Journey to Purpose

Content note: this episode includes frank talk about steroid and drug use, the death of a friend, and strong language. Everything shared is one person's experience, not medical advice.

What is spiritual bodybuilding? It's training the body as a meditation: listening to it, and asking what intention sits behind every rep, meal and supplement, instead of chasing validation from outside.

"This is kind of like punishment, but you color the punishment as discipline." Nahum Vizakis

"If you want something new, you have to become something new." Nahum Vizakis

Philippa talks to Nahum Vizakis, a combat veteran and former NPC competitor, about how a bad show in 2013, an identity crisis and a first ayahuasca ceremony led to the idea of the spiritual bodybuilder. They dig into why discipline can be self-punishment in disguise, how the fitness world has changed for younger lifters, and why two people can look identical on stage while one has done the harder inner work. Nahum is honest about what he's still working out, including a recent ceremony that gave him a lesson in trust rather than the clarity he went looking for. They also get into macho online culture, why people are craving connection again, and what he'd say to anyone chasing external validation.

Nahum Justin Vizakis is a former U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal operator, a combat veteran, and the author of The Biohacker's Guide to Spiritual Bodybuilding and The Indigo Flame. He competed in thirteen NPC bodybuilding events and now works as a fascial stretch therapist, entheogenic healer and coach. Find him at spiritualbodybuilder.com.

Connect with Nahum Vizakis:

🌐 https://www.spiritualbodybuilder.com

📖 The Biohacker's Guide to Spiritual Bodybuilding: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FSF59FSR

📖 The Indigo Flame: https://www.balboapress.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/868497-the-indigo-flame

📸 https://instagram.com/Spiritual_Bodybuilder

▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@SpiritualBodybuilder

Welcome to the Journey to Purpose Podcast — your guide to personal transformation, spiritual awakening, and finding meaning. Hosted by Philippa Bagley, each episode features in-depth interviews with inspiring thought leaders, therapists, coaches, and everyday people who have overcome addiction, trauma, financial hardship, and burnout to build purposeful lives.

Whether you're seeking direction in your career, healing from past struggles, building resilience, or exploring spirituality, this personal development podcast delivers practical insights and transformational wisdom. Topics include: personal growth, healing and therapy, entrepreneurship, financial independence, mindfulness, spirituality, overcoming adversity, life coaching, and authentic living.

Join our growing community of listeners discovering their life's purpose. New episodes every week.

If you like what you hear, don't forget to follow, review and subscribe

GLP-1 medications work by curbing appetite so effectively that people eat less, and when they eat less, muscle comes off alongside the fat. The fix is strength training and higher protein intake, started before the muscle is gone, not after.

"These drugs, it's like having a gun. If you don't know safety and you don't know how to use it, it's dangerous to you," says Jason Nelson, founder of Body Image Fitness.

In Nelson's own practice, 94% of clients who finished their last GLP-1 dose six months ago are still sitting at the same weight today — the direct result of pairing the drug with a dedicated muscle-preservation protocol, rather than leaving weight loss to the medication alone.

Jason grew up in Trinidad, where an arm-wrestling loss at school sent him looking for a way to get stronger, and a borrowed barbell in his living room lit a fire that never went out. He built his own construction company, moved to New York for his now-wife, and fell into personal training almost by accident, which led to competitive bodybuilding and eventually to founding Body Image Fitness after being let go from a corporate gym six weeks before a show. In this conversation, Jason talks through what separates coaching competitors from coaching everyday clients, why GLP-1 use without a strength and nutrition foundation almost always ends in weight rebound, and two unsexy measurements, calf circumference and single-leg balance, that his practice tracks as early predictors of mortality in older clients. He also shares what he'd tell his younger self about not being in a race with anyone else's timeline.

Jason Nelson is the founder of Body Image Fitness, a personal training, fat-loss and longevity practice based in Williston Park, New York. A former competitive bodybuilder, he now works primarily with clients over 40, building strength and nutrition protocols, including around GLP-1 and peptide therapy, designed to protect muscle and extend healthy lifespan. Learn more at bodyimage.health.

Connect with Jason Nelson:
🌐 bodyimage.health

Welcome to the Journey to Purpose Podcast — your guide to personal transformation, spiritual awakening, and finding meaning. Hosted by Philippa Bagley, each episode features in-depth interviews with inspiring thought leaders, therapists, coaches, and everyday people who have overcome addiction, trauma, financial hardship, and burnout to build purposeful lives.

Whether you're seeking direction in your career, healing from past struggles, building resilience, or exploring spirituality, this personal development podcast delivers practical insights and transformational wisdom. Topics include: personal growth, healing and therapy, entrepreneurship, financial independence, mindfulness, spirituality, overcoming adversity, life coaching, and authentic living.

Join our growing community of listeners discovering their life's purpose. New episodes every week.

If you like what you hear, don't forget to follow, review and subscribe

Most veterans only use their VA home loan once, if they use it at all — but the benefit isn't a one-time perk. There's no limit on how many times you can use it, and you don't have to have deployed, or even retired, to qualify.

"Did somebody shoot at you?" Matthew Johnson asks of the veterans who assume they're not entitled to it. "What makes you think you have to retire to earn that?"

By his own estimate, drawn from the content research he's done for his real estate business, only around 12% of eligible veterans ever use the benefit at all.

Matthew Johnson spent 22 years in the US Navy — as a Seabee doing construction work, then as a recruiter — before retiring as a senior chief and moving into Houston real estate, where he specialises in VA loans for veterans and first responders. He and Pippa, both military veterans themselves, trade stories on military directness versus civilian HR, the discipline of basic training on both sides of the Atlantic, and why the hardest part of leadership is just doing the job you were already supposed to be doing. Matthew also talks about GOT-UR-6IX Culture, the veteran-owned apparel brand he runs with his wife, which gives a cut of every co-branded shirt straight to grassroots veteran and first-responder nonprofits rather than the big national names.

Matthew Johnson is a 22-year US Navy veteran (Seabee and recruiter, retired senior chief) and a VA loan specialist with AnchorUp TX in Houston, Texas. He also co-founded GOT-UR-6IX Culture, a veteran-owned apparel brand giving back to grassroots veteran and first-responder organisations.

Connect with Matthew Johnson:
🌐 anchoruptx.com
🌐 sameflagsameoath.com
📷 instagram.com/anchoruprealtygroup
📷 instagram.com/got.ur.6ix

Welcome to the Journey to Purpose Podcast — your guide to personal transformation, spiritual awakening, and finding meaning. Hosted by Philippa Bagley, each episode features in-depth interviews with inspiring thought leaders, therapists, coaches, and everyday people who have overcome addiction, trauma, financial hardship, and burnout to build purposeful lives.

Whether you're seeking direction in your career, healing from past struggles, building resilience, or exploring spirituality, this personal development podcast delivers practical insights and transformational wisdom. Topics include: personal growth, healing and therapy, entrepreneurship, financial independence, mindfulness, spirituality, overcoming adversity, life coaching, and authentic living.

Join our growing community of listeners discovering their life's purpose. New episodes every week.

If you like what you hear, don't forget to follow, review and subscribe

When a crisis puts your story in the media's hands, the people who come through it intact are the ones who've picked one spokesperson, agreed their key messages in advance, and accepted that once the story is out, they don't control it anymore.

PR founder Sophie Wilson learned this the hard way in 2015, when her close friend Gareth went missing while travelling in Malaysia. Within hours she'd become the public face of a campaign that reached Robert De Niro, Downing Street and the front of Sky News — and, eventually, a body that had to be identified. "The media always needs an angle and it is a beast," she says of what the experience taught her. It's a lesson she's carried into her agency work ever since: "Stories are what move people and people create impact."

The conversation moves from the practical mechanics of a breaking news campaign (why you need one spokesperson, how fast a story can be seized and twisted by a single journalist's guess) to the much harder question of what happens when the cameras move on — grief, guilt, and the year-long wait before Gareth's funeral. It closes with Sophie's second brush with the public spotlight: going public with her own long Covid diagnosis, an article that went to number one on Apple News and led to a BBC radio documentary.

Sophie Wilson is the founder and CEO of Tuesday Media, a storytelling and PR agency representing positive changemakers, innovators and entrepreneurs. She chairs the industry body the PRCA and is a vocal advocate for flexible working in the PR industry. Find her at tuesday-media.com.

Connect with Sophie Wilson:
🌐 tuesday-media.com

Welcome to the Journey to Purpose Podcast — your guide to personal transformation, spiritual awakening, and finding meaning. Hosted by Philippa Bagley, each episode features in-depth interviews with inspiring thought leaders, therapists, coaches, and everyday people who have overcome addiction, trauma, financial hardship, and burnout to build purposeful lives.

Whether you're seeking direction in your career, healing from past struggles, building resilience, or exploring spirituality, this personal development podcast delivers practical insights and transformational wisdom. Topics include: personal growth, healing and therapy, entrepreneurship, financial independence, mindfulness, spirituality, overcoming adversity, life coaching, and authentic living.

Join our growing community of listeners discovering their life's purpose. New episodes every week.

If you like what you hear, don't forget to follow, review and subscribe

Real transformation isn't inspirational, it's expensive. Army veteran, entrepreneur and author Scott Lackey argues that every transformation has a cost most people never admit to, and the discomfort you're avoiding right now is usually the exact price of the life you say you want.

Scott puts it plainly: "The thing that you're going to have to sacrifice, Scott, is yourself. You're going to have to be vulnerable, authentic, transparent."

That cost isn't abstract for him. A private equity firm once invested $3 million in a product he invented, the Childhood Health Passport, only for him to be fired from his own company six months later. He rebuilt, taking a second business from $2.8 million to $20 million in four years through acquisitions, before losing control of that one too, to his own investors this time.

The conversation moves from comfort as "the enemy of progress" through Scott's framework of the warrior, the poet, and the shepherd, to the difference between ownership and stewardship, and why Scott stripped every trophy and plaque off his office walls to test whether people could see who he actually was without them. Pippa and Scott dig into authenticity versus the performance of social media, the maths behind why most content never gets seen anyway, and what it actually takes to come forward and be vulnerable in public.

Scott Lackey is a US Army veteran (Desert Shield and Desert Storm), Chief Sales Officer for a global manufacturer, Ironman athlete, and the author of Wake Up to Die Again, a #1 new release and #2 bestseller on Amazon. He also works as an independent turnaround consultant, brought in by banks, law firms and boards to assess companies in crisis. Find him at scottlackey.com.

Connect with Scott Lackey:
🌐 scottlackey.com

Welcome to the Journey to Purpose Podcast — your guide to personal transformation, spiritual awakening, and finding meaning. Hosted by Philippa Bagley, each episode features in-depth interviews with inspiring thought leaders, therapists, coaches, and everyday people who have overcome addiction, trauma, financial hardship, and burnout to build purposeful lives.

Whether you're seeking direction in your career, healing from past struggles, building resilience, or exploring spirituality, this personal development podcast delivers practical insights and transformational wisdom. Topics include: personal growth, healing and therapy, entrepreneurship, financial independence, mindfulness, spirituality, overcoming adversity, life coaching, and authentic living.

Join our growing community of listeners discovering their life's purpose. New episodes every week.

If you like what you hear, don't forget to follow, review and subscribe

Note: no LinkedIn, book purchase link, or other appearance link was given in the episode beyond scottlackey.com — I've only included what he actually named rather than guessing at a LinkedIn URL or Amazon link.

Reinventing yourself after 60 doesn't take one dramatic leap. It takes saying yes to the next small thing, over and over, until a whole new life adds up.

"72 is only a number," says Norman Calvo, who spent 44 years in mortgage banking in New York before retiring in his early 70s and building a second life around curiosity instead of career.

He didn't take his first singing lesson until he was 62. By his 70s, he'd sold out two one-man cabaret shows in Times Square, with a third, Beyond the Norm, booked at Don't Tell Mama for 18 October 2026.

In this conversation with Pippa, Norman talks about what actually changed in his early 60s: joining a choir almost by accident, training for his first marathon, and slowly turning "extracurricular activities" into the centre of his life rather than the edges of it. He explains how he kept a full-time mortgage career going alongside two sold-out cabaret shows, what shifted when a guest on his own podcast asked him whether he'd lived the life he was meant to live, and how he and his wife have learned to travel on different terms rather than always together. It's a candid conversation about choosing joy over achievement, and refusing to let age decide what comes next.

Norman Calvo spent 44 years in mortgage banking in New York, eventually selling his own company to a bank. Since taking his first singing lesson at 62, he's run the New York City Marathon, practised handstands, and built a cabaret career that's led to two sold-out one-man shows at Don't Tell Mama in Times Square. His third show, Beyond the Norm, plays 18 October 2026. He writes about ageing with curiosity rather than caution on his Substack.

Connect with Norman Calvo:
🌐 againstthenorm.net
🌐 normancalvo.substack.com

Welcome to the Journey to Purpose Podcast — your guide to personal transformation, spiritual awakening, and finding meaning. Hosted by Philippa Bagley, each episode features in-depth interviews with inspiring thought leaders, therapists, coaches, and everyday people who have overcome addiction, trauma, financial hardship, and burnout to build purposeful lives.

Whether you're seeking direction in your career, healing from past struggles, building resilience, or exploring spirituality, this personal development podcast delivers practical insights and transformational wisdom. Topics include: personal growth, healing and therapy, entrepreneurship, financial independence, mindfulness, spirituality, overcoming adversity, life coaching, and authentic living.

Join our growing community of listeners discovering their life's purpose. New episodes every week.

If you like what you hear, don't forget to follow, review and subscribe

The most common reason marriages fall apart isn't an affair or a blow-up. It's what marriage coach Dr. Lee Baucom calls "the pause button": couples quietly put their connection on hold for kids, careers or hobbies, tell themselves they'll get back to each other later, and often never do.

"You can't pause a relationship. They're either growing and expanding, or they're shrinking and dying." — Lee Baucom

"It takes two to tango. My response is, you already are tangoing. It just doesn't sound like you like the dance." — Lee Baucom

In this episode, Pippa talks to Dr. Lee Baucom, a marriage coach with over 30 years' experience, about why the difference between marriage coaching and marriage therapy matters, why "communication skills" alone don't fix a disconnected marriage, and why one partner can often start turning things around even when the other isn't trying. They talk through the three levels of connection (physical, emotional and spiritual), the difference between "reports" and "rapport" in daily conversation, why phones have become competition for a partner's attention, and how commitment, not the feeling of love, is the "North Star" that gets a couple through the hard patches.

Lee H. Baucom, Ph.D. holds a doctorate and two master's degrees in marriage and family therapy and has spent over 30 years working with couples. In 1999 he created the Save The Marriage System, and he has since written seven books, including How To Save Your Marriage In 3 Simple Steps. His Unpause app helps couples rebuild daily habits of connection before a marriage reaches crisis point. Find him at savethemarriage.com.Connect with Lee Baucom:

🌐 savethemarriage.com

🌐 unpauseyourmarriage.com

💼 linkedin.com/in/lee-baucom-4813b110

📖 How To Save Your Marriage In 3 Simple Steps

🎧 The Save The Marriage Podcast

Welcome to the Journey to Purpose Podcast — your guide to personal transformation, spiritual awakening, and finding meaning. Hosted by Philippa Bagley, each episode features in-depth interviews with inspiring thought leaders, therapists, coaches, and everyday people who have overcome addiction, trauma, financial hardship, and burnout to build purposeful lives.

Whether you're seeking direction in your career, healing from past struggles, building resilience, or exploring spirituality, this personal development podcast delivers practical insights and transformational wisdom. Topics include: personal growth, healing and therapy, entrepreneurship, financial independence, mindfulness, spirituality, overcoming adversity, life coaching, and authentic living.

Join our growing community of listeners discovering their life's purpose. New episodes every week.

If you like what you hear, don't forget to follow, review and subscribe

How do you stay calm under pressure? According to retired Navy Master Diver Thomas Perkins, it isn't a personality trait, it's a process you build through repetition until fear can't get to the front of the queue.

"You don't have to let fear come all the way to the front and own the room," Perkins says, describing the mental checklist he still runs before every dive, flight, or sail.

Perkins helped bring one of the U.S. Navy's atmospheric diving suits to 2,000 feet, a depth well past the roughly 1,200-foot limit of the established hard-suit systems used in the North Sea at the time. He got there the same way he built everything else in his career: drill after drill, until a record-breaking dive felt like just another Tuesday.

In this episode, Thomas and Pippa talk about what it actually takes to lead people through danger without losing your own nerve. Thomas spent 21 years in the U.S. Navy, including four years training Navy SEAL candidates at BUD/S, and earned a Bronze Star for calm, decisive leadership under fire. They get into why he spent years "running towards danger" before he learned to value his own life, what changed after an 18-month deployment away from his young children, why inclusion turned out to be one of his core leadership tools, and the one decision, at 16, that he still calls his only real regret. Pippa brings her own fear of falling into the conversation, and the two compare notes on why her tandem skydive went so differently from his by-the-book approach to facing fear.

Thomas Perkins is a retired U.S. Navy Master Diver, Bronze Star recipient, and pilot who spent 21 years in the Navy, including four years training Navy SEAL candidates in underwater operations. He's the author of A Life Not Worth Living: What Combat, Courage, and Fatherhood Taught Me About Finding Inner Peace, and runs Lentic, a veteran-owned services company. He currently splits his time between sailing the Caribbean and Florida.

Connect with Thomas Perkins:

🌐 lentic.us

💼 linkedin.com/in/thomasperkins3

📖 A Life Not Worth Living: amazon.com/dp/1971949485

📱 Instagram/Facebook: @AuthorThomasPerkins

Welcome to the Journey to Purpose Podcast — your guide to personal transformation, spiritual awakening, and finding meaning. Hosted by Philippa Bagley, each episode features in-depth interviews with inspiring thought leaders, therapists, coaches, and everyday people who have overcome addiction, trauma, financial hardship, and burnout to build purposeful lives.

Whether you're seeking direction in your career, healing from past struggles, building resilience, or exploring spirituality, this personal development podcast delivers practical insights and transformational wisdom. Topics include: personal growth, healing and therapy, entrepreneurship, financial independence, mindfulness, spirituality, overcoming adversity, life coaching, and authentic living.

Join our growing community of listeners discovering their life's purpose. New episodes every week.

If you like what you hear, don't forget to follow, review and subscribe

Mark Steiner wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until he was 57, and only because his daughter was diagnosed first and started describing her symptoms back to him. Quitting alcohol around the same time is what he says finally let him see it clearly.

"I always looked at myself as a little inferior. I was always a little insecure. I didn't think I was a good student because I couldn't focus... I just always thought that I was less." — Mark Steiner

"The moment I didn't do it for several weeks, all of a sudden I started to feel like there was a bit of a fog that lifted. I seemed to be a little more alert, a little more sharp." — Mark Steiner

Mark built GigSalad — now the biggest marketplace of its kind connecting event planners with entertainers across the US and Canada — twenty-two years before any of this came to light. In this conversation he talks about what changed once he stopped masking, why curiosity and commitment turned out to be two different things, why he's going back to acting in his sixties not to get famous this time but because he actually loves the craft, and why he's launching a new interview podcast, Think Upon, once his home studio is finished.

Mark Steiner is the co-founder and CEO of GigSalad, the online marketplace connecting event planners with entertainers, speakers and other event professionals across the US and Canada. He co-hosts The Big Ideas Podcast and is launching a new interview podcast, Think Upon, later this year.

Connect with Mark Steiner:
🌐 https://thinkupon.com
🌐 https://www.gigsalad.com
💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/markandrewsteiner/
🎧 The Big Ideas Podcast

Welcome to the Journey to Purpose Podcast — your guide to personal transformation, spiritual awakening, and finding meaning. Hosted by Philippa Bagley, each episode features in-depth interviews with inspiring thought leaders, therapists, coaches, and everyday people who have overcome addiction, trauma, financial hardship, and burnout to build purposeful lives.

Whether you're seeking direction in your career, healing from past struggles, building resilience, or exploring spirituality, this personal development podcast delivers practical insights and transformational wisdom. Topics include: personal growth, healing and therapy, entrepreneurship, financial independence, mindfulness, spirituality, overcoming adversity, life coaching, and authentic living.

Join our growing community of listeners discovering their life's purpose. New episodes every week.

If you like what you hear, don't forget to follow, review and subscribe

Corporate America still doesn't trust flexible work — not because part-time or job-share talent gets less done, but because most managers aren't trained to run a team they can't see at their desk every day, and shrinking headcounts make companies reluctant to spend a full-time slot on anyone who isn't in the office full-time.

"I would put any part-timer up against most full-timers because I believe they will go the extra mile in exchange for having the flexibility," says Lisa Kent, founder of The Luminations Group and Dauntless LeadHERship.

"Focus on what you learn, what you contribute, what you get done, and not when and how and where," Lisa tells the consultants, students and senior leaders she mentors — advice she's given for over two decades, long before flexible work had a name.

Lisa built The Luminations Group in 2000 after leaving her role as CEO of NetGrocer, the first nationwide online grocer, when she realised the flexible, part-time talent pool she'd relied on there was being written off by the rest of corporate America. The company she assumed would last a year or two is still running today, twenty-six years on, now serving people managing childcare, ageing parents, career pivots and everything in between — not just mothers of young children. In this conversation, Lisa and Pippa talk about why flexibility still gets treated as a risk rather than an asset, what changed for Lisa after interviewing a former Haleon CEO on her own podcast and realising she was still performing rather than being herself, why failing fast is the leadership skill nobody teaches early enough, and why Lisa's next venture is aimed at elder care — a problem she knows firsthand, having spent years caring for both of her parents through dementia.

Lisa Kent is the founder of The Luminations Group, a marketing consultancy built on flexible, part-time talent that she later sold to Market Performance Group (now operating as FleXforce), and the founder of Dauntless LeadHERship, a podcast and leadership platform for women navigating corporate and entrepreneurial careers. She's an adjunct professor of integrated marketing at NYU and Lehigh, and holds a BA from Yale and an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. More at dauntless.works.

Connect with Lisa Kent:
🌐 https://dauntless.works/
💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisabkent/

Welcome to the Journey to Purpose Podcast — your guide to personal transformation, spiritual awakening, and finding meaning. Hosted by Philippa Bagley, each episode features in-depth interviews with inspiring thought leaders, therapists, coaches, and everyday people who have overcome addiction, trauma, financial hardship, and burnout to build purposeful lives.

Whether you're seeking direction in your career, healing from past struggles, building resilience, or exploring spirituality, this personal development podcast delivers practical insights and transformational wisdom. Topics include: personal growth, healing and therapy, entrepreneurship, financial independence, mindfulness, spirituality, overcoming adversity, life coaching, and authentic living.

Join our growing community of listeners discovering their life's purpose. New episodes every week.

If you like what you hear, don't forget to follow, review and subscribe