehow also not burning out… this one is for you.

I’m not going to say much more about it because honestly I’ll just get too emotional. Read it, and then come back and tell me what you think.

There’s some really interesting pushback in the comments too, worth a scroll once you’ve read the piece.

Read It

Hey Silly Rebel Women’s Circle News

A few things have evolved with the Circle after almost an entire first month running, and I wanted to fill you in.

The virtual circle has had a refresh to make it more accessible! The price has dropped to $111/month, and spots are now unlimited (join anytime!), and the session structure has been simplified into something I’m really proud of.

Also new this week: the Women’s Circle Substack community chat is open to everyone, free subscribers included. It’s a place to connect, ask questions, and keep the conversation going between sessions. Because honestly, some of the best stuff happens in the in-between.

Join The Community Chat

And look... I could tell you more about what the Circle feels like from the inside, but these three say it better than I can.

As for the small group in-person Kamloops circle... I know I said April. And it almost was. But I’m putting the finishing touches on something that’s going to make it really, really good. We’re moving the launch to May, and more details are coming soon…and trust me, you’re going to be stoked about the collab that’s coming together for it! Trust Stacey ;)

In the meantime, this Tuesday at 9am PDT is our Hot Seats call. If you’ve been thinking about using that free trial session, this is a great one to start with. Real questions, honest conversation with peers, zero ego.

Learn More

Until next time, keep kicking ass out there, eh!

Your girl, Stace

Hey Silly Rebel Women's Circle

Hey Silly Rebel Women’s Circle is an intentional circle for embodiment, business, money, and real human conversations.

By Stacey Owen | Hey Silly Rebel

If you enjoyed this content, please like, comment or share this post so more Substack users can find it ♥️

Share Hey Silly Rebel

How much of the way you’re living right now is actually yours?

Not your parents’. Not your industry’s. Not the version of “successful” that got handed to you before you were even old enough to question it.

Yours.

Because I’ve been sitting with that question a loootttt lately.

Partly because of my no-social experiment (more on that in my voice note to you). Partly because of the conversations I’ve been having on the podcast. And partly because of a book that genuinely wrecked me (in the best, most necessary way), and we need to have a chat about all of this!

Everything in today’s email is connected by that thread: What actually belongs to you? And what have you just… accepted? Because whose rules are these anyway?!

Okay. Let’s get into it, my friend.

A personal voice note from me to you:

Speaking of Social Media Platforms… Have You Heard of Gander?

A friend of mine (shoutout to ) introduced me to this, and I had to share it with you.

It’s called Gander. It’s a Canadian-built social media platform, and honestly, it’s pretty cool!

Your data stays on Canadian servers. Your feed is yours to control. Zero selling of your info, zero creepy tracking. Oh, and it has built-in tools to flag bias and check sources. Which, ‘cause really… that’s pretty impressive.

They’re in early access right now, which means you can grab your username before someone else does. If you’ve been looking for a new social media home base that isn’t Meta, then this one is worth checking out!

Check Out Gander

Hey Silly Rebel Podcast | Episode 6

Who Are You Becoming?

My guest, Natasha Lyndon, and I have known each other for about eight years, and I can tell you that this conversation felt like the best kind of “chin wag” (listen to the episode to hear the bts of that phrase, haha). The kind where you’re laughing one minute and then someone says something that hits you straight-up in the heart in the next.

Get this…Natasha decided to cut the Wi-Fi at home and remove data from her phone entirely. People thought she was extreme. She thought she was curious. I mean, I think she’s a badass.

She shared, “My brain could rest.” Not perform better. Not optimize. Just… rest. And doesn’t that sound so nice?!

She started reading again. Making art. Calling friends just to talk. And slowly, something shifted, and in her words, she became someone she respected again.

We get into what identity actually is, why your defaults are running the show more than you think, and the question I want to leave you with:

Who are you becoming? And do you respect her?

This episode is for you if you’ve ever felt that quiet, slightly tight feeling in your chest when you look at your habits and think… hmm, maybe these aren’t so great.

Listen Here

Hey Silly Rebel Podcast | Episode 7

You Were Never Meant to Build This Alone

Fresh out this week, and I am SO proud of this conversation!

My beautiful friend + guest, , is a community builder, event curator, and somatic practitioner right here in Kamloops. She’s the founder of Fullest Table — a seasonal supper series for women that is exactly as wonderful as it sounds — and she runs a nervous system coaching practice that is genuinely changing lives.

She said something early in our conversation that I keep coming back to:

And isn’t that genuinely the truth?!

We talked about why women perform in social situations (it’s not a character flaw…it’s your nervous system doing what it was designed to do), what it feels like to walk into a room where you don’t have to be anything other than what you are, and what it really looks like to build a business when you were raised to believe success has to be hard.

We also got into nourishment as actual business infrastructure. Kayla’s start, stop, pause list is genuinely one of the most practical frameworks I’ve heard in a while. And building in community instead of isolation, what that actually looks like vs the vision board version of it.

This one’s worth the full 61 minutes. I promise.

Listen Here

A Few Reminders…

The BIG Pitch — March 13th, I'm back as a judge for The BIG Pitch 2026, hosted by Community Futures! If you're an entrepreneur in the Thompson Country region with something cool to share, this is your stage! Either apply or just come to hang out, and I’ll see you there. Apply Here

Regulated Retreat I'm honoured to be speaking at Regulated, a three-day nervous system reset retreat for people who are done surviving and ready to feel steady again. If that sentence just hit you in the chest, it might be for you. Learn more.

What I'm Reading

On Our Best Behavior by Elise Loehnen

I thought I was self-aware. You know…I thought I knew my own mind. I thought the decisions I was making were mine.

And then this book came along and gently (and then not so gently) made me take a good long look at all of that…

On Our Best Behavior is about the belief systems and unspoken rules we’ve absorbed throughout our lives… and how so many of them were never actually ours to begin with. Elise Loehnen maps it through the lens of the seven deadly sins and what they’ve cost women specifically, and it is wild how much clarity (and grief, and freedom) can come from finally seeing the rulebook you didn’t know you were following.

It devastated me. It built me back up. And I’m still thinking about it.

If you’re in a season of asking whose version of life am I living? Read this book.

The Hey Silly Rebel Women’s Circle is Open!

Everything we’ve been talking about today? The identity questions. The defaults. The rules that aren’t yours. The community you deserve.

That is what the Women’s Circle is built for.

It’s a monthly gathering space for ambitious, thoughtful women who want depth, real conversation, and room to be seen without performing. We talk about money, identity, business, life (aaaall the stuff that actually matters), and what it looks like to build success in a way that genuinely feels like you!

And this month? is our guest practitioner, bringing her somatic and nervous system work directly into the circle! If her episode resonated with you, this is your chance to go deeper with her.

Virtual: Tuesdays at 9am PST

In-person (Kamloops): Tuesdays at 3:30pm PST / These will start in April and have very limited spots.

First session is free.

Come as you are. Because that’s the whole point ;)

Women's Circle Details

Until next time, keep kicking ass out there, eh!

Your girl,

Stace

Hey Silly Rebel Women's Circle

Hey Silly Rebel Women’s Circle is an intentional circle for embodiment, business, money, and real human conversations.

By Stacey Owen | Hey Silly Rebel

If you enjoyed this content, please like, comment or share this post so more Substack users can find it ♥️

Share Hey Silly Rebel

Subscribe now

We were deep in it…talking about community, about why she built Fullest Table, about what it actually means to create spaces where women can just... be. And she dropped it like it was nothing…

Yeah. That one hiiitttt.

Subscribe now

Kayla is a community builder, event curator, and somatic practitioner based right here in Kamloops. She’s the founder of Fullest Table — a seasonal supper series for women that is exactly as good as it sounds — and she also runs a nervous system coaching practice over at kaylabrazier.com. She comes at community from a different angle than most. Not the vision board, find-your-people version. The actual biology of it.

We got into why women perform in social situations, and why that’s not a character flaw; it’s just your nervous system doing what it was designed to do. We talked about what actually happens when a woman walks into a room where she doesn’t have to be anything other than what she is. Physically. Emotionally. What shifts.

We talked about building a business when you were raised to believe success has to be hard. The unspoken rule a lot of us absorbed growing up (that struggle is the price of getting somewhere good) and what it takes to actually unlearn that.

We talked about nourishment as actual business infrastructure. About building around your energy instead of forcing your energy to match your business. And about what it looks like to protect your slowness when growth culture is constantly poking at you to do more.

We talked about being the kind of person with 852 gazillion ideas (relatable!) and how Kayla manages that without losing her mind. Her start, stop, pause list is genuinely one of the most practical things I’ve heard in a while.

And we closed on the big one.

For the woman who is tired but still deeply called, what does it actually look like to build something in community instead of isolation? Her answer is good. Really good.

This one’s worth the 61 minutes. I promise.

Kickass Guest Bio + Links:

Kayla Brazier is a community builder, event curator, and Somatic Practitioner based in Kamloops, BC. She is the founder of Fullest Table, where she designs elevated dinner experiences that bring women together around beauty, conversation, and nervous-system-centred connection.

Find Kayla at:

• Fullest Table fullesttable.com

• Somatic practice kaylabrazier.com

• Instagram @fullesttable

• Substack

• Get your Fullest Table Conversation Cards here

Kayla’s next event: Women and Community — April 11th at Privato Winery, featuring Sarah Wildeman of Our Common (her TEDx talk is linked on the waitlist page and definitely worth watching before you go!)

Hey Silly Rebel episodes mentioned: Episode 5 with , on consistency, rhythm, and what it means to show up in your own way

Also, cool news, Kayla is the guest practitioner in Women’s Circle this month!

If this conversation resonates and you want to go deeper with her, this is your chance. She’ll be bringing her somatic and nervous system work directly into the circle. It’s going to be soooo good!

Women’s Circle is open for virtual (Tuesdays, 9am PST) and in-person in Kamloops (Tuesdays, 3:30pm PST). First session is free.

Women's Circle Details

Hey Silly Rebel Women's Circle

Hey Silly Rebel Women’s Circle is an intentional circle for embodiment, business, money, and real human conversations.

By Stacey Owen | Hey Silly Rebel

About Your Host:

Hey, I’m Stace.

Former marketing agency founder + CEO, and current Silly Rebel. I know how to build businesses (built 4 in the last 12 years) that look successful from the outside, and quietly eat you alive on the inside. ‘Cause I’ve been there.

This year, I opted out. No social media and no hustle-for-visibility games, no thank yoooou! No building a life around platforms that don’t love you back. Instead, I’m writing honestly about money, business, and what it actually takes to build a sustainable life—not just a scalable one.

This Substack is where the thinking lives. The questions, experiments, shares and unpolished truths. Just honest thoughts, written for people who are tired of performing and ready for real life again.

(Photos below are by From Jen’s Lens at the last Fullest Table event.)

If you enjoyed this content, please like or comment on this post so more Substack users can find it ♥️

Share

If you’ve been craving a place to come back to yourself (not your productivity, not your persona, not your “I’m fine” voice), this is your reminder:

We start tomorrow, and I have a very special meditation prepped for you!

Aaand because of how the Tuesdays line up this month, you’re getting four Spiritual Gym sessions instead of three!

A whole extra week. A lil’ extra bonus pocket of support. *chefs kiss*

Quick note on what Spiritual Gym actually is, in case you’ve been wondering:

It’s an embodiment practice. It’s getting back into your body so you can actually hear what you know.

Because so many of us are brilliant… and completely disconnected from our own signals. And when you can’t feel yourself, intuition gets muffled, which results in your confidence and self-trust becoming wobbly. Decisions get louder in your head and quieter in your gut. No bueno.

AND FRIENDS — I’m absolutely stoked to be letting you in on who our first guest practitioner for the Women’s Circle…

On March 31, (somatic practitioner + nervous system coach) is joining us for a session called Community as a Business Strategy, aka the “you’re not supposed to build alone” conversation, with practical nervous system tools you can use before sales calls, events, collaborations… all the relational stuff that matters!

If you’ve been circling the Hey Silly Rebel Women’s Circle, consider this your nudge.

You can join anytime, and you don’t need to be “ready.” You just need to be done doing it all solo.

Here’s the full page with all the details:

Hey Silly Rebel Women's Circle

Can’t wait to see a few of your beautiful faces tomorrow!

Your girl,

Stace