Elevate Daily

Always feeling rushed? A friend recently found me sitting in my parked car down the road from my house...not on my phone. Not on a call. Just sitting there. When they knocked on the window and asked what I was doing, I said, "I'm transitioning."

If you're racing from one thing to the next, or you keep telling yourself the story that you're behind...oh, how I get it.

In this week's episode of Elevate Daily, I share how to stop feeling rushed with one simple shift: building transition time into your day, and the small daily rituals that help you fully arrive. It's how I stay present for the people and moments I love most...instead of rushing right past them. Short, practical, and so delicious.

In This Episode We Explore:

• Why you always feel rushed, even when you have the time. Default mode keeps us in never-ending, get-it-done energy...and when we never pause, we end up in the trap of just getting through our lives (and our success) instead of truly experiencing them.
• Why buffer time alone isn't enough. Space fills up fast. I share why ritual is what lets you fully arrive…and what I'm really doing in my car before I walk through the door.
• Transition rituals from my life and my clients' lives. The gym buffer where my best ideas now arrive, the evening walk that closes my workday, a client's first sip of coffee... and why your evening ritual matters more than you think.
• How to be more present, starting this week. Where to find your first transition point (morning, during your day, or evening) and a simple three-step ritual you can enjoy today.

Connect with Alexia:

• Visit Alexia's website → alexiausgaard.com
• Follow Alexia on Instagram → @Alexia_usgaard
• Explore ILLUMINATE → My 90-Minute Signature Experience. For high-achieving founders who sense they're working against themselves, and want to find the rituals that specifically support their life, their work, and the way they're meant to lead.

Loved this episode?

Share it with a friend who's always racing from one thing to the next. She deserves a moment to arrive too.

I'd love to know where you're adding transition time this week. Send me a DM or tag me on Instagram with your biggest takeaway.

Let's elevate together, one intentional day at a time.

With love & devotion,

Alexia

If Part 1 was the preparation, Part 2 is the becoming, and everything that has changed since.

We pick up exactly where we left off, with the roar that began it all, and move through the delivery, the early weeks of postpartum, and the unmasking that motherhood has asked of me in every area of my life. This is the most vulnerable conversation I have shared on Elevate Daily, and I am so grateful it was held by my dear friend Annette Müller.

In This Episode We Explore:

• The birth itself. The primal sounds, the surges not contractions, being on all fours, the six and a half hour labor, and the moment I felt every woman who has ever birthed birthing with me.
• What it meant to be so fully held. The village in that room, Z holding it down, Annette at my side, my doula and my sister, and why investing in that level of support was one of the greatest gifts I gave myself entering motherhood.
• The ring of fire and what the pushing stage taught me about slowing down, trusting the process, and letting the body lead.
• My daughter arriving ten days on time, the ego stripping of the waiting, and why she came exactly when she was meant to.
• What postpartum actually feels like. The raw, the real, and the beautiful all at once. Happy tears as the truest summary of motherhood, and what I most want every mother to hear who is quietly holding more than she is naming.
• The unmasking that a small being brings. The subtle masks and personas you do not realize you are wearing until motherhood strips them away, one moment at a time.
• Why rituals and simplicity have become the foundation of how we are now building our lives, our relationship, and our family.
• The sacred friendship between a mother and a childless friend, the unspoken dynamics of different seasons, and why naming it with love is what allows sisterhood to last.

Meet Annette Müller:

Annette is a medicine woman, an artist, storyteller, and the founder of Wild Nettle. While she is a doula by training, she held space for us at the birth as a dear friend and someone who was able to give me strength, love, and support throughout the birthing process (not in a clinical role). I'm forever grateful she was there.

Connect with Annette:

• Visit Annette's website - annettemuller.love

Connect with Alexia:

• Visit Alexia's website - alexiausgaard.com
• Follow Alexia on Instagram - @Alexia_usgaard
• Explore ILLUMINATE - 90-Minute Experience
• Listen to part one - Episode 59: Motherhood: The Ultimate Rite Of Passage, Part 1 | Annette Müller Interviews Me

Loved this episode?

Share it with a woman who is in the thick of postpartum, preparing for birth, or navigating the beautiful, messy, sacred season of becoming a mother.

I would love to know what landed most for you. Send me a DM or tag me on Instagram with your biggest takeaway from this conversation.

Let's elevate together, one intentional day at a time.

With love & devotion,

Alexia

There is so much I have been holding, and I am so ready to finally share it with you.

This is my first episode back on Elevate Daily since welcoming our daughter into the world. For this one, I handed the mic to my dear friend Annette Müller, who was with me through this entire journey, to interview me.

What began as an intimate debrief between two friends became something I knew I had to share with this community. Raw, real, and deeply devotional, this is Part 1 of a two-part conversation about one of the most profound rites of passage of my life.

In This Episode We Explore:

• The journey to motherhood and what it truly meant to choose it consciously. How I had to heal my own relationship with being mothered, honor my inner child, and work through the fears that came with being a deeply ambitious, all-in woman who also deeply wanted to be a present mother.
• How my husband and I navigated the conversation of becoming parents together as two entrepreneurs with big missions, and the non-negotiables we put in place around presence, support structures, and radical honesty about our needs.
• What pregnancy truly is: a nine-month initiation. Each trimester brought its own lessons, its own unraveling, and its own shaping of who I was becoming.
• My decision to have a home birth in South Africa and the journey of building a birth team I deeply trusted, and the importance of feeling safe, informed, and empowered in whatever birth environment you choose.
• Strength training through pregnancy, why pregnant women are not fragile, and the advice that changed everything for me.
• The three pillars of birth preparation: physical, emotional, and spiritual. From strength training and pelvic floor support, to surrounding myself with sisterhood and naming my fears, to writing prayers and mantras with my husband and leaning into my creativity.
• And then the birth begins. Part 2 is coming.

Meet Annette Müller:

Annette is a medicine woman, an artist, storyteller, and the founder of Wild Nettle. While she is a doula by training, she held space for us at the birth as a dear friend and someone who was able to give me strength, love, and support throughout the birthing process (not in a clinical role). I'm forever grateful she was there.

Connect with Annette:

• Annette's website - annettemuller.love

Connect with Alexia:

• Visit Alexia's website - alexiausgaard.com
• Connect with Alexia on Instagram - @Alexia_usgaard
• Explore ILLUMINATE - 90-Minute Gene Keys Experience

Loved this episode?

Share it with a woman who is on her conception journey, pregnant, a mother, or simply on the threshold of something that is asking her to become more of herself.

I would love to know what landed most for you. Send me a DM or tag me on Instagram with your biggest takeaway from this conversation.

Let's elevate together, one intentional day at a time.

With love & devotion,

Alexia

We are closing out our Best Of series with this one, and there is no better note to end on. A timeless conversation from the Elevate Daily archive that is just as alive today as when it was first recorded.

If I could give little Lex one piece of advice, it would be this: the more you deepen into self-leadership, into knowing yourself, honoring yourself, and having reverence for your life, the more everything in your external world elevates too. That is where this episode begins.

In This Episode We Explore:

• Why your core values are the foundation of everything you stand for and how getting clear on them makes every decision simpler and more aligned.
• Why the challenge for most high performers is not a lack of opportunity but learning to discern which opportunities are truly worth a yes.
• A simple guided process for identifying your core values using two powerful memory prompts. One fulfilling experience and one moment of misalignment.
• How to narrow your values down to three to five and use them as a daily compass for how you lead yourself and what you allow into your life.

Connect with Alexia:

• Visit Alexia's website - alexiausgaard.com
• Follow Alexia on Instagram - @Alexia_usgaard
• Explore ILLUMINATE - 90-Minute Gene Keys Experience
• Listen to the full episode here - Episode 2: How We Deepen To Elevate Higher

Loved this episode?

Share it with someone who is ready to get radically clear on what they stand for.

I would love to know what landed most for you. Send me a DM or tag me on Instagram with one of your core values and how you are committing to honoring it this week.

Let's elevate together, one intentional day at a time.

With love & devotion,

Alexia

What if the goal was never to control your nervous system, but to build enough capacity to move through it?

As part of our special series celebrating 50 episodes of Elevate Daily, I am bringing back one of the most grounding conversations we have had on this show. In this episode you will hear three clips from my rich conversation with Sarah Tacy, a nervous system specialist whose work sits at the intersection of somatic intelligence and deep human potential. If your nervous system has been feeling overstimulated, wired and tired, heavy or hazy, this one is for you.

In This Episode We Explore:

• Why Sarah has shifted from the word "regulation" to "resonance" and what that reframe opens up.
• What functional freeze is and why most of us are living in it without even knowing.
• The power of co-regulation, why you were never meant to carry it all alone, and a simple eight-minute practice to start with.
• A message for the woman who is holding everything right now and what Sarah most wants her to know.

Meet Sarah Tacy:

Sarah Tacy is a nervous system specialist whose work weaves together somatic exploration and attuned listening to create new possibilities for her clients' lives, bodies, and beyond. With a background spanning yoga, athletic performance, and over a decade of private client work with everyone from Olympians to CEOs, Sarah brings a masterful understanding of how the body functions and how that functioning shapes our emotions, our relationships, and our capacity to truly thrive. She is the host of the Threshold Moments podcast and the creator of Resourced, a 12-week course in nervous system repatterning as the foundation for sustainable liberation, boundaries, sovereignty, aligned connection, and joy.

Connect with Sarah:

• Visit Sarah's website - sarahtacy.com
• Follow Sarah on Instagram - @sarahtacyt
• Listen to Sarah’s podcast - Threshold Moments
• Resourced: The 12 week course in nervous system repatterning - Enroll here

Connect with Alexia:

• Visit Alexia's website - alexiausgaard.com
• Follow Alexia on Instagram - @Alexia_usgaard
• Explore ILLUMINATE - 90-Minute Gene Keys Experience
• Listen to part 1 of the full episode - From Burnout to Sustainable Leadership - Resourcing Your Nervous System with Sarah Tacy (Part 1)
• Listen to part 2 of the full episode - Co-Regulation & Healing Hyper-Independence With Sarah Tacy (Part 2)

Loved this episode?

Share it with someone who has been trying to regulate their way to calm and is ready for a different conversation.

I would love to know what landed most for you. Send me a DM or tag me on Instagram with your biggest takeaway from this conversation.

Let's elevate together, one intentional day at a time.

With love & devotion,

Alexia

What if burnout has less to do with doing too much, and more to do with doing too little of what actually brings you joy?

This is one of those episodes that shifts something in you. I am making the case for play, not as something frivolous or unproductive, but as one of the most powerful strategies available to you as a leader, a creator, and a human being. When we stop experiencing the life we are building, everything starts to feel heavier than it needs to...that is where play becomes the antidote.

In This Episode We Explore:

• Why burnout is often a joy deficit, not just an overload of work and what that reframe opens up.
• What play actually is, including the definition from the founder of the National Institute of Play and why it matters more than most of us realize.
• How to reconnect with what play means for you specifically, including a beautiful invitation to look back at your ten year old self.
• A simple weekly play date ritual to experiment with for just one month and why 20 to 30 minutes can genuinely change things.
• Why resistance always shows up when we start prioritizing play and how to move through it without abandoning the practice.

Connect with Alexia:

• Visit Alexia's website - alexiausgaard.com
• Follow Alexia on Instagram - @Alexia_usgaard
• Explore ILLUMINATE - 90-Minute Gene Keys Experience
• Listen to the full episode - The Play Ritual: Why the Most Successful Women Are The Most Deprived of Play

Loved this episode?

Share it with someone who has been waiting for permission to play again.

I would love to know what landed most for you. Send me a DM or tag me on Instagram with the one way you are committing to bringing more play into your week.

Let's elevate together, one intentional day at a time.

With love & devotion,

Alexia

What if the most radical thing you could do for your business, your creativity, and your life had nothing to do with optimizing, scaling, or staying relevant online?

This is one of those conversations that stayed with me long after we stopped recording. Caro Gómez has built her entire body of work around one powerful, unapologetic philosophy: f*ck the algorithm, feed your ancestors. She approaches business, creativity, and life through the lens of ancestral wisdom, sacred defiance, and the radical belief that joy is resistance. And it is some of the most alive, most meaningful work I have ever encountered.

In This Episode We Explore:

• What "f*ck the algorithm, feed your ancestors" actually means and the radical acceptance it asks of us.
• How ancestral connection lives in the simplest everyday moments and why you are probably already doing it without realizing.
• The power of food, memory, and daily ritual as a portal to your lineage and why honoring that changes everything.
• Why this way of working is a calling, not a strategy and the kind of magnetism it creates that no algorithm can manufacture.
• A simple ritual to carry with you after you listen.

Meet Caro Gómez:

Caro Gómez is a shapeshifting award-winning artist, ancestral mentor, and shaman's apprentice of the Maya Q'eqchi' lineage. She weaves together textiles, cacao, storytelling, and spiritual business to help creatives reclaim their ancestry, adorn their bodies as altars, and live with sacred defiance. Her work is a reclamation of joy as resistance, roots as intelligence, and ritual as a return to legacy. Her leadership is cyclical, creative, and deeply intentional, rooted in the belief that the future belongs to those who remember.

Connect with Caro:

• Follow Caro on Instagram - @carogomez_joywitch
• Visit Caro's website - https://www.themayanschoolofembodiment.com/

Connect with Alexia:

• Visit Alexia's website - alexiausgaard.com
• Follow Alexia on Instagram - @Alexia_usgaard
• Explore ILLUMINATE - 90-Minute Gene Keys Experience
• Listen to the full episode - Episode 28: Feed Your Ancestors, Not The Algorithm with Caro Gómez

Loved this episode?

Share it with someone who is ready to slow down, go deeper, and build something that truly feeds their soul and their lineage.

I would love to know what landed most for you. Send me a DM or tag me on Instagram with the ancestor you are thinking of today or the everyday ritual you are ready to honor with more intention.

Let's elevate together, one intentional day at a time.

With love & devotion,

Alexia

What if you had a single tool that gave you a clear, honest dashboard into how you are actually living your life?

This is one of those episodes I keep coming back to...practical, grounding, and one that has genuinely changed the way I structure my weeks. I am walking you through my rituals tracker, a one-page dashboard that has become one of the most powerful tools in how I show up week after week as my most intentional, most elevated self.

At its heart, this tracker is a get-to-do list. A weekly ritual that gives you visibility, focus, and the freedom that only comes when you are truly honest about who you want to be and what you are committed to creating.

In This Episode We Explore:

• Why a rituals tracker is completely different from a to-do list and why that distinction changes everything.
• The five core sections of the dashboard and how to use each one to design a week that truly reflects who you want to be.
• Why commitments are more powerful than goals and how anchoring to them creates more trust, more freedom, and more flow.
• The invitation to try this for just one month and notice what shifts when you finally have visibility into where your energy is actually going.

Connect with Alexia:

• Visit Alexia's website - alexiausgaard.com
• Follow Alexia on Instagram - @Alexia_usgaard
• Explore ILLUMINATE - 90-Minute Gene Keys Experience
• Download the free Rituals Tracker
• Listen to the full episode - The Weekly Ritual Tracker: Your One-Page Dashboard for Living as Your Highest Self

Loved this episode?

Share it with someone who is ready to stop drowning in their to-do list and start designing their weeks with real intention.

I would love to know how this lands for you. Send me a DM or tag me on Instagram with the one commitment you are ready to honor this week.

Let's elevate together, one intentional day at a time.

With love & devotion,

Alexia

What if the most powerful thing you could do for your financial future had nothing to do with a spreadsheet?

This is one of the most powerful conversations in the Elevate Daily archive, and it felt like exactly the right time to bring it back. In this episode, I sit down with Kaitlyn Carlson, Founder and CEO of Theory Planning Partners, a boutique wealth creation firm for the top female entrepreneurs in the United States. She is a Certified Financial Planner, a Certified Exit Planning Advisor, and an Accredited Wealth Management Advisor. But beyond all of that, she is a spiritual seeker, a devoted mother, and someone I deeply respect for the way she leads with integrity, tenderness, and truth. She will talk about nervous system regulation and net worth in the same breath, and she does it in a way that makes the whole conversation feel like a permission slip.

In This Episode We Explore:

• Why wealth is so much more than money and why it always starts from the inside out.
• How to calculate your peace number and why most of us don't have clarity on it yet.
• What it really means to live a work optional life and how to start building toward it from wherever you are right now.
• How to hold the vision without being attached to the how and why Kaitlyn's athletic background shaped her entire financial philosophy.
• Why numbers are neutral, clarity is free, and the sooner you stop being afraid of your finances, the more power you reclaim.

Meet Kaitlyn Carlson:

Before founding Theory Planning Partners, Kaitlyn’s career began in asset management with Putnam Investments. She then spent the majority of her career at UBS Financial Services, holding roles across both the southern and northeastern regions of the U.S. There she developed more than 300 financial plans for clients with assets ranging from $500,000 to $1 billion, before becoming an advisor on a private wealth management team overseeing more than $600 million for a select number of families. She holds her CFP, CEPA, and AWMA designations, and brings to all of it a deeply spiritual approach to what it truly means to create wealth. Outside of work, she teaches yoga, travels, and is ravenous to understand why we are here and how to make a meaningful life.

Connect with Kaitlyn:

• Visit Kaitlyn's website - theoryplanning.com
• Follow Kaitlyn on Instagram - @kaitlyn.carlson_

Connect with Alexia:

• Visit Alexia's website - alexiausgaard.com
• Follow Alexia on Instagram - @Alexia_usgaard
• Explore ILLUMINATE - 90-Minute Gene Keys Experience
• Listen to the full episode - How To Create Aligned Wealth (Without Shame, Hustle, or Scarcity) With Kaitlyn Carlson

Loved this episode?

Share it with the woman in your life who is ready to stop being afraid of her finances and start building real wealth on her own terms.

I would love to know what landed most for you. Send me a DM or tag me on Instagram with your biggest takeaway and the shift you are ready to make in how you relate to your wealth.

Let's elevate together, one intentional day at a time.

With love & devotion,

Alexia

Something my husband and I have spoken about a lot over the years is that what truly cultivates a partnership is intention. A commitment, day in and day out, to each other, to ourselves, and to showing up as our most elevated versions…for one another and for the future we are building together.

I invited my husband Zunaid onto the podcast for a raw, real conversation about what that actually looks like in our daily life. We were cozied up on the couch and pulled back the curtain on the specific rituals that keep us grounded, connected, and operating as a true team…even on the hard days.

In This Episode We Explore:

• Why intention is the foundation of a truly elevated partnership. So much of what holds a relationship together isn't the grand gestures...it's the small, daily acts of showing up with presence and care.
• How to build a ritual framework around your natural strengths as a couple. Z is a morning person. I am a night owl. Rather than fighting that, we sat down and honored it, structuring our rituals accordingly.
• The evening ritual that creates the conditions for true rest and connection. Every part of it is done with presence and joy.
• Why staying committed on the hard days is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself and your relationship.
• The invitation to start with just one ritual. Not a full tracker. Not an overhaul. Just one conversation with your partner this week where you listen deeply, reflect on each other's strengths, and commit to one shared ritual together.

Connect with Alexia:

• Visit Alexia's website - alexiausgaard.com
• Follow Alexia on Instagram - @Alexia_usgaard
• Explore ILLUMINATE - 90-Minute Gene Keys Experience
• Listen to the full episode - Episode 7: Finding My Hell Yes Partner: Our Journey of Intentional Love & Rituals

Loved this episode?

Share it with someone who is ready to bring more intention into their relationship and their everyday life.

I would love to know what ritual you are committing to after listening, whether it is something you are doing solo or something you are building with your partner. Send me a DM or tag me on Instagram with your biggest takeaway.

Let's elevate together, one intentional day at a time.

With love & devotion,

Alexia