Calm & Grounded with Stacey Chillemi

📚 Book: Healing at Work, https://www.susanwinchester.com

📊 Free Assessment: https://susanwinchester.com/assessment/ ──────────────────────────────────────────

Why a Small Thing at Work Can Wreck Your Whole Day

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 21:01:54 GMT

Someone walks past you in the hallway and does not say hi.

That is it. That is the whole event. And somehow you spend the rest of the day unraveling, replaying it, wondering what you did.

Meanwhile, that person has three kids, did not sleep last night, and is one of the nicest people you know.

Susan Schmitt Winchester has an explanation for that gap, and it is not that you are too sensitive. She is the co-author of Healing at Work with Martha Finney, a keynote and TEDx speaker, and a former Chief Human Resources Officer for two public companies over a career of more than 36 years. Her whole argument is that the size of the feeling is information, not a flaw.

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Your Body Got There Before Your Brain Did

Schmitt Winchester points to the book The Body Keeps the Score, and to something most of us were never told.

The moments that hurt when we were young do not stay in memory. They settle into the body, and the emotional reaction and the physical reaction get stored together.

Then most of us grew up without ever learning how to regulate a nervous system. Nobody taught it. So we carried the whole thing forward, intact.

Which means an ordinary Tuesday can light the fire underneath something twenty years old. As she puts it, it is like fuel on a fire that is so much bigger than what actually happened in the moment.

Here is the permission in that. Your reaction is not evidence that something is wrong with you. It is evidence that something happened to you and was never quite finished.

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Two Questions, Thirty Seconds, No Therapist Required

These are the ones Schmitt Winchester uses with her coaching clients, and you can ask them standing in a stairwell.

First: is there anyone from my past who showed these same characteristics and upset me this same way?

She is specific that it is not always a parent. A coach. A teacher. A group of girls who would not let you in.

Second, and this is the one that does the work: what did I take that earlier experience to mean about me?

The answers people give are almost always some version of there was something wrong with me, or I was not enough.

Once you can name the belief, the hallway moment stops being about the hallway. That is the entire shift.

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Is This Today’s Problem or an Older One

Both things can be true at once, and Schmitt Winchester is careful about this. Someone can genuinely behave badly, and it can also be pressing on something old in you.

So she uses a gauge, and it works because it measures how long the feeling lasts rather than how hard it hits.

An issue of the day stings and is gone by morning. An issue of the week keeps you anxious for days. An issue of the month sits on your chest. And an issue of a career is the one where you are convinced everything is about to fall apart.

Anything that occupies a week is rarely about the thing that started it.

She names a second signal too, and this one asks for some honesty. When you notice yourself reaching for something to take the edge off the feeling, that is not a character problem. It is a sign there is something underneath asking for attention.

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“Is it possible that what I’m taking it to mean about me has more to do with my past experience than what’s going on in front of me?”
Susan Schmitt Winchester, co-author of Healing at Work and former Chief Human Resources Officer

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Everything You Need to Feel Well Is Already Sitting at Your Job

This is the part that surprised me most, because we tend to file work under the things that drain us.

Schmitt Winchester points to Dr. Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, and his PERMA model, which lays out what human beings need in order to flourish. Every element of it is available at work.

Positive emotion, which everyone has felt at some point in their career and which fades fast unless you deliberately watch for it. Engagement, the state where you feel grounded and capable.

Relationships, which is the one that moves her most. She has friends from her earliest jobs who came to her wedding and spend holidays with her, people she would never have met otherwise.

Meaning, which for her came from helping other people succeed. And accomplishment, the ordinary and extraordinary things that make us feel better when we finish them.

Try this today. Instead of waiting for your job to hand you these five, go looking for where they already showed up this week. She adds one honest caveat: if engagement is truly never there, that is information about the workplace, not about you.

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What To Take With You

🔥 A reaction bigger than the moment means something older ignited.

🪞 Ask what you took it to mean about you.

⏱️ A feeling lasting a week is rarely about this week.

🫂 Nobody taught you to regulate. That is not failure.

🌱 Look for where PERMA already showed up this week.

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What I keep coming back to is how gentle her framing is underneath all of it.

She is not telling you to toughen up, or forgive anyone, or pretend the difficult person is secretly a gift. She is saying the feeling makes sense, that it has an origin, and that origins can be worked with.

So carry one question into tomorrow. When something lands harder than it should, before you decide what is wrong with you, ask what you are taking the moment to mean about yourself, and whether you have felt that exact way before.

Susan Schmitt Winchester is honest that this is a journey and not a fix. The book is not called Healed at Work. It is called Healing at Work, and she spent three decades learning how much that one word matters.

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📄 Free Chapter 5: The chapter behind this whole conversation, on why the workplace can be where you heal rather than just where you cope, https://susanwinchester.kartra.com/page/fPv846

🎙️ Listen to the full episode with Susan Schmitt Winchester:

📺 YouTube:

🎧 Episode: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/workplace-triggers-are-showing-you-an-older-pattern--74336788

🎙️ Podcast Series: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/healing-at-work-clock-in-heal-up--7020703

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About Susan Schmitt Winchester

Susan Schmitt Winchester is a keynote and TEDx speaker, an executive coach, and the co-author of Healing at Work with Martha Finney. Over a career of more than 36 years, she was Chief Human Resources Officer for two public companies, a Fortune 500 and a Fortune 150, which means she has watched thousands of people struggle with exactly what she once struggled with herself. She helps people see how patterns from their past are shaping their working relationships, and gives them something practical to do in the moments that used to derail them.

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CONNECT WITH SUSAN SCHMITT WINCHESTER:

🌐 Website: https://www.susanwinchester.com

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/susanjschmittwinchester

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanschmittwinchester/

📚 Book: Healing at Work, https://www.susanwinchester.com

📊 Free Assessment: https://susanwinchester.com/assessment/ ──────────────────────────────────────────

How to Actually Heal — Not Just Feel Better Temporarily

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:15:12 GMT

He drives thirteen hours to see his grandchildren without stopping for coffee.

No fatigue. No brain fog. A Brown’s Gas machine running in the back seat, two percent hydrogen flowing the whole way. George Wiseman, founder of Eagle Research and one of the world’s foremost independent researchers on Brown’s Gas technology, mentions this almost as an aside — as if driving halfway across the country, sharp and alert, is simply what happens when your body has what it needs.

He is in his sixties. He has been running his own body as a forty-year experiment. And he has protocols for all of it.

This episode is where all of that becomes practical.

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It Is Nutrition, Not a Quick Fix

The first thing Wiseman wants you to understand before you try anything: this is not a drug, and it is not fast.

“It’s nutrition,” he says. “And just like the lack of this particular nutrition took years to manifest into whatever ailment people have, it takes time for the body to recover, turn back on, and get healthy again.”

The body heals in sequence. Regeneration comes back first. Then immune function. Then organ repair. What you notice early, more energy, sharper thinking, less pain, is the signal that the process has started, not the end of it.

Give it weeks. Then months. Then watch what happens.

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Protocol 1: Start With the Water

Wiseman’s daily practice is simple. One quart of Brown’s Gas-bubbled distilled water first thing in the morning. Another quart throughout the day.

He recommends distilled water specifically because spring and filtered water contain minerals the body cannot absorb, which means it has to work to eliminate them. Distilled water removes that burden. He has been drinking it since 2001 and says he is healthier now than he was then.

If you are starting with this technology, this is where to begin. Replace your regular daily water with hydrogen-rich water, drink it fresh, and do it consistently.

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Protocol 2: Inhalation and the Rule That Keeps It Safe

Inhalation delivers not just hydrogen but Electrically Expanded Water directly into the bloodstream through the lungs. It is, in Wiseman’s view, the most complete delivery method available.

The number that matters is two percent. That is the concentration of hydrogen in the inhaled breath that research has confirmed as optimal. Blood reaches saturation at two percent. Going higher produces no additional benefit. Going above four point seven percent creates a combustion risk.

Wiseman describes a customer who was convinced by a competing company to increase his inhalation volume. The man leaned over a candle while exhaling and the explosion went into his sinus cavities. He ended up in the hospital. “When you see anybody saying more is better, run,” Wiseman says. “Do not walk, run.”

Two percent, for as long as your schedule allows. If you are managing a serious illness, Wiseman recommends at least eight hours daily, which most people achieve by sleeping with the machine running.

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Protocols 3 and 4: When You Want to Target One Spot

When Brown’s Gas is inhaled or consumed, your body decides where the hydrogen goes. That is right for whole-body support. But when something specific needs attention, the external protocols put you in control.

Bagging means enclosing a limb or body area and directing the gas inside so it absorbs through the skin. Wiseman’s go-to example: carpal tunnel syndrome. “In ten minutes your carpal tunnel pain is completely gone,” he says, “and it stays, because the gas has gone transdermally through the skin to relieve the inflammation of the tendon sheath.”

The fourth protocol is applying Brown’s Gas-bubbled water directly to the skin, held in place with a damp dressing. This is how the first skin cancer testimonial happened in 1996, when a customer taped bubbled water on a cotton ball to a melanoma on his forehead. Three weeks later, it was gone. Wiseman did not believe him at the time. It took nearly a decade before he tried any health application himself.

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Protocols 5 and 6: The Advanced Applications Most People Miss

Protocol five is deuterium-depleted water. Deuterium is heavy hydrogen, and in excess it slows metabolism significantly. People spend up to five hundred dollars a month buying it commercially.

The AquaCure machine produces it automatically. When Brown’s Gas is burned and the resulting steam is condensed, the water that forms is deuterium-depleted. No extra steps. It happens as a byproduct.

Protocol six is what Wiseman calls new water. When Brown’s Gas is burned, the condensed steam has had its molecular memory erased. New water readily absorbs the informational signature of whatever surrounds it. Wiseman placed a bottle next to orange juice and later found it tasted like orange juice. In a separately documented case, new water placed near a fifty-mineral supplement spontaneously developed a sediment containing all fifty minerals, from a bottle that had contained only H2O.

“You can make food, you can make medicine, you can make fuel, you can make minerals,” he says. This one is still being explored. But Wiseman presents it with more personal fascination than any other protocol.

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“Over the decades we haven’t found anything yet that Brown’s Gas really doesn’t help somewhat, somehow. So we encourage people to actually just try it and see how it works for them.”
George Wiseman, founder, Eagle Research

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What To Take With You

🔑 Start with the water — one quart morning, one quart through the day.

🔑 Inhale at 2% hydrogen, never higher — more is dangerous, not better.

🔑 Use external protocols to target specific pain or inflammation directly.

🔑 The body heals in sequence — energy and clarity come before the bigger changes.

🔑 Consistency matters more than intensity — eight hours sleeping beats one hour pushing.

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Wiseman has kept track of the machines returned under his one-year satisfaction guarantee. Only one in a thousand come back for the reason that it did not work. But many of those returned machines had only a few hours on the usage meter.

The technology cannot do anything if it is not used.

That is not a criticism. It is a reminder that healing requires a commitment your body can count on. Not perfection. Just showing up for it every day, the way you would with any other essential nutrient.

George Wiseman has been showing up for this work for forty years, driven by a loss that still lives in him and a gratitude that has not faded. If you have been curious about this and kept waiting for the right moment, this episode is the signal to stop waiting.

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🎙️ Listen to the full episode with George Wiseman:

📺 YouTube:

🎧 Spotify: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/hydrogen-water-benefits-and-the-6-protocols-that-heal--73938460
🎙️ Podcast Series: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/breathe-different-the-brown-s-gas-revolution--7060704

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About George Wiseman

George Wiseman is the founder of Eagle Research, an inventor and researcher who has spent nearly four decades developing practical applications for Brown’s Gas technology, from industrial combustion science to cellular health and longevity. He has written twenty-four books on alternative energy and applied science, holds blasting certifications from his years in industrial mining, and is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost independent researchers on Brown’s Gas. He has helped tens of thousands of people find options when conventional approaches have run out.

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CONNECT WITH GEORGE WISEMAN:
🌐 Website: https://eagle-research.com
📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ecopegasus
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100054308450085
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georgewiseman1984/
🐦 X: https://x.com/Eagle_Research
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-wiseman-53969814/

🔬 AquaCure: https://www.aquacure.life

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⚠️ DISCLAIMER: The AquaCure is not classified as a medical device by the FDA. Always consult a healthcare provider for medical decisions.
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The Grief Nobody Talks About

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:18:51 GMT

Hi friend 💜

There is a grief that has no funeral.

No one brings you flowers. No one sits beside you in the dark and whispers I am so sorry for your loss. No casseroles left on the doorstep. No week off work. No one checking in months later to see how you are holding up.

The world keeps moving at its full relentless speed, and you are expected to move with it because from the outside nothing has changed.

But inside you, something has cracked open that you do not yet have words for.

And you grieve alone. In silence. Wondering if what you feel is even real. Wondering if you are allowed to hurt this much over something that nobody else can see.

I know that grief.

I have lived inside it.

And I want to talk about it today — not because it is comfortable or easy or because I have it all figured out — but because I spent too many years carrying it alone and I do not want you to do the same.

The Grief We Were Never Taught to Name

We were taught from the time we were small that grief belongs to death.

We understand funerals. We understand loss that arrives suddenly and visibly with a date you will remember for the rest of your life. We have rituals for that kind of grief. Language for it. A socially acceptable window of time in which we are permitted to fall apart before the world gently expects us to pull ourselves back together.

But nobody teaches us what to do with the other kind.

The grief that arrives not from death but from change.

The grief of watching someone you love transform into someone new — and mourning the version of them that quietly disappeared even as they stand right in front of you alive and present and more fully themselves than they have ever been.

The grief of the life you imagined that became something else entirely. The dream you released not because you failed but because life moved in a direction you did not choose. The relationship that dissolved slowly and quietly over years until one day you looked up and realized you were grieving something that had been gone for a long time without anyone naming it.

The grief of the parent you needed and never had. The childhood that asked too much of you too soon. The innocence that left before you were ready.

The grief of the version of yourself that existed before the loss — the one who did not yet know how quickly everything could change.

We do not have funerals for these losses.

We do not have words for them.

And so we do what we were taught to do with anything that makes us feel too much.

We bury it.

What We Do With the Pain We Cannot Name

We become extraordinary at pretending.

We take the grief, and we fold it into something very small, and we tuck it somewhere deep inside us where we are convinced it cannot reach us. We stay busy. We stay productive. We pour ourselves into our work, our children, our responsibilities. We smile when people ask how we are doing. We say fine. We say I have moved on. We say other people have it so much worse.

And for a while — sometimes for years — it works.

Until one ordinary afternoon when a song comes on the radio or an old photograph falls out of a drawer or the light falls in a certain way across a room you once knew and something inside you gives way without warning.

And you realize the grief was never gone.

It was only waiting.

Grief is the most patient thing in the world. It will wait years if it has to. And when it finally surfaces — in the body as exhaustion or illness or a tightness in the chest that never fully releases — it arrives with the full force of everything you refused to feel.

Because grief does not shrink when you ignore it.

It accumulates.

It settles into the body. Into the immune system. Into the nervous system. Into the shoulders that never quite drop and the sleep that never quite restores and the sadness that follows you from room to room like a shadow you stopped trying to name.

The body keeps everything we refuse to feel.

And eventually it asks — in its own insistent language — to be heard.

The Losses That Never Get Named

I want to stop here and name some of the grief that lives without language.

The grief of the parent who was physically present and emotionally absent. Who loved you the best they could and whose best was not enough. Who left wounds that were invisible to everyone but you. That is a real loss. It deserves to be grieved.

The grief of the childhood that asked too much of you. The child who had to grow up too fast. Who learned to read the room before they learned to read words. Who became responsible for other people’s emotions before they had the tools to manage their own. That child deserved better. And grieving what they deserved and did not receive is not self-pity. It is honesty.

The grief of watching someone you love become someone new. This is the one I want to hold the longest because I believe it is the most misunderstood and the most lonely grief there is.

How do you explain to anyone that you are mourning a person who is still alive?

How do you say out loud — I love who they are becoming, and I grieve who they were — without someone misunderstanding? Without someone implying that your grief means your love is insufficient?

You loved them then. You love them now. The love has not moved an inch.

And still the grief is there.

Not because something went wrong.

Because love is that deep.

And because nobody told you that you were allowed to hold both at the same time — the pride and the heartbreak, the joy and the loss — without one canceling out the other.

You are allowed to hold both.

I promise you that.

The Goodbye I Did Not Know Was Coming

I want to tell you about a phone call.

My aunt was dying. I had been her caretaker in her final months when no one else would come. Not because I was obligated but because I could not imagine doing otherwise. Because leaving someone to face the end alone is something I am not capable of.

The night she died, we spoke one last time. She had an oxygen mask covering her entire face, and even with that, they could only get 75% oxygen into her body. She looked at me through the screen, and she said something I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

She said I hope I didn’t give you too much to chew.

I said, Carol. You gave me exactly enough.

She said I love you.

I said I love you too.

And then we both hung up.

That was the last time I heard her voice.

I did not know it was the last time. It felt like just another phone call. Just another ordinary night at the end of a long week. I hung up without lingering because I thought there would be more time.

There is always supposed to be more time.

The grief that came after was not only for her.

It was for every ordinary moment I had not recognized as sacred while it was happening. Every phone call I had rushed through. Every visit I had postponed. Every time I had said I love you without stopping to feel the full weight of those words before they left my mouth.

Grief teaches you that ordinary moments are the sacred ones.

It just usually teaches you too late.

What Happens When You Finally Let It Rise

Here is what I want you to know about grief that surfaces.

The tears are not the breakdown.

The tears are the breakthrough.

When the grief you have been carrying finally finds its way up — when it rises without permission on an ordinary afternoon and takes your breath away, and you cannot explain to anyone why — that is not evidence that you are falling apart.

That is evidence that something in you finally trusts itself enough to feel what it has been holding.

Grief that is felt moves through us.

Grief that is suppressed accumulates inside us.

The difference between those two experiences is the difference between a wound that heals and a wound that festers. Between weight that is carried and weight that is released. Between a life lived on the surface of yourself and a life lived from the inside out.

When grief rises, let it.

Cry without knowing exactly why. Feel the weight of something lost without being able to explain it to anyone who asks. Let the sadness be as big as it actually is rather than as small as you have been telling yourself it should be.

This is not weakness.

This is the bravest thing a person can do.

The Shame That Keeps Grief Underground

I have to name this because it is the thing that keeps most of us from feeling our grief at all.

Shame.

The voice that says you do not have the right to hurt this much. That other people have it worse. That grieving someone who is still alive is self-indulgent. That the complicated feelings you have about someone you love mean you do not love them enough.

Shame is the prison where grief lives when it is not allowed to breathe.

And grief that lives in shame does not heal.

It hardens.

It becomes the armor we wear so nothing can hurt us — and so nothing can reach us. Not the pain and not the joy. Not the loss and not the love. Nothing.

You did not build that armor because you were weak.

You built it because you were doing the best you could with what you had.

But you do not have to keep wearing it.

You are allowed to put it down.

You are allowed to feel all of it — the complicated, confusing grief you have been telling yourself you have no right to feel — and discover on the other side that feeling it did not destroy you.

It freed you.

The Permission You Have Been Waiting For

I want to give you something before you finish reading this.

Not advice. Not a list of steps. Not a roadmap for grieving correctly.

Just permission.

Permission to grieve the losses that have no funerals.

Permission to miss someone who is still alive.

Permission to feel proud and heartbroken at the same time.

Permission to love someone completely and still ache for who they were.

Permission to cry on an ordinary Tuesday without knowing exactly why.

Permission to take as long as you need.

Grief does not run on a schedule. It does not respect your calendar or your to-do list or the amount of time that has passed or what anyone else thinks you should be feeling by now.

It runs on its own timeline entirely.

And the only way through it is not around it or above it or underneath it.

It is through it.

Felt fully. Honored honestly. Released slowly and imperfectly and with tremendous gentleness toward yourself.

What Lives on the Other Side

I will not tell you that grief ends completely. I am not sure that is always true.

Some losses become part of us. They do not disappear — they integrate. They become woven into who we are like threads of a different color that change the whole pattern. Evidence of what we loved. Evidence of what we survived. Evidence of the life we have actually lived rather than the one we imagined.

But grief that has been felt does not have to hide anymore.

It does not have to accumulate in the body and pull at us from below the surface. It does not have to harden into armor that keeps everything out. It does not have to live in shame and silence and the exhausting pretending that everything is fine.

It can sit beside us openly. As part of our story. As evidence of how deeply we loved and how courageously we kept going anyway.

That is the other side of grief.

Not the absence of pain.

But the freedom that comes from having felt it all the way through.

And here is the most important thing I know about that freedom.

When you finally let your grief breathe — when you stop running from it and turn to face it instead — something shifts not just inside you but around you.

You become someone who can sit with another person in their pain without flinching. Someone who does not rush to fix or minimize or silver-line what someone else is carrying. Someone who can simply be present — fully and honestly present — in the hardest moments of someone else’s life.

Because you know what it feels like to be truly seen in your pain.

And you refuse to let anyone else feel as alone in theirs as you once felt in yours.

That is what we do with our grief when we are brave enough to feel it.

We turn it into a lantern.

And we walk back into the dark to find the people who need the light.

It is not the cards you were dealt. It is how you played the hand.

Stacey Chillemi is a 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and founder of Advisor Global Media — a podcast reaching an ecosystem of 1.3M+ listeners and followers worldwide. She has testified before the United States Congress on disability rights and has spent her life turning her most painful chapters into lanterns for the people walking in the dark.

A Letter From My Future Self

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 14:51:59 GMT

Hi friend!

When I look back at the woman I was at fifty-four, I want to reach through time and hold her hand for a moment. Not to fix anything. Not to warn her. Just to let her know that it all works out — not perfectly, not without cost, but in ways that matter deeply.

At fifty-four, I was still carrying so much. Wounds I had faced and wounds I had not yet fully faced. Some of them I had named and forgiven. Others were still circling quietly in the background of my life — present but not yet free. I knew they were there. I was working on them. That is the honest truth about healing — it is not a destination you arrive at. It is a road you stay on.

What I understand now at seventy-four that I could not fully see at fifty-four is that those wounds were never obstacles to my life. They were the material my life was made from.

The Gift I Never Expected

My mother — the woman who was an angel and a devil all at once who came from her own broken places and passed some of that breaking on to me — she gave me something she never intended to give me. She showed me by contrast exactly the kind of woman I was determined to become. That is a painful gift. But it is still a gift.

What Epilepsy Taught Me

Epilepsy — that figure in a black robe who entered my life before I could understand what life even was — I spent decades asking why it chose me. At seventy-four, I have stopped asking that question. Not because I have the answer. But because I have the evidence.

Everything epilepsy took from me it eventually replaced with something I could not have built any other way. The fifteen years without driving gave me my books. The office floor gave me my voice before Congress. The limitations gave me my purpose.

It chose me because I could carry it.

What I Regret

What I regret at seventy-four looking back at fifty-four is simpler than I expected. Not the hard things. Not the wounds. Not the obstacles. I regret the hours spent behind a desk when the sun was outside. I regret the moments I was so focused on building that I forgot to simply be. Nature was always there waiting for me, and I did not always answer.

Answer more often at fifty-four. Go outside. Let the grass remind you that some things grow without being managed.

The Story I Never Told

The version of my story I never told anyone — not even myself — is this: I was afraid that if I stopped fighting I would disappear. That the drive and the work and the constant forward motion were not just strategies but survival. That if I rested something essential about me would dissolve.

At seventy-four I know that is not true.

You can rest and still be exactly who you are. You can stop proving and still be worthy. You can simply exist — imperfect and unfinished and enough — and the world will not fall apart.

What I Want You to Know

To my fifty-four-year-old self, I want to say this: the legacy you are building is real. Your children will be proud. The people whose lives you touched will carry something of you forward into places you will never see.

But the greatest gift you can give yourself in the years ahead is not another accomplishment.

It is permission.

Permission to feel everything you have been managing so skillfully. Permission to let the wounds that are still circling finally land and be looked at directly. Permission to enjoy the life you worked so hard to build.

You are not behind. You are not too late. You are exactly where you are supposed to be.

And the best — I promise you — is still coming.

With all the love and certainty that only twenty years of hindsight can carry —

Stacey at seventy-four

It is not the cards you were dealt. It is how you played the hand.

You're Not Driven. You're Dysregulated.

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 23:04:22 GMT

Susan Winchester opens with a question instead of a claim.

When was the last time you really felt calm at work?

Most people pause. Then they admit it has been a while. Some cannot remember at all.

That pause is the whole thing. Winchester is a former Fortune 500 Chief Human Resources Officer with more than 36 years of executive leadership experience, a keynote speaker, a TEDx speaker whose talk is called “Tackling Perfectionism at Work,” an executive coach, and co-author of Healing at Work with Martha Finney.

She spent thirty of her thirty-six years describing her own exhaustion as a strength. She is not scolding anyone here. She is describing the inside of her own career.

── ✦ ──

Perfectionism Is Fear of Failure Wearing a Business Suit

Winchester’s distinction is the one everything else rests on. Perfectionism is fueled by a fear of failure rather than a desire for success.

Both engines produce nearly identical output. They feel nothing alike from the inside.

You ship either way. You get the testimonial either way. But one version leaves you energized and the other leaves you replaying the client call at eleven at night, deciding what you should have said.

The test takes ten seconds. Are you building toward something you want, or away from something you fear? If it is the second, fear is driving, and your revenue will never tell you that.

── ✦ ──

Your Nervous System Cannot Tell a Launch Deadline From a Tiger

Here is the mechanism. Your nervous system reads the stakes, decides you are in danger, and flips into fight, flight, or freeze. The energy arrives. The focus sharpens. You perform.

As Winchester puts it, the nervous system does not realize we are no longer being chased by tigers. We are being chased by beliefs about ourselves that feel exactly like tigers.

She points to two researchers. Jeffrey Rutstein has written that survival responses are set off by running late to a meeting, having an argument, feeling ashamed, sitting in traffic. Peter Levine’s work says the nervous system cannot tell the difference between trauma and simply being overwhelmed.

Which reframes procrastination completely. Winchester reads it as the same system taking you offline rather than letting you sit down with a task it has flagged as threatening. That is why the work becomes possible at midnight and impossible at two in the afternoon.

She is honest about her own blind spot. She did not know how much she had come to depend on the high of feeling anxious until a coach told her she was addicted to anxiety. Her first reaction was, what?

── ✦ ──

You Do Not Have a Time Problem

This is the sharpest thing she says, and it reframes an entire industry of advice.

Clients tell her constantly that they do not have enough time. Her response: this is not a time management issue, it is a nervous system management issue.

She is generous about the tools. There is the four D’s, where you ask whether to do a task, defer it, delegate it, or dump it. Winchester calls it useful. It is just answering a different question than the one you are actually asking.

Because underneath the overscheduling is something else. When we stay constantly busy, she says, we are actually ignoring our nervous system and its needs.

Staying busy produces a kind of manufactured calm, a sense of safety built entirely on motion. For a lot of experts it rests on a belief nobody ever examines: if I do everything I possibly can, maybe I will not get into trouble.

The symptom is easy to catch. If you feel guilty the moment you stop producing, that guilt is the signal.

── ✦ ──

Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Please Are Already in Your Business

Most people know three of these. Winchester works with a fourth she did not invent but sees everywhere: please.

Fight is the bully, argumentative and oppositional. She is clear this is not a character verdict. Fight is simply a strategy for staying safe.

Flight is the person convinced they need to leave. New department, new company, new niche. Her observation stings: if you leave without resolving your own reaction, you meet the same personality at the next stop. She describes it almost like a radar, searching out the people we have unresolved history with.

Freeze is staying off the radar. She describes a woman who realized after thirty years that she had never once spoken first, only in response to being spoken to. The cost is direct. Someone in freeze may be holding the best solution in the room and be too afraid to say it.

Please is the person who never says no. Any project, any weekend. Winchester calls herself the queen of that one, and names the trap: they get too exhausted to do their own work, resentment builds, and resentment is a short step to martyr.

All four run unconsciously every day. Knowing which is yours turns an automatic reaction into something you can see coming.

── ✦ ──

Your Reaction Is Your Property

Winchester borrows property lines from Melody Beattie’s The Language of Letting Go. Your choices, your decisions, your actions are your property. The other person has their own.

Applied to a client who blindsides you or a partner who drops the ball, it gets uncomfortable in a useful way. Your reaction is your property, not theirs.

Her coach calls the goal being emotionally sober. You own your response instead of sitting back to judge and blame the person who set you off.

She frames the alternative as four roles: victim, villain, martyr, and leader. Most of us take the first three when something goes wrong, and all three share one feature. They put you in a place of no power.

Her phrase for the way out is that each one of us is the CEO of me. It sounds like a slogan until you try to use it in a real meeting.

── ✦ ──

“This is not a time management issue. It’s a nervous system management issue.”
Susan Winchester, former Fortune 500 Chief Human Resources Officer and co-author of Healing at Work

── ✦ ──

What To Take With You

🎯 Perfectionism avoids failure. It does not chase success.

⚡ Procrastination is your system offline, not laziness.

🕒 Time management tools cannot fix a regulation problem.

🪞 Which of the four is yours: fight, flight, freeze, please?

🧠 Reaction bigger than the moment means something older fired.

── ✦ ──

Winchester is direct with people who say this is just who they are. Our experience of ourselves at work, she says, is not our character. It is often the training we had when we were little.

That distinction is what makes this fixable rather than merely survivable. The brain is malleable, the pathways can be rewired, and she has watched people do it.

So take one thing into this week. Keep a log. When something sets you off, write down what happened and why the reaction was as big as it was. Her rule of thumb is the one to watch for: if the reaction is bigger than the moment, something older got activated. You will not undo decades in a week, but Susan Winchester spent thirty years proving how much that one question is worth.

── ✦ ──

📄 Free Guide: The ASDP's Guide to Overcoming Overwhelm, Susan's special report on the neuroscience of overwhelm and her Rapid Power Reclaim process, https://programs.healingatwork.com/overcoming-overwhelm

── ✦ ──

🎙️ Listen to the full episode with Susan Winchester:

📺 YouTube:

🎧 Episode: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/perfectionism-at-work-is-fear-of-failure-in-disguise--73862506

🎙️ Podcast Series: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/healing-at-work-clock-in-heal-up--7020703

── ✦ ──

About Susan Winchester

Susan Winchester is a former Fortune 500 Chief Human Resources Officer with more than 36 years of executive leadership experience, most recently leading HR for a Fortune 150 company in Silicon Valley. She is a keynote speaker, a TEDx speaker whose talk is called “Tackling Perfectionism at Work,” an executive coach, and co-author of Healing at Work with Martha Finney, an international bestseller on Amazon in five countries. She helps high achieving professionals and senior leaders see the patterns driving their overwork, and gives them practical tools for the moments that used to run them.

──────────────────────────────────────────

CONNECT WITH SUSAN WINCHESTER:

🌐 Website: https://www.susanwinchester.com

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/susanjschmittwinchester

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanschmittwinchester/

📚 Book/Resource: Healing at Work: https://www.susanwinchester.com

📄 Free Guide: The ASDP’s Guide to Overcoming Overwhelm, Susan’s special report on the neuroscience of overwhelm and her Rapid Power Reclaim process, https://programs.healingatwork.com/overcoming-overwhelm

📊 Free Assessment: https://susanwinchester.com/assessment/ ──────────────────────────────────────────

The Day Two Strangers Saved My Life on a Manhattan Street

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 12:24:05 GMT

Hi friend 💜

I have never told this story publicly before.

It happened in the middle of a Manhattan crosswalk. I felt the aura coming — that tingling electrical sensation starting in my feet, traveling all the way up my body. The moment it hit my head, I knew.

I was going down.

What two complete strangers did next is something I have carried quietly for years.

I am sharing it today because I believe some stories are meant to be told not just kept. And I believe this one might reach someone who needs to be reminded that humanity still shows up when it matters most.

I hope it reaches you wherever you are today. 💜

With love
Stacey

I have never told this story publicly.

Not because I am ashamed of it. But because for years I did not know how to tell it without it feeling like a crisis story — and it was never just that. It was something else. Something I have carried quietly for a long time.

It was a moment that showed me what humanity looks like when it shows up without being asked.

The City

I was working in Manhattan.

I loved the city the way people who did not grow up there sometimes love it — with the particular intensity of someone who had spent years being told what she could not do and was quietly proving something to herself every single day she showed up.

On my breaks, I would walk. I loved walking the streets — the vendors, the window displays, the energy of a city that never quite stopped moving. It was one of the small freedoms I had claimed for myself in a life where freedom had not always come easily.

I was in the middle of the crosswalk when it started.

The Aura

If you have epilepsy, you know what an aura feels like.

For me, it always started in my feet.

A tingling sensation. Almost electrical. Like something was moving through my body from the ground up — traveling slowly from my feet through my legs through my chest until it hit my head.

And the moment it hit my head — that was the last thing I would remember.

Every single time.

When that sensation started, I knew what was coming. There was no negotiating with it. No willing it away. No convincing my body to hold on just a little longer.

I was going down.

And I would probably remain unconscious for only a few seconds — though in those seconds the world could change completely around me and I would have no idea.

I had seconds.

The Street

I started walking faster.

Get to the sidewalk. Get somewhere safe. Get out of the street.

There were hundreds of cars. Buses. Taxis. The light was red, but lights change. I was in the middle of the crosswalk with the city moving all around me, and I knew — with the particular clarity that comes right before everything goes dark — that I was not going to make it.

I went down.

Right there in the middle of a Manhattan street with traffic waiting at the light and hundreds of people moving around me and the city doing what the city always does, which is keep going.

I do not remember hitting the ground.

I do not remember the seconds between the aura and the darkness.

What I remember is opening my eyes.

The Arms

I was in someone’s arms.

Strong arms. A uniform. A face looking down at me with an expression I did not expect — not alarm, not pity, not the particular discomfort people sometimes show when they encounter a body doing something bodies are not supposed to do in public.

Just calm. Just presence. Just a person who had decided without any fanfare that this was what needed to happen next.

He had carried me to the sidewalk.

I do not know how long I had been on the ground. I do not know exactly what it looked like from the outside — a woman collapsed in a Manhattan crosswalk while another officer redirected traffic around her. I only know what I woke up to, which was safety. Which was someone’s arms. Which was the sidewalk underneath me and the city still moving and two police officers who had stopped everything they were doing to make sure I was okay.

He set me down gently.

He asked if I was okay.

I said yes.

He asked if I needed an ambulance.

I said no.

He looked at me for a moment — the kind of look that was checking whether I actually meant what I said — and then he nodded. And then he made sure I could stand. And then he went back to work.

Just like that.

No ceremony. No expectation of gratitude. No waiting for me to find the right words.

He just did what needed to be done and then went back to the work of keeping a city moving.

What I Have Carried

I have thought about those two officers many times since that day.

I have thought about the fact that they did not know me. They did not know my name or my story or that I had been living with epilepsy since I was five years old or that I had spent decades learning to navigate a world that was not always built with people like me in mind.

They just saw a person who needed help.

And they helped.

I have always wished I knew who they were. Not to make it into something larger than it was. But because there are moments in life when a stranger does something for you that you cannot repay and cannot forget, and all you can do is carry it forward — be the person who shows up for someone else the way they showed up for you.

To the two officers who carried me off a Manhattan street that day —

I never got to thank you properly.

I hope somewhere in the universe this reaches you.

You gave me something that day that went beyond the moment. You reminded me — in the middle of a seizure in the middle of a crosswalk in the middle of a city that never stops — that people still show up for each other.

That strangers still carry strangers to safety.

That the world still has that in it.

Thank you. From the bottom of my heart. Thank you. 💜

What I Know Now

Epilepsy has taken things from me.

It has also given me things I could not have earned any other way.

It gave me the ability to recognize grace when it arrives without announcement. It gave me a particular sensitivity to the moments when humanity shows up quietly — not in speeches or grand gestures but in a pair of arms in the middle of a Manhattan street.

It gave me the understanding that we are more connected to each other than we usually allow ourselves to believe.

That on any given day in any given city, a stranger might carry you to safety without ever asking for anything in return.

And that the right response — the only response — is to carry someone else when it is your turn.

That is the lesson I have been learning my whole life.

One sidewalk at a time.

It is not the cards you were dealt. It is how you played the hand. 💜

Share Calm & Grounded with Stacey Chillemi

Stacey Chillemi has lived with epilepsy since the age of five. She is a 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and founder of Advisor Global Media — a podcast reaching 1.3 million listeners worldwide. She testified before the United States Congress on disability rights and has been a HOPE mentor for the Epilepsy Foundation for sixteen years.

staceychillemi.com | media@staceychillemi.com

Why Family Wealth Disappears by Generation Three

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 23:15:25 GMT

The first generation builds it. The second maintains it. The third loses it.

You have heard this. What you have not heard is the real explanation — not the vague one about spoiled heirs, but the actual structural failures that cause it. Every time.

Susan Lindeque knows those failures from the inside. The founder of Avestix, a chartered accountant with a CFO background, she spent 14 years as the chief investment officer of a single family office managing one family’s wealth across three generations and multiple countries.

She did not theorize about this. She lived it.

── ✦ ──

Three Failures That Sink Most Family Fortunes

The third-generation loss pattern traces back to the same three breakdowns, in family after family.

The first is governance. No documented structure for who makes decisions, who has authority, or how the wealth gets managed when the founder is gone. Without it, the money is exposed to whatever family dynamics emerge in a crisis.

The second is succession planning. When there is no documented plan, the question of who inherits what gets answered in the worst possible moment: in grief, under legal pressure, with family members who have not spoken honestly with each other in years.

The third is the one most people miss entirely: the transfer of values. The founding generation absorbed a particular orientation toward money through hard experience. That orientation does not transfer automatically. “I always start to say, what is your why?” Lindeque explains. “Why do you want to have generational wealth?” Without a clear answer to that question, the inheritance arrives with no instruction manual.

── ✦ ──

The Gap Nobody Bridges Until It Is Too Late

$86 trillion is transferring between generations over the next 15 to 20 years. The families receiving it are not the same people who built it.

The inheriting generation grew up in a prolonged bull market. They have never experienced a 2008-style financial crisis. Their appetite for digital assets, AI, robotics, and quantum computing reflects a worldview shaped by growth, not by loss.

The founding generation’s instincts were forged in the opposite conditions.

Neither is wrong. But the gap between them, when left unaddressed, is where family wealth goes to fracture. Lindeque describes it as two different poles that need to be brought closer through listening, not by one side capitulating to the other.

The older generation has negotiation skills, business instincts, and the hard-won knowledge of what it takes to build something from nothing. The younger generation has native fluency with the technologies that will define the next several decades of wealth creation. A family that holds both and creates a structure where both feel heard is positioned to keep what was built.

── ✦ ──

The Most Expensive Thing a Family Does Is Avoid One Conversation

This is the through-line in everything Lindeque has observed. The conversation families avoid costs more than any bad investment.

For many founders, financial matters were private. Handled behind closed doors. Not discussed with spouses or children. When there is no succession plan and no communication structure, and the founder passes away without clear guidelines, what follows is almost always family conflict.

“Money is a driving force that splits families,” Lindeque says plainly. And when the family splits, the wealth follows.

Her practical first step: bring everyone to the table, show them what the wealth looks like, explain the structures, and give each family member access to information appropriate to their involvement. Start there, even if the conversation is incomplete. The sooner it begins, the less it costs.

── ✦ ──

What the Families Who Keep It Actually Do

Three consistent practices show up in every family that successfully preserves wealth across generations.

Multi-jurisdictional thinking. They do not keep everything in one country or one tax environment. They spread holdings across Singapore, Cayman Islands, Puerto Rico, British Virgin Islands, each chosen for its combination of tax treatment and legal protections. And they revisit those decisions as laws and family circumstances change.

Co-investment. They increasingly invest alongside other trusted families rather than managing isolated portfolios. The advantage is not just pooled capital. It is pooled judgment. Patient money, meaning capital that is their own and not tied to a fund’s performance timeline, can be evaluated with a discipline institutional investors rarely match.

And the third, which cannot be delegated to any advisor: a shared family vision. Lindeque advocates for something as structured as a formal family vision statement, developed by bringing all generations around the same table and asking what they actually want to build together. That includes the women who have historically been excluded from these conversations, and the younger generation whose perspective deserves to be heard rather than overruled.

── ✦ ──

“All the money in the world doesn’t matter because then there’s no purpose. What do we want to create? It comes down to what is your legacy. What do you truly want to leave behind for your family?”
Susan Lindeque, Founder, Avestix

── ✦ ──

What To Take With You

🏛️ Build governance structures before you need them 📋 Document succession plans while the founder is still there to shape them 💬 Start the family wealth conversation now — incomplete is still better than absent 🌍 Spread assets across multiple jurisdictions to protect against any single legal or tax shift 🎯 Define your family’s why before the money changes hands

── ✦ ──

The families that survive the third-generation transition are not always the richest or the best advised. They are the ones who have answered one question honestly and communicated the answer deliberately to everyone who will inherit what they built.

What is your why?

That is where Susan Lindeque starts every conversation about wealth and legacy. Not with the balance sheet. Not with the tax structure. With the purpose behind it all. Because without that, all the governance in the world is just paperwork.

The work starts with a conversation. Start it sooner than feels necessary.

── ✦ ──

🎙️ Listen to the full episode with Susan Lindeque:

📺 YouTube:

🎧 Spotify: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/why-the-third-generation-loses-the-wealth--73824619

🎙️ Podcast Series: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-wealth-mentor--6955839

── ✦ ──

Susan Lindeque is the founder of Avestix, a chartered accountant with a CFO background who spent 14 years as the chief investment officer of a single family office managing wealth across three generations and multiple countries. She specializes in generational wealth preservation, succession planning, family governance, and alternative asset investment. Through Avestix and the Avestix Frontier community, she helps family offices and high-net-worth families build the structures and communication frameworks that protect multigenerational wealth.

── ✦ ──

CONNECT WITH SUSAN LINDEQUE:

🌐 Website: https://www.avestix.com

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanlindeque

📩 Email: susan@avestix.com

The Real Reason Success Never Feels Like Enough

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 23:30:27 GMT

For thirty years, she came home from work and ran a performance review on herself.

She replayed the whole day like a movie. She should not have spoken up in that meeting. She should have spoken up in that meeting. Someone was probably angry with her.

That is Susan Winchester, a former Fortune 500 Chief Human Resources Officer with more than 36 years of executive leadership experience, a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources, keynote speaker, executive coach, and co-author of Healing at Work with Martha Finney. Her last corporate seat was head of HR for a Fortune 150 company in Silicon Valley.

So this is not a story about someone who could not handle pressure. She reached the top of her field while running that audit every single night, and she says the tape never once concluded that she had done enough.

── ✦ ──

Work Is Not the Problem. It Is Where the Problem Shows Up.

Winchester’s first move is to relocate the source. The feeling of never being enough usually predates the client, the launch, the platform, and the revenue target.

That distinction decides where you spend your energy. If the business is the problem, you rebuild the business, and plenty of experts rebrand, repackage, and repivot before noticing the feeling packed itself and came along.

Here is her reframe, and it is the useful one. If the work feels harder for you than it seems to for other people, that is not a verdict on your ability. It is information about what you are carrying into it.

── ✦ ──

The Pattern Has a Name, and Two Thirds of the Room Qualifies

Winchester and Martha Finney coined the term Adult Survivor of a Damaged Past, or ASDP, while writing the book. There was no useful name for it before.

The research behind it is real. In the late 1990s the CDC and Kaiser Permanente, led by physicians Felitti and Anda, surveyed roughly 17,000 people about ten adverse childhood experiences. Nearly two thirds reported at least one. Forty percent reported at least two.

Winchester scored higher than four of the ten, after a lifetime of assuming her childhood was not that bad.

She is also clear that you do not need a single ACE to be shaped by this. People tell her after keynotes that they scored zero and still carry limiting beliefs, and she believes them. Children draw conclusions about themselves from ordinary moments, and those conclusions come to work with them.

── ✦ ──

The Unconscious Wounded Career Path Is Expensive and Invisible

This is her term for the road she was on for thirty of her thirty-six years. You show up every day disconnected from how much your history is shaping the experience, and you settle into victim, villain, or martyr without ever choosing it.

Two things keep it running. A limiting belief, which for her was that she was not good enough. And a nervous system nobody taught you to regulate, so you reach for whatever settles it fastest.

For ambitious experts, that soother is almost always overwork, which is exactly why it stays invisible. Every client, every audience, and every algorithm rewards you for it.

The cost is not just tired weekends. Winchester talks openly about the years she was not emotionally available to her sons while she was consumed with what she had done at work and what might happen tomorrow.

── ✦ ──

The Better Question in a Bumper Car Moment

When a client, a partner, or a colleague sets you off, the reflex is to ask why that person is like that. Winchester suggests asking why it feels familiar.

She and Finney call these collisions bumper car moments. Her read is that a strong trigger is a clue that an unresolved emotional need is being activated by someone who resembles a figure from your past.

Her sequence with coaching clients is short enough to use today. What are you taking this to mean about you? Have you felt that exact way before? Is it possible those earlier experiences are fuel on the fire of what just happened?

She describes a leader who blew up a meeting because a few people were not seated at the start time, then carried the anger into the next day. Asked what he made it mean, he said disrespect, and he immediately named two earlier moments where he had felt the same thing. His body relaxed. He apologized to everyone in the room.

The reaction had never been about the meeting.

── ✦ ──

Why the Next Level Never Fixes It

Every expert building an authority brand has a version of the number that will finally settle things. The book deal, the keynote fee, the client roster.

Winchester’s answer is structural. Achievement buys a short hit of relief, then the stakes rise, the demands increase, and the proving resumes at a higher altitude. The personalities change and the buttons stay the same.

She points to something her mentor Ken Wright told her that explains why nobody questions it. Perfectionism is not a pursuit of success. It is an effort to avoid failure. Markets reward perfectionists, which is why the most exhausting pattern in your business is also the most applauded one.

The diagnostic is fast. Notice whether you are working toward something good or away from something bad. If it is the second, fear is driving.

── ✦ ──

“It’s not that you’re bad at your job. It’s just that you are managing some unconscious dynamics that are really having an influence on you.”
Susan Winchester, former Fortune 500 Chief Human Resources Officer and co-author of Healing at Work

── ✦ ──

What To Take With You

🔍 Difficulty is information, not a verdict on you.

🪞 Ask why it feels familiar, not who is wrong.

⚡ Overwork is a nervous system habit, not ambition.

🎯 Perfectionism avoids failure. It does not chase success.

🧠 Old patterns are pathways, not permanent architecture.

── ✦ ──

The phrase Winchester and Finney keep returning to is that damaged is not doomed, and her reasoning is biological rather than motivational. The brain builds well-worn pathways, and the brain is fully capable of changing them.

If you take one thing into this week, make it the pause. The next time something at work sets you off, skip the blame for sixty seconds and ask what you are taking it to mean about you, and whether you have felt it before.

You will not undo thirty years in one meeting. But you will be standing outside the pattern instead of inside it, and Susan Winchester spent three decades proving how much that one step is worth.

── ✦ ──

🎙️ Listen to the full episode with Susan Winchester:

📺 YouTube:

🎧 Episode: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/workplace-burnout-starts-long-before-your-first-job--73408726

🎙️ Podcast Series: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/healing-at-work-clock-in-heal-up--7020703

── ✦ ──

About Susan Winchester

Susan Winchester is a former Fortune 500 Chief Human Resources Officer with more than 36 years of executive leadership experience, most recently leading HR for a Fortune 150 company in Silicon Valley. She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources, a keynote speaker, an executive coach, and co-author of Healing at Work with Martha Finney, an international bestseller on Amazon in five countries. She helps high achieving professionals and senior leaders see how unresolved patterns are shaping their careers, and gives them practical tools for the moments that used to derail them.

──────────────────────────────────────────

CONNECT WITH SUSAN WINCHESTER:

🌐 Website: https://www.susanwinchester.com

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/susanjschmittwinchester

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanschmittwinchester/

📚 Book/Resource: Healing at Work, https://www.susanwinchester.com

📊 Free Assessment: https://susanwinchester.com/assessment/ ──────────────────────────────────────────

The Room That Ended My Pity Party Forever

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:35:00 GMT

Hi friend 💜

I want to share something with you today that I have never written about quite this directly.

There was a room I walked into years ago that changed everything about how I saw my life with epilepsy.

I walked in angry. Furious at every limitation. Furious at every medication that had failed. Furious at everything epilepsy had taken from me.

And then I saw them.

People having 300 seizures a day. Someone who had to be restrained so their own body would not destroy itself.

I remember standing completely still.

And thinking — I can walk out of here on my own.

That single thought rearranged something in me permanently. Not because my situation suddenly became easy. But because for the first time in my life I understood what gratitude actually felt like.

This is the story of that room. And what I carried out of it.

I hope it reaches you wherever you are today. 💜

With love
Stacey

I walked into that room angry.

Not the quiet kind of angry that stays politely beneath the surface. The real kind. The kind that had been building for years through medication after medication, side effect after side effect, limitation after limitation. I was young, and I was furious, and I had decided, somewhere along the way, that epilepsy had stolen something from me that I was never getting back.

I was right about that last part. I just had the wrong understanding of what it meant.

The Medications

Before I tell you about the room, I need to tell you about what came before it.

When I was young, phenobarbital controlled my seizures for years. Then my body changed. Adolescence arrived, and with it, hormonal shifts that medication could not keep up with. The seizures came back. And what followed was one of the most exhausting seasons of my life — a long search for something that worked, conducted entirely inside my own nervous system.

One medication blurred my vision. Another flattened my emotions until I felt like I was watching my own life through frosted glass. One affected my speech so severely that I could hear every word forming perfectly in my mind but could not produce them correctly out loud. I sounded, I was told, like someone who had been drinking heavily. I knew exactly what I wanted to say. My mouth simply would not cooperate.

The process of changing medications was its own particular ordeal. You could not simply stop one and start another. You had to be weaned slowly — a half pill reduction every three or four weeks — while the new medication built up in your bloodstream. For months at a time I existed somewhere between two chemical realities, belonging fully to neither, feeling the side effects of both.

Nothing worked well. Nothing worked for long.

And then a trial group was announced. A new medication. A real chance.

The Room

I did not know what I would find when I walked through that door.

What I found was a room full of people who had epilepsy far more severe than mine. People whose seizures numbered not in the single digits per month, as mine did at my worst, but in the dozens. In the hundreds. Ninety seizures a day. One hundred and fifty. Three hundred.

I had never encountered numbers like that before.

There was a person in that room who had to be restrained. Not restrained the way you restrain a child throwing a tantrum — restrained the way you restrain someone whose body is trying to destroy itself every few minutes. Strapped down so the seizures could not send them to the floor or into the walls. So they would not break bones they had no control over.

I remember my jaw dropping.

I remember standing very still.

And I remember, for the first time in years, feeling something other than anger.

The Shift

I am not proud of how long the pity party had lasted. Looking back, I understand it. I was young. I was frightened. Nobody had given me the tools to understand what was happening to my body or why, and the medications that were supposed to help kept making things worse in different ways. Anger was the only response that felt proportionate to the situation.

But in that room, something broke open inside me.

I looked around at people whose daily reality made my worst months look manageable. I looked at the restraints. I looked at the blank stares of those whose seizures had taken so much that there was almost nothing of ordinary life left.

And I thought: I can walk out of here on my own.

That thought — so simple, so obvious, so entirely new to me — was the beginning of something I had never felt before in connection with epilepsy.

Gratitude.

Not performed gratitude. Not the kind you say out loud because someone tells you to count your blessings. The real kind. The kind that arrives unbidden and rearranges something permanently inside you.

I was not terminal. I was not confined. I had an invisible condition — one that nobody could see when they looked at me, one that I could choose to disclose or not disclose, one that had cost me real things but had not taken everything.

The pity party was over.

What Came After

The medication from that trial turned out to be Dilantin.

My body rejected it completely. Sores appeared throughout my body — external and internal — so severe that I could not move, could not swallow, could not lift my arms. I lost weight rapidly. I could not feed myself.

My father took time off work to care for me. He made chicken broth — breakfast, lunch and dinner — and fed it to me by hand because I could not hold a spoon. He did not talk about what he was doing. He did not ask to be thanked. He simply stayed and fed me and waited for the sores to heal.

That helplessness — complete, physical, humiliating helplessness — taught me something that has never left me. It taught me what it feels like to need another person entirely. To depend on love as a literal survival mechanism.

I have enormous compassion for elderly people for exactly this reason. I know, from inside my own body, what it feels like when your physical capabilities stop matching your mental ones. I learned that in my early twenties, lying in a bed I could not get out of, being fed by a man who never once made me feel like a burden.

What I Carried Out of That Room

I walked into the trial group furious at epilepsy.

I walked out with something I had not expected to find there.

Perspective. Proportion. And a gratitude so specific and so grounded in reality that it has never entirely left me, even on the hardest days.

Yes, epilepsy took things from me. It took fifteen years of driving. It took opportunities. It took an ease of movement through the world that other people never had to think about.

But I could walk out of that room on my own.

I could breathe the air outside.

I could feel grass under my feet and look up at the sky and watch birds cross it.

Those things — the small, unremarkable, invisible gifts of a body that mostly works — are not small. They are not unremarkable. I know that now in a way I cannot un-know.

The obstacles that crossed my path gave me something I could not have earned any other way.

They gave me the ability to be grateful for what most people never think to notice.

And that — more than any medication that ever worked, more than any credential I have earned or stage I have stood on — is the thing I am most grateful epilepsy taught me.

You are not alone in this. You never have been.

Stacey Chillemi has lived with epilepsy since the age of five. She is a 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and host of The Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — a podcast reaching 1.3 million listeners worldwide. She testified before the United States Congress on disability rights and has been a HOPE mentor for the Epilepsy Foundation for sixteen years.

Website: staceychillemi.com | Podcast: The Advisor with Stacey Chillemi | Email: media@staceychillemi.com

The Real Reason You Still Trade Hours for Income

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:06:14 GMT

He had a client who called him in the middle of the night. Woke him out of a dead sleep. To complain.

This was a business Luke Van Der Veer had taken from nothing to a steady stream of leads. He was the reason the phone was ringing at all, and he was still the one getting yelled at.

He shut the entire agency down the next day.

Luke Van Der Veer is a business owner, investor, and the founder of Website Rental Coaching. He left a corporate HR job after teaching himself SEO, reached the point where he could have stopped working entirely at 28, then used the profits to buy an ice cream catering company operating across three states for $1.7 million. He is currently acquiring a paving company valued at roughly $4 million. What he figured out is not really about SEO. It is about who owns the asset.

── ✦ ──

You’ve Been Collecting Business Models, Not Skills

Before anything worked, Luke Van Der Veer tried eBay, Amazon, drop shipping, and affiliate marketing. He paid for coaching on Facebook ads and built a Facebook ads agency. He paid for coaching on Google ads and built one of those too.

Business number eight or nine, he was close to quitting. Every one of them made some money. None of them replaced a job.

Then he saw the pattern. Almost everything he tried was a business model, not a skill. As he put it, selling on Amazon isn’t a skill. You just create stuff and list it.

SEO was different because it was portable. He could use it on his own business, sell it to others, or consult on it, and it stayed valuable no matter which venture died.

Here is the cost of missing this. If your income depends on a platform, an algorithm, or a single offer, you are one policy change away from starting over.

Run the audit today: what would you still have if your current business disappeared tomorrow?

── ✦ ──

If You Don’t Own the Asset, You Own a Job

The agency version of his work looked successful from the outside. Inside, it was a job with more bosses. Send me this report. Fix this image. Upload that.

So he rebuilt it inverted. Instead of ranking websites for clients, he built websites in the same niches and kept them. Then he rented the leads to businesses.

He calls it renting the internet. The mechanics matter less than the power shift.

“They would pay me, but I didn’t have to worry about anything they wanted because I was in control of the assets, not them.”

This is the trap most consultants and coaches never see. You can spend a decade building extraordinary results inside someone else’s business, someone else’s platform, someone else’s account, and walk away with a testimonial.

Ask one question of every engagement: at the end of this, what do I own?

── ✦ ──

Leverage Means Picking the Market Before You Do the Work

Luke Van Der Veer defines leverage in a way you can actually act on. It means setting things up that will pay you without doing future work.

Three moves got him there. He learned the process, documented it, and taught it to virtual assistants so he could manage instead of execute. Then he chose his markets deliberately.

That third move is the one almost everyone skips. He could have chased brutally competitive niches, but he knew that holding those rankings would require constant work forever.

So he picked markets where the effort drops off sharply once the position is earned. A couple of hours a week of monitoring. That was the point.

He calls it working backwards: decide what you want your week to look like, then pick a market that can actually produce that week.

The cost of skipping this is the version of success nobody warns you about. You win, and the win owns you.

── ✦ ──

Stop Pitching. Show Up With the Result Already Delivered.

Most local business owners have hired a marketing company and been burned. They are not skeptical of you personally. They are skeptical of promises.

So Luke Van Der Veer stopped making them. He generates the leads first, using a site he owns, then approaches the contractor with customers already in hand.

Not a projection. Not a case study. An actual customer, right now, on the table.

“You don’t have to trust me, here’s the customer right now. Do you want more of these?”

It changes the conversation entirely, because there is nothing left to believe in. For anyone selling expertise, the parallel is direct: the fastest way past a skeptical buyer is to deliver something small and real before you ever ask for the engagement.

── ✦ ──

The Fastest Way to Grow an Asset Is to Buy One That Already Works

The acquisitions started with a tax bill he did not want to pay. His CPA gave him two options, and buying an existing business was the one that fit his skill set.

He bought an ice cream catering company for $1.7 million on an SBA loan. Ten percent down. With legal fees, roughly $225,000 out of pocket for a company already producing tens of thousands a month in cash flow.

Then he did the part most buyers cannot do. He applied his lead generation skill and raised the valuation by about a million dollars in eight months to a year, because a company’s price is a multiple of its net income.

He also brought his brother in at fifty percent to run it, then built a team until neither of them was needed. Owner independence pushes the multiple higher still.

And he sees a window opening. He expects baby boomer owners to hit retirement age in 2027, 2028, and 2029, flooding the market with businesses for sale. Rough for sellers. Very good for anyone with a skill that raises a company’s value.

── ✦ ──

What To Take With You

🧠 Build a skill, not a business model.

🔑 Own the asset, or you own a job.

🎯 Pick low-maintenance markets on purpose.

📞 Lead with proof, not a pitch.

📈 Buying beats building when cash flow exists.

Here is the part of his story that rarely gets told. Once he could stop working, he booked a trip to the Bahamas to celebrate. Two days in, sitting on a lounge chair, he realized he could not do that for forty years.

He went back to work. The difference was that it was his. He also hit the money number he had been chasing and found the feeling did not follow. What actually landed was time, and the ability to decide what a Tuesday looks like.

── ✦ ──

Watch/Listen/Share the Full Episode

📺 YouTube:

🎧 Spotify:

── ✦ ──

ABOUT LUKE VAN DER VEER

Luke Van Der Veer is a business owner, investor, and the founder of Website Rental Coaching. He built a portfolio of lead-generating websites rented to local service businesses, reached financial independence at 28, and now owns multiple million-dollar companies. Since 2020, he has taught others how to build website rental income and how to use lead generation to raise the value of the businesses they own or buy.

CONNECT WITH LUKE!

🌐 Website: http://www.websiterentalcoaching.com/

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lukevanderveer/?hl=en

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukevanderveer

📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/websiterentalcoaching/ ──────────────────────────────────────

Final Thoughts

If you take one action from this, make it the ownership audit. Look at where your best work is going and ask what you keep when the engagement ends. Luke Van Der Veer rebuilt his entire business around that single question, and it is the reason he stopped trading hours before 30.

Why Your Body May Not Be Healing the Way It Should

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:15:10 GMT

He sat down wearing cannulas in his nose and said, almost as an aside, “Just want to make sure people don’t think they’re talking to an invalid. It’s quite the opposite, actually.”

George Wiseman, founder of Eagle Research and one of the world’s leading independent researchers on Brown’s Gas technology, has been inhaling a hydrogen and oxygen mixture every single day for the past decade. His psoriasis is gone. His arthritis is gone. His childhood heart murmur, the condition that killed his grandfather, was confirmed gone by his doctor. He passed two driver’s tests without the glasses he had worn since age nine.

He is in his sixties and says he looks twenty years younger than he did ten years ago.

But here is the thing that stopped me cold: he had access to the technology that produced all of this since 1986. For thirty years, the answer was sitting in his shop. And the woman he loved died without it.

That is the story I want to tell you today.

The Cowboy Who Learned to Question Everything

Wiseman grew up on a cattle ranch in British Columbia. Nine kids, a twenty-five-foot trapper’s cabin built in the 1800s, no electricity, no running water, no radio signal. Up at four-thirty every morning to saddle horses.

There were no mechanics, no veterinarians, no specialists within reach. If something broke, you figured out why, and you fixed it so it would not break again. He called this laziness at the time. He just hated doing things twice.

That instinct followed him everywhere. When he attended mechanics college, he convinced his instructor that six of his answers were more correct than the curriculum. He grew up not knowing that pickup trucks were not supposed to get thirty-six miles to the gallon, because his did, and he had tuned it that way without knowing it was unusual.

The ranch gave him something most of us never get: the habit of trusting what is actually real over what he was told should be real. That habit is the foundation of everything that came next.

How a Combustion Expert Stumbled Into Healing

Wiseman started working with Brown’s Gas in 1986. Not for health reasons. For industrial ones. The gas, produced by running electricity through water in a process called electrolysis, could replace acetylene torches at two percent of the cost. It could improve fuel efficiency. It was a combustion tool.

Then his customers started doing things he never asked them to do.

They bubbled the gas through water and fed it to plants. Plants in soil grew roughly three times faster. Plants in hydroponics grew approximately ten times faster. People started reporting health changes. A man applied Brown’s Gas-bubbled water to a melanoma on his forehead. Three weeks later, it was gone.

Wiseman did not believe him.

He was an explosives expert. He had his blasting certifications. He had once deliberately set off a seventy-PSI explosion in a metal container in his shop just to understand the force involved, and people came running from blocks away because the garage doors had acted like giant speakers. The idea that someone should be inhaling this gas struck him as genuinely dangerous.

So he waited. And he dismissed. And the reports kept coming.

It took until 2005 before he finally tried drinking Brown’s Gas-bubbled water himself. He says he has not been sick since.

The Woman He Could Not Save

Wiseman met his wife Tanaj through Match.com in the late 1990s, back when the platform was just getting started. She was the director of a Montessori school in Ontario, a multimedia artist, someone who looked at the world fresh and made sure life had more in it than work.

Their love emails crossed in the digital mail on the same day, both of them writing the words without knowing the other had done the same.

They married in 1999. And then, slowly, she got sick.

Wiseman became her full-time caregiver. He carried her to the bathroom when she could no longer walk. He slept in thirty-minute intervals so he could check on her through the night. He modified the bed so she could breathe more easily sitting up. He could not leave her for more than twenty minutes at a time, which meant he could not work. Over several years, they went $300,000 into debt.

Her diagnosis, a severe form of lupus, was not confirmed until March 2016, when she was rushed to the hospital because she could no longer catch her breath. She died that month of heart failure.

Wiseman came home and could not enter their apartment. He walked in, saw her things, and had to leave. It took five attempts before he could stay. He says there were moments when he realized he had stopped breathing. His body, he says, was just shutting down from grief.

The Night Everything Changed

A few days after Tanaj died, Wiseman sat on the couch staring at nothing. All five of his cats gathered around him at once, something they had never done before. Animals who normally competed for his attention simply sat with him.

He looked at the Brown’s Gas machine in the corner.

He remembered a video a customer had sent him two months earlier of a Taiwanese hydrogen bar where people were inhaling the gas safely. He finally understood the science: below four point seven percent hydrogen in inhaled air, the gas is non-combustible. At two percent, it is perfectly safe.

He set up a video camera. Set the flow under two percent. And breathed in for fifteen minutes. He did not, as he puts it, care whether he lived or died.

That night he could not sleep. He was wide awake and alert in a way that felt nothing like caffeine. Within weeks, psoriasis that had been with him for years peeled away. Within three weeks, his libido returned with a force that surprised him entirely.

“I can tell you that if you have a strong libido, you care if you live or die,” he says. “That literally saved my life.”

Three months later, a woman emailed him. She had lupus symptoms. She had been inhaling Brown’s Gas for three weeks. They were gone.

Wiseman fell to the floor and sobbed on the carpet and could not stop.

“I had Brown’s Gas in my shop since 1986. I’d been told it had health applications since 1996. I was told by hundreds of people by 2006 that it was good. And here it was in 2016, three weeks time. All the pain and suffering, the financial, the physical, the emotional suffering we went through would totally not have happened.”
George Wiseman, founder, Eagle Research

What Your Body Is Actually Missing

Here is the science Wiseman has spent forty years studying, in plain language.

Approximately sixty-two percent of the human body by volume is hydrogen. Another twenty-four percent is oxygen. Twelve percent is carbon. Everything else, every mineral and compound you have ever read about on a supplement label, makes up the remaining two percent.

“Our most important macronutrient is hydrogen,” Wiseman says, “and it has been ignored for literally hundreds of years.”

His framework for what happens when the body lacks sufficient hydrogen is logical and, once you hear it, difficult to argue with. The body triages. It keeps the immediately life-sustaining systems running and shuts down what it considers expendable. The regeneration system, including stem cell activity, goes first. That is why, Wiseman argues, people age faster than they need to.

If the deficiency continues, immune function degrades. You get sick more easily and recover more slowly. If it goes on long enough, organs begin to fail.

“When I got enough hydrogen,” he says, “my organs healed, my immune systems came back online, my regeneration system came back online.”

The optimal inhalation level, supported by what Wiseman describes as thousands of scientific studies, is two percent hydrogen in the inhaled breath. Going higher produces no additional benefit. Duration matters more than concentration. He compares one hour of daily inhalation to the time most people spend eating. The best schedule, he says, is whatever you will actually stick to.

What To Take With You

🔑 Your body triages when it lacks resources — regeneration shuts down before survival does.

🔑 Sixty-two percent of your body by volume is hydrogen — it is your most overlooked macronutrient.

🔑 Expert syndrome is real — knowing something deeply in one context can blind you to it in another.

🔑 Duration of support matters more than intensity — consistent daily input beats occasional high doses.

🔑 Grief can shut your body down physiologically, not just emotionally — take that seriously.

Wiseman’s business was investigated seven times by government agencies in the United States and Canada during the 1970s and 1980s. His phones were tapped. Packages disappeared. Not one customer complaint was ever found.

He kept going because of what the ranch had taught him: deal with what is real, help people get results, and keep your word.

When asked what he hopes people remember about him years from now, his answer came in two seconds.

“I hope they remember that I helped them.”

He made that decision on the floor of his apartment, surrounded by five cats who had never done that before, on the worst night of his life. A decade later, tens of thousands of people are doing better because he got up off that floor.

Whatever you are carrying right now, George Wiseman’s story is a reminder that the answer you have been looking for might already be closer than you think. Sometimes we just need to stop dismissing what we have not yet understood.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode with George Wiseman:

📺 YouTube:

🎧 Spotify: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/grief-purpose-and-the-healing-that-followed--73071547
🎙️ Podcast Series: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/breathe-different-the-brown-s-gas-revolution--7060704

George Wiseman is the founder of Eagle Research, an inventor and researcher who has spent nearly four decades developing practical applications for Brown’s Gas technology, from industrial combustion science to cellular health and wellness. He has written twenty-four books on alternative energy and applied science, holds blasting certifications from his years in industrial mining, and is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost independent researchers on Brown’s Gas. He has helped tens of thousands of people find options when conventional approaches have run out.

CONNECT WITH GEORGE WISEMAN:
🌐 Website: https://eagle-research.com
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georgewiseman1984/
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-wiseman-53969814/
▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ecopegasus
🐦 X / Twitter: https://x.com/Eagle_Research
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100054308450085

He Stepped Over My Body and Kept Walking. Thirty Minutes Later I Was Fired.

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:02:02 GMT

From the outside the television industry looks glamorous. The lights. The studios. The names you recognize walking the halls. People see it and think — what a life.

From the inside it looks very different.

It is relentless. It is demanding. It will consume every hour you are willing to give it and then ask for more. I gave it everything I had. I walked those halls with purpose, moved between studios with urgency, and showed up every single day ready to do whatever the next production needed.

I loved it. I was good at it. And I believed — with everything in me — that I was building toward something.

I was walking through Rockefeller Center on an ordinary day, moving from one studio to the next, when I felt it.

The tingling sensation.

Anyone who lives with epilepsy knows this feeling. It is your body’s only warning. A few seconds of knowing what is coming without any ability to stop it.

I looked around quickly hoping to find somewhere — anywhere — I could go without drawing attention to myself. I was not the type to make a scene. My seizures were usually brief and I had learned over the years to manage them as quietly as possible.

But there is no managing the ground.

Within seconds my arms and legs gave out completely. I went straight down. No warning. No way to catch myself. Just the floor of a busy hallway in one of the most famous buildings in New York City rising up to meet me.

I opened my eyes.

People were everywhere. Moving fast. Everyone had somewhere to be.

And then an executive walked by with his crew.

He looked down.

He stepped over me and kept walking.

I was conscious. I could see him. I just could not speak yet — those first moments after a seizure the body comes back before the voice does. I lay there on that floor, completely aware of what had just happened, unable to do anything but watch him go.

I kept thinking — how do you see a person on the floor and step over them? Even if you did not see them fall. Even if you do not know what happened. There is a human being lying on the ground in front of you and you step over them like they are something in your way.

That thought has stayed with me for decades.

Thirty minutes later one of his assistants — a young woman who looked like she did not want to be delivering this message — came to find me.

I am sorry, she said. But we are going to have to let you go.

I remember looking at her. I remember the stunned silence that followed. After everything I had given. After every early morning and late night and extra hour. After showing up through medications that made me foggy and seizures that terrified me and a condition I had never asked for and could not control.

He could not even deliver the news himself. He sent someone else to do it.

I do not remember what I said. I do not think I said much. I gathered myself, walked back down that hallway one final time and out the door.

I walked out with my head up.

I want to be honest about what followed though. Because the triumphant exit is only part of the story.

I was devastated.

Not just hurt. Devastated. The kind of devastation that takes years to fully surface because you are too busy surviving to feel it all at once. I built new things — a freelance company, a new chapter, a marriage, a life — but underneath all of it the wound was there.

Epilepsy had done it again.

Every time I walked three steps forward this disorder knocked me two steps back. I knew what I was capable of. I could feel the potential inside me like something banging against a wall trying to get out. And every time I got close to something that mattered a seizure would arrive uninvited and change everything.

It is a particular kind of grief — the grief of knowing what you could do if your own body would simply cooperate.

I carried that grief quietly for a long time.

And then someone from the Epilepsy Foundation called.

He was a director who worked with people living with epilepsy across New Jersey and he invited me to do something I had never imagined doing.

Come to Washington, he said. Speak before Congress.

I remember standing in that hearing room. I remember the faces of the people listening. I remember Congressman Rush Holt of New Jersey — our congressman — sitting across from me as I spoke. And I remember the moment he reached into his pocket, took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes.

Afterwards he shook my hand.

My sister had epilepsy, he said. You brought back a lot of memories for me.

In the months that followed additional protections were added to the Americans with Disabilities Act — strengthening the rights of people with disabilities in the workplace. Making it harder for an employer to do what was done to me on that hallway floor.

I think about the executive who stepped over me sometimes.

I wonder if he ever thinks about it.

I wonder if he knows that the woman he stepped over went on to build a podcast reaching 1.3 million listeners. To write twenty books. To stand before Congress and change the law.

I do not tell you this to be triumphant.

I tell you this because I spent years believing that what happened in that hallway defined the ceiling of what was possible for me.

It did not.

The floor of Rockefeller Center was not my ending.

It was the beginning of everything I was actually meant to build.

If you have ever been stepped over — literally or figuratively — by someone who should have stopped and did not, I want you to know something.

The people who step over you reveal everything about themselves and nothing about your worth.

Get up.

Keep walking.

Your head stays up.

Read the complete From Seizures to Success series: staceychillemi.com/my-story Book a free strategy call: calendly.com/carecoachingonline/booking-link

Stacey Chillemi is an award-winning podcast host, 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate and founder of Advisor Global Media. Featured on ABC, NBC, CBS and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. Her podcast reaches 1.3 million listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host. She testified before the United States Congress on disability rights and job discrimination.

Explore how we can work together: staceychillemi.com/work-with-me

You're Not Getting Old. Your Body Is Running Low on Energy.

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:31:20 GMT

There is something Dr. Hany Demian stopped doing years ago.

He stopped guessing his patients’ ages.

Not because he lost interest. Because he was wrong too many times. A patient would walk in and he would think, forty, maybe forty-five. Then he would look at the chart. Sixty-two. Another would look sixty and turn out to be thirty-eight. After enough of those moments, he stopped guessing entirely.

Dr. Demian is a board-certified spine surgeon, CEO, healthcare entrepreneur, and longevity specialist running twelve clinics. He has spent years studying what separates people who age well from those who do not. And what he has found is not what most people expect.

── ✦ ──

Aging Is Not a Timeline. It Is an Energy Problem.

Dr. Demian describes aging as multi-organ energy failure. That phrase is worth sitting with.

It means the reason you feel exhausted, foggy, stiff, or just off is not simply that time has passed. It is that your tissues are not getting enough energy to repair and recover the way they should.

The culprit is the mitochondria — the power plant inside every cell. When the mitochondria are not adequately fueled, everything downstream suffers. Sleep does not restore you fully. Muscles do not rebuild. Hormones decline because the raw materials to sustain them are gone.

This is not a process that begins at forty or fifty. According to Dr. Demian, it begins far earlier than that.

── ✦ ──

The Science Says Aging Starts at Five

When Dr. Demian first says this, it sounds extreme. But the reasoning is grounded in how the body develops.

From birth to age five, every system is directed toward growth. By five, that initial developmental phase stabilizes. And from that point forward, every single choice begins accumulating — how much a child moves, what they eat, how much they sleep — in ways that compound for decades.

Children who played multiple sports during those early years developed what Dr. Demian calls an exercise protein — a cellular and hormonal foundation that persists into adulthood and shapes how their bodies respond to physical stress for the rest of their lives.

The hormonal piece matters just as much. Regular movement in childhood causes estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone to develop earlier and remain active longer. Dr. Demian points to military veterans as the most visible example: people pushed physically from a young age carry a posture and vitality decades later that you can see from across a room.

And if you were active as a kid but fell away from it — the foundation does not disappear. “Even if they stop for a period of time,” he says, “the protein will be there. So it will be easier for them to get back in shape.”

── ✦ ──

The Blood Test Your Doctor Is Probably Skipping

Dr. Demian spent six months trying to figure out what was wrong with one of his patients.

Everything looked fine on paper. Testosterone levels: normal. Free testosterone: normal. Nutrition: on track. Sleep: evaluated. And yet the patient was not recovering. Something was off and Dr. Demian could not find it.

Then he tested estrogen.

“The minute I looked at his estrogen, my eyes opened,” he says. This was a male patient. And estrogen in men governs joint lubrication, libido, skin quality, and mood. When it is out of balance, the effects ripple through the entire system in ways that can look like almost any other condition.

Dr. Demian now recommends something called a Dutch test — a urine-based hormone panel that does not just check whether your hormone levels fall within a reference range. It examines how those hormones are actually being used and metabolized inside your body. That distinction is enormous.

He is also clear about something the FDA recently confirmed: hormone therapy does not cause cancer. The black box warning suggesting it did has been removed. What actually exposes people to risk is the opposite. “The lack of hormones or hormone deficiency in your system is way more dangerous,” he says. “It exposes women and men to heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots.”

── ✦ ──

“Seventy-five percent of longevity is for free. Everything else — hormones, peptides, supplements — is only twenty-five percent.”

Dr. Hany Demian, Board-Certified Spine Surgeon and Longevity Specialist

── ✦ ──

The Simple Stuff Is Still the Most Important Stuff

When someone asked Dr. Demian how to improve health without a $100,000 longevity program, his answer was immediate.

Sleep first. He recommends a dark room — darkness signals the body to direct hormones and nutrients to the tissues that need repair — and waking without an alarm at least twice a week. Not a specific hour count. Just letting the body finish.

On food, he is specific: one to one and a half grams of protein per pound of body weight delivers the highest return of any nutritional approach. Keep carbohydrates and fats to the earlier part of the day when you are most active. Shift toward a protein-dense evening meal.

Exercise does not need a specific format. It needs to match your actual life. Dr. Demian talks about identifying what your body needs to do — climb stairs, carry your kids, stay on your feet for long stretches — and building strength around those real demands. He notes that grip strength is now one of the most reliable long-term indicators of longevity. Simple to train. Almost nobody thinks about it.

The last piece: find a doctor who understands biology, not just pathology. A pathology-focused doctor treats disease after it appears. A biology-focused doctor looks at where you are on the trajectory before it gets there.

── ✦ ──

The Supplements Worth Your Money — and the Ones That Are Not

Dr. Demian takes a short, deliberate list himself. Here is what he actually uses and why.

NMN and NAD+ are the foundation. These compounds fuel the mitochondria directly. He recommends both because some people lack the enzyme needed to convert NAD on its own — NMN fills the gap. Injections are most effective, but pills and patches work too. The key is adjusting the dose until you feel it working.

Vitamin D3, K2, and natokinase work together to clear cholesterol from the arteries before it calcifies. He contrasts this directly with statins, which calcify soft cholesterol plaques and hold them in the vessel walls — an older mechanism he no longer finds compelling when the option exists to clear the buildup entirely.

Omega-3 or PEA he considers equally essential.

Beyond that, he does not mince words: “Other than that, honestly, you’re just wasting money and time if it’s not done within the context of a program.” Testing reveals what your body actually needs. Without it, supplementation is expensive guesswork.

── ✦ ──

What To Take With You

🔑 Aging is not something that happens to you — it is the result of accumulated choices starting in childhood.

🔑 Sleep in a dark room. Wake without an alarm at least twice a week. It is free and it is the highest-return habit you have.

🔑 Eat one to one and a half grams of protein per pound of body weight. Keep carbs and fats in the morning.

🔑 Get a Dutch test, not just a standard hormone panel. Knowing your hormone levels is not the same as knowing how your body is using them.

🔑 NAD+, NMN, D3, K2, and natokinase — these are the core. Everything else needs a reason backed by your own testing.

── ✦ ──

There is a sentence Dr. Demian said near the end of the conversation that I keep coming back to.

“Aging is optional. So what would you choose? To age or to defy aging?”

It sounds like a slogan. But he means it as a real question. The research he is describing is not fringe. It is the direction medicine is moving — personalized, continuous, proactive, and built around where your biology actually is rather than waiting for something to go wrong.

Seventy-five percent of it is free. That is the part most people skip because it does not feel like enough. Sleep, movement, protein, finding the right medical partner. These are not consolation prizes for people who cannot afford the expensive programs. They are the foundation that makes everything else work.

Dr. Hany Demian has twelve clinics worth of evidence that the basics, done consistently, change the trajectory. The rest is optimization on top of a foundation that most of us have not fully built yet.

Start there.

── ✦ ──

🎙️ Listen to the full episode with Dr. Hany Demian:

📺 YouTube:

🎧 Spotify: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/aging-starts-at-5-and-you-can-slow-it-down--72996532

🎙️ Podcast Series: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-healing-hub--6509257

── ✦ ──

About Dr. Hany Demian: Dr. Hany Demian is a board-certified spine surgeon, CEO, healthcare entrepreneur, and longevity specialist running twelve clinics focused on regenerative medicine and preventative healthcare. His work combines genetic testing, comprehensive biomarker analysis, hormonal optimization, and AI-assisted monitoring to address the biological roots of aging. He works with patients who want to optimize healthy bodies and with those searching for answers that conventional medicine has not found.

── ✦ ──

CONNECT WITH DR. HANY DEMIAN:

🌐 Website: https://drdemian.com/

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drhanydemian/

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hany-demian-5b79b659/

The Parking Lot That Changed Everything

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:56:30 GMT

Hi friend 💜

I want to tell you about a parking lot.

Not a dramatic one. Not a parking lot anyone would have reason to remember except me. Just an ordinary stretch of pavement — poorly constructed, uneven, the kind of thing you drive through a hundred times without thinking twice.

I thought twice about this one for four and a half years.

I had just started living again.

After decades of epilepsy — of seizures and limitations and the slow careful work of building a life that felt like mine — I had arrived somewhere that finally felt like freedom. I was seizure-free. I was speaking on stages across the country. I was doing the work that filled me up more than anything else I had ever done.

Then I drove into a poorly constructed parking lot on an ordinary afternoon.

My car hit a bump that should not have been there. In less than three seconds, I went forward and backward. My head hit the steering wheel.

I drove home. Told myself I was fine.

My arms were starting to swell by the time I got there.

What followed was four and a half years of pain, recovery, loss and — eventually — the most unexpected gift.

Within days, I could not move my arms past my hips. I could not hold a coffee cup. I could not get out of bed in the morning without help.

I had spent years asking epilepsy to let me live normally. Now I was asking my arms to do the same thing.

And for four and a half years — they said no.

There were mornings in those years when I lay in bed and asked the ceiling when it was going to stop. I had been through so much. Physically. Emotionally. In ways that left marks you cannot see but can always feel. I kept asking myself when I was going to get a stretch of life that did not cost this much.

But I pushed through anyway. With the same tired resilience I had been carrying since I was five years old.

And something happened in those four and a half years that I did not plan for.

I stopped saying yes to everything.

I had been a people pleaser my entire life. Someone who said yes because no felt dangerous. Someone who absorbed other people’s needs and made them her own. Someone who justified her limitations to people who would never understand them anyway.

When you cannot hold a coffee cup, you have to be ruthlessly clear about what you are going to do with the energy you have. You cannot afford to spend it on things that drain you.

So I started saying no.

I created real boundaries. I chose the people around me based on a simple question — does this person give me strength or take it?

I stopped performing for people who were not worth the performance.

I chose silence when I had previously chosen explanation.

I built a life I could actually live in.

Today my arms are mobile again. Not at full strength — perhaps never at full strength. But moving. Working. Doing most of what I need them to do.

I used to think that helping yourself first was a form of selfishness.

I understand now that it is the only way to genuinely help anyone else.

You cannot pour from arms that cannot lift.

You cannot give what you have already spent.

If you are in a season right now where life has taken something from you that you worked hard to build — I want you to hear this from someone who has been there more than once.

The rebuilding is not just about getting back what you lost.

Sometimes it is about discovering what you never had in the first place.

You are not alone in this. 💜

With love and gratitude,
Stacey

media@staceychillemi.com
staceychillemi.com
calendly.com/carecoachingonline/booking-link

The Man Who Grabbed the Wheel

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 23:34:53 GMT

Hi friend 💜

I want to tell you about the moment my husband saved my life.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

I was in my third year of college. I was dating Michael — the man I met in English class who would eventually become my husband. We were driving back to his house through a stretch of open farmland, everything quiet and spacious the way the world feels when you are young and in love and do not yet know what the next fifteen years are going to ask of you.

I felt the aura.

That tingling sensation. My body’s only warning. I turned to Michael in the passenger seat and said the words as calmly as I could.

Michael. I am going to have a seizure.

I started pulling to the side of the road.

The clock ran out before I got there.

My body stiffened completely. My foot locked down on the gas pedal. My arms stiffened to the wheel. Michael grabbed it with everything he had — his foot all the way down on the brake, my foot all the way down on the gas — the car heading straight toward a telephone pole.

He pulled us away from it.

He told me later that in that moment I had the strength of a male bouncer. That if he had not been in the passenger seat, I would likely have been dead.

Death flashed before my eyes again. And I was not even conscious to see it.

Shortly after, I sat across from my doctor and heard the words I had been dreading.

He asked me to stop driving until my seizures could be controlled.

I told myself it would be a few months.

It was fifteen years.

Fifteen years of medication changes and adjustments. Of my father driving up to my college campus to get me. Of the close friend who lived off campus who took me to the grocery store every week because I had no other way to get there. Of family members reorganizing their schedules around my limitation. Of saying yes to rides I did not want to need from people I did not want to inconvenience.

I was an independent woman. I had always been. I did not want help from anyone. And here I was — needing a ride to buy milk.

When I eventually married Michael, and we had children, the walls became a prison.

I could not take my kids to the toy store on a Tuesday afternoon because the feeling struck me. I could not do the small spontaneous things other mothers did without thinking — the things that feel like nothing until you realize you cannot do them.

I felt depressed.

I felt like an underachieved woman with dreams on hold because of a condition I had never asked for and could not control.

But I did not stop.

I started writing. I wrote an article about epilepsy and sent it to the Epilepsy Foundation. They published it. Three to four hundred letters came back from strangers across the United States and Canada who had felt exactly what I was feeling.

I took those letters and wrote Epilepsy You Are Not Alone.

I built a blog. A writing career. A platform.

And then one day an email arrived from someone who had found my book at a Barnes and Noble.

They wrote to say it had saved their life.

In that moment something shifted in me. Not all at once. Not dramatically. But quietly and permanently. Maybe this life — the one I had built inside the walls of everything I could not do — was not the lesser version of the life I had planned.

Maybe it was exactly what I was supposed to build.

It took fifteen years to get my license back.

It took changing everything. My diet. My stress response. My sleep. Integrative medicine. Yoga. Therapy. Confidence work. Acceptance of the life I actually had instead of the one I had wanted.

And a brilliant doctor who refused to give up.

When I finally got behind the wheel again after fifteen years, it felt like walking through prison doors into open air with no one stopping me and the whole world ahead.

The first thing I did was take my kids to the toy store.

Not because it was important.

Because I could.

And because for fifteen years I could not.

I used to grieve the career I never got to have. The journalism. The television. All the versions of myself that the seizures made impossible.

I understand now that everything I built inside those walls was not the consolation prize.

The book that saved a life was built inside those walls.
The platform that reaches 1.3 million listeners was built inside those walls.
The twenty books. The Congress testimony. All of it — built from inside a prison nobody else could see.

When the life you planned becomes unavailable — you do not stop building.

You build differently.

You work with what you have.

And sometimes what you build inside the walls is more extraordinary than anything you could have built outside them.

You are not alone in your version of this. 💜

With love and gratitude,
Stacey

media@staceychillemi.com
staceychillemi.com
calendly.com/carecoachingonline/booking-link

Your Family Office Has a Gap Nobody Is Watching

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:01:29 GMT

Your family office was built to protect what you spent a lifetime building.

But here is the question almost no one asks out loud: what if the structure underneath it has quietly stopped protecting you and started creating risk instead?

Susan Lindeque has seen it happen more times than she can count. As Founder and CEO of Avestix Group, a Chartered Accountant, and Chief Investment Officer of her own single-family office, who has raised, invested, or managed more than a billion dollars across over a hundred private acquisitions, she knows exactly where the line sits between protection and exposure.

The scariest part? Most families are on the wrong side of that line without knowing it.

── ✦ ──

The CPA and Quarterly Review Model Is Over

For decades, a good accountant and a once-a-year financial review were enough. Lindeque says those days are gone, and the reason is simple: the money has moved.

“Previously, a lot of people just invested in public markets,” she explains. “But these days, a lot of people invest in alternative markets. Real estate, venture capital, data centers, art, exotic cars.” Private assets carry private complexity. They sit inside trusts, LLCs, and offshore entities — each with its own reporting obligations, tax consequences, and regulatory requirements.

And families are not just passive investors anymore. They want to sit at the table, make decisions, and co-invest directly. That shift comes with a cost most are not prepared for. “What they don’t realize is that with that comes a lot of requirements in terms of state taxes, federal taxes, and reporting. And that’s where all the problems are starting.”

── ✦ ──

Three Advisors, Zero Integration, and a Gap Nobody is Aware Of

Here is the setup most wealthy families have: a CPA for taxes, an attorney for entity structure, a wealth manager for the portfolio. Each does their piece well. The family is still exposed.

Why? Because nobody is watching the space between them.

“If your wealth manager triggers a position and that position creates a tax event, and your tax person is not aware of that,” Lindeque says, “that’s where the problem begins.” A capital call, a liquidity event, a new co-investment — every single one carries reporting obligations at the state and federal level. If no one has a complete dashboard showing exactly what is happening across all of it in real time, the gaps compound quietly.

She has watched this play out at its most painful: when the principal of a family office passes away, and the wealth transfers to a spouse who was never part of the financial conversations. “The women just don’t even know where to start looking. Your CPA, your wealth advisor, and your attorney all work in silos. There’s no crossover between all of them. And that’s really a big, big problem.”

── ✦ ──

The Slow Accumulation Nobody Sees Coming

The real danger is not the one large penalty. It is the pattern that forms when small failures pile up over time.

“If you miss one, you’re okay. If you miss two, you can maybe say that was a problem. But if it’s starting to be continuous, then there’s a real big problem somewhere.“ That pattern, when regulators see it, reads as systemic failure. The IRS can place liens on assets. Banks can close accounts. The consequences of unmanaged compliance gaps can reach into the millions.

Lindeque sees AI as the solution to this accumulation problem. The back-end burden of compliance — forms, reporting, cross-jurisdictional obligations — is exactly where automation changes the picture. “That’s why I’m so passionate about Claude and other AI systems out there, because it will just help reduce that burden and help break down some of the complexity that’s there.”

── ✦ ──

The Whiteboard Before the System

When a family comes to Lindeque and asks her to redesign their compliance from the ground up, she does not start with software. She starts with a whiteboard.

“I literally start and look at where all your investment holdings are, where you have it, where it is from a jurisdiction perspective, and who’s the advisor responsible for all of that.” Public assets are visible. Private assets — the exotic car, the yacht, the Palm Beach property, the gold held somewhere in London, the Bitcoin on a consumer exchange — those are where the gaps hide.

The first move for any principal who feels buried by complexity is the same: get a clear, consolidated view of where everything is. Not a list of advisors. A map. Every holding, every jurisdiction, every person responsible. “If you don’t know your whole holistic picture, then the foundation that you build everything on is so, so weak.”

── ✦ ──

“If you don’t have a complete dashboard that gives you 24/7 exactly what’s happening and where, that’s the big danger — because they inherited some wealth and they’ve got no idea.”
~ Susan Lindeque, Founder and CEO, Avestix Group

── ✦ ──

What To Take With You

💡 The CPA and quarterly review model no longer covers alternative asset complexity

💡 Three advisors in silos = three gaps nobody owns — integration is the fix

💡 Map every holding, jurisdiction, and responsible party before building any system

💡 Small missed obligations compound into patterns that cost millions

💡 Compliance is not a cost center — it is the foundation your wealth is built on

── ✦ ──

The mindset shift Lindeque asks for is simple. Stop treating compliance as an invoice to be paid. Start treating it as the architecture your wealth lives inside.

“If you actually consider this — well, this is the foundation on which I built my wealth — then that changes everything the way you look at it.”

That shift does not require a new system or a new advisor. It starts with a whiteboard and an honest answer to one question: do you actually know where everything is?

Susan Lindeque has spent 25 years learning the difference between a structure that protects and one that quietly creates exposure. The families who sleep at night are the ones who built compliance into the architecture — not bolted it on after the fact.

── ✦ ──

🎙️ Watch / Listen

📺 YouTube:

🎧 Spotify:

🎙️ Podcast Series: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-wealth-mentor--6955839

── ✦ ──

About Susan Lindeque

Susan Lindeque is the Founder and CEO of Avestix Group, a woman-led, woman-owned fund management firm built around alternative assets and multi-family office services. She is a Chartered Accountant and Chief Investment Officer of her own single-family office, with more than a billion dollars raised, invested, or managed across over one hundred private acquisitions. She helps ultra-high-net-worth families and family offices identify structural compliance gaps and build integrated wealth architectures that protect generational legacies.

CONNECT WITH SUSAN LINDEQUE:
🌐 Website: www.avestix.com
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanlindeque

He Left a $300M Fund to Fix What No One Else Would

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:31:00 GMT

There was nothing new on an officer’s belt for 35 years.

Not one new tool. Not one new option. Just guns, tasers, batons, and pepper spray — the same four choices, decade after decade, while the nature of what officers were being called to handle changed completely around them.

Scot Cohen, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Wrap Technologies (NASDAQ: WRAP), saw that gap. He spent 30 years in capital markets — co-founding a New York hedge fund that reached $300 million in assets — and walked away from all of it to fill it. Not because it was easy. Because it was his.

That decision, and what he built from it over nine years and $175 million, is one of the most instructive authority-building stories you will hear this year.

── ✦ ──

The Lesson Most Experts Miss Before They Build Anything

Cohen thought the product would sell itself.

He assumed 100 body camera videos showing the BolaWrap working would be enough to get the rest of the country to adopt it. They were not. What he discovered — the hard way — is a sequence that applies to every expert trying to build authority in a resistant industry.

Technology without training is useless. Training without policy is unauthorized. You have to go in this order: policy first, training second, technology third. Skip any step and the whole thing stalls, no matter how good the product is.

For your authority brand, the parallel is exact. A great offer without an audience that trusts you means nothing. An audience without a framework they can actually use means nothing. You cannot lead with the tool. You have to lead with the belief system that makes the tool make sense.

── ✦ ──

Why Eight-Hour Sessions Are Killing Your Clients’ Results

Wrap Technologies trained law enforcement agencies the standard way for years. Eight hours, one session, PowerPoint, certification, done.

It did not work. Retention collapsed. Nobody used the device correctly in the field because nobody actually remembered how.

Cohen rebuilt the entire model around two-to-three-minute burst sessions, repeated over time, paired with virtual reality practice. The result was a fivefold increase in usage. Not because the device changed. Because the learning model changed.

If you are a coach, consultant, or educator, pay attention to this. Long workshops and dense programs feel impressive. But completion rates are low and behavior change is lower. The expert who designs for repetition and application — not information delivery — is the one whose clients actually get results. Results are what build your reputation.

── ✦ ──

The Metric Nobody Tracks (That Changes Everything)

Most law enforcement agencies report use of force. Almost none report force avoidance — the arrests made without incident, the situations resolved without escalation, the outcomes that never made the news because nothing went wrong.

Cohen has been pushing for force avoidance tracking nationally. His argument: you cannot build a culture of good outcomes if you only measure bad ones.

For your business, this is the testimonial problem. Most experts collect proof of transformation — the big win, the revenue number, the milestone. Almost none collect proof of prevention — the client who did not make an expensive mistake, the founder who did not burn out, the leader who did not lose the team.

The outcomes that didn’t happen are often your strongest evidence. Start documenting them.

── ✦ ──

What a Resistant Industry Actually Teaches You About Leadership

Cohen went nine years without the traction he knew the product deserved. There were moments, he says, where he wanted to shut the whole thing down.

He did not. And the reason he stayed is the most transferable thing in this entire episode.

“If you can associate purpose with this, with whatever you’re looking to do to make change — if that’s your purpose, your true purpose — don’t let anything stop you.”

When your authority brand is rooted in something you genuinely believe the world needs, the resistance you face becomes data, not defeat. Every slow year, every rejected pitch, every market that was not ready yet — it all becomes evidence that you are working on something real. Easy things do not take nine years.

── ✦ ──

“I want every officer, federal and state, to be carrying a BolaWrap because I know that every day in this country there is resistance, and I don’t want officers hurting themselves or escalating a situation. I want to give them an option.”
Scot Cohen, Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Wrap Technologies

── ✦ ──

What To Take With You

🎯 Lead with policy, not product — build the belief system before you introduce the tool.
📉 Measure what didn’t go wrong — prevention outcomes are your most underused proof.
🔁 Design for repetition, not information — short and practiced beats long and forgotten.
🏗️ Build the ecosystem, not just the offer — customers want end-to-end, not a single slice.
🔥 Purpose is the only thing that survives a nine-year build — know yours before you start.

── ✦ ──

Most experts quit before the market catches up to them.

They build the right thing at the right time, and then they stop six months too early because the resistance felt like rejection. Cohen’s nine years inside one of the most resistant industries in the world is a case study in staying when staying is hard.

The thing worth knowing is that the 100 departments now showing measurable results — force down, litigation down, community trust up — are proof that the system works. Not in theory. In the field, daily, where it actually counts.

Scot Cohen did not just build a device. He built a training model, a policy framework, a counter-drone detection system, and a federal subsidiary. He listened to what his customers actually needed and kept building. That is what authority that scales looks like.

── ✦ ──

🎙️ Listen to the full episode with Scot Cohen:

📺 YouTube:

🎧 Spotify: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/public-safety-technology-just-crossed-a-new-line--72762111
🎙️ Podcast Series: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-no-harm-standard--7125922

── ✦ ──

Scot Cohen is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Wrap Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: WRAP), a publicly traded global public safety company whose non-lethal restraint device, virtual reality training platform, and drone response systems are now deployed across more than 1,000 agencies in 60 countries. He left a 30-year career in capital markets — including co-founding a $300 million hedge fund — to build a company he describes as his higher purpose, leading every round of Wrap’s $90 million in financing and running a foundation that delivers mental health support to law enforcement officials.

── ✦ ──

CONNECT WITH SCOT COHEN & WRAP TECHNOLOGIES:

🌐 Website: https://www.wrap.com

📸 Instagram: @wraptechinc

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scot-cohen-643181375/

📘 Facebook: @wraptechinc

Why the Smartest Leaders in the Room Are Still Losing Trust

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 23:05:30 GMT

Here is the question Rich Lyons hears most from the leaders he coaches.

“When am I gonna stop feeling afraid?”

Rich Lyons, entrepreneur, former CEO, leadership coach, and author of Life Is Sales: A Holistic Approach to Sales, Self-Discovery, and Living a Life of Purpose, has a two-word answer for them. You won’t.

That answer, he says, is not a warning. It is the beginning of real leadership. Because the leaders who struggle most are not the ones who feel afraid — they are the ones who believe they should not.

── ✦ ──

The Trust Problem Nobody Is Talking About Honestly

Most leaders treat trust like a byproduct. Do good work, build a strong track record, lead with expertise, and trust follows.

Lyons disagrees. He spent years as a CEO walking his office floor, building face-to-face relationships with five hundred employees, and watching what actually created loyalty. It was never expertise. It was consistency, honesty, and being willing to show up as a real person.

He points to how much harder this has become in a world where people cannot always tell whether they are talking to a person or an AI, where remote work has stripped away casual hallway conversations, and where polished personal brands have made authenticity feel scarce.

The cost of not solving this is not just a likability problem. It is a retention problem, a culture problem, and a growth ceiling.

── ✦ ──

Fear Is Information, Not a Flaw

Lyons uses a scale of one to ten to help leaders understand their emotional states. Fear, he teaches, is never a yes or no answer.

“We’re afraid all the time,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I’m shaking in the fetal position on the floor. But we have anxiety, we have excitement. That’s always going on.”

When a leader says they are not afraid, they are not being strong — they are cutting themselves off from one of the most useful signals they have. Fear, when you are aware of it, tells you whether you are prepared, whether something is missing, whether a risk is real or imagined.

Lyons’ framework is built around five core feelings: fear, hurt, anger, sadness, and joy. Everything else is a derivative. And the one most leaders misread is anger.

Underneath most anger, he says, is hurt or fear that has not been named. Leaders who skip past that layer and go straight to anger create messes they did not intend and lose trust they cannot easily rebuild.

── ✦ ──

The Loop That Separates Leaders From Managers

Self-awareness without self-regulation is just navel-gazing. Lyons is specific about what the full loop looks like in a real business moment.

Something happens. A comment stings. A deal falls through. A team member says something wrong. Without awareness, you leak — the fear or hurt comes out sideways and creates a bigger problem than the original one.

With awareness, something different becomes possible. Lyons described it this way:

“I can literally be watching myself. Wow, I really got hooked. I just reacted. What’s going on inside? And then boom, back. Why am I here? What am I trying to accomplish? Stay on purpose.”

That loop — from reaction back to purpose — is self-regulation. Not suppression. The ability to feel something fully and still choose how you respond.

The bonus: once you become attuned to your own emotional state, you start reading the room far more accurately. You walk in and sense that someone is afraid before they say a word. That social awareness is what makes a leader someone people genuinely want to follow.

── ✦ ──

Authenticity Is Not Vulnerability Theater

Lyons draws a clear line between being authentic and oversharing. As CEO, he was not friends with all five hundred of his employees. But they knew him.

At annual all-hands meetings, he flew everyone to Chicago. Standing in front of that room, he would sometimes be moved to tears looking at what the team had built together. He did not hide it.

His people made fun of him for it — counting how many sentences he would get through before he started crying. He was fine with that. “I’m fine with you making fun of me because I care.”

That is the line. Authenticity is not telling your team everything. It is letting them see that you mean what you say, that the work matters to you, and that you are there to serve them — not to be served by them.

He has a name for the opposite pattern: the “affirm me” culture, where the CEO expects their team to validate them constantly. It is, he says, one of the surest signs that a leader has confused their role. Your job as a CEO, Lyons says plainly, is to cheerlead your people. Not to need your people to cheerlead you.

── ✦ ──

The Deal He Walked Away From — and Why It Made Him Richer

Here is the business case for authenticity, made specific.

Lyons would sometimes sit across from a prospective client and tell them outright that his company was not the right fit. He would refer them to a competitor. Revenue walked out the door.

Those same clients came back later. Different project. Bigger budget. “You’d be so surprised,” he said, “how many people would come back to me later. I know you didn’t want to do that other project. How about this project?”

The trust built by a single honest moment outlasted a dozen successful pitches. That is the return on authenticity that most leaders never calculate because they are too focused on closing every deal.

The counterintuitive truth Lyons has built his entire philosophy around: serve first, and the business follows. Pursue the money first, and you will always feel like you are chasing something just out of reach.

── ✦ ──

“My job as a CEO is to cheerlead all my people, not help them cheerlead me.”
Rich Lyons, entrepreneur, former CEO, and author of Life Is Sales

── ✦ ──

What To Take With You

🎯 Notice fear before you act on it. You do not have to do anything with it — just observe it. Awareness alone shifts the pattern.

🎯 Ask what is underneath the anger. Most anger is hurt or fear wearing a harder face. Finding the real feeling gives you real options.

🎯 Stop filling silence. Silence is not a gap you are required to close. The leaders who can sit quietly in a room carry more presence than the ones who fill every pause.

🎯 Be curious on purpose. Ask questions and listen for the actual answer — not just while you are waiting to talk.

🎯 Define wealth before you chase it. Lyons will not coach someone whose only goal is money. Health, relationships, family, meaningful work — if those are not in the definition, the money will not satisfy anyway.

── ✦ ──

The leaders Lyons describes as most trustworthy are not the ones who have eliminated fear, doubt, or imposter syndrome. They are the ones who have stopped pretending those things are not there.

That shift — from performing confidence to actually knowing yourself — is what people feel when they are around a real leader. They cannot always name it. But they trust it. And they follow it.

If you are building something that matters and feel like the people who need you most still are not finding you, start here. Not with a better pitch or a bigger platform. Start with the question Lyons asks every client: who are you actually being when no one is evaluating you?

That answer, more than any strategy or system, is the foundation your authority is built on. Rich Lyons has been proving that for decades.

── ✦ ──

🎙️ Listen to the full episode with Rich Lyons: 📺 YouTube:

🎧 Spotify: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/authentic-leadership-builds-trust-faster-than-expertise--72695030 🎙️ Podcast Series: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sell-smarter-live-better--6777245

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Rich Lyons is an entrepreneur, former CEO, leadership coach, and author of Life Is Sales: A Holistic Approach to Sales, Self-Discovery, and Living a Life of Purpose. He built Lyons Consulting Group to roughly five hundred employees before selling the company in 2017, and now leads leadership cohorts, advisory boards, and one-on-one executive coaching focused on self-awareness, authentic leadership, and service-driven growth. He helps leaders build the kind of trust that creates real loyalty — the kind that outlasts any title, pitch, or polished personal brand.

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CONNECT WITH RICH LYONS
🌐 Website: https://www.lifeissales.com https://www.richlyons.com
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardblyons/
🐦 X / Twitter: @richardblyons
📸 Instagram: @richardblyons

The Sound My Father Heard in the Hallway

Advisor with Stacey Chillemi — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:02:59 GMT

Hi friend 💜

I have been carrying this story for a long time.

Not because it is too painful to tell — though it is one of the most vulnerable things I have ever put into words. But because I was not sure the world was ready to receive it in the way it deserved.

I think it is ready now.

I was sixteen years old.

The bathroom was quiet. The water was warm. It was an ordinary weekday afternoon.

I felt the aura.

I was in the bathtub.

And then I went under.

My father was walking past the bathroom when he heard a sound that was not right — a gurgling sound, quiet and wrong and unlike anything that should be coming from behind a locked door.

He called my name. I did not answer.

He kicked the door open.

He found me underneath the water.

He pulled me out.

I came back to consciousness on the bathroom floor. Wet. Frightened. And — this is the part that surprises people when I tell this story — deeply, completely embarrassed.

Not grateful. Not relieved.

Embarrassed.

I was sixteen years old, and my body had betrayed me in the most private space in the home. I was a teenager who wanted nothing more than independence and normalcy. And instead I was on a bathroom floor, soaking wet, staring up at my father’s face.

He sat down on the floor beside me.

He did not speak for a long time.

He did not fill the silence with reassurance. He did not lecture me. He did not cry, though I suspect some part of him needed to.

He just sat there.

On the bathroom floor.

With me.

That is the whole story, in a way. Not the seizure. Not the water. Not even the fear.

Just my father — sitting on a bathroom floor, refusing to leave, being present in the most unglamorous and completely essential way.

None of what I have built since exists if he does not hear that sound in the hallway.

None of it exists if he hesitates.

None of it exists if he does not stay.

I was sixteen years old, and I was drowning in my own bathtub.

And the world was not ready for me to leave yet.

Death sent me back.

If you have someone in your life who has ever kicked a door open for you — who has ever stayed when staying was hard — I hope you tell them today.

They changed everything. Even if they never knew it. 💜

With love and gratitude,

Stacey

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