Rise Together

Working together to build a compassionate, progressive government that actually works for the people!

By Walter Rhein

Decolonized Journalism

An investigative newsletter providing important context to political, human rights, and racial justice stories.

By Arturo Dominguez

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with and ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Margaret Williams, MS, ACC in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Ofer Lidsky's Website

Ofer Lidsky

Founder, CEO, & Neurotechnology Innovator

Ofer Lidsky is a visionary serial entrepreneur and deep-tech innovator with over 30 years of experience developing cutting-edge software platforms across digital health, neurotechnology, genetics, and information security. Driven by a mission to create meaningful global impact, he specializes in transforming complex scientific concepts into highly practical, life-changing digital tools.

Current Leadership & Ventures

• Founder & CEO, Excellent Brain (2015 – Present)

Ofer leads a pioneering neurotechnology company that develops advanced Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) and Virtual Reality (VR) solutions. The company’s flagship platform offers home-based, non-drug neurofeedback training kits and attention-focused games designed to help individuals and families manage ADHD, enhance self-regulation, and maximize cognitive performance. Under his leadership, the platform has expanded globally across 20 countries and recently launched its clinical-grade Android ecosystem.

• Co-Founder, CEO & CTO, DNAtix (2007 – Present)

A pioneer in the digital genetics space, Ofer co-founded DNAtix to build a direct-to-consumer digital ecosystem for anonymous, encrypted genetic data transfer and analysis. Notably, his development team successfully performed a landmark proof-of-concept by transferring a full viral DNA sequence through the Ethereum blockchain. He is also the primary inventor of a registered U.S. patent for user authentication based on genetic sequences.

• Founder, TerraSafe Ltd. (2005 – Present)

Recognizing early on the critical need for robust data protection, Ofer founded TerraSafe, a premier hybrid cloud backup and managed data security provider delivering comprehensive technical defense and synchronization solutions for businesses.

Thought Leadership & Professional Affiliations

Ofer is an active member of the Forbes Technology Council (joined January 2023), where he regularly contributes insights on leadership, technology, and intentional innovation. He also serves as a Global Facilitator for The Mental Wellness Society, collaborating on international initiatives to bridge tech innovation with human well-being. He frequently lectures on leadership, consciousness, and the foundational role of integrity in business.

Core Expertise

• Neurotechnology & Digital Health: Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI), EEG signal processing, and therapeutic VR/gamification.

• Genomics & Emerging Tech: Blockchain infrastructure applications for secure medical data.

• Cybersecurity: Comprehensive information security, managed cloud architecture, and cryptographic authentication.

• Organizational Leadership: Building cross-functional development teams and scaling product footprints globally with an emphasis on clarity and high integrity.

  ---

• Talking Points: Making a Breakthrough with ADHD

For women in leadership who think differently and lead anyway.

A breakthrough with ADHD doesn’t come from finally becoming someone else. It comes from reading your own terrain honestly, building the systems that hold your line, and refusing to keep paying the tax of pretending. These talking points are written for women who lead with attention that works differently, whether you were diagnosed at eight or are only now connecting the dots at fifty-two. The aim is plain: stop managing shame, and start managing the mission.

Open the Conversation

• Name the terrain, not the deficit. ADHD is a different operating system, not a broken one. You don’t have an attention shortage; you have an attention that goes all in on what it finds urgent, interesting, or threatening, and goes dark on what it doesn’t. The breakthrough starts when you stop fighting the wiring and start commanding it.

• Most women were missed. The old picture of ADHD was a boy who couldn’t sit still. Women learned early to mask, to overprepare, to overapologize, and to white-knuckle their way through. That masking is expensive, and a lot of women only get the diagnosis after the bill comes due. If that’s you, you are not late. You are finally accurate.

• The shame is the real obstacle, not the ADHD. By the time many women reach leadership, they’ve absorbed years of “you’re so smart, why can’t you just.” The breakthrough isn’t a new planner. It’s setting down the belief that you’re a disciplined person who keeps failing, and picking up the truth that you’re a differently-wired person who hasn’t had the right systems.

The Core Message

Your attention is a resource to be commanded, not a flaw to be hidden.

• Manage energy and attention like terrain, not willpower. You already read rooms, you read your own state the same way. Know your high-signal hours and put your hardest thinking there. Know what drains you and stop scheduling it at 4 p.m. This is situational awareness applied inward, not a productivity hack.

• Build systems that hold the line so your brain doesn’t have to. A leader doesn’t hold the whole battle in her head; she builds the structure that holds it for her. Externalize everything: capture tasks the moment they appear, set the reminder before you trust yourself to remember, and make the default path the right path. The point isn’t discipline. It’s removing the moments where discipline was ever required.

• Hyperfocus is a weapon aimed at it. The same wiring that loses your keys can lock onto a hard problem for six straight hours and produce work no one else could. The skill isn’t turning hyperfocus off. It’s pointing it at what matters and protecting it from interruption when it shows up.

• Delegate to your difference, not against it. Stop assigning yourself the detail-grind tasks that punish your wiring and exhaust your team’s patience. Hand those to people built for them and keep the work that uses your range pattern recognition, fast pivots, and big-picture command. That isn’t avoidance. That’s the correct allocation of force.

Reframes Worth Repeating

• “Disorganized” often means no system has matched how you actually think yet. Build the match.

• “Inconsistent” often means under-stimulated. The work isn’t too hard, but it’s not engaging enough to hold you. Engineer the stakes.

• “Too intense” is frequently just clarity that other people aren’t used to hearing out loud.

• “Can’t finish things” usually means the start was the hard part. Lower the cost of starting, and the finishing follows.

For the Coaching Chair

Susan, a composite client, was a VP who ran three divisions and a household and could not, for the life of her, return a routine email before it became a crisis. She thought she was lazy. She is one of the most capable people I’ve worked with. What changed wasn’t effort she had spent decades on effort. What changed was that she stopped relying on her memory and built a capture system she trusted, moved her hardest decisions to her sharp morning window, and handed the recurring detail work to a coordinator who was genuinely good at it. Within a quarter, she wasn’t “managing her ADHD.” She was running her divisions with the brain she actually has. The breakthrough was permission plus structure in that order.

Anticipate the Pushback

• “Isn’t this just an excuse?” No. An excuse explains why nothing will change. A diagnosis explains why the old strategy failed, so you can choose one that works. Accountability goes up, not down, when you stop fighting blind.

• “Won’t people see me as less capable?” You don’t owe anyone your medical chart. What you owe yourself is systems that let your real capability show. Disclose strategically, where it buys you support, not reflexively, out of guilt.

• “I’ve made it this far without help.” You’ve made it this far carrying a weight you didn’t need to carry. Imagine the range you’ll have once you set it down.

Close

The breakthrough is not the day your attention behaves. It’s the day you stop running someone else’s playbook and start leading from the brain you were given with the structure, the self-knowledge, and the nerve to use it. You were never the problem. You were under-equipped. That ends the day you decide it does.

Two questions to sit with:

Where am I still spending energy hiding how my mind works instead of building around it?

And what would I take on next if I trusted that my wiring was an asset, not a liability?

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you , , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Margaret Williams, MS, ACC in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Thank you , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Share

Subscribe now

Get more from Margaret Williams, MS, ACC in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

The Human Resolve®

Why leaders lose clarity under pressure and how to get it back. Weekly insights on decision-making when performance matters most. For executives and high performers in constant change. Every Wednesday.

By Savio P. Clemente

Savio P. Clemente is a healthcare leadership keynote speaker, journalist, board-certified executive wellness coach (NBC-HWC, ACC), and bestselling author. He specializes in executive decision quality, cognitive load management, and what he defines as the “Post-Crisis Leadership Gap,” the vulnerable period after an organizational disruption when systems stabilize but executive judgment and team alignment have not fully recovered.

Savio P. Clemente's Linkedin

Core Frameworks & Professional Work

• Adaptive Resilience Leadership®: Clemente is the creator of this proprietary framework, which helps high-performing executive teams, particularly in healthcare, stabilize their cognition, reduce decision fatigue, and maintain strategic clarity under sustained pressure.

• The Human Resolve®: He is the author of The Human Resolve®, a weekly Substack newsletter focused on decision-making, reducing cognitive load, and helping leaders regain clarity when performance matters most.

• Media & Interviews: As a syndicated columnist and media personality, Clemente has interviewed over 2,000 executives, visionaries, and celebrities (ranging from events like SXSW, CES, and the World Business Forum to the Academy Awards). His work uncovers the core behaviors that drive adaptability and sustained high performance.

  Savio P. Clemente's Website

  ---

Lived Experience & Background

Clemente’s professional perspective is deeply informed by his personal journey as a two-time cancer survivor. After undergoing a life-saving stem cell transplant for Stage 3 Diffuse Large B-cell Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, he translated his firsthand experience with prolonged medical uncertainty and recovery into actionable leadership wisdom. He frequently addresses the intersection of physical recovery, mental clarity, and the restoration of executive agency.

Key Media & Publications

• TEDx Speaker: Presenter of the viral talk, “7 Minutes to Wellness: How to Love Your Inner Stranger.”

• Bestselling Author: Author of I Survived Cancer and Here Is How I Did It.

• Media Features: His insights have been featured across major platforms, including Fox News, Authority Magazine, Thrive Global, the LA Tribune, and Bloomberg.

  ---

  Subscribe now

  Share

  ---

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Margaret Williams, MS, ACC in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Not because you’re weak. Not because you’re afraid. Because you measured the terrain, and you decided the moment didn’t call for everything you had. You held the line with a fraction of your force, and it was enough.

That decision has a name. It’s called temperance. And it is one of the most misread strengths a leader can carry.

What It Actually Is

Temperance is not restraint for its own sake. It’s not the quiet, swallowed silence of a woman who’s been told to shrink. Strip that interpretation out right now; it doesn’t belong to you.

Temperance is three things working as one.

It’s self-governance, the discipline to command yourself before you command anyone else. It’s balance, the steadiness to hold your footing when competing pressures pull at you from every direction. And it’s measured power strength that knows exactly how much of itself to deploy, and chooses not to spend a round more.

Think of it the way you’d think of a seasoned commander. The untested one empties the magazine at every threat. The seasoned one knows that power held in reserve is still power. Often, it’s more.

Where in your leadership are you firing everything you have, when a measured response would hold the same ground?

How It Gets Withheld

Here’s what they don’t tell you. Temperance gets weaponized against women in leadership, and it gets denied to us in the same breath.

When a man holds his fire, he’s disciplined. Strategic. A steady hand. When you hold yours, you’re passive. When a man balances competing demands, he’s a master juggler. When you do it, you’re spread too thin. And when you deploy measured power exactly the right amount, no more, they call it cold. Calculating. Hard to read.

So, the system sets a trap. Show too much force, and you’re aggressive. Show temperance, and you’re either weak or you’re cold. There’s no clean lane. That’s not an accident. That’s how authority gets withheld from the people who threaten the existing order.

And the cruelest part: many of us internalize it. We learn to confuse temperance with self-erasure. We hold back not as a measured command decision, but out of fear of the penalty. That’s not temperance. That’s a leash someone else is holding.

Why You, and Why It’s Not Weakness

You were likely trained to read this strength as a deficit. Let me reframe the terrain.

Temperance is the opposite of weakness. Weakness is having no control over your own response. Weakness is the leader who detonates because she couldn’t govern herself, or the one who vanishes because she never built the spine to choose. Temperance sits between those two failures. It is the deliberate center.

It takes more strength to hold power in reserve than to spend it. Anyone can react. It takes a commander to decide. When you measure your response when you balance the moment and govern yourself and deploy exactly what’s required, you are doing the hardest work leadership asks of anyone.

That’s not you holding back. That’s you in full command.

The Leadership Impact

When you lead with temperance, the chain of command around you steadies. People read it instantly, even when they can’t name it. They know you won’t overreact. They know you won’t collapse. They know that whatever lands on your desk, your response will be proportionate to the threat, no more, no less.

That predictability is power. A team that trusts your judgment under pressure will follow you into terrain they’d never enter behind a volatile leader. Your composure becomes their cover.

And when the real moment comes, when full force is required, your reserve means you have it. The leader who spends everything on small fights has nothing left for the decisive one. You will. That’s the dividend temperance pays.

How to Take It Back

Reclaiming temperance starts with separating the real thing from the counterfeit. Run this check.

First: before you respond, name the actual threat level. Is this a clash, or is this the hill? Most of what provokes us is a clash. Match your force to the size of the fight.

Second: govern yourself first. Take the pause. One breath. The space between stimulus and response is where your authority lives. Claim it deliberately, don’t let the moment claim it for you.

Third: distinguish a command decision from a leash. Ask yourself, am I holding back because I’ve measured this and chosen restraint? Or am I holding back because I’m afraid of the penalty? The first is temperance. The second is something to break.

Fourth: keep your reserve visible to yourself. You are not being passive. You are holding power in hand, deciding moment by moment how much to deploy. That framing changes everything.

What It Feels Like to Stand in It

It feels like steadiness. Not numbness steadiness. The ground holds under you when it’s shifting for everyone else.

It feels like the quiet confidence of a leader who is never surprised by her own reaction, because she governs it. It feels like walking out of a charged room knowing you gave exactly what the moment required and not one ounce more, and the work got done.

It feels like power you can finally trust, because the hand on it is your own.

From the Coaching Chair

I worked with a leader I’ll call Diane. Two decades into a career she’d built brick by brick, and she came to me convinced she had a temper problem. Every challenge to her authority, she met at full force. She’d win the moment and lose the room. She was exhausted, and she was starting to believe the label they’d hung on her volatile.

We didn’t work on suppression. Suppression would have just built the counterfeit. We worked on measurement. Threat level first. Pause second. Match the force to the fight.

The shift wasn’t that Diane went quiet. The shift was that she went deliberate. She stopped spending her full authority on every conflict and started holding it in reserve for the fights that decided things. Her team steadied. Her own exhaustion lifted. And the next time a genuine line was crossed, she had every bit of her power intact, and she brought it. Cleanly. Proportionately. Nobody called her volatile after that. They called her formidable.

She didn’t get smaller. She got command of herself. That’s temperance.

Final Reflection

Temperance is not the absence of power. It’s the mastery of it. Self-governance, balance, measured force held as one, in your own hand.

Sit with these two questions before you go.

Where have you been spending your full authority on conflicts that never deserved it?

And what might steady around you if you simply held your power in reserve and trusted yourself to know when to use it?

Closing

This was Foresight. I see you. And I’ll see you next time.

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

Share

Get more from Margaret Williams, MS, ACC in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Not a lie someone told you. Not a betrayal you can name and be angry about. Something quieter than that. A story you’ve been carrying so long you stopped seeing it as a story at all. You just call it the truth. You call it “how things are.”

But it isn’t how things are, beloved. It’s an illusion. And you’ve been building on it.

This is Foresight. And today we’re talking about illusions, what they actually are, why they exist, what they cost you, and how you walk yourself out of one without falling apart in the process.

Because you can. And it changes everything on the other side.

What They Actually Are

An illusion is not a lie. A lie comes from outside you; somebody else hands it to you. An illusion you build yourself, with your own hands, out of the materials you were given.

It’s a story your mind constructed to make sense of something that didn’t make sense. You make something bearable that wasn’t. To keep you safe when you were small and couldn’t afford the truth.

“If I’m good enough, they’ll finally love me.” That’s an illusion.

“If I achieve enough, I’ll finally feel safe.” Illusion.

“This is just how much it’s supposed to hurt.” “I can’t leave.” “There’s no other way.” “This is the best I can do.”

These aren’t facts. They’re constructions. Stories that hardened into walls, and you’ve been mistaking the walls for the world.

Why They Exist

Here’s what I need you to understand, because this is where the shame wants to creep in. How did I believe this for so long? How did I not see it?

You didn’t fail to see it. The illusion was doing a job.

Every illusion you carry was protective once. It started as the kindest story your mind could tell you in a moment you couldn’t survive any other way.

The child who decided “it’s my fault” because a world where it was her fault felt safer than a world where the adults who were supposed to protect her simply wouldn’t. At least fault gave her something to fix. Something to control.

The woman who decided “I just have to work harder” because believing effort would save her felt better than facing a system that was never going to reward her fairly no matter what she did.

That’s why illusions exist, love. They are mercy your younger self extended to you when the truth would have been too heavy to hold. They were never stupidity. They were survival, wearing the costume of belief.

And if you’re a marginalized woman, you were handed a whole architecture of them. Keep your head down, and you’ll be safe. Be twice as good, and you’ll be recognized. Don’t make waves, and you’ll be protected. Illusions, everyone sold to you as wisdom, because they kept you manageable.

What They Cost

But here is the foresight piece. A story that saved you at seven will quietly bankrupt you at forty.

Because you kept building on it. And not just in the obvious ways. Your mind actually goes to work protecting the illusion it filters out what doesn’t fit, plays up what confirms it, quietly steers you away from anything that might prove it wrong. That’s not a flaw in you. That’s just how the mind handles a belief it’s decided it needs. It keeps the evidence tidy.

So, you pick partners that fit the story. You take jobs that confirm it. You walk past the doors that would’ve contradicted it, because they got filtered out before you ever consciously saw them.

And here’s why this matters more than almost anything else we talk about. The illusion isn’t one belief sitting off to the side. It’s the foundation. Every boundary you try to set, every goal you reach for, every bid for something better, you’re building it all on top of that foundation. And if the foundation is the illusion, the structure can’t hold. You can’t out-strategize a false belief about what you deserve. You can’t out-work a story that says you’ll never be enough. You’ll just build a bigger, more impressive version of the same trap.

And the cruelest cost of all you stop being able to see what’s actually in front of you. Real love that doesn’t match the illusion of love you were taught. Real opportunity that doesn’t look like the narrow door you were told to wait at.

You are not living your life. You are living the story about your life. And those are not the same thing.

How to Change It

So let me give you the way through. Three moves. None of them complicated. All of them ask for courage.

First, question the thing you’re most certain about. Not the small doubts. The bedrock. The belief that feels so true it doesn’t even feel like a belief. Ask it one honest question: Is this actually true, or is this just what I had to believe back then? And then look for the seam, the place where reality keeps contradicting the story. A friend who loves you without you earning it. The time something good came easy. Your mind has been filing those away as exceptions. Stop letting it. The exceptions are the truth trying to get in.

Second, grieve it. This is the part people skip, and it’s why they fail. When an illusion falls, you don’t just feel free. You feel loss. Because that story was a companion. It organized your world. Letting it go means grieving the life you thought you were living, and the version of you who believed it. Let yourself grieve. The grief is not a detour. The grief is the doorway.

Third, build slowly on the new ground. Don’t rush to replace one grand story with another. Just start standing on what’s actually real, one small true thing at a time. That happened. This is true. I can see this clearly now. Reality is quieter than illusion. But it holds.

If you’ve been with me for the episode on what we call love, you’ll recognize this muscle. There, the question was whether what you called love was really just a cycle. Here, it’s whether what you call truth is really just a story. Same work. You’re learning to tell the construction from the real thing.

Why It’s Transformational

Here’s what waits for you on the other side. And this is the whole reason the hard work is worth it.

When you walk out of an illusion, you don’t just change a belief. You get your vision back. You start seeing people as they actually are, not as your story needed them to be. You start seeing the opportunities that were always there, sitting in the blind spot your mind built. You stop being so easy to deceive by others and by yourself, because the hooks they used to catch you on are simply gone.

Your decisions get sharper because you’re finally working with real information instead of a story. Your relationships get truer, because you’re meeting people in reality instead of in the role your illusion cast them in. And the exhaustion lifts that bone-deep tiredness of holding up a world that was never real.

That’s the transformation. Not that life gets easier. That life gets real. And a real life, even a harder one, is lighter to carry than the most beautiful illusion because you’re no longer spending all your strength holding up something that was always going to fall.

From the Coaching Chair

I had a client who had built everything on one illusion: if I am indispensable, I will be safe. She was the one who never dropped the ball. The one who held it all. And she was disappearing under the weight of it.

The work wasn’t teaching her to delegate. She knew how to delegate. The work was sitting with her while she finally asked the question underneath: what am I so afraid of, if I’m not the one holding everything?

And there it was. A girl who learned, a long time ago, that being needed was the only way to be kept. The whole towering structure of her overwork stood on that one small, ancient belief.

She grieved it. Really grieved it. And then she set it down.

She didn’t become less capable. She became free. She told me, months later, that she hadn’t realized she’d been running from something her whole career until she stopped, and nothing she feared actually happened.

Final Reflection

Pause with me here.

I want you to think of one thing you’re certain about. One belief about yourself, or your life, or what you’re allowed to have, that feels like simple fact.

Now hold it gently, and ask: Is this true? Or is this just what I needed to believe, once, to get through something?

You don’t have to tear it down tonight. You don’t have to have the answer. You just have to be willing to hold the question to let one crack of light into a room you’d stopped checking.

That willingness is the beginning of seeing clearly.

Closing

An illusion convinces you it’s the floor beneath your feet when really it’s something you’ve been holding up with both hands, for years, without ever once setting it down to look at it.

So set it down, beloved. Not all at once. Just enough to see what it actually is. Find out what’s real underneath it. Grieve what wasn’t. And notice when your hands are finally empty, how much lighter you walk.

The truth was never the heavy thing. The illusion was. You were just the one carrying it.

You can set it down anytime you’re ready.

And you can see clearly. You always could. You were only ever protecting the part of you that wasn’t safe to know yet.

She’s safe now.

This was Foresight. I see you. And I’ll see you next time.

Subscribe now

Share

Mack Devlin, widely known by his online moniker Street Preacher, is an American writer, singer, artist, and digital content creator. He is the author and host of Mack Devlin’s Imperfect Speech, a Substack publication and multimedia platform where he shares his writing, live broadcasts, and creative commentary.

Creative Philosophy & Style

Devlin describes his work and communication style as “complex non-linear speech, fragmented for variety, compounded with circumlocution, but constructed without duplicity.” This candid, unapologetic approach defines his public persona. Operating under the banner of being “imperfect as all holy hell,” his content frequently explores the intersections of faith, recovery, art, and human vulnerability, inviting his audience to “stumble through together.”

Digital Presence & Content

Through his Substack channel, Devlin produces a diverse range of content, including:

· Live Broadcasts & Interviews: He regularly hosts live video and audio segments, featuring deep-dive conversations with fellow writers and creators, such as his recent broadcast with Ilias Shepherd Marrow.

· Writing & Curated Commentary: Devlin utilizes his platform to amplify other independent voices, frequently “restacking” and reviewing pieces on literature, creative perseverance, and personal transformation.

· Philanthropy: He leverages his digital reach to support charitable causes, actively promoting organizations like the Make-A-Wish Foundation to encourage community giving.

Personal Life

Devlin is an open adherent of the Christian faith, which deeply informs the themes of grace, brokenness, and resilience in his writing. In addition to his literary work, he is a passionate singer and visual artist.

Talking Points: How Faith & Spirituality Sustain Us During Chaotic Times with Street Preacher

Awakening for the leaders, the seekers, and the ones still holding on while everything around them shifts

There is something different about the chaos of this moment.

You feel it.

The flood of news. The grief that doesn’t end. The decisions that should be simple are becoming impossible. The kind of fatigue that sleep alone can’t fix.

You cannot lead or even live out of an empty well.

That is what faith and spirituality are for.

Not as decoration. Not as an escape. Not as the spiritual version of looking away.

But as the ground you stand on when the ground itself is shaking.

“Where in your life is the ground shaking right now?”

1. Faith Is Not The Absence Of Chaos. It Is What Holds You Inside It.

Many of us were taught that faith means peace, ease, and certainty.

So the moment chaos arrives, we assume we’re doing something wrong.

That is not faith. That is naivety.

Real faith is not the absence of trouble. It is the deep, quiet trust that you are held inside it.

• Faith doesn’t make the storm stop.

• Faith makes you the kind of person who can stand inside the storm without becoming it.

Quotable: “Faith is not what you reach for to skip the hard part. It is what holds you while you walk through it.”

2. Spirituality Is Not a Feeling. It Is a Practice.

If your spirituality only shows up when you feel good, it will not sustain you when you don’t.

You cannot wait for inspiration. You have to build infrastructure.

Build a rhythm that holds you on the days you don’t feel anything at all:

• a daily moment of stillness, prayer, or breath

• a weekly practice that returns you to yourself

• scripture, mantra, or words that anchor you when your own run dry

• rest as a sacred act, not a reward

Quotable: “You cannot survive chaos on inspiration. You survive it in practice.”

3. Chaos Is Not Only Loss. It Is Also A Revealer.

Hard seasons strip things away. That is the painful part.

But they also reveal what is true.

• What you actually believe, not just what you’ve been saying.

• Who is really in your corner, not just who has been in your calendar.

• What you are actually called to, not just what you were chasing.

Don’t outrun the revealing. Some of the most important leadership lessons you will ever learn are on the other side of letting yourself feel this.

“What has this season already revealed to you that you have been afraid to admit?”

4. Faith Without Action Is Bypass. Action Without Faith Is Exhaustion.

Some people use spirituality to escape responsibility. They pray and never move.

Others have no spiritual practice at all. They push and push until their body, their leadership, or their joy gives out.

Neither is sustainable.

• Pray and then act.

• Act and then return to the source.

• Let your faith fuel your work. Let your work be evidence of your faith.

Quotable: “Prayer is not a substitute for the work. The work is not a substitute for prayer. You need both.”

5. You Were Not Meant to Do This Alone

Especially in chaotic seasons, isolation will lie to you.

It will tell you no one understands. It will tell you, you are the only one. It will tell you to retreat.

Resist that voice.

• Sit with the people who remind you who you are.

• Show up for the community that has held you and let them hold you again.

• Build the kind of relationships where prayer, lament, and laughter can all exist in the same room.

Your ancestors, biological or spiritual, did not survive their chaos in private. Neither will you.

Quotable: “You are not meant to carry this alone. You were never meant to.”

6. Hold Grief And Hope At The Same Time

Real spiritual maturity is not the ability to choose hope over grief.

It is the ability to hold them in the same hand.

• You can be devastated and still trust.

• You can be furious and still pray.

• You can be exhausted and still believe in what is on the other side of this.

Both are sacred. Both are real. Neither one cancels the other out.

Quotable: “Hope is not the absence of grief. It is what you grow alongside it.”

7. Faith Is How You Keep Choosing the Wider Story

In chaos, the small story wants to be the only story.

Today’s news. This week’s loss. This month’s exhaustion.

Faith pulls your eyes back to the wider arc.

• The people who came before you, what they survived, what they built, what they handed you.

• The people coming after you want what you are building for them, even now, even tired.

• The longer story you are part of is much older, much wider, much more enduring than this moment.

The chaos is real. And it is not the whole story.

Quotable: “Faith is the discipline of refusing to mistake this moment for the whole story.”

Closing Reflection

Sit with these questions this week:

• What is one practice I will return to, daily, no matter what the headlines say?

• What grief do I need to stop running from, and what hope do I need to stop apologizing for?

• Who do I need to call this week so that I am not walking through this alone?

You don’t get to control the chaos.

But you do get to choose what you stand on while it unfolds.

Stand on something that has held people before you.

Stand on something that will hold the people after you.

Then lead from there.

Call To Action

• Drop a word or short phrase in the comments that captures what is holding you right now

• Like, save, or share this Live with one person who is walking through something hard

Subscribe now

Share

• Follow for the next Live—we’re continuing the conversationThank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Margaret Williams, MS, ACC in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

People hear the phrase and think insecurity. Imposter syndrome. Self-doubt. They reduce it to “negative self-talk” and reach for an affirmation.

But the real enemy within is not that simple.

The enemy within is not your fear.

It is the inherited voice of every person, system, and structure that taught you to question yourself.

It is the surveillance you internalized in order to survive.

If you are a marginalized leader, you know this voice intimately. It has lived in your head for so long, you may have stopped recognizing it as someone else’s.

It sounds like:

• “Don’t be too much.”

• “Make sure they’re comfortable.”

• “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

• “Don’t take up too much space.”

That voice did not start with you.

It was given to you.

By teachers. By relatives. By coworkers. By systems. By every room that needed you small in order to feel large.

You absorbed it because you had to.

And now it lives inside you, dressed up as your own thinking.

The enemy within is not your insecurity.

It is the voice of everyone who needed you to doubt yourself, finally living inside your own head.

Why It Matters

Until you can tell the difference between your voice and the inherited one, every major decision you make is being co-authored by people you would not consciously invite into the room.

It looks like:

• second-guessing yourself in the middle of leading

• shrinking the ask before you have even made it

• preparing twice as long as anyone else and still apologizing for being prepared

• choosing the safer version of yourself and calling it humility

The cost is staggering. You spend your best energy negotiating with a voice you did not author, in a room you did not consent to host.

Every leadership move you make from that voice is a move made under occupation.

You deserve leadership that is yours.

You deserve a mind that belongs to you.

Visibility: Naming The Enemy Makes It Visible

The enemy within rules through camouflage. It hides by sounding like you.

The first act of power is naming it.

It sounds like:

• “That is not my voice. That is the voice I inherited.”

• “I am not afraid. I am being told to be afraid.”

• “This thought belongs to a room I am no longer in.”

When you name the inherited voice, it loses its disguise. You stop confusing it with truth. You stop letting it run leadership decisions through the back door.

What you can see, you can interrogate.

What you can name, you can release.

Visible self-awareness here is not paranoia. It is leadership clarity. It is the difference between leading from your mind and leading from inside someone else’s.

Liberation: Refusing The Voice Frees You

Once you can hear the difference between your voice and the inherited one, you are free to stop obeying it.

It sounds like:

• “I hear you. I am not taking orders from you anymore.”

• “You kept me safe once. You do not get to keep me small forever.”

• “I do not have to argue with you. I just have to stop following you.”

You do not have to silence the voice.

You have to stop letting it lead.

Liberation is not the absence of doubt. It is the refusal to confuse doubt with direction.

The enemy within only has power as long as you mistake its instructions for your own.

That mistake is over.

Transformation: Your Refusal Changes the Room

When one leader stops being led by the inherited voice, something radical happens.

The room expands.

Other leaders realize:

• “That voice is in my head too.”

• “I do not have to obey it.”

• “I am not the only one fighting this fight.”

The inherited voice is not just a personal occupation. It is a cultural one. It rules entire industries, entire generations, entire families. When you refuse it out loud, you give the people around you permission to refuse theirs.

That is how personal refusal becomes systemic change.

You do not just free yourself.

You make room for everyone else to hear themselves more clearly, too.

The Leadership Reality

Most leaders are not held back by their lack of talent.

They are held back by the voice that learned to live in their head long before they had a chance to choose what they believed.

You were trained to:

• mistake other people’s fear of you for your own self-knowledge

• treat the loudest internal voice as the truest

• carry surveillance you never consented to as if it were intuition

That is the reality. And it is also why so many capable leaders are still asking permission from voices that never deserved a seat at the table.

If that is you, pause.

You are not crazy.

You are not weak.

You are not behind.

You have been hosting people in your mind who do not pay rent and do not bring peace.

You are allowed to evict them.

Closing Reflection

Before your next leadership move, sit with these:

• Whose voice is currently loudest in my head, and is it actually mine?

• What do I keep hesitating to say that part of me already knows is true?

• If the inherited voice fell silent for one day, what would I do, ask for, or build?

The answers are not arrogance.

They are evidence of who you actually are when no one else is in your head.

The Final Truth

You cannot lead from a mind that is still being co-authored.

You cannot rise inside a voice that was built to keep you small.

And you cannot build what is yours while still taking orders from a room you have long since left.

Name the voice.

Refuse it.

Then lead from the mind that has always been yours.

That is the work.

Subscribe now

Share

From a Woman to a Leader

Helping women in tech be seen, heard, and respected as the leaders they already are.

By Limor Bergman Gross

Limor's Website

Limor Berman Gross Biography

Limor Bergman Gross is an accomplished executive leadership coach, international speaker, and former technology executive with over 20 years of experience building, leading, and scaling global engineering teams.

She focuses on helping engineering managers, directors, and rising women leaders in technology shift from execution-driven roles to positions of strategic influence and executive presence.

Professional Background & Tech Career

Before transitioning into executive coaching, Limor spent more than two decades in the tech industry, navigating male-dominated corporate environments. Her career began as a software engineer, and she steadily advanced through engineering management into senior leadership roles.

• Engineering Leadership: She has managed fully remote, globally distributed engineering teams for prominent companies, including serving as Director of Engineering at DigitalOcean. She also held technical roles at organizations like VMware and Sun Microsystems.

• Global Experience: Her leadership style is deeply informed by her real-world experiences navigating corporate growth, managing complex technical transformations, moving countries, and leading teams across multiple time zones.

Executive Coaching & Advocacy

In 2019, Limor pivoted from her corporate trajectory to address the “visibility gap” she had witnessed throughout her career, in which high-performing women were often overlooked for senior promotions despite delivering strong tactical results.

• Coaching Practice: Through her practice, she partners with women in engineering and tech leadership, helping them master the “unspoken rules” of corporate advancement—such as managing up, establishing executive presence, negotiating authority, and increasing visibility without burnout.

• Credentials: She is an International Coaching Federation (ICF) Professional Certified Coach (PCC).

• Podcast & Media: She is the host of the popular podcast From a Woman to a Leader, where she shares practical, fluff-free leadership frameworks and speaks on career momentum, systemic changes, and diversity in tech.

• Global Mentorship: Beyond her private practice, Limor actively mentors women and founders internationally through organizations like The Female Factor and Tech2Impact, and works with companies to design scalable internal mentorship and leadership development pipelines.

Education & Personal Life

Limor holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Accounting. Originally from Israel, she spent nine years living and working in the United States before returning to her home country. She balances her professional coaching and speaking schedule with her personal life as a mother of four and is an avid fitness enthusiast.

Talking Points for Women in Tech

A framing note before we start. This isn’t a piece about how hard it is to be a woman in tech. The women listening already know the terrain they live in. This is about what we plant for those coming up behind us, and why planting is the leadership act. Decision-makers in the room: this is also about you, because the seeds don’t grow in soil you don’t tend.

First, Define the Terrain: “Tech” Is Bigger Than the Big Five

Hear me on this before we go further: when someone says “women in tech,” most people picture five companies in California. That picture is the first thing we have to correct.

• Tech isn’t one industry. It’s a layer running through nearly all of them. That’s the real reason the workforce numbers swing so much; it depends on where you draw the line.

• Count it by sector companies whose core business is technology, and you get software and SaaS, hardware and semiconductors, internet and platforms, telecom, IT services, cybersecurity, fintech, AI and data, gaming, and the emerging edge: blockchain, climate tech, biotech-tech.

• Count it by occupation tech roles regardless of what the company sells and the field explodes outward: the software engineer at a bank, the data scientist at a hospital, the security lead at a retailer, the cloud architect in a defense program. That’s software development, data science, cloud and DevOps, cybersecurity, IT, technical product management, UX engineering, and AI/ML.

• And the representation isn’t even across that ground. Women sit near 30% in data science, but only about 18% in machine learning, and roughly 12% in cybersecurity. “Women in tech” hides real spread depending on which corner of the field you mean.

Why this matters for the decision-makers: the pipeline you’re responsible for tending isn’t only Silicon Valley. It runs through healthcare, finance, government, manufacturing, defense, retail, and education, every sector that now runs on software, which is nearly all of them. The seeds get planted across the whole field, not one orchard.

Opening Reflection: The Ground We’re Standing On

Hear me on this: the numbers haven’t moved the way the press releases promised.

• Women hold roughly a quarter to 28% of U.S. technology roles while making up close to half the overall workforce (high5, 2025; WomenHack, 2025).

• The representation thins as the work gets more technical and more senior, about 26% of computing roles, 16% of engineering roles (high5, 2025). The higher you climb, the lonelier the room.

• Half the women who enter tech leave the industry by 35 (Female Tech Leaders, 2025). That’s not a leak. That’s a field being abandoned mid-season.

Data note: These figures vary 2–28% by source depending on how “tech role” is defined (sector vs. occupation, global vs. U.S.). I’m using the conservative U.S. occupational range. Treat the exact percentage as directional, not precise.

Point One: The Broken Rung Is Where the Seed Gets Crushed

The glass ceiling gets the headlines. The broken rung does the damage.

• For every 100 men promoted to manager in 2025, only 93 women advanced, and just 60 Black women, 82 Latinas, and Asian women (McKinsey & Company & LeanIn.Org, 2025).

• This is the first promotion. Not the corner office, the first step into managing people. Miss it, and a woman never builds the leadership credibility the next rung requires. The gap compounds for a decade.

• Sponsorship is the water that rung needs: employees with sponsors are nearly twice as likely to be promoted, yet only 31% of entry-level women have one, against 45% of men (McKinsey & Company & LeanIn.Org, 2025).

Reflection for the decision-makers: you have been guarding the ceiling while the seedlings died at ground level. Move your attention to the first promotion. That’s the soil.

Data note: McKinsey’s own 2025 book The Broken Rung cites 81 women per 100 men using a different historical sample; the 93 figure is the current single-year pipeline number. Both are real; the lower figure is the longer trend. Cite the one that matches your point and say which.

Point Two: A New Fault Line: AI

A fresh inequity is being planted right now, in real time, and most people aren’t watching it.

• Only 21% of entry-level women are encouraged by their managers to use AI tools, compared with 33% of men (McKinsey & Company & LeanIn.Org, 2025).

• Encouragement matters: when employees are encouraged to use AI, they’re over 50% more likely to do so, and that’s how they build the skill (McKinsey & Company & LeanIn.Org, 2025).

• Women hold roughly 22% of AI jobs and 18% of machine-learning engineer roles (WEF, 2025; Stanford AI Index, 2025). If we don’t intervene at the encouragement stage, the next generation’s gap is being set today.

This is the seed nobody planted on purpose which is exactly how the worst inequities grow. Untended ground still produces a crop. Usually weeds.

Point Three: Sowing Is the Job, Not the Side Project

Here’s the turn. Every woman who made it through has a choice about what she does with the clearing she cut.

• Scarcity says: protect your seat, there’s only one. Abundance says: the woman you sponsor doesn’t cost you your position — she extends your line.

• Closing the first-promotion gap alone would add roughly one million women to management over five years (Fortune / LeanIn-McKinsey analysis). That’s not charity. That’s a talent pipeline most companies are leaving in the ground.

• More than half of women in tech say they lack a female role model in leadership (Comparably, 2024). You being visible is itself a seed. Sometimes the only one a younger woman gets.

The mentor you never had is the one you’re now equipped to be. That’s succession. That’s the whole assignment.

Data note: The “one million women” projection traces to the 2019 LeanIn/McKinsey study and a 72-per-100 promotion rate. The direction holds; the exact figure is dated. Frame it as illustrative of scale, not a current forecast.

Closing Reflection

Sowing seeds is slow work. You rarely see the harvest from where you’re standing. The officer who trained me never saw what I became, but I am standing on the ground she cleared. That’s the deal we make with the women coming up: we plant what we won’t personally pick.

To the decision-makers: stop measuring the ceiling and start tending the rung. To the women: the clearing you cut is not just yours to stand in. It’s yours to hand down.

The harvest belongs to whoever does the planting. So plant.

References

Comparably. (2024). Women in tech leadership representation survey. (As cited in industry compilations; verify against the primary Comparably dataset before publication.)

Female Tech Leaders Magazine. (2025, August 9). Women in tech in 2025: 50+ statistics point to a “bro” culture. https://femaletechleadersmagazine.substack.com

high5. (2025, November 25). 15+ women in tech statistics for 2024–2025, in the U.S. (Compiling BLS, NSF, and NCWIT data). https://high5test.com/women-in-tech-statistics/

McKinsey & Company, & LeanIn.Org. (2025). Women in the workplace 2025. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/women-in-the-workplace

Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. (2025). Artificial intelligence index report 2025. (As cited in industry compilations; verify chapter figures against the primary report.)

WomenHack. (2025). Women in tech statistics 2026: Gender gap data, pay equity & trends. https://womenhack.com/women-in-tech-statistics/

World Economic Forum. (2025). Global gender gap report 2025. (As cited in industry compilations; verify against the primary WEF report.)

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Margaret Williams, MS, ACC in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Love Notes & Prayers: Little Bits of Guidance for your Soul

Inspirational, motivational, juicy tidbits to alter and shift your perspective about life in the chaos.

By Melissa Bird

Leading From The Heart

I'd Rather Be Writing

My perspective is never given equal representation in the mainstream media. I believe character matters. I believe the experts. I believe in education. I believe women. Let me know if you have a story to tell. There's no AI content in my newsletter.

By Walter Rhein

Dr. Melissa Bird’s Bio

Dr. Melissa Bird is an author, public speaker, transformational life coach, lay preacher, and social justice advocate.

Rooted in her background as a clinical social worker and educator, her work centers on helping individuals “harness the power of their rebellion for good,” promoting intuitive leadership, and advocating for marginalized communities. She is a descendant of the Shivwits Band of Southern Paiutes. Most recently, she ran as a candidate in the Democratic primary for Oregon’s 4th Congressional District.

In her Latest Book, Leading from the Heart.

The core message and themes of Dr. Melissa Bird’s book, Leading from the Heart, center around creating a “graceful revolution” in personal and professional leadership.

The book is a self-help and leadership guide focused on the following central themes:

· Dismantling Perfectionism: Dr. Bird challenges the traditional, rigid structures of leadership, urging readers to let go of “perfectionist shame” and the exhausting pressure to always look flawless.

· Embracing Vulnerability & Intuition: The text highlights how true leadership stems from an internal compass. It encourages readers to stop looking externally for validation and instead tap into their own intuition, compassion, and soulful alignment.

· Healing Through Grief and Loss: Drawing on deep personal experiences, the book explores how navigating profound suffering, fear, and grief can become a catalyst for our greatest personal transformations and community connections.

· The Graceful Revolution: Ultimately, the synopsis describes an intentional shift toward a heart-centered leadership style—one that values asking better questions, showing up authentically, living comfortably in life’s gray areas, and bringing people together to drive meaningful, systemic change.

Key Biographical Details

1. Professional & Activist Background

• Social Work & Advocacy: Dr. Bird has an extensive history in community organizing and policy advocacy. She previously served as the Chief Lobbyist and Executive Director for the Planned Parenthood Action Council of Utah, where she worked directly on writing and navigating state legislation.

• Public Speaking & Coaching: As a “clairvoyant coach” and speaker, she leads international workshops and keynotes focusing on transformational leadership, earth-based spirituality, intersectional feminism, and social justice.

• Media & Podcasting: She hosts The Thinnest Veil podcast and maintains an active personal Substack titled Love Notes & Prayers: Little Bits of Guidance for your Soul.

• Academia: She has served as an adjunct professor across several institutions, including Portland State University, the University of Utah, and the University of Southern California.

  ---

2. Recent Political History

In 2025, Dr. Bird launched a campaign for public office, running for the Democratic nomination to represent Oregon’s 4th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

• Her platform championed grassroots issues, including Medicare for All, the “Rural New Deal” economic model, corporate-free campaign financing, reproductive freedom, and affordable housing.

• She ultimately lost the primary election to the incumbent on May 19, 2026.

3. Education

• Ph.D. in Social Work – University of Southern California (2017)

• Master of Social Work (MSW) – University of Utah (2003)

• B.S. in Human Development and Family Studies – University of Utah (1998)

Personal Life

Dr. Bird grew up in Salt Lake City and Park City, Utah, and currently resides in Corvallis, Oregon, with her family. In her public platforms and podcast appearances, she speaks openly about how her lived experiences, including navigating poverty, her bisexual identity, her complex connection to her Indigenous heritage, and personal grief, deeply inform her leadership style and political convictions.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with and ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Margaret Williams, MS, ACC in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Subscribe now

Share

That’s wrong. Reading a room is reading ground. You don’t walk into unfamiliar terrain and guess your way across it; you assess it. Where’s the high ground? Where’s the cover? Who holds it? The room is no different.

If you can’t read the room, you can’t influence it.

It’s a skill. It’s trainable. And once you know what you’re actually looking for, it becomes one of the sharpest advantages you carry into any room you enter.

Let me bring you in: when you walk into a room, what are you tracking first, the people, or the power?

Why This Matters

This isn’t a soft skill. It decides whether your ideas land, how your leadership reads to the people who matter, and whether you gain or lose ground in the moments that count.

Leaders who read the room well move conversations, shape decisions, and build alignment. Leaders who don’t miss the timing, misread the dynamics, and weaken their own position without ever knowing they did it.

And here’s what every woman who’s been talked over already knows: when you misread a room, you pay a higher price for it. Your idea gets attributed to someone else. Your read gets called emotional. The cost of getting it wrong is not the same for everyone, which is exactly why you learn to get it right.

Visibility: Read Power, Not Just People

Most people read personalities. Strong leaders read power.

Every room has a structure, whether anyone names it or not. Track it:

• Who people defer to

• Who speaks last

• Who gets acknowledged and who gets repeated by someone else

• Who actually drives the decision

When you miss this:

• You aim your message at the wrong audience

• Your contribution gets overlooked or reassigned to the person who said it louder

• You lose influence and can’t trace why

When you read it well:

• You speak to the people who decide

• You position your ideas where they hold

• Your influence grows without you working harder for it

If you don’t know who holds the ground, you’re talking to the room. Not leading it.

Liberation: Read Yourself First

Before you read the room, read yourself. If you walk in anxious, looking for approval, or trying to prove something, you are not reading the room. You’re reacting to it, and a distorted instrument gives a distorted read.

When you’re not grounded:

• You over-talk, or go silent, at the wrong moment

• You read neutral signals as hostile ones

• Emotion drives the response before judgment gets a vote

When you are:

• Composed under observation

• A clean read of what’s in front of you

• A response you chose, not one that escaped you

Steady the instrument before you trust the reading.

Transformation: Read the Unspoken

What isn’t said usually outweighs what is. Watch for the hesitation, the shift in energy, the silence that lands right after a key point, and the subject everyone steps around.

Silence isn’t empty. It’s information.

When you ignore it:

• You make surface-level decisions on incomplete intelligence

• You miss the resistance forming under the table

• You reinforce the dysfunction nobody will name

When you see it:

• You surface the real issue

• You address what the room is avoiding

• You move the conversation at a level others can’t reach

Rooms communicate in patterns, not just words. Learn to read the pattern.

The Leadership Move: Adjust Without Losing Yourself

Reading the room is not shrinking. It’s adjusting your approach without surrendering your voice.

You don’t perform, dilute, or chase approval. You choose your timing, refine your delivery, and align the message to the moment on your terms.

Without this discipline:

• Leaders either overpower the room or vanish in it

• The message misses

• Influence stays inconsistent

With it:

• The communication lands

• The influence is intentional

• The presence holds

Adaptation is strategy. Self-abandonment is not.

Putting It into Practice

Four moves to drill until they’re automatic:

• Pause before you speak. What is actually happening here?

• Map the power. Who influences the outcome?

• Track the pattern. Who leads, who follows, who resists?

• Check yourself. Am I reading the room or projecting onto it?

You don’t just read the room. You interpret it, then decide how to move.

Two Questions Leaders Ask

How do I know if I’m misreading it? Check your internal state. If you feel defensive, anxious, or overly cautious, you’re probably reacting, not reading.

What if the room is biased or unsafe? Then this skill stops being optional. You’re no longer reading for engagement; you’re reading for risk, timing, and position. That’s terrain assessment under fire, and it’s exactly when it matters most.

Closing Reflection

Reading the room isn’t about fitting in. It’s about understanding what’s happening so you can lead inside it.

When leaders read a room well, they speak with precision, they influence on purpose, and they move conversations other people never even see.

Final Question

What’s one signal you’ve learned to watch that changed how you lead in a room?

You don’t lead the room, you ignore. You lead the room, you understand.

Subscribe now

Share

The Secret Ingredient

Christina Donohue - The Secret Ingredient

Trauma Coach, Writer, Seer, & Herbalist

Short Bio (Social Media / Sidebar)

Christina Donohue is a trauma coach, writer, herbalist, and creator of the Substack publication The Secret Ingredient. Operating as a “Seer-Knower” with deep claircognizant and supportive clairvoyant impressions, she specializes in inner-child healing, emotional clarity, and delivering birth-map charts to help individuals find deep recognition, healing, and truth.

Full Professional Bio

Christina Donohue is a dedicated trauma coach, holistic writer, herbalist, and intuitive practitioner who helps individuals navigate the complexities of emotional healing to uncover their deepest truths. As the creator of the Substack space, The Secret Ingredient, Christina fosters a community centered on emotional clarity, deep personal recognition, and spiritual awakening.

Affectionately described as a “Seer-Knower,” Christina blends her creative writing and herbal backgrounds with profound intuitive gifts, drawing on claircognizant insights and supportive clairvoyant impressions. A cornerstone of her practice is crafting personalized birth map charts, which provide clients with a foundational roadmap for self-discovery, spiritual alignment, and inner-child healing.

Whether she is sharing reflective prose on creative currents, guiding a client through past trauma, or connecting with nature through herbalism, Christina’s work is anchored in radical empathy and the activation of higher creative frequencies. She is passionate about helping others awaken the quiet, sleeping parts of themselves so they can dream, laugh, and live beyond their accepted edges.

Core Areas of Expertise

• Trauma Coaching & Inner Child Work: Guiding individuals through the process of emotional processing to establish long-term clarity and healing.

• Intuitive Guidance & Birth Charts: Utilizing intuitive insights to read personal energetic maps, providing truth and clarity to those at a crossroads.

• Creative Writing & Community Building: Publishing regular insights, poetry, and reflective notes on The Secret Ingredient to inspire a collective return to self-love and authenticity.

  ---

Inner Child Work: Live Session Talking Points

Framed in your voice: direct, military-grounded, no-nonsense, centering women who’ve been marginalized in leadership. Inner-child work is reframed as operational rather than therapeutic.

OPEN: Name the Misconception

• “Inner child work” sounds soft. Sounds like something you do on a therapist’s couch with a box of tissues. That’s not what this is.

• The reality: every decision you make under pressure is being routed through patterns you set down before you had words for them. You’re not leading from the present. You’re leading from old terrain.

• For women who’ve been marginalized, talked over, overlooked, and made to prove it twice, those patterns got installed early and reinforced hard. This isn’t about feelings. It’s about knowing what’s actually driving you.

  ---

REFRAME: What this really is

• Inner child work is reconnaissance on yourself. You’re reading your own terrain before you move troops across it.

• The “inner child” is just the part of you that learned, young, how to stay safe: stay quiet, overperform, don’t take up space, don’t trust the room. Those were survival skills. They worked then.

• The problem isn’t that you have them. The problem is running 2025 operations on a survival map you drew at age seven.

  ---

THE COST: Why it matters in leadership

• Old patterns show up as: over-apologizing, can’t delegate, freezing when challenged, overworking to earn a seat you already hold, and reading every neutral face as a threat.

• You think it’s a personality trait. It’s a wound to have your decision-making done for you.

• A leader who hasn’t done this work is reactive and doesn’t know it. She mistakes her triggers for instincts.

  ---

THE WORK: Practical steps (no woo)

1. Identify the trigger. When you overreact or shut down, log it. What just happened? That’s the entry point.

2. Trace it back. Where did you first learn that response was necessary? Name it. Don’t excavate trauma—just locate the origin.

3. Separate them from now. The threat that made that pattern smart is usually gone. Ask: Is this response protecting me, or running me?

4. Re-decide on purpose. Choose the response a safe leader would make. Repeat until it’s the new default.

• This is energy management and situational awareness turned inward. Same skills you use to read a room—pointed at yourself.

  ---

THE TRUTH: Close

• You cannot lead other people further than you’ve led yourself. Period.

• The work isn’t about getting soft. It’s about removing the hidden hand that’s been steering you so you can take the wheel.

• For women who were told to stay small: this is how you stop negotiating with a ghost and start commanding your own ground.

Reflection questions (for the room):

• What response did you learn as a young person that you’re still running on autopilot?

• Where in your leadership are you protecting a child who no longer needs protecting?

• What would you decide differently if you trusted the room?

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Margaret Williams, MS, ACC in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Not the kind ones. Not the steady ones. Not the people who love you easy.

The hard ones. The ones who run hot and cold. The boss who praises you on Monday and humiliates you by Thursday. The partner who pulls you close the moment after they’ve pushed you away. The friend who keeps you spinning, never sure which version of them is going to walk through the door today.

You keep going back. And you cannot, for the life of you, understand why.

Sit with me a minute. Because if that question has ever lived in your chest, you are not broken, and you are not alone, and you are exactly where this conversation is meant to find you.

This is Foresight. Today we’re talking about trauma bonding, what it actually is, how it takes hold, what it’s quietly costing your leadership, how to break it, and the part almost nobody warns you about: what comes after.

Because something does come after. And it’s gentler than you’re bracing for.

What It Actually Is

Let me name it plainly, beloved, because the misunderstanding is where good women get stuck for years.

A trauma bond is not love. It is not loyalty. It is not a sign the connection runs deep, or that the two of you were meant to be.

A trauma bond is an attachment that forms when somebody hands you the wound and the comfort from the same hand.

That’s the whole mechanism. The pain and the relief, pouring from one source. Your nervous system learns to brace for the hurt, then floods with relief when it finally stops, and that flood feels like love.

It isn’t. It’s just your body, grateful the hurting paused.

The intensity was never depth. It was your nervous system running a loop; it was never built to survive. Hear that clearly, because it’s the first piece of good news: what you’re feeling is a mechanism, not a verdict on your worth. And a mechanism can be understood. A mechanism can be undone.

How It Takes Hold

This doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in stages, and each one quietly locks the next in place.

First, the idealization. The beginning is electric. They make you feel seen the way you have never, in your whole life, been seen. Chosen. Your nervous system memorizes that high, and that memory becomes the very thing you’ll spend the rest of the relationship trying to win back.

Then the devaluation. The warmth pulls back. The criticism starts. The ground that felt so solid begins to move under you, and you cannot figure out what you did wrong. So, you do what you were trained to do, you love harder. You try harder. You reach.

Then the intermittent reward. And this is the hook. Right when you’re finally about to give up, the warmth returns. Just enough. Just long enough. And the relief is so enormous it wipes the whole slate clean.

That’s the trap closing. Because here’s what your body just learned: endure the pain long enough, and the relief will come. If they were cruel all the time, you’d leave. If they were kind all the time, you’d be at peace. It’s the not knowing that welds you to them.

The same way a slot machine keeps a person in the chair. Not because it pays out every time. Because it pays out sometimes.

And the last stage the loss of self. By now, you’ve reorganized your entire nervous system around managing them. Reading them. Anticipating them. You’ve gone quiet on the inside because every ounce of your attention points outward, at the one person you can never quite predict. And one ordinary morning, you wake up and cannot remember who you were before them.

That is how it takes hold. Not because you were foolish. Because the mechanism is built to capture the woman who doesn’t quit. The loyal one. The strong one. You were caught precisely because of your best qualities, not your worst.

Why You and Why It’s Not Weakness

I know some of you are already turning this on yourselves. How did I let this happen? What is wrong with me?

Nothing is wrong with you. Let me say it again, slower, so it lands: nothing is wrong with you.

If you learned early that love came with conditions that affection had to be earned, that safety could vanish without warning, then a trauma bond doesn’t register as a red flag. It feels like home. Your system recognizes the chaos and calls it love, because chaos was the shape love first arrived in. You were a child doing the only thing a child can do: adapting to survive the love you were given.

And if you’re a marginalized woman, layer this on top. You were trained to over-give. To earn your place twice over. To read the room and manage it. To stay, to fix, to be anything but the one who walks away. You were praised your whole life for exactly the traits that keep a trauma bond bolted shut.

So when you can’t leave something that’s hurting you, that is not a character flaw, beloved. That is conditioning, doing precisely what it was built to do.

You are not weak. You are loyal to a fault, in a world that taught you your worth lived in how much you could endure. And the very strength they used against you that is the same strength that is going to carry you out.

The Leadership Impact

Now let me take this out of your personal life and into the room where you lead. Because a trauma bond never stays in one lane.

When you’ve been bonded to unpredictability, you start leading from it. Always scanning. Always managing other people’s moods before you’ll trust your own judgment. You mistake a volatile boss’s occasional approval for mentorship, and you bend yourself around keeping them happy instead of doing the work that’s actually yours to do.

And here’s what costs you most. A trauma bond taught you that intensity equals importance. So, you chase the dramatic and overlook the steady. You pour your best energy into winning over the person who withholds, and you neglect the people who show up for you, every single time, because steady doesn’t spike your system the way chaos does.

You under-value your steady people. You over-invest in the ones who keep you guessing. And slowly you build a whole working life organized around earning an approval that was never, ever coming.

There’s a cost to the women watching you, too. When you model endurance as loyalty, when you stay in rooms that diminish you and call it strength, they learn that’s the price of the seat. You teach them to bond to their own mistreatment. That is not the inheritance you want to leave, beloved. You know it isn’t.

So, hear the other side of that coin. Breaking the bond isn’t only personal healing. It’s a leadership correction. It changes who you tolerate, who you elevate, and what every woman learning leadership by watching you comes to believe is possible. When you choose differently, you give them permission to choose differently too. That is a legacy worth the hard work.

How to Break It

There is a way out. It is not easy. But it is clear, and it is walkable, and women do it every day.

Name it. Out loud. “This is a trauma bond. This is not love.” You cannot break what you keep calling by the wrong name. The naming is the first crack of light under the door.

Stop waiting for the good version to come back. The good version is part of the trap. The warmth was never the real them, breaking through the cruelty, the warmth is what baits it. The day you stop chasing the good days is the day the cycle starts to lose its grip.

Go no contact, or the lowest contact your life will allow. Every time you reach back, you reset the machine to zero. The bond cannot dissolve while you’re feeding it. It dissolves in the absence. The distance is not cruelty to them or to yourself. The distance is the medicine.

And expect the crash. When you pull away, your body will scream that you’ve made a terrible mistake. You’ll miss them with an intensity that feels like proof you should turn around and go back.

It is not proof. It is withdrawal. The missing is not a sign you were wrong; the missing is the bond dying. Let it die. You can grieve it and still let it die.

Last thing, and don’t skip it: get a witness. One person, a friend, a coach, a therapist who can hold the truth steady when your memory tries to soften it. Because it will. A trauma bond rewrites history; it deletes the bad days and replays the good ones on a loop. You need someone standing outside the spell who remembers what actually happened. You don’t have to carry this alone. You were never meant to.

What Comes After

Here’s the part nobody prepares you for.

When the bond finally breaks, you don’t feel triumphant. You don’t feel free the way you imagined you would.

You feel flat.

Quiet. Almost bored. Like the color drained out of everything. And in that flatness, a dangerous little thought comes knocking: Maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe I overreacted. Maybe I’ll reach out, just once.

Hear me, beloved. That flatness is not emptiness. It is your nervous system recalibrating to peace, and peace feels foreign after you’ve spent years living on adrenaline. You’ve mistaken chaos for aliveness so long that calm shows up feeling like nothing at all.

It’s not nothing. It’s the absence of a war you’d stopped noticing you were fighting.

Give it time. The flatness isn’t the destination, it’s the in-between. It’s your eyes adjusting to a room after the fluorescent glare finally clicks off.

And then, slowly, real feeling comes back. Not the spike-and-crash you used to call love. Something steadier. You’ll notice you slept through the whole night. That your shoulders have come down from around your ears. That you can sit with a partner, a team, a friend, and not be bracing for the floor to move.

You’ll feel safety settle over you. And for the first time in a long time, you won’t mistake it for boredom. You’ll recognize it for what it is. Home the real kind.

From the Coaching Chair

I had a client brilliant, accomplished, the kind of woman who could run a company but couldn’t leave a relationship that was quietly dismantling her. She’d leave and go back. Leave and go back. And every time, she’d tell me about the good week they’d just had, like it erased the three bad ones standing behind it.

What shifted her wasn’t me telling her to leave. She already knew she should leave. It was the day I asked her to write down what actually happened every day, just the facts, no story. After a month, I asked her to read it back to herself.

The page told the truth her heart kept editing out.

She left. And she called me three weeks later, frightened, because she felt nothing. She was sure something was broken in her. I told her exactly what I’m telling you: that flatness is not broken. That flatness is healing, wearing a quiet coat. Stay in it.

She did. The woman I spoke with six months on wasn’t performing okay. She was okay. Settled. Clear-eyed. Sleeping through the night. She said she hadn’t realized how loud her whole life had been until it went quiet.

She didn’t lose love when she left. She found out what love was never supposed to cost.

Final Reflection

Pause with me here.

Think of one relationship, past or present, personal or professional, where the intensity felt like love. Or like loyalty. Where the highs ran high precisely because the lows ran so low.

Don’t judge it. Don’t fix it tonight. Just ask yourself one honest question.

Was that depth or was that a cycle?

And then one more, gentler still.

Who have I been trying to earn who was never going to pay me back?

You don’t have to do a single thing with the answers yet. You only have to look at them clearly. To stop calling the chaos love, even for one quiet moment.

That’s where the freedom starts. Right here. In the looking.

Closing

A trauma bond convinces you that the person who hurt you is the only one who can heal you. That is the lie sitting at the dead center of the whole machine.

The truth is the exact opposite. The healing was never going to come from the hand that held the wound. It was always going to come from you walking out, surviving the withdrawal, sitting through the flatness, and waiting for the real feeling to return.

And it does return. I promise you, beloved. It comes back.

Here’s what becomes possible on the other side. You stop confusing intensity with connection. You stop reading the steady person as boring and the chaotic one as exciting. You stop being available to people who run hot and cold because now you feel the cost while it’s happening, not three years too late. And you start choosing differently, in your relationships and in the rooms where you lead: not the spark that burns you, but the warmth that keeps you.

You don’t just leave one bad bond. You upgrade the entire system that chose it.

So, here’s the question I’ll leave you holding tonight.

What have you been calling love that was really just a cycle you were afraid to leave?

Sit with that. You don’t have to act tonight. You only have to stop lying to yourself about what it is. That alone that single honest moment is the beginning of getting free.

The right kind of love will not hurt you and heal you from the same hand. You are allowed to want that. You are allowed to walk away from anything that isn’t that in your heart, and in the rooms where you lead. And you are allowed to believe it’s still coming for you. Because it is.

This was Foresight. I see you. And I’ll see you next time.

Subscribe now

Share

Omixintel

OMIX is strategic intelligence built for decision-makers under pressure. We track signals, expose patterns, and challenge narratives. While others follow headlines, we focus on what drives them. Clarity is operational.

Omixintel’s Profile Bio

“When things stop lining up, pay attention. That’s usually where the signal starts. OMIX focuses on decision clarity, pressure, timing, and the movement behind events before the outcome becomes obvious.”

Key Focus Areas & Themes

From their recent activity and posts, Omixintel primarily shares insights focused on:

• Strategic Thinking & Leadership: Analyzing how people react to challenges, decision-making under pressure, and distinguishing between boundaries and confrontation.

• Positioning vs. Opportunity: Emphasizing long-term positioning over chasing short-term opportunities (e.g., their post “Don’t Chase Opportunities. Build Position”).

• Decision Clarity: Cutting through noise to focus on core lessons, learning loops, and organizational integrity.

Thank you , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Subscribe now

Get more from Margaret Williams, MS, ACC in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

The Language of Orgasm’s Substack

The Online Sex School for women with a pleasure syllabus. Questions: Samantha@thelanguageoforgasm.com Grab my free 69 Dirty Talk Phrases www.TheLanguageofOrgasm.com SWAK, Samantha KindHeart, Hypnotherapist, teacher, yoga teacher and animal lover

Professional Biography

The Language of Orgasm is a premier online sex education platform and community dedicated to empowering women through comprehensive, pleasure-focused education. Operating under the guiding philosophy of “pleasure with a syllabus,” the platform bridges the gap in traditional sex education by providing women with the practical insights, anatomical knowledge, and communication tools necessary to unlock vibrant, fulfilling intimate lives.

Founded and led by an expert team of educators, the platform focuses on dismantling the shame and confusion often surrounding female sexuality. Through a blend of somatic practices, neuroscience, and actionable frameworks, The Language of Orgasm teaches women how to connect deeply with their bodies, understand the mechanics of arousal, and cultivate profound physical and emotional fulfillment.

Core Pillars & Frameworks

• The Communication of Desire: A specialized framework that teaches the neuroscience of dirty talk and verbal intimacy, helping individuals communicate their desires confidently and without fear.

• Somatic & Anatomical Realism: Utilizing accurate anatomical guidance and mindfulness techniques—such as interoception and targeted journaling—to help women map their own pleasure responses.

• The Art of Aftercare: Emphasizing the psychological and physiological importance of post-intimacy grounding, teaching that pleasure is a practice to sustain rather than a momentary destination.

Through its highly engaged Substack community, dedicated educational programs, and live interactive workshops, The Language of Orgasm serves as a trusted guide for women and couples looking to rewrite their intimate scripts and step into their full personal power.

Core Message

The fear of speaking openly about intimacy with a partner isn’t a character flaw; it’s your brain’s threat-detection system treating vulnerability as danger. Understand the wiring, and you can work with it instead of against it.

Key Talking Points

1. Vulnerability registers as a threat

• The brain’s amygdala doesn’t distinguish well between physical danger and social/emotional exposure. Asking for what you want out loud can trigger the same alarm as standing at a cliff edge.

• That flush of fear before you speak isn’t a sign to stop. It’s your nervous system flagging, “these matters.”

2. Shame lives in the body, not just the mind

• For many women, especially those raised to be “good,” accommodating, or silent about their own wants and desires, desire was coded early on as something to hide.

• Sound bite: “You weren’t born afraid to say what you want. You were taught it.”

3. Safety is the precondition for openness

• The prefrontal cortex (language, expression, playfulness) goes offline when the threat response is active. You literally can’t find the words when you don’t feel safe.

• Connection and trust with a partner aren’t the reward for openness; they’re the foundation that makes openness possible.

4. Naming reduces the fear

• Research on “affect labeling” shows that putting feelings and wants into words lowers amygdala activity. Speaking the thing out loud literally calms the alarm.

• The first time is the hardest. The nervous system updates with repetition: I said it, and I was safe.

5. Small steps rewire the response

• You don’t go from silence to total openness overnight. Each low-stakes moment of honesty teaches your brain that the exposure didn’t cost you anything.

• Start where it’s safe. Build from there.

6. The leadership parallel

• The same fear that silences you in intimacy often silences you in the boardroom, the fear of wanting out loud, of being “too much,” of being seen.

• Reclaiming your voice in one arena strengthens it in the others. Self-knowledge and self-expression are compound.

The Shift

Fear around speaking your desires isn’t proof that something’s wrong with you. It’s a nervous system doing its job with outdated information. Safety first, words second, repetition always. That’s how the fear loses its grip.

Subscribe now

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Margaret Williams, MS, ACC in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Nicole Johnston's Website

Nicole Johnston, TEDx & Leadership Speaker | Best-Selling Author | Executive & Leadership Coach. She is dedicated to helping corporate women overcome workplace obstacles, own their value, and step into their full authority. As the founder of innatePOWER®, she leverages over three decades of high-level corporate experience to cultivate “Mental Fitness” and authentic leadership in individuals and organizations worldwide.

Executive Background

Prior to launching her coaching practice in January 2023, Nicole built a distinguished 30-year career as a global senior Sales and Marketing executive within Fortune 50 and FMCG/CPG giants. She has successfully led multi-functional teams and managed business portfolios worth up to $1.5 billion. Her notable corporate leadership roles include:

• Vice President of Sales, Food Division at Newell Brands

• Head of Pet Healthcare at Boehringer Ingelheim

• Vice President of Sales Strategy & Head of Ecommerce (Latin America) at Kimberly-Clark

• General Manager of Club & Dollar Channels at The Hershey Company

Coaching & Speaking Philosophy

Driven by a pivotal moment that shifted her focus from building billion-dollar business structures to developing people, Nicole founded innatePOWER™. Her work addresses the critical, often unwritten dynamics of corporate environments—such as navigating power literacy, overcoming the exhaustion of invisible labor, and transitioning from merely “performing” leadership to truly embodying it.

She is a certified Organizational Development Coach through Symbiosis Coaching and holds credentials in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). As an inspirational speaker, she frequently delivers keynotes, corporate training, masterclasses, and workshops aimed at challenging organizations to build a better, more inclusive future.

Authorship & Education

Nicole is the author of the best-selling book, Taboo Topics: Things Women Should Talk About, But Don’t (released May 2025), which provides concrete language and tools for women navigating complex career advancement barriers.

A native of Iowa, she holds a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) in International Business, French, and Spanish from The University of Iowa Tippie College of Business, where she also serves on the board. Additionally, she is an alumna of the Executive Leadership Institute at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Taboo Topics: Things Women Should Talk About, But Don’t

The book serves as a candid guide and professional manifesto specifically tailored for career-minded, executive-track, and director-level women. Johnston argues that women often experience professional stalls, friction, or burnout not because of a lack of capability or confidence, but due to hidden cultural, structural, and unwritten rules in the corporate world that are rarely addressed in traditional leadership manuals.

Drawing on her 30+ years of global corporate experience leading billion-dollar business portfolios (including senior roles at companies like Procter & Gamble and Hershey Foods), she brings these silent challenges into the open, offering women practical strategies to advance with clarity.

Key Themes & Topics Covered in her Book

· The Hidden Rules of Executive Presence: Unpacking the unspoken and often double standards by which women are evaluated differently than men in leadership spaces, and how to navigate them authentically.

· The Emotional Labor Tax: Managing the quiet pressure often placed on women to handle office dynamics, minimize conflicts, or take on non-promotable “office housework” tasks that drain strategic focus.

· The Perfectionism & Over-delivery Trap: Exploring why many women wait until they feel 100% qualified before taking major professional risks or speaking up, and how that can inadvertently hurt their strategic visibility.

· Silently Carried Realities: Shedding structural guilt and bringing language to personal, physical, and biological milestones (such as pregnancy, biological cycles, and menopause) that women frequently navigate in silence while maintaining demanding corporate schedules.

The Takeaway

Ultimately, Taboo Topics provides actionable boundaries, leadership strategies, and validation to help ambitious women step into senior leadership roles on their own terms without sacrificing their well-being.

TALKING POINTS: MENTAL LOAD & TABOO TOPICS

PART ONE: MENTAL LOAD

Core Message

The mental load is the invisible work of remembering, planning, anticipating, and managing, and women, especially marginalized women, carry it disproportionately at home and at work.

Key Talking Points

1. Name what it actually is

• It’s not the doing. It’s the remembering to do and the managing of who does what.

• You’re the one who notices the supplies are low, the deadline is coming, and the team morale is slipping. Nobody assigned you that. You just got handed it.

• Sound bite: “Mental load isn’t the task. It’s being the person who can never stop tracking the tasks.”

2. It’s heavier for marginalized women

• You carry the household mental load AND the workplace mental load AND the load of monitoring how you’re perceived in rooms not built for you.

• Three full-time tracking systems running at once. That’s why you’re tired in a way rest doesn’t fix.

3. It’s invisible by design

• The load stays invisible because it has no deliverables. No one sees the forty decisions you made before 9 am.

• What’s invisible doesn’t get valued. What doesn’t get valued doesn’t get shared.

4. The cost is real

• Decision fatigue. Burnout. The resentment that builds when you’re the default manager of everything.

• You’re spending your best cognitive energy on logistics instead of leadership.

5. The shift

• Make it visible before you try to redistribute it. You can’t hand off what no one can see.

• Stop being the only one who holds the system. Document it. Name it. Let it be someone else’s turn to remember.

PART TWO: TABOO TOPICS

Core Message

The things we’re not supposed to talk about money, ambition, rage, rest, failure, mental health are exactly the things keeping us stuck when we stay silent about them.

Key Talking Points

1. Why taboos exist for us specifically

• Marginalized women were taught that silence is safety. Don’t discuss your salary. Don’t admit you’re struggling. Don’t show ambition too loudly.

• Sound bite: “The topics you were told to keep quiet are the ones holding the most power over you.”

2. Money

• We don’t talk about pay, and that silence is exactly how pay gaps survive.

• Sharing numbers feels dangerous. It’s actually protective for you and everyone behind you.

3. Ambition

• Women are punished for wanting loudly. So we learn to shrink the want.

• Naming your ambition out loud isn’t arrogance. It’s the first step to claiming it.

4. Rage

• You were told anger isn’t allowed for you, it’s the “angry woman” stereotype waiting to be hung on you.

• But anger is information. It tells you exactly where your boundaries got crossed.

5. Rest & struggle

• Admitting you’re tired feels like admitting you can’t handle it. So we perform okay while running on empty.

• Saying “I’m struggling” out loud is not a weakness. It’s how you stop carrying it alone.

6. The shift

• The taboo loses its grip the moment it’s spoken. Privately first. One safe person is enough.

• We break these silences together, or we keep paying for them alone.

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Margaret Williams, MS, ACC in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app