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

Ethical 5-MeO-DMT facilitation isn't a weekend certification and a single big mystical peak — it's minimum-effective-dose protocols, trauma-informed training, and integration support that starts before the session and continues for weeks after.

"They went from one identity as the plumber, now the new identity just happens to have more linen and beads," says Stephan Kerby, describing what happens when new facilitators chase the status of the role instead of the safety of their clients.

Mindscape Psychedelic Institute, which Kerby co-founded with his wife Amber Kerby, LMFT, has trained more than 1,200 practitioners since 2022 in trauma-informed 5-MeO-DMT and psychedelic facilitation.

Kerby's own path into this work started with undiagnosed PTSD from a childhood outside Washington D.C. and a brief stint in the military, and a psychedelic experience he describes as "20 years of therapy in a weekend." What followed was years as a participant, then a facilitator with a six-month waiting list, then the realisation that the underground scene he was working in was missing something: proper mental health training. In this conversation, Pippa and Kerby get into what separates a genuinely ethical facilitator from someone who's just found a faster route to feeling special, why intention should be held loosely rather than clutched, the accessibility problem building inside the clinical psychedelic space, and the Embodiment Protocol Kerby developed after watching too many people revert to their old baseline personality within weeks of a huge experience.

Stephan Kerby is co-founder and lead educator at Mindscape Psychedelic Institute, where he trains clinicians, facilitators and serious students in ethics, trauma-informed practice and 5-MeO-DMT facilitation. He is co-author, with Amber Kerby, LMFT, of The Embodiment Protocol: A Practical Guide to Awakening with 5-MeO-DMT.

Connect with Stephan Kerby:

🌐 https://www.mindscapeinstitute.org/

💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/mindscapeinstitute/

📖 https://www.amazon.com/Embodiment-Protocol-Practical-Awakening-5-MeO-DMT/dp/B0G2GN1RG8

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

Grief doesn't run on anyone else's timeline, and rebuilding trust in yourself after loss is less about one big breakthrough than learning to hear your own inner voice again, then actually acting on it.

"I was carrying the grief about my mom around with me like a backpack for like 20 years... it was part of my identity, and I had to unpack that." — Lori Karsch

That inner voice mattered in practice, not just in theory. Lori was engaged to another man when her mother lay dying, and everyone in her life, including her own mother, told her the marriage was a mistake. Her gut agreed. She called it off. She met her husband a year later, and they've now been married 25 years.

In this conversation, Lori and Philippa talk about what it actually looks like to rebuild self-trust after losing your mother young and growing up in a chaotic, sometimes violent home: the slow work of setting boundaries, unlearning people-pleasing, and telling the difference between grief for a death and grief for a version of yourself you thought you'd become. They also get into why "you should be over it by now" is one of the most damaging things you can say to someone grieving, and why healing doesn't mean loving the person you lost any less.

Lori Karsch is a bestselling memoir author, speaker, mentor and certified counselor with a graduate degree in school counseling. She helps women reconnect with themselves after grief, emotional hardship and major life transitions. Her memoir, Torn Wide Open, charts her path from losing her mother young to reclaiming her inner voice and trust in herself. She's now developing New Perspective Retreats for women navigating major life transitions.

Connect with Lori Karsch:
🌐 https://www.lorikarsch.com
📖 Torn Wide Open (book): https://a.co/d/07dOKHGA
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/loribkarsch
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/loribkarsch

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

You don't need a data point or a life-altering diagnosis to trust your intuition again — you need to survive the moment you stopped trusting it, and rebuild from there.

"No, I'm gonna trust myself and not follow what you said," says Tania Ho, describing the moment her retreat-centre partnership with her own teacher broke down. "That was the beginning of that breakdown. And there were so many other moments too — that's what the industry is doing, that's what the trends are, that's what other people are doing. But it's so important always to come back to myself."

Tania isn't a data person, and this isn't a stat-driven conversation — it's an experiential one, built on nine years of running a wellness retreat from the ground up with no construction or hospitality-management background to fall back on.

We talk about what happened when Tania, an intuitive soul guide and the founder of Museflower Retreat & Spa in Chiang Rai, Thailand, quit her spa management job after her father died at 25, co-founded a retreat centre with a teacher she trusted completely, and then watched that partnership implode within six months of opening. She talks about the doubt spiral that followed — "can I really trust myself?" — and how she rebuilt from there, not by finding a better teacher to follow, but by learning to trust her own gut instead. We also get into the two types of sensitive people she sees at her retreats, why she runs an all-vegetarian, coffee-free centre on purpose, and how she reads the difference between a guest who needs a spa day and one who needs to properly fall apart for a week.

Tania Ho is the founder and owner of Museflower Retreat & Spa, an all-inclusive vegetarian wellness retreat centre in Chiang Rai, northern Thailand, and an intuitive soul guide helping sensitive people trust their own intuition through energy tools, oracle card readings and fire release ceremonies. She's also the host of Embrace Your Sacred Nature, her own podcast on wellness practices and energy tools. museflowerretreat.com

Connect with Tania Ho:

🌐 https://musefloweretreat.com/

🌐 https://taniaho.me/

🎧 https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/exploring-meditation-styles-with-tania-ho/id1639714009?i=1000631575793

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

Emotional independence, according to former ICU nurse turned coach Jesseca Banchy, means learning to manage your own anxiety, anger and self-worth internally, instead of handing that job to other people, relationships, or things you own.

"Self-improvement is a whole crock of shit. Psychology is a whole crock of shit. It's all about getting to a level of being seen as good enough." — Jesseca Banchy

"It's okay to have temper tantrums. We need to have more temper tantrums. We need to scream and cry more often." — Jesseca Banchy

Jesseca spent nearly a decade nursing in ICU and critical care, including her current post at a small Tucson hospital that treats both civilians and shackled prison inmates, and she talks candidly about what that work has taught her about compassion, boundaries, and seeing people as more than the worst thing they've done. She and Philippa get into how Jesseca protects her own energy on shift, the near-fatal accident at 19 that got her sober, her belief that everyone has "their own planet," and why she thinks being weird is a form of courage. The conversation closes with Jesseca's other project, Compost Cultura, and why she thinks fixing the planet starts with fixing our relationship to trash.

Jesseca Banchy is a semi-retired ICU registered nurse, founder of Magnetic Soul Healing (holistic coaching in emotional independence for women) and Compost Cultura (composting and waste-reduction education), and is currently pursuing a PhD in Metaphysical Science.

Connect with Jesseca Banchy:
🌐 magneticsoulhealing.org
🌐 compostcultura.org

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 unwritten rules of promotion aren't secret, they're patterns leadership already rewards. Career and executive coach Maya Sharfi says the fastest way to learn them is to stop asking for the steps and start acting like you already have the role.

"You don't want to show up in the promotion conversation like Oliver Twist: please, sir, can you please pour into my bowl the steps to get promoted," Sharfi says. "Instead, you want to show up almost as if you already have the role."

Sharfi points to a study showing that before around age five, boys and girls are equally drawn to games framed as being for "kids who are smart" and games framed as being for "kids who work hard." After five, girls start gravitating toward the "hard work" games. It's a measurable, early start to a pattern many women spend decades trying to unlearn.

In this conversation, Maya and Pippa dig into why so many capable women apologise before they've even made their point, and why "just be more direct" backfires when the advice doesn't account for how women get read differently for the same behaviour. Maya breaks down her "four zones of career alignment" framework for working out what you actually want before you chase the next title, her method for having proactive but collaborative conversations that surface the real, unwritten reasons someone isn't getting promoted, and why reconnecting with someone you haven't spoken to in ten years costs you nothing and isn't the social crime it feels like. They also talk about introversion, psychological safety at work, and the particular flavour of imposter syndrome that shows up once your clients are already getting results.

Maya Sharfi is a career and executive coach and the founder of Build Yourself, where she helps ambitious women step into senior leadership roles without burning out. Her background spans landscape architecture, Harvard Business School, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and she now works with women navigating promotions, career pivots, and the gap between how they lead and how they're told to lead.

Find her at buildyourselfworkshop.com.

Connect with Maya Sharfi:

🌐 buildyourselfworkshop.com

💼 linkedin.com/in/mayasharfi

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

Past life regression uses hypnosis to access memories a practitioner believes come from earlier lives, then works with the emotions attached to them so they stop bleeding into the present one.

"I'm an absolute firm believer that what we see in our day-to-day life is not everything at all," says energy therapist Natasha Joy Price. "There is more beyond that, and we just can't see it, we can't sense it."

She's not exaggerating about the range of what surfaces. One client kept smelling burning at home for no reason, and driving her partner mad insisting he check the house. A regression session traced it back to a past life as Joan of Arc. "Your energy field is something that's missed off the list in our holistic health," Price says. "Nobody checks in on it. And your energy flows through your physical body — it's just a beautiful piece of organic machinery."

In this episode, Natasha talks about the accidental Reiki session after the birth of her third child that cracked open thirty years of parallel practice: a property solicitor by day, energy healer and past life regression therapist by night, the two kept deliberately separate until clients started telling her she was "the calmest solicitor" they'd ever met. She and Pippa get into what past life regression is actually for (clearing stuck emotional patterns, not proving you were Cleopatra), how she keeps sessions safe when they touch on death and trauma, what burnout looks like through an energy lens versus a purely psychological one, and the novel and workbook she's written along the way.

Natasha Joy Price is an energy therapist, Reiki master and past life regression practitioner with over 20 years of study across Reiki, Theta Healing, hypnotherapy, and her own Soul Continuum method, alongside a Master's in parapsychology. She runs Dandelion Therapies, hosts the podcast Balm to the Soul, and is the author of Freedom of the Soul and the novel The Red Magus.

Connect with Natasha Joy Price: 🌐 https://dandeliontherapies.co.uk 📖 The Red Magus: https://dandeliontherapies.co.uk/the-red-magus/ 📖 Freedom of the Soul: https://dandeliontherapies.co.uk/publications/ 🎧 Balm to the Soul (her podcast): https://dandeliontherapies.co.uk/balm-to-the-soul/

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