Growing up, my favorite pastime was playing dress-up and putting on shows with my friends, and I was lucky enough to have two (two!) stages in the basement of my childhood home before my parents remodeled it. The performer in me still can’t quite believe that luck. One of those stages was a small elevated platform with a curtain, backed by a dressing room tucked under the stairs. And because I’d spent years collecting costumes from dance recitals, along with a few strange and wonderful relics from my grandmother’s closet, I had a trunk’s worth of material to work with.

The older I get, the more I find myself in awe of the wisdom of children, and how much we have to learn (or remember, rather) from them. All it took was some new, extravagant clothing and my imagination, and the 10-year-old me lived in an entirely different reality. If you think about it, that’s all we’re doing here in these meat suits we call bodies, except somewhere along the way we condition ourselves to deny our power. We forget that we’re the main characters in our own plays called life, and our creativity goes dormant. The thing we call reality starts to look and feel the same day after day, because that’s who we’ve decided to be.

Last week I attended a retreat at the home of my business coach. Whenever I engage in any “personal development,” I do so wearing two hats: participant and observer. I’m there to be a student - to learn and experience new things alongside new people. But I’m also there taking notes, watching for evidence of what’s possible. What exactly allowed my coach to build the business she has, with a waitlist of women wanting to work with her, hosting retreats in a majestic space she built on her property, as her husband and kids milled around as a helpful supporting team? “She’s really made it,” I thought. Now, I could look at her and feel like I am worlds away from my version of that kind of success. And admittedly, there are days when I have - when I’ve submitted to my doubt and imposter voice. But the majority of the time I’m fully embodying my curiosity and patience; thus I look at her the way you’d look at someone standing on the other side of a bridge you’re still building. My job is to keep moving forward, one plank at a time.

As my path of self-discovery has deepened over the last decade, I’ve gotten better at attuning to my intuition and to the messages that land in my awareness at seemingly random moments.

One such message arrived as clearly as if someone had whispered it in my ear while I sat in that retreat listening to Amber speak. It said: she believed she was, and so she was.

It dawned on me that nothing separates me from my coach except what I believe about myself, and a great deal of bold, consistent, aligned action. That isn’t to minimize her skill or her years of experience on me, and it isn’t to say I could ever be her, or would want to. She is uniquely herself; I want to be uniquely myself. But who is that, exactly? Which identity am I choosing to live inside, and is it supporting the future I say I want, or quietly resisting it? In that moment I realized I could merely choose to believe I am the bad-ass coach I already am. I could shift from the safe role of student to the confident position of teacher and guide, which I already am for my clients. I’ve got countless testimonials to that effect. I could wake up tomorrow and be her, with complete and total conviction.

None of this is new information to me. Years ago I learned and understood logically that the foundation of reality creation (or if that word feels too woo, call it simply creating desired results) is always identity. It’s who you decide to BE. Picture a pyramid: identity at the base, and above it the beliefs and paradigms you hold about the world, or the glasses through which you see everything. Above that sit your thoughts and emotions, looping on repeat, acting as a self-reinforcing energy that determines what you do or don’t do. Those actions produce your results. Contrary to common understanding, you don’t change by changing your actions; those are simply a side effect of who you already think you are. A flower blooms or dies based on its roots and the quality of its soil, not on how hard it tries. I’ve known this for years, and it still took this retreat, sitting in a room with a group of female phenoms building real businesses, to watch it fully land and integrate. They were the light I needed to finally see what I’d been resisting: full, resolved belief in myself, and the fact that I can create the exact version of this reality I want.

It’s a vulnerable thing to admit all of this, knowing my self-doubt is now on full display to past, current, and future clients. But I’m no better than anyone reading this. I’m documenting my own evolution as much for myself as for you, because we all carry some version of the same voice. Rick Carson, in his timeless book Taming Your Gremlin, calls it exactly that: the gremlin, or the inner narrator that runs on autopilot, quietly convinced that safety lives in staying whoever you’ve always been. His advice was never to argue with it or try to silence it. That only feeds it. It’s simply to notice it’s talking, and choose anyway. So while my gremlin insists I still have so much to learn and I’m still not quite ready, I’m beginning to notice the voice, thank it for trying to keep me safe, and pick a better costume nevertheless.

We’re here to be mirrors and lighthouses for each other, after all, and that’s as true for me as for anyone reading this. So excuse me while I step into my dressing room and change into something a little bolder, a little brighter, and a little more bad-ass. I believe I am her. And so, I am.

With conviction,

Nathalie

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I don’t know when that appreciation for the unknown started to diminish, only that it did, and that a heart once open to life’s uncertainties slowly gave way to something more brittle: the need for predictability, and a grip on control over every aspect of my future. I recall a catalyst for that shift in my sophomore year of college, when a routine dental procedure led to an infection in my throat and lungs that nearly killed me. There is nothing like a brush with death to reorganize a nervous system around one objective: survive. I came out of that year more disciplined than I went in, more terrified of failure than I’d ever been, counting calories, moderating every emotion, and managing every interaction like a variable I could control if I just tried hard enough. It was exhausting, and I didn’t comprehend the toll it would eventually take on me.

We are primal creatures underneath all our sophistication, wired to scan for threat, even when that threat is hardly existential. As a result, we seek the certainty — the known entity. Tony Robbins has spent decades teaching that certainty and its apparent opposite, the craving for surprise, variety, and change, are both core human needs, often battling inside the same person. Certainty says: if I know what’s coming, I can prepare, and at least minimize the damage. Antithetically, uncertainty implies that a life fully mapped in advance, with no surprises and nothing left to discover, would be unbearable. We vacillate between the two all the time, and we spend most of our lives trying to reconcile a largely unconscious contradiction.

The most unexpected thing I’ve done, astonishing even myself, was leave a stable corporate career for an entrepreneurial path. The version of me five years ago would never have believed it if you’d told her she would give up the apparent “security” and professional identity of “success” for a career where the only certainty is that the odds are stacked against you. I still don’t have the predictability I spent decades trying to manufacture, particularly after my illness. And to be honest, I still don’t know what next month’s income will look like, yet somewhere inside that ongoing uncertainty, I have never felt more alive and like myself.

Since then, the best parts of my business have taken shape through people and opportunities I couldn’t have foreseen. I was on a train in New York, a city neither of us lives in, reading (not ironically) The Courage to Be Disliked on my way to visit my college roommate, when I met someone who is now a dear friend and business collaborator. It was an encounter we both now call a serendipitous Universe Collision. A separate opportunity, coaching and facilitating a founders group, came from a woman I met at Hoffman, which, if you are unfamiliar, is essentially an anonymous healing experience that can only be described as ten years of therapy in one intensive week. Neither one came from crafting social media content, a pitch deck, or a strategic plan. I was simply being myself, unguarded, out in the world, following my joy and doing things I love (and yes, I even love the therapy).

The same thing happened recently in my personal life, after many years of singledom and cycling on and off the obligatory dating apps that mostly left me depleted and uninspired. A couple of months ago, on my regular morning walk, a man stepped into my path and asked me out. I would never have clocked him as a potential partner, but I was impressed by his courage, so I said yes, never expecting it to evolve beyond a first date. In the short time since, he has changed the shape of my days, even though very little of this relationship resembles what I thought I was looking for.

None of this is an argument against a clear vision and goals. A direction still matters. Certainty is useful when you need driving directions. But it is uncertainty, the unexpected, that makes the actual trip worth taking. It’s the wrong turn that becomes the better route; the sliding door moment when you meet the person who alters the trajectory of your life.

I believe wonder to be the most underrated emotion we have access to. We throw the word ‘wonderful’ around so casually that we’ve lost the felt sense of what it’s actually describing: the state of being genuinely in awe of your own experience. If you’ve spent years optimizing, gripping, trying to engineer every outcome so that nothing catches you off guard, I understand the impulse. I lived inside it for a long time. But I wonder what possibilities would unfold if we all opened our palms instead of tightening our fists? That kid in front of the closet already knew something it took me a lifetime to relearn: that not knowing what’s behind the door was the best gift of them all.

Sitting here in the quiet morning on my 41st birthday—a day that should be filled with joyous celebration—I find myself sobbing with grief. Yet I am reminded that life is the contrast: the immense gratitude for my blessings and the deep well of sorrow that I’ll never again hear my mother’s voice singing me happy birthday. I’ll never listen to her reminisce about the day I was born, and she’ll never get to experience the joy of watching me bring life into the world. And yet, my cup is spilling over with love as messages pour in from the beautiful people that continue to grace my journey. As tears pour out of me writing this, I am proud of the woman I am today, not escaping or numbing, just feeling all of it. Trusting she’s with me as I begin a new year of this full-spectrum experience where mystery and magic abound.

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As I was undergoing long overdue oral surgery last week with my mouth pried open and nitrous oxide streaming up my nostrils, I suddenly felt an intense wave of grief surge through my sedated body. Upon seeing the tears streaming down my face and assuming the local anesthesia hadn’t fully kicked in, the doctor asked me if I felt pain. I shook my head “no” – not the kind of pain she was suggesting, anyway. It was a curious sensation to be practically numb physically with my consciousness on overdrive. While I was overcome by sorrow, the immobilization provided a unique, detached vantage point from which to witness my emotional self. I suspect I belong to the majority in that I rarely welcome the presence of the darker, heavier feelings. However, I have become particularly adept at evading them during the last year, namely those associated with the greatest loss I have ever experienced: my mother. Nevertheless, all of my defense mechanisms – the perpetual busyness, overindulgences, and plain old denial – did not entirely eclipse my self-awareness, and I admit they were futile. As exhibited in the surgical chair, no amount of anesthesia or physical paralysis can permanently dam the powerful swell of emotions that define the human experience.

This event led me to wonder: what am I truly afraid of, and why do any of us resist emotions at all? My analytical brain rationalizes that feelings are just vibrations in the body, and as my wise friend recently reminded me, they are always temporary. The discomfort never lasts forever, and I have ample evidence to prove that I can weather the challenges. Yet anytime a thought about my mother arises that elicits the familiar, foreboding sense of an imminent breakdown, the primitive voice in my head pretending to keep me safe says that it is not a convenient time to let go. Sometimes the excuse is that I’m in a professional or social setting where emoting is inappropriate or might make others feel uncomfortable. But typically, the grief surfaces in the quietude of my own space and company, and on those occasions, I tell myself that the emotional hangover that inevitably occurs if I allow its unfolding is unproductive. Cue Netflix and another glass of wine, which somehow I justify as more productive…

Evidently, it’s never convenient to enter the shadowy abyss of sadness, but there’s an important distinction between what we consider opportune and what is authentic and essential. If I’m honest with myself, the real fear is not the dull headache and puffy eyes; it’s that I will be lost forever in the ensuing darkness. I might actually have to reckon with who I am without my mom – my world. I liken my feelings to an ever-present current swirling beneath the surface, and the second I stop treading water, my sorrow swiftly and quietly drowns me. Dr. David Hawkins describes this common sentiment in his book Letting Go. “We have become afraid of our inner feelings because they hold such a massive amount of negativity that we fear we would be overwhelmed by it if we were to take a deeper look.” The activities that I use to avoid the anguish not only serve to help me compartmentalize the overwhelm, but also to fill a massive void left in my heart, mind, and daily life from the absence of my mother in physical form. Maybe if I stay occupied, I won’t be crushed by this certainty: that I will never again be able to share the experience of falling in love, of seeking advice when I get pregnant and have a child of my own, or of leaning on her through the inevitable heartbreaks in my future. Like a child that covers her eyes and thinks the outside world can’t see her, I am fooling myself into believing that I get to bypass the real work of grappling with reality. In her biographical memoir entitled The Year of Magical Thinking, author Joan Didion’s honest depiction of losing her husband struck a nerve for me. She states, “Grief turns out to be a place none of us will know until we reach it. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail…Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.” After reading those sentences, it dawned on me that I am resisting the haunting emptiness once I surrender to the truth.

While I confess that I’ve hardly scratched the surface of my grief, intellectually I understand that loss – deep, painful loss – is inescapable. And so are the tears that follow, again and again without warning. We do not get to pick and choose the most convenient time for them to arrive, but we can decide to invite them in when they knock on our heart’s door. We are all surfing the wave of life, and with that thrill come the inevitable falls. I liken this brand of pain to the space between impact and drowning. If I were really surfing, eventually I’d have to come back to the surface for air, but clearly feelings are not limited by the same rules as the physical body. They say that grief never really ends; it just changes form. Even when you think you’ve transcended it – when you’ve come up for air – suddenly you find yourself incapacitated in a dentist chair bawling your eyes out. We expend so much energy trying to keep our heads above water, fighting life’s natural cycles and filling the empty spaces inside, but perhaps we aren’t supposed to do anything. Humans are beautiful because of our trauma and fragility, not in spite of it, and the void under the surface takes on a new meaning when we are willing to put on the goggles and simply open our eyes. So, next time I fall off the surfboard and plunge into the ocean’s depths, I will try to remember that not only do I know how to swim, but I can also breathe underwater and my warm, salty tears feel right at home.

Last week I had lunch with a friend who is also a coach. As coaches do, we got real deep, real fast.

She spent years building a career most people would call the definition of arrival. She attended a top-tier law school, worked on Wall Street, and various impressive companies adorned her résumé. And from the inside of all that, she watched the same pattern I lived myself and now see as a full-on epidemic: top talent, burned out, misaligned, quietly exiting in record numbers (or secretly wishing they could, if they only knew what they’d do), because the traditional model of work was never built to hold the whole of who they are.

We didn’t spend the lunch trading too many war stories about our past corporate lives, though there’s always a little of that. What we actually talked about was the strange, specific terrain of leaving something predictable to build something of our own: the freedom, the vulnerability, and the things that keep us both anchored when the ground feels shaky. That includes the impact we actually want to make; the recognition that our job as coaches is to help people move through a pace of change that is only accelerating, up to and including a drastically different shape of work than the one we imagined as we set out into the professional world. The future of work debate since Covid — in-person versus hybrid — doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what we’re collectively facing.

I would be irresponsible to tell you to quit your job. That’s not my message. Nor is it a prediction that full-time employment in corporations entirely disappears. What I do believe with real conviction, however, is that there will be far fewer full-time roles available in the shape we currently recognize them, and that the workforce will look nothing like it does today within five years or less.

It’s your choice to see that as a doomsday statement or an invitation to get ahead of something rather than be caught off guard by it. Yet, I know that if you’re reading this, you’re smart, conscious, and massively capable. You’ve already proven your ability to create results and achieve success. If you can do that in one arena, you most certainly can do it in another…and likely have more fun in the process.

I want to be proof that the shift from corporate to creator, as I call it, is not just survivable, but fulfilling. I also want to help those of you brave enough to face reality build the bridge between the job you’re doing today and the professional life you create on the other side of it — the one rooted in the unique intersection of your interests, skills, and capabilities. That combination only exists in you, and like lining up the correct numbers on a bike lock, it reveals the real value you’re able to create in the world. It’s you, in a category of one.

For some people, that will look like a portfolio of projects. For others, it might be fractional work across a few organizations that want what you alone offer. For others still, it could be an entirely different job you pioneer that doesn’t even exist yet.

None of this happens by accident, and none of it happens alone. It takes preparation, foresight, and, more than anything, those of us willing to lock arms with each other through what I think will be a genuinely rocky transition. That is the work I’m here to do as a coach: not predicting the future with certainty, because no one has that, but helping people build the interior and practical foundation to meet it.

Author Steven Kotler, in his book The Art of Impossible, makes the case that curiosity is the raw material of everything that follows it: mastery, flow, and the work that eventually becomes indistinguishable from who you are. He also writes about what he calls the optimal performance equation, and the practice is simple. Carve out fifteen minutes a day that belong only to you, and spend them pushing against the edge of a challenge that’s aligned with something you’re genuinely curious about; that you’re skilled enough to attempt but have not yet mastered. Try to get a little better today, and then a little better again tomorrow. Keep repeating. The dopamine loop of incremental improvement does the rest, and it teaches your nervous system something no five-year plan ever could. You are capable of building mastery on your own terms, outside anyone else’s system.

My friend and I didn’t solve for any of the uncertainty ahead over lunch. We just agreed that no matter how personally challenging our entrepreneurial paths are, the motivation is you—helping those who are ready to do the hard thing too, before the rude awakening arrives on its own terms instead of yours.

If you’re feeling that particular kind of restlessness that has nothing to do with your résumé and everything to do with what you sense is coming, congratulations, you’re tuned into the signal. Now, will you heed the call while you still get to choose the pace?

I created a short guide called The Passion Pursuit to help people excavate the things they’re genuinely curious about, find where a few of them intersect, and start treating that intersection as the foundation of something real to pursue rather than a hobby to get to someday. If the four walls of your office have started to feel smaller than you’d like, this is a great starting point. Paid subscribers download it below.

And if you’re past the worksheet and ready to build the actual bridge, that’s the work I do with clients one-on-one: naming the exact intersection of who you are, what you know, and what only you can offer the world, then building the real, practical plan to get you there. If that’s where you are, let’s talk.

With passion,

Nathalie

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While getting ready for a first date a couple of weeks ago, I spontaneously turned my camera on and started talking about it. I didn’t have a script, and it didn’t fit into any strategic content plan. It was an impulse in the spirit of being more open and vulnerable; less curation, more me. I told the story of a man managing a construction site near my house—one I’d passed by almost daily for months—who stopped me on my morning walk a few weeks earlier. Without knowing a thing about me, he asked me out in the middle of the street with unabashed boldness. I was floored not only by his approach, but by the person who showed up in our first proper encounter. Nothing about this meet-cute or match made sense. And yet, as I write this, multiple (long) dates and phone calls later, I can’t fight my body’s signals. My logical mind is attempting to reconcile the ease and lightness I feel with the specific image I’ve long held in my mind of the partner I’ve been calling in. And despite the incongruity, it feels like a big exhale, a long time coming after a lifetime of holding my breath.

I’ll back up. I’m forty. I ended my marriage shortly after a fairy tale wedding. I also walked away from a corporate career I’d spent fourteen years building. Often, I feel like I’m still finding my direction while friends I’ve known since childhood are long since settled: careers established, families formed, the whole picture of their lives assembled on schedule. They have what I’ve always pictured as the definition of success at this age. I know the comparison pattern for what it is, and some days I still can’t stop running it anyway. But below the starting-over feeling is a new narrative I’ve been gradually crafting with the help of great coaching, mentorship, and years of my own, often arduous inner work: I’m not behind; I’m re-writing the definition of success, creating my reality in real time, on purpose.

It feels safe to show the idyllic travel photos on Instagram and the polished presentations on LinkedIn. It feels far more unsettling to reveal that revenue hasn’t yet become predictable, or that all the profit gets reinvested back into my own coaching and development. It’s uncomfortable to share the part where I’m sitting at home on Friday night in sweatpants, feeling lonely, or when I’m ghosted after a date with a man I thought I’d see again.

I’ve reflected deeply in the four and a half years since my mother’s passing, and I can see now how much of her life she spent chasing the picture of success. I name it without judgment because I understand exactly where it came from, and I can see how important it was to her to ensure everything looked perfect from the outside. All of it, the entire architecture of achievement as measured by everyone around her, and in the end, none of it mattered to her. I’ve carried her on my shoulder through most of my own life edit, observing my similar tendencies, and vowing not to lose the truth of myself the way she did. By the end, mom traded the designer shoes and bags for t-shirts and flip-flops, and the big house in the gated neighborhood for a cottage by the water. She never stopped loving her bling, but she wore it differently, rocking it in her leather jacket, while flying free on the back of her partner’s motorcycle (yes, that’s her in the image below, just a couple of years before she died). She’d finally let out her own long exhale: forgoing the facade in favor of the feeling underneath it. I think about that trade constantly, and while I, too, love wearing her bling, her lesson of freedom is the most valuable inheritance she left me.

I remember when I learned that everything we want in life is for a feeling. I held that notion conceptually for a long time, but in these last few years, as I’ve blessedly returned to the wisdom of my own body—to really feeling again—it’s finally landing.

This new relationship has been a powerful mirror of that. And I’m watching the same principle rewrite my business right now. I’ve spent years trying to model success after coaches I admire, and what keeps getting reflected to me is less forcing it into a mold, less linear plan, more portfolio, more me: different interests intersecting and weaving into something that somehow makes sense. Maxwell Maltz named this same thing decades ago in his book Psycho-Cybernetics: “Creative striving for a goal that is important to you as a result of your own deep-felt needs, aspirations, and talents, and not the symbols which the Joneses expect you to display, brings happiness as well as success.”

If you’re reading this and some part of you feels behind, questioning your own measures of success, I see you. And if some version of your life looks right on paper and you’re still lying awake feeling like something underneath it isn’t right, I see you, too. But let’s take a walk together in nature, shall we? Let’s remember our essence and our innate freedom, deep below the layers performed for the ‘Joneses.’ Let the universe dish up its magic, surprising us while we’re tending to our hearts, giving us no choice but to listen for the full-body YES, just like I did, gratefully, when that man appeared in front of me on my morning walk.

Paid subscribers can download the workbook below for additional tools and to take your practice deeper.

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Yet the day of the first ceremony, my body decided otherwise: my period started unexpectedly, and out of respect for the guidelines of this particular indigenous tradition, I couldn’t participate. Having prepared for months and traveled all the way to Costa Rica, the isolation from the rest of the group was harder to sit with than the Ayahuasca. The irony wasn’t lost on me: the fertility “problem” (among others) I’d come there hoping to heal was the very thing keeping me out of the ceremony. Instead, I watched my peers retreat each evening and re-emerge the next morning, sharing their trip reports. Even though this turn of events gave me a softer, more beautiful alternative ceremony of my own, the old patterns of comparison and the dreaded FOMO still crept in. This wasn’t on the figurative brochure.

That same tension—wanting to belong to the group and, somewhere underneath it, wanting my own singular ceremony—is one I recognize from the rest of my life too. On paper, I followed a fairly traditional path: good girl, good school, good grades. But in my first job out of college, the rug was pulled out from under me in an unexpected layoff after eighteen months of relentless work and stress. My soul leaned into the detour. I pursued a role with a company that served only Latin America as one of a handful of non-Latin employees on staff. A few years later, that position led to the chance to move to Argentina and then to Mexico, as a young, naive gringa leading teams in a foreign language on unfamiliar terrain. In retrospect, the early professional divergence revealed as much to me about my own psyche as any plant medicine ceremony has: an internal tug-of-war between wanting to take the road less traveled, to step outside the mold, and wanting the conventional path, the one where I fit neatly inside it. Both desires have always lived in me at once, and I’ve never fully surrendered to either.

That inner battle took up arms again recently while I was home visiting family. Holding my cousin’s six-week-old baby, I watched him and his wife move through new parenthood together in their early thirties, both with good jobs, a house, and a partnership that from where I sat looked effortless and exactly on schedule. Why not me? Why did I take the life detour? I felt a familiar ache, and the old story returned: that I’m behind, that I did things wrong, that there’s still something in me to heal and fix. Being single and forty, just starting on my entrepreneurial path: that wasn’t in the brochure either.

A passage from one of my favorite authors, Neale Donald Walsch, has helped me make sense of the message I heard so clearly in Costa Rica. In his book Happier Than God, he writes that calling a condition “perfect” is not the same as calling it “wonderful.” It is to say that it’s ideally suited to your soul’s agenda in this moment, which may very well be to change the condition as a means of knowing, demonstrating, and experiencing the vastness of Who You Really Are. He says: “It is therefore very okay to observe previously created conditions, circumstances, or possibilities that do not please you, to take responsibility for your role in co-creating them, to speak a word of gratitude for their existence, and then to choose again, creating another condition or circumstance without judgment or condemnation.”

Something clicked when I read this. It hasn’t eliminated the tension I feel between checking the boxes of a “normal” life and being the one who goes her own way, often by myself, but it has put that tension into context. It’s all perfect, I suppose, if I’m open to receiving what it offers. I liked that idea enough to tattoo it on my arm last year: a permanent reminder that, at some level, I am always choosing in alignment with the lessons I’m here to learn, and to trust my inner guidance system.

Reaching what many call “mid-life,” seeking an epic love, building my own business after detonating my corporate career, feeling behind, left out, comparing, questioning the whole thing: it’s all perfect. I want the partnership. I want to stop doing math on my own timeline every time I hold someone else’s baby. And in the same breath, I love the life I’m building. I love that my work is a creative act—an expression of my values and purpose. I love being a bridge between cultures, and between the linear corporate world and the esoteric, emotional, and energetic domains. Feeling beautifully, sometimes painfully, alone on my path: also perfect. The loneliness and the freedom live in the same body. So does the fear of missing out. So does the quieter, stubborn certainty underneath it all, that I haven’t.

I know that everything I desire, and plenty that I don’t, is on its way right on time. I am choosing it, after all. And I know that I am here to create the kind of life that was never going to fit neatly into any brochure. I imagine none of it will look remotely like what I expected. And that, too, is all perfect.

While I received the gift of her words and the reminder of the impact I’m here to make, I also know that I didn’t change her life. She did. What I offered was a particular kind of attention, both as a witness and mirror, holding a container in which she could finally hear what had been trying to come through her for a long time. Our hearts always know the way; we just need to get underneath all the conditioning we accumulate throughout our lifetime. Everything that came forward in our time together was already there, waiting to be expressed.

She arrived at coaching with the goal to be promoted to VP. What we discovered fairly quickly was that the promotion was a “should,” something familiar to reach for because the real desire was harder to name. Her creative spirit had been slowly, quietly stifled inside a corporate machine she’d outgrown, and she wanted to fly on her own. She had wanted this for longer than she had allowed herself to admit. She was also terrified of what she perceived as a less secure path.

That fear is the most consistent thing I encounter in my work with clients, and understanding this changed how I think about clarity entirely. Fear, not missing information or wrong timing, is what sits between capable people and their life by design, or what I call The Vital Life. It is what makes clarity feel impossible when the truth is already present beneath the surface. Fear obscures it. It disguises itself as not being ready, and I don’t have it figured out yet, and it stays that way until enough inner ground has been built to move through it with something steadier than certainty.

My client, among countless others, built that ground. She isn’t in that corporate role anymore. She is now, indeed, flying.

Counterintuitively, strategy has very little to do with it.

I introduced these last week in my masterclass, From Corporate Work to Life’s Work, and I want to offer these here as a slower, more personal excavation. Each one has a question I’ll invite you to spend time with. Take these somewhere quiet and spacious, with a notebook if you like.

Awareness — become the observer of your life

Awareness is the condition that precedes every choice we make, and most of us are running large portions of our lives on automatic; patterns of thought, behavior, and identity wired in so long ago that we stopped recognizing them as patterns at all. They became the wallpaper. The practice isn’t fixing or judging what you find. It’s simply stepping back and watching what’s actually there, including the stories you’ve been telling yourself about who you are and what’s available to you.

Contemplate this: If you watched yourself this week as though you were watching a movie of your life and you are the main character, what would you be screaming at the TV screen because you’ve been too close to see it?

Thought Choice — choose your thoughts on purpose

We have somewhere around 60,000 thoughts per day, most of them reruns, and most of them subconscious. Our thoughts are habits as much as our behaviors are, and the stories we’ve been running about our professional lives — about what’s safe, what’s possible, who we’re allowed to be — are often not facts. They are simply very well-practiced sentences.

One of the things that kept my client on that VP track far longer than it served her was a thought that sounded completely true: this is the only path that makes sense for someone like me. It wasn’t. It was conditioning that had hardened into belief. What shifted wasn’t the thought alone; it was her willingness to examine it closely enough to see it as a thought at all, rather than the truth.

Contemplate this: What is the sentence you’ve been running about your professional life, and is it actually true, or is it just well-rehearsed?

Emotional Processing — feel and receive the message emotions offer

This is the skill I return to most consistently, and the one most people are most practiced at bypassing. High achievers especially become adept at it; we avoid discomfort through productivity, busyness, and one more thing to optimize. The emotions don’t disappear; they just find other means of reaching us with their message.

What my client discovered when she finally let herself sit in the feeling she’d been managing for years was that it was boredom. While there was a lot about her job and team she liked, she’d hit a ceiling with a life that wasn’t exercising her creative gift. When she stopped managing the feeling and just allowed that vibration to integrate, the truth was obvious.

Contemplate this: What feeling are you unwilling to feel? When you stifle feelings on one end of the spectrum, you stifle your capacity to fully feel those on the opposite end as well.

Massive Action — move and iterate until you get results

Waiting for certainty before action is a recipe for perpetual stagnation. Clarity is revealed through movement, contrary to how shaky it can feel when the territory ahead is genuinely unknown.

This is less about urgency or volume of action and more about staying in motion, even incrementally. Treat it like an experiment, and every result, including the ones that don’t work, is information. My client didn’t have a business plan when she made her decision. She had one honest conversation with herself and one small step, and everything grew from there.

Contemplate this: What is the smallest step you keep telling yourself you’ll take once you have more clarity, and what would it look like to take it this week?

Result Creation — recognize your experience as a side effect

By the time something shows up in the outer conditions of your life like the work that doesn’t fit, the body signaling something, or the growing sense that what you’ve built doesn’t match who you’ve become, it is already a side effect. It’s a reflection of what has been happening inside: in your sense of identity, the beliefs that govern what you allow yourself to reach for, and your nervous system’s working definition of what is safe to want.

Most people skip this part. They move the furniture of their outer life and wonder why the room still feels cluttered. What my client eventually understood is that the shift she needed to make wasn’t really about the career. It was about who she decided she was and what she finally allowed herself to believe was possible for her. The career became the side effect of that, not the cause.

Contemplate this: If the life you’re living right now is a reflection of your inner world (your sense of identity, your beliefs, your emotional wiring), what would need to shift inside first before anything outside could genuinely change?

If you answer these five questions honestly, I’ll bet the answers surface some things.

If you want to go deeper into the practices like the nervous system work, the desire excavation, and the fuller map of how these skills work together, the complete replay of last week’s masterclass is available here. It’s free until June 26, before it’s only accessible to my paid subscribers.

And if something in these questions has landed and you sense that you’d like to do this work with someone alongside you, I currently have three openings for my Vital Shift offer: three 90-minute sessions, a developmental deep dive using the Enneagram, and a bonus fourth session added for anyone who books by July 1st.

The invitation is simply this: if you’re ready to move from circling the edge to actually crossing it, let’s talk about how I can support you.

Book a Clarity Call

To your Vital Life,

Nathalie

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With the A/C blasting, I took deep breaths to untie the knot in my stomach and delay what felt like a wave crashing over me the moment I walked through those doors.

I remember the daily commute after Covid-era “flexible work” perks faded and leadership called for a full five-day return to office. As a good HR soldier, I was naturally expected to model the way. Yet there I was: physically at a job I had somehow convinced myself I had no choice but to keep doing, mentally wishing I were anywhere else. So I would sit, breathe, and manufacture a smile lest I seem anything but grateful to be there.

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And I was genuinely grateful. I didn’t take for granted a well-paying position I’d worked incredibly hard for over a fourteen-year corporate career. But everything in me was revolting. I kept telling myself there was no other option. I was “in too far.” Sure, I could go elsewhere, but deep down I knew that wasn’t the cure-all. I’d been through too many company rodeos. Different horse, same ride.

In hindsight, the story I was telling myself — that it was too late to change — was not the truth. It is what truth sounds like when it has been filtered through an uninvestigated paradigm. From inside the container of obligation, fear, and an identity built entirely around fitting in somewhere, the possibilities look bleak. This is not a failure of imagination. It is what happens when we have been inside a system long enough that the system’s ceiling becomes our own.

I’ve been listening to different thought leaders lately who are addressing the nature of this moment of awakening and increasing transparency we are in. One of them is Todd Rose, a Harvard-trained social scientist who studies collective illusions and the psychology of social conformity. He contends that we profoundly and consistently miscalculate what other people actually think, and that miscalculation drives us to conform to an imagined consensus that often doesn’t even exist. In the context of my own unquestioned beliefs, I see now that part of me assumed I was following the expected path, and that everyone around me thought it was the right one; the very definition of success.

But who is everyone anyway, and why did I care?

My brain was doing what brains do: keeping me safe, which looked like staying the course and conforming to the expectations of the groups I belonged to. There was an unspoken agreement: if you are here, working hard, you must love it, and it must be right. Right?

Rose also asserted that we are living in the age of courage over conformity, and he made a distinction between fitting in and belonging.

That stuck me. At some subconscious level, I stayed because I didn’t want to risk rejection, and I had no other model or community to welcome me.

Most of us have been optimizing for fitting in since we interpreted the danger of not doing so as young children. The corporate world, for all its real gifts, is one of the most sophisticated systems ever built for producing that particular trade. I say this as someone who spent more than a decade inside it and was genuinely good at it. In my HR capacity, I even helped build it (often touted as “culture”). What I didn’t have language for in that parking lot was that the dread was not really about the commute, the emails, or even the job. It was the cost of the trade finally coming due. My nervous system was telling me, with increasing urgency, that the version of me walking through those doors each morning was not authentic or even alive, really. I was seeking to fit into a mold of who I thought I should be, upholding a corporate culture I represented, all the while never belonging to the one person who mattered most: myself.

The poet John Keats had a name for the capacity he believed made great creative work possible. He called it Negative Capability: the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Negative Capability is not only a poetic ideal. It is the essential inner skill of every meaningful life decision.

What also kept me on the corporate track despite the daily dread was not a lack of desire to change. It was an inability to tolerate not knowing what I was changing toward. Every time the message got loud enough to register, my mind would immediately retort: But what would you do instead? How would you make a living? Who would you even be? I could not produce satisfying answers (fear disguised as a lack of clarity), and so it was easier to stay inside the story of “I’m in too far,” “I’m too late,” or “I’m being responsible.”

What I understand now, having lived on the other side and walked this path with clients long enough to recognize the pattern, is that the path does not reveal itself in advance. It reveals itself to the person who has developed enough interior capacity (or Negative Capability, if that term resonates) to stand in the uncertainty without it destroying them.

The path is made clear for the person who has the courage to take the first step. And then another…

Despite displaying the courage to leave corporate and walk the path of creator, I’ve still been trying my darnedest to conform.

So, to come full circle, let me say the thing I have been too afraid to say.

What I believe is that for most people, your life’s work is not inside a corporation. Not because there is anything wrong with corporate work; I still work with leaders and teams inside organizations and know there are genuine exceptions. But because the full, irreplaceable expression of what you are uniquely here to bring forward rarely belongs to someone else’s institution or bottom line.

It is whispering somewhere inside you right now. You may hear it in the parking lot before you walk in, on the drive home, or in the quiet moments when you are alone with yourself. Maybe it is the work you do on the side that lights you up differently. Maybe it is the thing you keep saying you will do someday, when things are less uncertain.

But things will never feel less uncertain. The time is not coming to find you. You have to find it by becoming someone who can stand in the not-knowing without reaching for a way out.

We are in an extraordinary moment. The tools to build something entirely your own — a one-person business, a body of work, an expression of your gifts (whether it’s a source of income or not, no matter) — are no longer reserved for a few. A device that fits in your pocket is enough to get started. And the technology that makes it possible to reach, serve, and build is only going to grow more powerful from here. What’s available today is the least advanced it will ever be, and it is considerably more so than what existed just a few years ago as I sat in that parking lot.

The question is not whether it is possible. The question is whether you are willing to hear what is calling you, reject the gravitational pull of conformity, and develop the safety inside yourself to explore what’s alive in you.

Who do you want to serve?

What do you care about?

What are you uniquely capable of offering the world?

I’m not saying leave your job tomorrow, or that the path should look the same for everyone. Some people will feel this clearly. Others will drive in both lanes for a while (or forever) from desire, necessity, or both. Personally, I had to leave the corporate world entirely to hear the Truth inside of me clearly. But that was my journey, and I’m grateful I had the option to do so.

What I am saying is: You’re never too late. You’re always right on time.

And your life’s work is not waiting for you to have it all figured out.

It is waiting for you to drive out of that parking lot without a GPS, trusting your inner compass to help you find your way.

With courage,

Nathalie

I’m hosting a free live masterclass this Friday, June 19, from 1–2pm ET called From Corporate Work to Life’s Work, where I’ll share the 5 inner skills for walking this path, even before you have clarity on where it leads. The replay and tools I share will be available through June 26, and then only available to my paid subscribers.

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I rode out the pandemic in my 22nd-floor condo in downtown Miami. Every morning I woke up to hundreds of unread emails, a body that felt like a live wire, and a view of the city spread out below me. For many months, the streets looked largely empty, and aside from the DJ blasting tunes from his patio in the building across from me, the world had gone quiet in the strangest way.

Let me back up. Just three months into my dream Leadership Development job for a major company in the hospitality industry, I was furloughed, unsure if I’d ever be called back. So I picked up contract work with a public health organization. I was as close to the front lines as a non-essential worker locked in a high-rise could get. Underneath all of it, my mother’s stage 4 cancer was progressing. She was declining rapidly while the world seemed to be collapsing around us. I was terrified for her, anxiety-ridden myself, and actively avoiding what might surface if I ever stopped moving.

Locked up, working 10+ hours a day, I had four walls as boundaries but no emotional ones whatsoever. While hiding from the virus, denying the painful truth that I would soon lose the most important person in the world to me, and pretending I could hold my own through it all, I was drowning in the noise—fear disguised as productivity, urgency, and responsibility.

Soon after the lockdowns lifted, I landed a new role, back in my Human Resources Business Partner seat. Finally, I can add real value again, I told myself. What I actually got was more noise at a higher volume, because now I wasn’t just inside the system; I was an instrument of it. I was enforcing decisions I wasn’t sure I even agreed with, including terminating employees who refused to provide proof of vaccination status or an acceptable exemption. The dissonance I felt in my body during those years was trying to tell me something. And still, I couldn’t hear it through the noise.

Now, over five years removed, what I know is this: that dissonance was the signal.

It was the quiet, persistent frequency calling for me to wake up. My body had been broadcasting it for years, telling me that something didn’t fit. I was performing a version of myself that had been built to serve a system and to advance an agenda that was never really my own.

To be clear, I am not claiming the system is all a conspiracy, nor that it is all bad. I benefited from it in many ways over the course of my career, and despite leaving my corporate path, I have by no means exited it entirely. It is, however, a structure that was designed to produce capable, compliant contributors who don’t ask too many questions about the terms of the arrangement. Work hard. Follow the rules. Rise just enough to stay invested. And in return: the paycheck, the title, the employer-sponsored sick-care plan, and the 401k invested in a market that doesn’t reflect reality.

I’m not here to tell you to blow it all up. There are practical needs, constraints, and plenty of genuinely great leaders and organizations out there. But I am asking you to get honest about whether you know the terms you’ve agreed to, and whether you agreed to them consciously. Because the world is reorganizing — geopolitically, economically, and socially — at a pace of change I can barely grasp. I don’t know the future, but the structures we were trained to trust warrant real scrutiny. And your job, your role, and your industry will undoubtedly look vastly different in five years. For many people, it won’t exist at all.

This is an invitation to stop outsourcing your sense of security to systems that actually perpetuate fear and co-dependency. Ask yourself this honestly: if you trusted that you were fundamentally safe, that you have what it takes, that the floor would hold, what would you actually do? We can feel powerless in the face of it all, or we can play our own part in embodying something different. That choice is always available.

The vantage point I spent years thinking I had twenty-two floors up, hundreds of emails per day, and proving my competence for a system I’d never examined- wasn’t a vantage point at all. It offered height without clarity, which I’ve only started to gain more recently in this journey, and ironically, living much closer to the ground. The greatest skill available to you right now that no AI can replicate is discernment; it’s the capacity to separate signal from noise. To hear what your own life is trying to tell you underneath the performance, the productivity, and the chronic, low-grade fear that most of us have normalized so thoroughly we’ve stopped calling it fear at all.

This is the work I’m here to do, and the work I am still doing on myself. I’m not about pushing change from the outside, because that’s not how it works. But I am focused on becoming someone who listened to the signal, who lives from it, and who can hold that frequency steadily enough that others feel it as a possibility for themselves. I’m here to be a reminder that the answers all lie within, and you already know the way.

If you feel the call, this is also where resourcing yourself to support you in that shift is transformational. I know it’s been invaluable for me, and I never would have jumped off that cliff, from corporate to creator, without a coach. Whether it’s a coach, mentors, and/or a community, find the people who will witness you, who mirror back and hold you through the choices you’re making and the person you’re becoming in the process.

The new paradigm of leadership begins inside your own heart and extends outward to whoever belongs in your ecosystem. It arises when you stop confusing altitude for clarity, when you tune out the noise long enough to hear what’s actually being transmitted, and when you start letting your signal lead.

You don’t have to exit the system…or not entirely. But recognize and like who you are inside of it. And if you do choose to go rogue, send me your signal so I can visit.

With clarity,

Nathalie

If you’d like to watch or listen to the video version of this essay, you can find it on my YouTube channel.

Paid subscribers get access to three downloadable tools I mention that accompany this session:

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A few weeks ago, I was sitting in the audience at TEDx Miami for an event called The Future is Human, surrounded by people thinking critically about artificial intelligence and what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world. During one of the more technical talks, the speaker flashed a headline atop his slide that awoke something in me:

P(doom)

He was using it in its technical sense — the probability of a catastrophic AI outcome, such as a doomsday event or the end of things as we know them. He had a whole framework for it, but I was only half-listening because my mind had already gone somewhere else.

P(doom). The probability of doom. It captured what I feel on certain mornings when I wake up and let the headlines in. Or the dread that overtakes me when I let myself marinate in narratives of fear, urgency, and a world that increasingly seems to be run by systems failing the people they were built to serve.

I know you know this feeling. Maybe it shows up as the Sunday-night spiral before the work week. Maybe it’s the quiet, low-grade anxiety that something large and important is no longer working — in the culture, in your industry, in your career, or in the life you worked so hard to build. We live in a world that is genuinely turbulent, and staying informed feels like a civic duty even when the information consistently delivers you to despair.

But here’s where the math turned interesting for me.

(Not so ironically, I used AI to harken me back to high school statistics class and re-educate myself on the formula for calculating the probability of anything...)

P(X) = Number of Favorable Outcomes ÷ Total Number of Possible Outcomes

At both a philosophical and a spiritual level, the denominator — total possible outcomes — is infinite. Our natural world and humanity within it are not a closed system. The possibilities available to any of us, at any moment, are boundless. We live in an illusion of limitation, and the whole game of life is waking up and expanding beyond what we ever thought was possible. We are not on the receiving end of a fixed deck of 52 cards. We are the dealer co-creating with forces beyond our full comprehension, and we continue to generate new ones.

Put more plainly: if you keep cataloguing the ways things could go wrong — the jobs disappearing, the chances closing, and the world narrowing — you are literally increasing the numerator for doom. You are doing the math on the wrong side of the equation. But if you turn your full, deliberate, energetically committed attention to what’s possible, what’s opening, and what’s being created, you increase the probability of that instead.

I know how this can sound, and I want to tread carefully because this is not a manifesto for spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity. We don’t resolve real injustice or real constraint by simply “choosing good vibes.” The world is complicated, and staying alert to what’s actually happening matters.

But there is a distinction worth naming between awareness and absorption, or between being informed and being captured. It’s the difference between being the interested observer and living inside the doom spiral as your primary address.

Your attention is not neutral. It is the most active force you have.

One of my mentors has a line he repeats often: attention is your most valuable currency, and you always get what you pay for.

I’ve been contemplating that more acutely lately since I started working with a new business coach — someone I was specifically attracted to not just because of her skill set, but because of the business she’s built, the life she created, and the unabashedly authentic way she moves through the world. She carries a kind of ease and authority that isn’t performed or achieved through sheer effort, but that she’s cultivated from the inside out.

Like every other coach or mentor I’ve chosen to work with since starting my business, I enrolled with her because I wanted to be near evidence of what I’m building toward.

That’s not a small thing. It’s actually the thing.

In order to achieve any goal, we have to (at some level) believe it’s possible. But believing something is possible is the floor, not the ceiling. What actually moves you from intention to reality is familiarity. It’s the felt, embodied, nervous-system-level recognition of who you’re becoming. When you can sit across from someone who is already living a version of what you want, your body stops treating it as foreign territory. It starts to feel like something you know, and, in some sense, like someone you’ve been all along.

This is why coaching and mentorship aren’t just about skill acquisition; they’re about proximity to the possible, until the possible becomes probable, the probable becomes expected, and the expected becomes you.

The progression I’ve come to understand looks like this:

potential → possibility → probability → certainty → creation in 3D reality

Moving from one stage to the next is accelerated by familiarity. The more you are in contact with what you want through evidence, embodied experience, and the people you’re in relationship with, the more your identity begins to reorganize around it. And identity is where all of this lives. Vision and concrete goals are important, but none of that will matter until that future reality feels native to you.

The probability of your dream — your vision, your goal, the life you are actually here to live — becoming real is a function of intense focus, combined with genuine belief in its possibility, multiplied by familiarity. The kind that comes from proximity to evidence, until you become the version of yourself who already has it. That goes for the probability of doom as well… you don't get to have it on only one side of the equation.

Author and activist Charles Eisenstein puts it plainly: “The world that we prepare for will be the world that we create. The future is not a given, not to be predicted according to likelihoods — we create it as a choice.”

This is the most important leverage point available to any of us in a moment that can feel heavy with what’s wrong and frightening and narrowing. We are not denying what’s difficult, but we choose, deliberately and repeatedly, to increase the numerator on the other side.

While the TEDx theme was The Future Is Human, I’d offer a small amendment: the future is wherever you focus your creative energy, and it belongs to whoever decides to inhabit it now.

That’s not blind optimism. It’s math.

With possibility,

Nathalie

If you’d like to watch the expanded video version of this essay, you can find it on YouTube.

I acknowledge my privilege as I share this image of my past self, which has evolved into a modern-day version that is very much alive and well in me today. The depiction is not boastful, nor is it sarcastic. While I get a good laugh and feel occasional mortification looking back at old photos, I am not ungrateful for my mother’s principal hand in designing that life. I know without a doubt she was nurturing me with the best of intentions. I am merely observing the probable source of my conditioned perfectionist mindset from a more developed consciousness and the smidge of wisdom I’ve gained in my years. I’ve realized that attempting or even fooling myself that perfection is achievable is my kryptonite: irresistible yet repeatedly interfering with the possibility of any true emotional freedom. And who am I – who are any of us – if we aren’t free? While I can hold appreciation and sentience in the same emotional space, “perfect” has a steep price that I have paid for as long as I can remember. I used to roll my eyes at my grandmother, who would predictably plump the pillows behind my cousins and me on our visits to her home the minute we stood up from her sofa. Now, that is me. I caught myself in the act just last weekend. Admittedly, I crave flawlessness in my surroundings, my appearance, my resume…every domain of my life. It deceivingly gives me a sense of peace, control, and worthiness. Yet, regardless of the girth of my pillows, the suppleness of my hair, or the amplitude of my wardrobe, I am still a human being who experiences the entire emotional spectrum, including but not limited to grief, anxiety, and insecurity.

Nobody can actually do what most of us mere mortals are constantly attempting, both consciously and subconsciously, which is to bypass those existential challenges and difficult feelings. If that were even achievable, arguably, we would be denying the human experience altogether. That said, we are adaptive beings, and society provides multitudes of avenues and rewards for hiding our flaws behind masks of beauty and order.

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My own pattern of succumbing to the perfection trap was illuminated for me recently through a new, romantic relationship. After multiple years of singledom, a man unexpectedly walked into my life and made me believe in the possibility of love again. My empowered self recognizes that I generated that belief…but I digress. It was a sweet reminder that I am indeed capable of feeling those feelings, after all. I had a fleeting sense that my inner work over the last few years had finally tuned me to the right frequency. Nevertheless, after a few months of dating, he suddenly ceased all communication with me. I was “ghosted,” which seems like something you hear about after a one-night rendezvous, or with 20-somethings as they taste the flavors of the dating rainbow. Oh, how naïve of me. I asked myself, how could this happen? I am the total package! Deep down, I admit that I may not entirely believe that about myself, nor was I necessarily convinced that this man was the one. Nonetheless, I yearned for the relationship’s unfolding to be…well, perfect.

Perhaps that’s where I had it all wrong. It’s unlikely that I will ever know what led to this abrupt disappearing act; yet, it aroused discomfort and insecurity in me, which, after some distance from the event, I now choose to see as a teacher. At some level, throughout our time together, I felt myself endeavoring to demonstrate that I could be the perfect partner to this man. I didn’t even flinch when his beloved dog created a crime scene out of one of my favorite pairs of heels. How could someone walk away from this cool, composed chick?

While I don’t purport to believe in perfection at an intellectual level, my programming has undeniably laid the foundation for me to pretend that state is attainable. But at what cost? Conceivably, this guy was keen enough to detect the façade. We relate to messy, we empathize with chaos, and we crave reminders that we aren’t alone in our turbulent journeys. We all want to feel accompanied and held in that humanity. While I can only conjecture as to the reasons for his behavior, and although there were definitely kinder and more mature ways to end the relationship (cough…have a conversation), I appreciate that the experience has helped me know myself a little better, or rather, know my heart better.

Not coincidentally, as I’ve been reading the latest book entitled Living Untethered by one of my favorite authors, Michael Singer, the following quote stood out:

This humbling experience, as I perceive it, served as a beautiful illustration that perfection is the mind suppressing the heart. And it is also lonely, boring, and fundamentally inhuman. It’s not approachable or relatable; it is like being a child in a museum of lovely things that you can’t touch. I contend that perfection is often just a ruse for our intrinsic and very normal beliefs of inadequacy. While looking attractive, having all the academic and/or professional accolades, and curating an orderly environment may lead to a short-term reward, if I learned anything from my mother’s awful disease and unfairly premature departure from this human plane (not to mention all the other atrocities we see daily), it’s this: life is flawed and rarely seems fair. No amount of contrived magnificence allows us to bypass the ugliness. Sure, maybe things feel easier at the outset because of how people treat you if you look the part. But ultimately, we are all in the same club, projecting our fears and yearning to feel whole, worthy, and included. Instead, I propose that we start a new club where the price of entry is unabashed authenticity, and the hot chicks that skip the line are replaced by those who are a bit more of a hot mess – hairspray optional.

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|<< Rewind |<<

As a kid, I was enraptured by the art of scrapbooking. Capturing beautiful moments on camera and the creative process involved in memorializing them captivated my attention for countless hours throughout my middle and high school summer breaks, which I can now recognize as my earliest experiences of being “in flow”. I was so absorbed in my project that time just seemed to disappear. I recall how beautifully tangible it felt – the joy of taking my rolls of film to a store, waiting days for their development, and finally, like a kid on Christmas, unwrapping actual photographs that I could hold in my hand and shuffle through repeatedly. Likewise, I savored my annual trips to the craft store, where I carefully selected the appropriate hardbound book that I would proceed to enliven with pictures, stickers, newspaper cutouts, tickets, and more…all evidence of happy memories of the past year. While those old, bulky scrapbooks consume a ridiculous amount of space as they deteriorate in my closet today, I cling to my nostalgia now that all my modern-day memories are siphoned to the cloud – some impersonal and arcane dimension where digital information hides out of sight, only to be summoned for viewing through one of our (too) many devices.

It’s fascinating and somewhat ironic, recalling the time I used to dedicate to the act of preserving my past; yet, as long as I can remember, I’ve been hurrying into my future with reckless abandon, afraid of arriving “late” to a self-imposed deadline to achieve the milestones on my life to-do list. Indeed, my relationship with time has been a complex one, and it continues to evolve. In his fictional book about Father Time, the first man on earth to count the hours, author Mitch Abom makes a poignant statement:

“Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.”

Oh, how that fear resonates for me, and once again, I’m reminded of nature’s perfect order in which none of it exists. And while it is unlikely that I will resume my scrapbooking hobby, these old home videos reminded me of the fleeting nature of time as I perceive it and how moving it is to press pause on the metaphorical tape of life, rewind, and savor the moments past.

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While the finite nature of time can be a prison of our own design, it’s also a profound blessing. It is the container in which we feel all the sensations of our uniquely human presence, ranging from agony to bliss. Time is also the anchor from which we create our future realities. Without time, there would be no evolution; no dimension for dreams or goals that provide direction and significance through the challenges and accomplishments that mark our daily journeys.

Paradoxically (or perhaps quite cleverly, as the Universe will have it), I finally watched the resurfaced videos, and I was transported back to a blissfully unhurried state, simply enjoying the moments and people right in front of me. I watched my innocent young self, carefree on the Florida Gulf Shore, basking in the sand and waves. I marveled at seeing my mom skipping gleefully as she collected shells on the beach. And I smiled as I heard my grandfather’s classic dry humor after more than 20 years since his passing – my mother cackling behind the camera as she recorded him narrate his process of making gourmet “penguin wing” sandwiches for a picnic.

The Chinese have a term, Hui Gan, which can be described most aptly as “returning sweetness,” or the finish, as one enjoys with certain teas or a fine wine. These videos were not just priceless footage of family that I will never physically embrace again in my current dimension of reality, but they also epitomized the notion of Hui Gan. Just like a fine wine, I am relishing the flavor of those memories as they linger on my proverbial tongue and heart – an elegant complement to the enticing next meal of my life, yet to be served.

In this masterclass, we went deep on the question: what happens when the ground you’ve built your life on was never actually steady? We talked about the unconscious beliefs keeping you stuck, the three states that shape every decision you make, and why building the capacity to hold uncertainty is the most important leadership skill no one is teaching. Watch the full replay here.

If you want to take this from concept to embodiment, I’ve included two tools for paid subscribers. These are resources I developed for my one-on-one coaching clients, designed to make the ideas in this masterclass something you practice in your body, not just understand in your mind. That is the difference between information and transformation, and it is at the heart of what I call Vital Leadership: the practice of leading from the inside out so that your external results are rooted in internal alignment rather than fear and survival.

A preview of what’s inside:

The Leadership Energy Map is a self-assessment across all seven energy dimensions, from Foundation (safety, stability) through Creation, Drive, Connection, Expression, Vision, and Purpose. You rate where you are now and where you want to be, giving you a clear picture of which centers are resourced and which are depleted. Think of it as an energy audit for your inner operating system.

The Finding Your Ground Nervous System Training & Resource Guide includes the three nervous system states and how to read them, the 5 Levers you can pull daily to support regulation, and the exercise to train your nervous system capacity. This will walk you through writing your three sentences (reactive, shut-down, and resonant), connecting each to a nervous system state, and practicing moving between them. You can do it with a partner or as a solo visualization. The more you intentionally move in and out of these states, the more capacity you build to hold whatever life asks of you.

And remember, you already have free access to tools and reflections across all seven energy centers in the 7-day Lead with Energy Activation series posted on my Substack. Each day includes a teaching, a guided exercise, and a recording you can return to anytime.

If something surfaced during the masterclass that you want to explore further, I work one-on-one with leaders navigating transitions. In that space, we go much deeper through my Vital Leader Pathway process, and it is all bespoke to you. Book a free Clarity Call here or through my website (nathaliedanielle.co) if you want to take this further.

With vitality,

Nathalie

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Welcome to day 7, the final day of your Lead with Energy Activations. Over the past six days, we’ve built a foundation of inner safety, reconnected with pleasure, claimed our identity and personal power, opened the heart, spoken truth, and learned to see from the inside out. Today, we arrive at the crown.

Sahasrara in Sanskrit means “thousandfold.” It’s often depicted as a thousand-petaled lotus flower, and while many imagine the petals reaching upward toward something divine, they actually arc downward, pouring nectar back into the body, nourishing every energy center below it. Spirit and matter are not separate. The crown doesn’t take you out of your life, but instead, it pours meaning back into it.

This is the energy center of connection — to something greater than yourself. You might call it God, the Universe, the Divine, Source, Love, or simply Purpose. The name doesn’t matter. What matters is the recognition that you are not doing this alone. That your life, leadership, and impact are part of something larger moving through you.

No matter what your relationship to that “something larger,” I want to introduce a framework that makes this practical, not abstract. It comes from the Conscious Leadership Group, adapted from a concept originally credited to Michael Beckwith. It’s called the 4 Ways of Leading in the World, and it describes four postures of consciousness that shape how we experience everything: leadership, purpose, time, happiness, all of it.

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The Framework: 4 Ways of Leading

To Me — “Life happens to me.” This is victim consciousness. The posture is blame. The experience is that there is a problem, someone is at fault, and someone else should fix it. The key question here is “Why me?” Most of us have visited this place, and some of us have lived there.

By Me — “I make life happen.” This is creator consciousness, and the posture is personal responsibility. The experience is curiosity and empowerment: I created this, so I can change it. The key question is “What can I learn? What do I want to create?” This is a powerful place to operate from. And if you’ve been doing the work of this series, you’ve been strengthening your By Me energy.

But as powerful as By Me is, it can also become exhausting because it’s all on you. You’re the one strategizing, pushing, and making it happen. And when you hit the ceiling of what effort alone can produce, there’s an invitation waiting.

Through Me — “I cooperate with life happening.” This is co-creator consciousness. The posture is surrender, which is not passivity, but active trust. The experience is flow, wonder, and awe. The belief here is that you are the source of meaning in your experience, and that life is whole and complete, even when it doesn’t look the way you planned. The key question shifts from “What can I do?” to “What wants to happen through me?”

This is where the crown opens because you stop being the sole author and start being a vessel. Ego doesn’t disappear; that seat of identity we built in the solar plexus is still important. But it gets balanced with the recognition that there is a bigger force behind you, and when you force less and flow more, creative energy moves through you into aligned action. You’re not alone in creating, you’re co-creating.

As Me — “Life is me.” This is unity consciousness: oneness, non-duality, the experience of being at one with all. It can look or sound like enlightenment is described (for those of us non-enlightened beings :). But for most of us, it’s a state we touch in moments rather than live in permanently. We won’t try to get there today. But knowing it exists reminds us that the journey doesn’t end at Through Me. There’s always more to open up to.

The shift that matters most for leaders right now is first, from To Me (victim consciousness) to By Me (creator consciousness). That empowerment alone is life-changing. Then, the shift from By Me to Through Me just gets to be fun. From “I have to make this happen” to “what wants to happen through me when I get out of my own way?” Notice the energetic tone of that.

Today’s Practice: From To Me to Through Me

This activation is a written exercise. Press play on the recording above to hear me walk you through it. Then come back here and write.

Step 1: Choose one area of your leadership or life where you feel stuck, where you’re pushing too hard, or where effort isn’t producing the results you expect.

It could be something broad like purpose, leadership, or time. Or something specific: a project, a relationship, or a decision you keep circling.

Step 2: Identify where you currently are.

Write down what you believe about this area right now. Be honest. You might recognize To Me energy (“this isn’t fair, someone should fix this”) or By Me energy (“I just need to work harder, strategize better, figure it out”).

Step 3: Now write a new belief that would move you into the next quadrant.

If you’re in To Me, first, no judgment! Then, ask yourself: if I took full ownership of this area and believed that I have the power to create something different, rather than waiting for someone or something else to change, what would I believe instead?

If you’re in By Me, ask yourself: if I believed life were cooperating with me in this area and trusted that I was a co-creator rather than the sole creator, what would I believe instead?

Write the beliefs you would hold, what new question(s) you would be asking, and how would that change your experience in this area.

Here are two examples to help you see the shift:

Purpose → To Me: “What purpose? I know I should have one, but I feel lost.” → By Me: “My purpose is mine to declare and go after. I just need to try many different things, which takes energy and commitment.” → Through Me: “My purpose is not in my doing, it’s self-evident in my being. I don’t chase it, I receive it through listening.”

Leadership → To Me: “My role comes with have-to’s, burdens, and incompetent followers.” → By Me: “There are skills and techniques to master which create good or effective leadership.” → Through Me: “Leadership arises in response to present need. There is no ‘one’ who is the leader, I am in co-creation with my team/stakeholders/collaborators based on what the moment asks for.”

Don’t worry about getting it perfect. Let the Through Me beliefs surprise you. They often sound quieter and more spacious than what you’re used to believing.

After the Practice: One Question

What opens up in your leadership when you stop trying to be the sole force behind everything and start trusting that something larger is co-creating with you?

This is the final activation, but it’s not the end. These seven energy centers aren’t a ladder you climb and leave behind. They’re a living system, and the more you practice moving through them, the more naturally your leadership flows from all of them at once.

If this series has moved something in you, I’d love for you to join me live. On Thursday, May 15, at 1:00 PM ET, I’m hosting a free masterclass on Substack called Lead with Energy: Finding Your Ground. We’ll go deeper into this work together with a focus on the first energy center (the Root), in real time.

Make sure you hit Subscribe to be notified when we go live, and if you can’t make it, the recording will live here on my Substack for you to catch up later.

Thank you for showing up every day this week.

Thank you for doing the inner work that most leaders never touch.

And thank you for trusting that the way you lead starts with the way you lead yourself.

With purpose,

Nathalie

Welcome to day 6 of your Lead with Energy Activations. Over the past five days, we’ve built a foundation of inner safety, reconnected with pleasure, claimed our identity and personal power, opened the heart, and found the courage to speak truth. Today, we arrive at the center that most people call the Third Eye. Here’s why it’s actually the First Eye.

We generally operate in a culture that prioritizes what we can see, measure, and prove. Most of us, especially those of us blessed with physical sight, have learned to rely almost entirely on our external senses to navigate reality. We observe, analyze, assess, and make decisions based on what’s in front of us. That’s useful, but it’s also incomplete.

Because everything you see in the world around you started as an imagination.

Sit in wonder with this: every building, every business, every movement, every relationship…someone saw it internally before it existed externally.

Life is mental. Imagination isn’t a luxury or a soft skill. It is arguably our most potent superpower as human beings, and it is certainly the most underused faculty in leadership.

The Sanskrit name for this energy center is Ajna, which means “to perceive and command.” It sits at the intersection of intellect and awareness, where insight meets action. And the Hermetic principle captures it perfectly: as within, so without. When we establish clarity in our inner world, we begin to shape a more congruent outer one. Our perceptions become blueprints for how we interpret challenges, build strategies, set priorities, and guide others.

I invite you to consider that the First Eye (your inner sight) doesn’t compete with your physical eyes. It expands them. When you learn to tune inward first, you begin to observe reality in a far greater range. You see patterns others miss. You sense what’s emerging before it’s obvious. You pick up on the energy between people, the thing that isn’t being said, or the opportunity hiding inside the problem. Your inner sight gives your outer sight more to work with.

When this center is blocked, vision becomes either obscured or distorted. You might find yourself stuck in rigid thinking, over-relying on data and analysis while dismissing your intuition. Or the opposite: chasing fantasies without grounding them in reality. When it’s aligned, you see with both eyes: the inner and the outer. You perceive clearly, imagine boldly, and act from a place of integrated knowing rather than reactive guessing.

This is what makes visionary leadership possible. Are you willing to close your external eyes long enough to see what your inner eye already knows, and then bring that vision into form?

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Today’s Practice: Vision Rehearsal

This activation is a guided visualization designed to strengthen your inner sight and rehearse a future moment of leadership from the inside out. Mental rehearsal is used by elite athletes, performers, and creative leaders to align inner vision with outer execution. Research shows that when practiced with vivid sensory detail, the brain processes a visualized experience similarly to a real one, strengthening neural pathways before you ever step into the room.

Close your eyes and press play on the recording above. I’ll guide you through the full practice. Then come back here for the reflection.

[Audio: Vision Rehearsal Guided Visualization — 5-6 minutes]

Here’s what we’ll do:

Step 1: Close your physical eyes to open your First Eye. We begin with a few breaths to shift from external seeing to internal seeing. This is the transition from observing the world around you to accessing the world within you.

Step 2: Choose a specific future moment. Think of something coming up in your leadership that matters. It could be a conversation, a presentation, a launch, or a decision you need to make. Just be sure it’s something real and specific.

Step 3: See it from the inside out. Don’t watch yourself from the outside like a movie. Be in it. Feel your body in that space. Notice the energy in the room. How are you standing, breathing, moving? What’s the quality of your voice? What emotions are alive in you? Engage all of your senses.

Step 4: Expand your observation. This is where the First Eye does what physical sight cannot. While you’re in the vision, let your inner sight show you what you would normally miss. What’s the energy between you and the other people in the room? What’s not being said but is being felt? What do you know about this moment that comes from a deeper place beyond the data?

Step 5: Anchor the experience. Gently press your thumb and forefinger together while you’re in the vision. This creates a somatic anchor, or a physical cue you can use later, before the real moment arrives, to recall this state of inner clarity and presence.

After the Practice: One Question

What did your first eye show you that your physical eyes would have missed?

Tomorrow is our final day where we reach the crown. It’s the center of connection, consciousness, and the recognition that your leadership is part of something much larger than you. But today, practice seeing from the inside out. Your imagination has been waiting for you to use it.

With clarity,

Nathalie

Welcome to day 5 of your Lead with Energy Activations. Over the past four days, we’ve built a foundation of inner safety, reconnected with pleasure, claimed our identity and personal power, and opened the heart. Today, we arrive at the throat.

Vishuddha in Sanskrit means “purification.” And that’s exactly what this energy center demands — a purification of what you say, how you say it, and whether you’re willing to say it at all.

The throat sits at the bridge between the inner work of the lower four centers and the visionary, transcendent energy of the upper two. It’s where doing meets being. Where everything you’ve been building internally — your safety, your power, your heart — gets expressed outward into the world through your voice. Not just your literal voice, although that matters. Your communication, your message, the truth you carry, and whether you dare to let it out.

It’s rarely acknowledged that communication doesn’t start with what you say to others. It starts with what you’re willing to say to yourself (everything moves from the inside out, after all).

If you’re avoiding a hard conversation with someone on your team, ask yourself what truth you’re avoiding in yourself first. If you can’t name what’s really happening internally, such as fear, disappointment, or a desire you won’t admit to, you won’t be able to name it externally with clarity or care. The external conversation is always downstream of the internal one.

A teacher and mentor of mine, Kevin Walton, says that love is the full acceptance of the all. I think about that often when it comes to the throat. Because confronting the truth — in yourself and with others — is not combative. It’s not opposition. It is, in fact, the most loving thing you can do. To be with what is here, to name it, to speak it with compassion rather than turning away from it is love in action.

When this energy center is blocked, it shows up as silence where there should be honesty. Avoidance dressed up as “keeping the peace.” Or the opposite: domineering communication, a lot of words without clarity, talking over people instead of with them. When it’s aligned, you speak with both truth and care. You don’t sugarcoat, and you don’t weaponize. Your words carry weight because they carry integrity.

This is where the Radical Candor framework becomes incredibly useful for leaders.

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The Framework: Radical Candor

Radical Candor, developed by Kim Scott, is built on two dimensions: Care Personally and Challenge Directly. When both are present, you get honest feedback rooted in genuine concern for the other person. That’s Radical Candor, and it’s what most leaders say they want but rarely practice.

What happens when one or both dimensions are missing?

High care, low challenge = Ruinous Empathy. You care about the person, but you withhold the truth to avoid discomfort. This is the most common pattern in leadership. It feels kind, but it’s not because the person doesn’t get what they need to grow.

Low care, high challenge = Obnoxious Aggression. You’re direct, but without compassion. Brutal honesty without consideration. The message might be accurate, but the delivery destroys trust.

Low care, low challenge = Manipulative Insincerity. Avoidance, flattery, passive aggression. You’re not being honest, and you don’t really care. This is the most toxic quadrant and the hardest to spot in yourself.

The invitation today isn’t just to understand this framework intellectually. It’s to feel where you live in it, and to practice what it feels like to speak from the place where care and challenge meet.

Today’s Practice: From Inner Truth to Radical Candor

This activation has two parts. We start inside, then move outward. Press play on the recording above to hear me walk you through both steps. Then come back here for the reflection.

Part 1: Name the Truth Inside

Before we go anywhere near a conversation with someone else, we start with you. This is the purification that Vishuddha asks for.

Ask yourself: What is the truth I’ve been avoiding in myself?

What is something you’ve been sidestepping, rationalizing, or burying under busyness? It might be a fear you haven’t admitted, a desire you’ve been minimizing, or a pattern you keep repeating but haven’t been willing to look at directly.

You don’t have to solve it, you just have to name it. Say it out loud and let your voice carry it. That alone is an act of purification.

Part 2: Prep a Conversation Using Radical Candor

Now that you’ve named what’s true inside, turn your attention outward.

Think of a conversation you’ve been avoiding or holding back. It could be with a colleague, a direct report, a partner, or a friend. Something that matters, where you’ve been choosing silence over honesty.

Now run it through the two Radical Candor dimensions:

1. Care Personally: What do you genuinely care about in this relationship? What is your intention for this person — not just your frustration or need, but your real care for their growth, their wellbeing, or the health of the relationship?

2. Challenge Directly: What is the honest thing that needs to be said? Not the softened version. Not the version you’ve been rehearsing that protects you from their reaction. The clear, true thing.

Hold both. Care and challenge. Then craft what you would actually say in a few sentences that carry both dimensions. Write them down if it helps.

And then…say it out loud. You don’t have to say it to the person yet (or sometimes ever). Just start by saying it to yourself. Let your voice practice holding truth and care at the same time. The throat center activates when you use it.

After the Practice: One Question

What shifts in preparing for a conversation with someone else when you’ve first gotten honest with yourself and when you’ve named the thing you’ve been avoiding?

Tomorrow, we move to the first eye (more commonly known as the third eye): the center of vision, intuition, and the ability to see beyond what’s right in front of you. But today, let your voice do what it was designed to do.

With resonance,

Nathalie

Welcome to day 4 of your Lead with Energy Activations. Over the past three days, we’ve built a foundation of inner safety, reconnected with what brings us pleasure, and claimed our identity and personal power. Today, we arrive at the heart.

This is the midpoint, and it’s not a coincidence that the heart sits here. Anahata, as it’s known in Sanskrit, is the bridge between the lower three energy centers, which govern your personal foundation, and the upper three, which govern how you express, envision, and connect to something greater than yourself. Everything we’ve built so far has been about you. Starting today, that energy expands outward into how you connect, lead, and show up for others.

Leading from the heart isn’t just about empathy or being “nicer.” There is a measurable, biological intelligence in your heart that most of us have been trained to override.

In 1991, researchers discovered that the heart has approximately 40,000 neurons — its own nervous system, now called the “little brain in the heart.” The heart can learn, remember, and influence decisions independently of the brain. According to the HeartMath Institute, the heart also generates the most powerful electromagnetic field in the body — up to 60 times stronger than the brain’s — and this field extends several feet beyond you, carrying information about your emotional state. You don’t just walk into a room; your energy does.

Heart coherence is the measurable state where your breath, emotions, and heart rhythm are in sync. In coherence, your capacity for intuition, creativity, decision-making, and relational intelligence dramatically improves. And when you are coherent, the people around you begin to synchronize with your rhythm — a phenomenon called entrainment. Your coherence literally shifts the room.

This is not soft leadership. This is an energetic intelligence that is real, measurable, and trainable.

When this center is blocked, you might become overly rational, emotionally distant, or transactional, or the opposite: people-pleasing or neglecting to honor your boundaries. When it’s aligned, you lead with both care and clarity, connected to yourself and others without losing yourself in the process.

Today’s activation helps you experience coherence directly.

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Today’s Practice: Quick Coherence (from the HeartMath Institute)

The Quick Coherence technique is a simple, science-backed practice developed by the HeartMath Institute that helps you shift from stress or mental overdrive into a state of heart coherence. It has two steps and can be done anywhere — seated at your desk, before a meeting, or in the middle of a difficult conversation.

Press play on the recording above to hear me guide you through the practice. Then come back here for the reflection.

[Audio: Quick Coherence Guided Practice — 4-5 minutes]

Here are the two steps:

Step 1: Heart-Focused Breathing. Focus your attention on the area of your heart. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual. You might inhale for five seconds and exhale for five seconds, or simply find a rhythm that feels comfortable.

Step 2: Activate a Regenerative Feeling. As you continue breathing through the heart, make a sincere attempt to experience a regenerative feeling such as appreciation, care, or compassion for someone or something in your life. It could be a person, a pet, a place, or a memory. You might also simply focus on a feeling of calm or ease. The key word is sincere — don’t force it, just invite it.

Hold both steps together for 60 seconds or longer. That’s it.

One thing I encourage: build a repertoire of feelings you can draw on. When you’re anxious or stressed, the feeling of calm might be easiest to access. When you’re tired or flat, try connecting to joy or gratitude. Having options helps you reach coherence more quickly, no matter what state you’re starting from.

After the Practice: One Question

Don’t rush back into your head. Stay in your body for a moment and sit with this:

Where in your leadership have you been thinking your way through something that your heart already knows the answer to?

Tomorrow we move to the throat — the center of truth, expression, and the courage to say what needs to be said. But today, come home to your heart. It has more intelligence than you’ve been giving it credit for.

With coherence,

Nathalie