Lucid Commons™

Kira Staggs is a mom, board-certified health and wellness coach, yoga teacher, independent scholar, and author of the Substack Feral Medicine. She spent nearly 20 years as a veterinary emergency and critical care technician in the US and UK, then went back to school for a degree in health sciences with a specialty in evolutionary medicine.

Watching sick animals and their frightened owners taught her that “underneath it all, humans are just animals,” and evolutionary medicine gave her the language for what she’d seen: stress. Six weeks after she went back to school, a surprise pregnancy rerouted her from integrative medicine to health coaching. When the world shut down six months after her son was born, the self-described introvert’s reaction was “don’t threaten me with a good time,” but she’s refreshingly honest that she did not have a good time, juggling a full course load with postpartum anxiety that kept her on high alert.

We get into the mismatch between our primitive biology and modern life, her three papers (on chewing as a signal that the threat is gone, sociophysiological dysregulation theory, and how a body that moves and senses less stays on guard), and why she says “humans built their own zoos.” Plus, why you need to find your “threshold tolerance for bullshit” before road rage hits, or before your kid spills the milk and you’re sobbing on the kitchen floor.

In this episode, Kira explains:
◻️ Why “we do not have to convince our nervous systems that we’re safe,” and what to do instead
◻️ What chewing has to do with stress eating
◻️ Why stress is “not the opposite of regulation,” and balance is something you do, not something you have
◻️ How we’re “outsourcing our interoception,” and what it looks like to be more human, not less

If you’ve ever reached for the chips after a hard day, told yourself to calm down and your body didn’t listen, or left Costco feeling like you’d survived something, this one’s for you.

Find Kira:
Read Feral Medicine on Substack
LinkedIn

Catherine Robert, educator, researcher, and host of the Fearless Careerist podcast, takes us on her career journey: contract bookkeeper, small-business CFO, oil services accountant, middle school registrar, drama and English teacher, school administrator, HR, tenured professor, and now writer. She was great at accounting, but it never felt like a vocation. Then she took a job at her daughter’s school and found her people: middle schoolers.

We reflect on why kids that age keep showing up in a different outfit (they’re “literally just hatched out of a little shell,” trying on new selves to see what fits), the five-minute hallway passing period that showed her how much a kid carries between classes, and why those years are “a critical time for people to become people.” Catherine shares what her research says about why people stay in the jobs that pay the least, the “career drift” many of us go through, and why the linear career path is dead. Her question now: once we’re adults, “Where’s our career services?”

We get into how kids learn to think when an answer is always one click away, how she taught eighth graders to figure out how they learn best, and why it’s time to rethink a system where “we’ve assessed kids to death and not much has changed.” Catherine shares what fielding 800 requests a day as a school administrator taught her about being human, and the idea from her doctoral studies that changed how she approaches policymaking.

She isn’t here to tell you to quit. “So many people live their lives in quiet desperation,” she says. If you’re ten years into the same job and ready for a change, she offers a way to think it through, so you can feel good about the decision, whether you go or stay.

If you’ve ever been great at a job that never felt like yours, wondered whether to stay or go, or are trying on a new self to see if it fits, this one’s for you.

Look for Fearless Careerist, the book, coming in spring 2027.

Fearless Careerist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FearlessCareerist

Find Catherine:
Website: https://catherinerobertedd.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-robert-823801212/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crobert903/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61560439627250

Tess Posner, award-winning musical artist, entrepreneur, and community builder, shares her journey from founding CEO of AI4ALL to full-time musician to founder of Resonance. Tess is on a mission to build the infrastructure that empowers local communities to navigate and shape their future with AI based on what matters to them, instead of accepting the defaults.

We discuss facing fear in a modern world, why she's learned it's impossible to heal anyone else and what she does instead, and why Resonance salons are her answer to an epidemic of loneliness and a loss of agency. We explore what it means to "live the questions" (hat tip to Rilke and her St. John's College education), why "education is often effective because of friction," and the human capacities worth protecting in the Age of AI. We compare thirty people lingering at a café in Paris to a Starbucks drive-thru, and consider what American culture traded when it optimized for efficiency.

Tess explains why she doesn't have a P(doom) and makes the case for building a future where technology alleviates suffering and fosters connection, agency, and creativity, instead of eroding what makes us human.

We explore her music—"Vertigo," written in the first weeks of the pandemic; "Party at the End of the World," the dance song she wrote under an orange wildfire sky in California; "You Set Me on Fire"; and "Feral Child," her letter to the inner child the modern world stepped on and that she buried, and what happened after she released it.

If you've ever lost touch with the kid who used to wonder about everything, chased answers when you needed to live the questions, or want a voice in the future being built, this one's for you.

Links:

🌐 Resonance

tess-posner.com

🎵 Feral Child
🎵 Party at the End of the World
🎵 Vertigo
🎵 You Set Me on Fire
✍️ Living the Questions

Rebecca Bultsma, an AI ethics researcher, writer, mom of four, and, by her own account, a huge nerd, brings nuance to an increasingly polarized world. We talk about her pivot from public relations to data and AI ethics, the moment she watched ChatGPT write a press release in seconds and knew everything would change, and her research on deepfakes: how K–12 leaders can respond when no one can tell what's real.

We also talk about growing up with her father, an Oxford-trained lawyer who was comfortable saying "I don't know," why she questions whether AI belongs in classrooms at all, the metaphors that shape how we act, Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, what happens when profit comes before people, and what your loyalty card is really for.

Rebecca shares why we've lost our tolerance for uncertainty, what London's cab drivers can teach us about using AI without outsourcing our thinking, and why, of all tools, she turns to Grok when she's trying to piece together what's true in real time. Through it all, she returns to what makes us uniquely human: critical thinking, our own voice, and our capacity to genuinely care for and connect with each other, because, as she puts it, "we're more than data points."

If you're wondering how to stay human in the Age of AI or how to hold nuance in a polarized world, this one's for you.

Find Rebecca on:

LinkedIn

Substack: Yes, and Also No

RebeccaBultsma.com

Brian Cunningham returns to dive deeper into the mechanics underneath the developmental progression of leadership he mapped in Part I. This time we tackle attention, focus, and intent—the three levers of our awareness—and the distinction between consciousness as the field and awareness as what perceives it.

We dig into what happens when our attention is constantly fragmented—by media, algorithms, or ADHD—and the gap between the millions of bits of stimuli hitting us each second and the handful we actually register. Brian introduces "free-ish will": agency that's real but bounded, and the nuance of what it means to co-create your life—the freedom of it, and the overwhelm that can keep us stuck in fear if we never move past self-authoring into self-transcendence. He lays out the four domains of our Awareness Quotient (AQ), the missing link between our IQ, EQ, and intuition: internal, external, the integration between the two, and the deeper purpose beneath it all. Then he gets specific—what it looks like, in a real meeting, to catch someone's fear before it hardens like wet clay, and to hand three people at three different leadership levels a role that expands all three at once.

He shares what he learned studying under David Dibble—a master apprentice of Don Miguel Ruiz (author of The Four Agreements)—including how to unleash the human spirit in the workplace not through retreats or seminars, but by treating the workplace itself as the tool. Sure you can meditate at the ashram in the mountains for a week, but can you lead people when the sh*t hits the fan at work?

If you've ever felt your attention hijacked, wondered how to reclaim your agency in a "free-ish" world, or want a practical framework to build your awareness muscle and leadership skills—this one's for you.

Find Brian at:
LinkedIn
AwarenessQuotientLeadership.com

Find Brian's books on Amazon:
Leadership: The Universal Principles

Our AQ (Awareness Quotient): The Missing Link to Extraordinary Leadership and Life

Erin Gerner, mom, lawyer, and entrepreneur, takes us from "I quit" to "oh shit" to "bullshit." From national junior tennis, to working motherhood and staying home, to entrepreneurship—which she calls "a special kind of lunacy," because the stress and fear are a gift when it's the hard you chose. Sometimes the plan is no plan: short memory, messy, scared, showing up anyway. Her message—really bad things can be happening, and you can still move forward.

We talk quitting without a backup plan, rebuilding from nothing, the power of community, radical self-acceptance, and letting go of other people's expectations of you. Now she coaches female lawyers, with a gift for seeing in people what they can't yet see in themselves—and reminding women exactly what they're capable of. She hosts Powerhouse Lawyers, where she welcomed me as a guest this summer.

If you've ever quit before you had a plan, or needed someone to remind you who you are—this one's for you.

Find Erin on:
LinkedIn
ErinGerner.com
Powerhouse Lawyers Podcast

Jordana Confino—recovering Type A+ perfectionist and founder of JC Coaching & Consulting—spent most of her life doing everything "right": Yale Law, two federal clerkships, a Big Law offer. Until her body forced the truth her mind kept overriding.

She takes us back to 1L year: sad, alone, and telling her parents she felt like a hamster in a pressure cooker—constantly self-berating, and even judging classmates who dared to take a moment for themselves.

Her first turning point came in therapy, doing a basic values exercise, when she realized she'd never once asked herself what she actually cared about. Why was she even in law school? Once she saw the gap between her values and her life, she couldn't unsee it—and it pushed her into work that finally aligned with what she valued.

But she burned out again, harder—this time her legs stopped working, literally. That's when she realized the problem was never the environment. She still had a toxic boss living in her own head.

Through career pivots, therapy, motherhood, and the unconditional love of her partner, Jordana discovered that while identity is dynamic, self-compassion is the constant that makes everything else possible—including unlearning inherited patterns so they don't pass to the next generation.

Now trained in positive psychology, she guides lawyers to work they love, teaching the tools that saved her, like personifying the inner critic and choosing self-compassion over self-punishment.

If you've ever let your inner critic run the show, mistaken achievement for self-worth, or wondered if there's a way to actually love your work, this one's for you.

Find Jordana on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanaconfino/

Website: https://www.jordanaconfino.com/

Hannah Firestone, attorney, artist, and novelist writing her first book under a pen name, is an old soul with a young heart. On her second day at a windowless office job, she drew herself one on the whiteboard and has redrawn it every day since, rain, fall leaves, or a stray Pizza Hut box, depending on what she sees on her walk in.

We get into what it means to bring your authentic self to work in two male-dominated industries, and her belief in manifestation, or as she puts it, expecting the best parking spot before you have even pulled into the lot. Hannah traces how "you're weird" feels like an insult when you're in high school, but she embraces it as a compliment as she approaches her 30th trip around the sun. We talk about her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor and hidden child, and the quotes she has carried since: "you are as happy as you choose to be," and "no one can make you feel inferior without your permission."

We reflect on the magic of curiosity, why she hates AI, the vastness of space, accepting not knowing what lives in other people's hearts and minds, and what it costs her to hold onto friendships across a divided political moment. As an attorney certified in alternative dispute resolution, Hannah shares how most conflict comes down to misunderstanding and subjectivity, and what it takes to navigate difficult conversations as we move through life.

If you have ever wanted to embrace your weird, held a belief that cost you a friendship, or find comfort in not having all the answers, this one is for you.

Check out A Call for Compromise: Examining Polarization and the Potential Use of ADR Solutions in Congress Post-Trump Administration

Thiago Licias de Oliveira, father of two, global talent executive turned founder of Unmaze, spent 25 years fixing what was broken inside companies like Johnson & Johnson, until a six-hour descent down an extinct volcano in Cape Verde gave him the first real mental space he'd had in over a decade.

In this conversation, we journey from Brazil, where he grew up with 80% monthly inflation and learned early that uncertainty was not the exception, it was the condition, to Europe, the U.S., Cape Verde, and recently to Cleveland—where a search for a more generative way to solve problems led him into positive organizational psychology. We talk entrepreneurship, how success can trap us (the Greek myth of Daedalus and his labyrinth), and his answer when his kids ask, but Dad, what if this fails?

Thiago challenges one of the values he inherited: never give up is a great value, he says, until it's not—learning when to stop is a critical skill. We get into how making gelato captures his essence as a nerd and artist, the symptoms of something much deeper brewing in society, and his belief that the real root goes back further than AI: we've taught kids to know, not how to think. His message for American society circa 2026: we're all part of the same whole.

If you're wondering whether never give up is the right call, if you feel like you're swimming against the current and looking for a different way, or you're exhausted by everything that's supposed to divide us, this one's for you.

Find Thiago on LinkedIn
Website: unmaze.work

Leila Entezam—Neuro-Emotional performance coach to CEOs, professional athletes, and celebrities, author of The Heart of Peak Performance, and self-described nature-loving brain nerd—takes us through her world: the path from pre-med to neuroscience to an MBA to a master's in psychology, and how 3,000 clinical hours studying human behavior led her to a niche that found her—high performers who look like they have it all together on the outside and feel lost as heck on the inside.

We talk about why compartmentalizing is a myth (it's one brain, one database, and whatever you're avoiding is still buzzing in the back, eating your bandwidth), why high performers will knock out ten different challenges but go quiet the second you ask them to sit with their own emotional landscape, and how ego-fueled achievement can leave you high-functioning and hollow at the same time. We also talk about a 65,000-employee survey and the one trait that came out on top when people were asked what they actually admire in a leader—spoiler: it isn't confidence.

We also get into her SETUP framework—somatics, emotions, thoughts, your universe, physiology—as a way to take inventory of everything actually in the room during a hard conversation, and why your body is sometimes a safer entry point than your feelings. We discussed everything from interoception to self-awareness, to why AI is designed to keep you doing more, leading to completion debt (and how she knows when media consumption has crossed into noise), to Suzy Welch's Becoming You and why most people can't actually name their own values, to the discipline of intention as the real skill of this decade. We end with Leila's three core values and a closing tribute to the person who taught her what unconditional love and community actually look like in practice.

If you've achieved everything on paper and still feel like something's missing, if you've written off coaching or therapy as woo-woo without knowing the neuroscience behind it, or if you're trying to figure out how to quiet the noise and consume consciously in a world engineered to keep you scrolling, this one's for you.

Find Leila on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/workwithleila/

Website: workwithleila.com