The Catherine Plano Podcast

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Felecia Hatcher is the granddaughter of a Jamaican sugar cane and yam farmer and the daughter of a construction entrepreneur, and she says she has spent her entire life building things. Once told by a high school guidance counsellor that her low grades meant she wouldn’t make it, she went on to co-found the venture-backed food brand Feverish Pops and write five books, including Genius Jam and Start a Business on a Ramen Noodle Budget. Today she is the CEO of Pharrell Williams’ Black Ambition Opportunity Inc., where she has invested in over 157 entrepreneurs who have collectively raised more than $100 million. She is also the first to say she has been burned out three times.

Felecia had raised millions of dollars in support of her work, and she was doing everything for everyone while not listening to her body. Getting ready to board a flight one night, she heard a voice louder than it had ever been: if you don’t sit down somewhere, you’re not going to make it through the night. This time she listened, and missed the event she was due to speak at. Resting for a few days, she finally opened a book she had been carrying around, Gay Hendricks’ The Big Leap. She went on to study with Gay and Kathy Hendricks for about two years.

You can’t pull your genius out of thin air, Felecia says. You have to take yourself through a process of elimination. Your zone of incompetence holds the things you are worst at, and doing them causes more harm than good, because time is the one commodity none of us get back. Your zone of competence holds things you can do, but other people do better. Then come your zone of excellence and your zone of genius, where work flows so well that hours feel like minutes. To make it practical, she layers the Eisenhower framework over the top: do what sits in your genius, decide on what sits in your excellence, delegate what sits in your competence, and delete what sits in your incompetence.

The zone that catches most high achievers, in Felecia’s view, is excellence. You have probably built your entire career there, and you can live a very comfortable life in it. That is exactly the danger. Your zone of excellence is a velvet cage, she says: you hit the target, but you never exceed the goal. Stay too long and you become complacent, and your body tells you, with an itch or a tension in your shoulders and back, that you are not doing the thing you are supposed to do. Her simplest test is trust. Ask yourself, do I trust myself in this? If you can honestly answer yes, you are in your genius.

Even knowing her genius, Felecia has slipped out of it. Having run a gourmet popsicle company for seven years, she invested in a hip hop ice cream shop and did what she does best: the pitch deck, the partners, the messaging. Then, on opening day, she was at the front register trying to scoop ice cream until her business partner told her, Felecia, get the heck out of the way. She describes herself as a first quarter person in a relay race, the catalyst who comes off the block, and says too many of us hold a baton for far too long, often out of ego. Pass it on, she says, whether to a person or an AI tool, and stay in the part only you can do.

Felecia offers a reframe on imposter syndrome: if you think that you are an imposter, then you are, because you are pretending to be a nobody when you have something of value. The same honesty shaped her recovery from burnout. Therapy helped her separate her identity from a company she had built for seven years, and her third burnout taught her that bath bombs and massages were not enough. Raise your hand, she says, and say something, even if it’s a whisper.

Felecia left us with three shiny golden nuggets. First, do the zone of genius audit to understand your zones of incompetence, competence and excellence, and truly get to your genius. Second, write yourself a permission slip to come back into your body and rest, and to get clear on what you want without any external validation. Third, use rest as a reset strategy: audit your calendar in 30-minute increments and realign your time for more joy and freedom. As she puts it, burnout is not a badge of honour.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube

Find Out More About Felecia Hatcher

Website: https://www.feleciahatcher.com/ 

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Have you ever had an argument in the shower, and won it? Have you written a message, deleted it, rewritten it, and then sent “no worries at all”? Can you replay something you said years ago, word for word, and still wince? Do you say “I just need to think about it”, mean it every single time, and somehow never finish the thinking? Is there a sentence you have been carrying for years that the person it was meant for has never once heard?

If more than two of those landed, this one is about you.

In this Moment of Awe, we explore the AstroPsychology of the inner voice: why the third house is not about how well you talk, what Lev Vygotsky, Paul Trapnell, Jennifer Campbell, Dana Crowley Jack and Matthew Lieberman can tell us about the conversation that never stops, and three ways to say the sentence you have been rehearsing.

The third house belongs to Gemini, and it is ruled by Mercury, the messenger. On the surface, it describes communication: talking, writing, learning, the everyday exchanges with the people closest to us. But the third house has two doors. One faces out towards the conversations you have with other people. The other faces in, towards the conversation you have with yourself all day, every day.

In the 1930s, Lev Vygotsky noticed that small children talk out loud to themselves while they play, and he argued that this private speech does not disappear as we grow up. It goes underground and becomes the voice in your head. Which means your inner voice did not begin as yours. It began as a conversation with other people. So the question of the third house is not “are you a good communicator?” It is: whose voice is doing most of the talking in there?

I once drafted an email to a colleague eleven times over three evenings. I prepared for every possible reply. I finally sent it close to midnight, and she replied the next morning with four words: “Of course, thank you.” I had spent three evenings preparing for a war that was only ever happening in my own head.

The archetype that lives in this house is the overthinker, the analyst. Its purpose is to use analysis to avoid deep emotional engagement. Its secondary gain is control: if I can understand it, I can manage it, and if I can predict every reaction, nobody can surprise me. What it protects you from is the fear of emotional vulnerability, and the fear of being caught not knowing.

The overthinker is not a flaw in your thinking. It is a bodyguard. The trouble is that it cannot tell the difference between the conversations that might hurt you and the ones that might free you. So it stops all of them.

In 1999, Paul Trapnell and Jennifer Campbell pulled apart two kinds of self-focus that look identical from the outside. Rumination is driven by threat. Reflection is driven by curiosity. Same subject, completely different motives. Rumination travelled with anxiety and distress, and reflection with openness to experience.

Much of this work is correlational, so it does not settle every question about which came first. But here is the useful part: the overthinker always believes it is reflecting, and most of the time it is ruminating. You can tell the difference by the feeling, not the content. Reflection feels like exploration. Rumination feels like being chased.

In 1991, Dana Crowley Jack described a pattern she called silencing the self: holding back thoughts, feelings and needs to keep a relationship safe. It creates a divided self, an outer self who keeps the peace and an inner self who is anything but peaceful. The sentence you do not say does not vanish. It moves into the third house and keeps talking, only now you are the one person who hears it.

And here is the part I find genuinely beautiful. In 2007, a team at UCLA led by Matthew Lieberman found that simply naming a feeling reduced activity in the amygdala. Not solving it, not analysing it. Just naming it.

For a long time, the sentence I could not say was “I do not agree.” The first time I said it plainly, in a room full of senior people, there was a long pause. Then somebody said, “Thank goodness, neither do I.”

Catch the loop. When you find yourself replaying or rehearsing a conversation, ask: am I exploring, or am I being chased? If you are being chased, stop asking why and ask how. How could I respond? The why keeps you circling. The how gives you somewhere to go.

Talk to yourself by name. Ethan Kross and his colleagues found that people who coached themselves through a stressful moment using their own name instead of “I” felt less anxious and performed better. “Catherine, what do you actually want to say?” That little distance gives you a choice.

Say one unrehearsed, true sentence. Something small, to one person, without drafting it first. “I feel left out.” “I am tired.” “I do not agree.” Every time you say something true and nothing terrible happens, the case for the bodyguard gets a little weaker.

You are not your thoughts, and you are not the voice that runs them. You are the one who decides which voice gets to speak out loud. The third house is not a verdict on how you communicate. It is a description of the conversation, and the conversation can change.

What if the clarity you have been waiting for is on the other side of the sentence, not in front of it?

Because the more human we are with each other, the more we all rise.

You can watch the video of this episode on YouTube.

If you have been having the same conversation with yourself for weeks, meet Bridget, your AI coach. She asks rather than tells, and the thinking stays yours: https://bridget.riseandthriveglobal.com/

If you are a coach, psychologist or therapist who has worked with this symbolic language for years and always known it belonged in your professional work, explore the AstroPsychology Practitioner Programme: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/astropsychology-practitioner-programme/

Or book a 20-minute clarity call, no obligation, just a conversation: https://calendly.com/catherineplano/meet-greet

Newsletter: Catherine Plano for transformation.

Instagram: @catherineplano for inspiration.

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Asha Nayaswami lost interest in Stanford after about two weeks. From then on, she made A’s when she went to class and F’s when she didn’t, and within a year she had flunked out, which was just fine with her. The people there were extremely intelligent, but she did not feel they were wise. Why do we live? Why do we suffer? What is the secret of real happiness? Then a fraternity on the Stanford campus invited Swami Kriyananda to speak. When he walked into the room, it was the first time she had ever seen anyone who had what she wanted, and she never looked back. Asha has dedicated her life to Kriya Yoga meditation, devotion to God and service to others, with 45 years of very close association with Kriyananda, a direct disciple of Paramhansa Yogananda, author of Autobiography of a Yogi.

After more than 50 years on the spiritual path, what does Asha know that her younger self could not have understood? The degree to which she created her own misery, and therefore the degree to which she can create her own happiness. You can rarely control circumstances, she says, but you can always at least influence your response. In her view, karma is an unlearned lesson about who we are, what causes suffering and what brings happiness. Like a worm moving away from a needle and towards food, we always go where we think happiness is. The trouble is that we think easy and pleasurable is good, whereas courageous and expansive is what really brings us to happiness.

Asha calls it a great misunderstanding on the spiritual path that you are not supposed to have these feelings. Grief, anger, fear and jealousy are, in her view, unfinished karma, and you do not get out of them just by hating them. For many years, she says, her personality was a preemptive strike, built to stay ahead of all that unresolved energy until it caught up with her. These days she will often say to herself, yes, I feel this way because I’m just not that good, and then try to minimise the damage. Soul can rejoice, she says, while ego just cries itself to sleep every night.

You can’t game the system, Asha says. There is no shortcut, nobody you can bribe, no trick, and the same attitude can be forward for one person and backward for another. Just before she was 20, terrified of conflict, she spent a summer in New York learning to yell at strangers, telling the groceryman he was stealing from her and fighting for the taxi cab. When she noticed she was beginning to enjoy it, she stopped. From then on she was no longer being nice because she was afraid, but because she had mastery over her own energy.

Asha would rather befriend the ego than fight it. Ego, as she defines it, is the infinite self identified with limitation, and it is meant to serve the higher self, not be the dictator. Her formula is to do a little better than your worst. Too tired to wash the dishes? Just stack them before bed. Want to write a horrible email? Write it, but don’t send it. Over time, she says, the ego starts to help: honey, remember what happened the last time you blew up like this?

If a child prays for chocolate cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner and doesn’t get it, Asha asks, has God really failed him? Once, praying for a situation to change while other people were really suffering, she heard an inner voice ask, do you think this is happening outside the will of God? Her prayer changed: whatever you’re trying to teach them, help them to learn it. You can complain all you want, she says, but in the end you have to say, thy will, not mine.

Asha left us with three shiny golden nuggets. First, always do a little better than your worst. Second, consider very deeply your place in relation to a greater reality, whether that is God, a guardian angel or your higher self, and spend a little time in silence, knowing you are not really alone. Third, remember that no minute of your life is unimportant, because every minute you are creating a vibration. The question, she says, is really simple: how can I love more, and how can I serve more?

Watch the full conversation on YouTube

Find Out More About Asha Nayaswami

Website: https://ashajoy.org

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

At seven or eight years old, Guy Finley was riding in the Hollywood Christmas parade, where his father was the honorary marshal, sitting on the lap of one of the biggest stars of the day. He remembers thinking, what’s wrong here? Everybody was so fearful, so angry and so anxious. Born into a show business family, he grew up with a contradiction he could not reconcile. That question, what is this pain, set him on a path he has walked for almost 70 years, and he says he is still just beginning. Today Guy is the Founding Director of Life of Learning Foundation, a nonprofit centre for spiritual discovery, and the acclaimed author of The Secret of Letting Go and more than 50 other books and audio programmes, translated into 30 languages.

Letting go, Guy says, is an inside story. We tend to look out at the world as the party responsible for the pain we are in, and he believes it is just not true. You cannot separate the experience of life from the nature having that experience. When he has a problem with another person, that person isn’t the problem. They are here to show him where parts of him are still clinging to certain ideas and demands. He calls them secret agents of God. And the work, he says, is done by seeing into our consciousness, not by fighting with it.

So why do we chase validation? Guy believes that affirming qualities we do not have only leaves us living in fear of proving we are what we imagine ourselves to be. He remembers being 12 at his father’s business meetings, in a suit and tie, his left shoulder hurting so badly he wanted to cry. Even that child, already conditioned to want approval, was afraid he would not get it. You cannot satisfy a fear, Guy says. You can dope it up or distract yourself from it, but until you understand the nature of fear itself, you will live in it. In his words, people bother us for only one reason: what we want from them.

Guy describes it as dominoes. Desire gives rise to image, image to identity, identity to attachment, attachment is dependency, and dependency is fear. He calls it the circle of self, and he is clear that a conditioned nature cannot free itself from its own conditioning. What can help is a light that reveals where we are conditioned. Escaping desire, he says, is lunacy. We are here to transcend the nature that believes it can complete itself through its desire.

Why are we drawn to anyone at all? Guy believes we discover ourselves through relationship. At first everything is oh yeah. Then oh yeah turns into oh no, and we meet the part of us that wants to blame the other person for not loving us the way they said they would. There is no bad revelation, he says. He is just as clear that trying to change the world is, in his words, egotism of the worst kind. You don’t change a rose. Guy has been with his wife for 46 years, and says he has never once raised his voice to her.

From around 18 to 25, Guy lived a celibate life, almost in a cave, only to find he still got angry. Awakening, he came to see, isn’t some sudden aha. It is the gradual recognition that who and what you are cannot be defined by any experience the mind wants to create. He tells the story of a knight who puts down his sword and shield and leaps into the dragon’s mouth, only to find it never had any teeth. It was all gums. For Guy, that is what an awakening is: the collapse of a false identity that produces false shadows in order to be the slayer of them.

Guy left us with three shiny golden nuggets, gathered into one practice he calls Stop, Drop, Endure. Stop: the moment you feel a fear or an anxiety, come to a stop, as present as you can in your body. Drop: catch the thoughts that rush in to explain why you feel the way you do, and be the observer of your consciousness rather than its servant. Endure: be willing to stay with what you feel, without reaching for a time to come when the pain will be gone. Useless suffering, Guy explains, believes escape is coming. Conscious suffering stays and watches.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube

Find Out More About Guy Finley

Website: https://www.guyfinley.org

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Well over 20 years ago, Catherine Clinton was in naturopathic medical school when the long hours caught up with her and she was diagnosed with two autoimmune conditions and Lyme disease. She had access to all kinds of healing modalities, yet the model was the same chemical and mechanical one modern medicine uses today. A physician she worked under during clinical rotations urged her to look into psychoneuroimmunology- how our thoughts and emotions impact our health- and at the same time she came across research on quantum biology. It all came together in an aha moment: the body isn’t just chemical and mechanical and physical, it’s energetic. Today Dr Clinton is a licensed naturopathic doctor and the author of Optimize: A Groundbreaking Seven-Step Plan to Health and Longevity Through Quantum Biology.

Dr Clinton believes the body is brilliant, and that symptoms are signals rather than faults. Environmental stressors are danger signals, and the body is responding appropriately to the information it receives. Rather than quieting the symptoms and killing the bugs, which she sees as a militaristic view of the body, she suggests tweaking the landscape, both externally and internally, so the body no longer needs to respond. Our cells are always listening, she says. Our mitochondria, our DNA, our fascia and our nervous system are always listening for signals of safety or danger, and our thoughts are one of the primary signals, running 24/7.

Our cells run on a negative electrical charge, Dr Clinton explains, and she points to research showing that when we lose that charge we start to see pain, inflammation and immune system dysregulation. We are electric beings. She has had patients on supplements for years that helped a little, and found those supplements worked much better once the electrical capacity of the body was addressed. Pain, inflammation and fatigue are broad markers of an energetic component, and tending to the mitochondria looks like movement, natural light, being circadian aligned and tending to our thoughts and emotions. Much of it, she says, is free and accessible.

Mind over matter, Dr Clinton says, is hard when we are sick. Instead, she returned to the relationships humans have evolved with over millennia: the rising and setting of the sun, the trees, the ground beneath our feet, birdsong and our own internal joy. In her words, it is less a matter of willpower and more a matter of remembrance. She sees a kernel of disconnection at the root of so much suffering, and coherence as the conductor of health, like a symphony where every instrument finally plays the same song.

The first idea in her book is that our body is an antenna. We’ve been taught to think of it as a machine, she says, and that’s not what it is. It is always receiving signals and information from our external and internal environment. Water in the body can take on a liquid crystal structure that holds information, which is why, for Dr Clinton, hydration isn’t just drinking water. A little mineral content helps water get into the cell, and she points to research, including work by Professor Gerald Pollack and his team at the University of Washington, on energising water with sunlight, infrared, stirring, tea and some traditional Ayurvedic remedies.

A little stress can be good, Dr Clinton says, but modern life rarely stops at a little. We live in a biohack hustle culture where we are trying to maximise every single thing, and nobody’s talking about rest maxing, the pause, silence or the power of not doing. She finds it ironic that gym lighting can change our metabolism in the very place we go to change it, and that health checklists can override the intuition that says today rest might be better. Cells do not heal, she says, if they are not in a parasympathetic state or a sense of safety.

Dr Clinton left us with three shiny golden nuggets. Align with the rhythm of the sun: go outside within 30 to 45 minutes of waking, take little light breaks through the day and lower the lights at night, rather than reaching for a phone whose bright LED light tells your body it’s noon. Be conscious of your water, drinking with gratitude, adding minerals and supporting the water in your body with movement, warm baths and sauna. And work on your internal coherence through gratitude, a heart coherence or mindfulness practice, or simply a pause. Her own non-negotiable is a gratitude practice before she even opens her eyes.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube

Find Out More About Dr Catherine Clinton

Website: https://www.drcatherineclinton.com

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Latha Jay works with celebrities and politicians who, from the outside, have manifested beautiful lives. People look at them and wonder how they could possibly be miserable. A manifestation teacher, speaker and author of The 24/7 Manifestation Method, with degrees in psychology and biology and advanced training in integrative medicine, Latha understands that gap. Before this work she attempted many other paths, and regardless of the external success, none of them felt successful internally. What she does now feels like a deep calling. As a child, she described manifestation as thinking with your heart, and she still believes that is exactly what it is.

If you manifest a mansion but you are all alone in it, Latha says, it is not going to feel like fulfilment. She sees it all the time: someone hits a goal, falls in love or reaches a money target, and suddenly realises they feel empty. What she teaches is the expansion of your identity, so that your nervous system feels safe in whatever you are going after. The nervous system is there for protection. Anything unfamiliar or new, it pushes away to keep you safe, and sometimes that safety is really keeping you small.

Latha is clear that manifesting is not something you start once you are ready. It is occurring 24/7. The difference is whether you are creating consciously or from a default state, where limiting beliefs tend to run the show. You’re not good enough. You can’t have that. You’re not pretty enough. Her work is not about removing those lies but identifying them, so that when they come up again, and they will, they are quieter and you can make a different choice. She believes words create our world, so she encourages affirmations in the positive present tense: not being grateful that a partner doesn’t cheat, but being grateful for a loyal partner.

Her 24/7 Manifestation Method is simple. Choose one short affirmation and write it 24 times as soon as you wake and 24 times right before bed, for seven consecutive days. Latha explains that it taps into the hypnagogic state between wakefulness and rest, when she says the subconscious is most impressionable, and that repetition there creates new pathways in the brain. Put emotion into it, she says, because feelings are the jet fuel of manifestation. And she is honest that your manifestation might not arrive within the seven days. What shifts is your thought pattern. As for how it arrives, that is none of our business. We are not micromanaging the universe.

Latha had long wanted to be on the cover of a magazine, and for a long time she carried the belief that someone who looks like her would not be shown on one. When she moved past it and told herself she should be on that cover, it happened very quickly, along with a billboard. Now, when something on her vision board is taking a long time, she gets curious and looks for the shadow underneath. Knowing your why matters too. When people want more money, she says, it is never just about the money, and asking why again and again uncovers the emotion that fuels it.

Why do people stay stuck? Latha points to familiarity, and to the fear of stepping into something bigger. Some people stay committed to struggle because it feels safe, and she is careful to say this is not toxic positivity: horrible things happen, and people are strong enough to move through them. Growth has a cost too. Clients who make more money or lose weight often tell her their friend circle has completely changed. She has been through it herself, letting go of friends she had for 30 years who were not meant to be part of her journey to this version of who she is.

Latha left us with three shiny golden nuggets. Do an identity audit: ask yourself what version of you would naturally create the life you want, write down the qualities that version has, then choose one and practise it again and again. Before any important decision, take a 90-second nervous system pause. Breathe slowly and ask whether you are responding from the fear of who you are now or as your future self. And for one day, listen closely to your language. Replace “I hope”, “I’m trying” and “maybe someday” with “I’m becoming”, “I’m choosing” and “I’m available for”, because your words reinforce your identity, and your identity shapes your actions.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube

Find Out More About Latha Jay

Website: https://www.lathajay.com

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Have you ever apologised to furniture? Do you reread a message you sent four hours ago, checking the tone? When someone praises your work, do you find the floor for them before they can get to it? Did you feel guilty resting the last time you were unwell?

If more than two of those landed, this one is about you.

In this Moment of Awe, we explore the AstroPsychology of self-worth: why the second house is not the money house, what Carl Rogers, Jennifer Crocker, Francis Flynn and Vanessa Bohns can tell us about proving and receiving and three ways to stop answering a question that was never yours.

The second house is the house of Taurus, and it is ruled by Venus. On the surface, it looks like the money house: wealth, finance, possessions. It is not. It asks one of the most uncomfortable questions in the entire chart: what do you believe you are worth? Not financially, not professionally, not socially, but at your core.

If the first house is the door, this is the room immediately behind it, and it is the harder one.

There was a year when I was still at the kitchen bench at eleven o’clock at night, eating something over the sink, answering emails that could comfortably have waited until Tuesday. I told myself this was simply what building something looked like. It was not. It was proof of purchase.

Venus is not about what you own. It is about what you value, what you find beautiful and what you allow yourself to take in. Which is exactly why worth and possessions ended up sharing a room. Human beings have always confused what they have with what they are.

Carl Rogers called this conditions of worth. As children, we receive love that arrives with terms attached. Be quiet, be good, achieve, do not need too much, do not be difficult. And a child who cannot survive without that love does the only sensible thing available: they work out which parts of themselves are acceptable and quietly exile the rest.

So here is the distinction I want you to hold. Your values are what is genuinely important to you. Your usefulness is what you produce. Most people have not looked at the first in about twenty years, and keep an extremely detailed spreadsheet on the second.

In shadow, the second house looks like overworking, undervaluing yourself and feeling that you must prove your worth. Sit with that word, prove. You only prove something that is in doubt. Nobody wakes up and proves the sun came up. If you are still proving, at some point you agreed the question was worth asking, and nobody makes that agreement on their own. Somebody asked you first.

Jennifer Crocker at the University of Michigan identified seven domains in which people stake their sense of worth: academics, appearance, approval from others, competition, family support, virtue and God’s love. Following students across their first year at university, she found that those who had staked their worth on the external ones were more likely to develop depressive symptoms. The problem was not how much self-esteem they had. It was what they had to keep doing to hold on to it.

Proving is not a character strength. It is an unpaid invoice you inherited.

In light, the second house looks like receiving, honouring your value, creating abundance from wholeness and knowing you are enough. Look at that first word: not earning, not achieving, receiving.

Across their work, Francis Flynn and Vanessa Bohns have had participants approach more than 14,000 strangers with direct requests. On average, people underestimate the likelihood that somebody will say yes by roughly half. We are so focused on what it will cost the other person to say yes that we never consider how uncomfortable it would be for them to say no. Most of us are walking around with a wildly inaccurate estimate of how welcome we are.

For most of my life, I carried the private sense that I was too much. Too intense, too fast, too many ideas arriving at once. So I learned to package myself down. And here is what I did not expect: the thing I spent thirty years apologising for is the thing people actually come to me for.

Find the sentence. Finish this honestly: “I am okay as long as I…” Whatever fills the gap is not your worth. It is your condition. You cannot renegotiate a contract you have never actually read.

Separate your values from your usefulness. Write down five things you genuinely value, and not one of them may be something you produce, achieve or deliver. If you stall at three, that pause is not a failure of imagination. It is the sound of a life organised entirely around output.

Practise receiving. Once this week, ask somebody for something small, real and slightly inconvenient, and take it without paying for it. No favour back, no apology, no explanation. And when somebody compliments you, your entire response is thank you.

Somebody handed you this question a very long time ago, and you have been answering it ever since. You are not worth what you produce, what you hold together or how little you need from anyone. Those are your receipts. They were never your value.

The chart does not tell you what you are worth. It shows you the room where you first agreed to prove it. And you are allowed to stop answering.

The work was never to become worth it. It was to stop agreeing to the question.

Because the more human we are with each other, the more we all rise.

You can watch the video of this episode on YouTube.

If you have been having the same conversation with yourself for weeks, meet Bridget, your AI coach. She asks rather than tells, and the thinking stays yours: https://bridget.riseandthriveglobal.com/

If you are a coach, psychologist or therapist and this framework felt like a language you already speak, explore the AstroPsychology Practitioner Programme: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/astropsychology-practitioner-programme/

Or book a 20-minute clarity call, no obligation, just a conversation: https://calendly.com/catherineplano/meet-greet

Newsletter: Catherine Plano for transformation.

Instagram: @catherineplano for inspiration.

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Christine Hassler sees so many high-achieving, emotionally intelligent, spiritually focused women going from shaman to astrologer to course, trying to work out what they need to do to find love. She advises against it, because the searching itself reinforces the belief that something is wrong with you. A master coach, spiritual psychologist and best-selling author of three books, including Expectation Hangover, Christine knows the territory personally. In her early twenties, she was a successful agent in the entertainment industry, and the money, the job and the guy all arrived. She still was not happy. Then her health, her engagement, her job and her family relationships fell apart at once, and she came face to face with how little self-worth she had. It was all outsourced. She had been seeing psychiatrists and psychologists since she was 11, but the question that changed things was a new one: what is this here to teach me?

Christine believes many women have bought into a very old programme about being chosen. When partnership does not arrive, the belief, conscious or not, becomes there must be something wrong with me, and every new course or healer reinforces it. The better question, she says, is what is my partnership to myself? She finds the women who struggle most to draw in a partner have often had to become hyper-independent, whether through being hurt or parentified too early. They long for love, but a protector part steps in front of the part that wants it and says we are safer on our own. The work is not fixing something broken. It is remembering who you really are.

Catherine admitted that even when she practises love, a wall goes up. Christine offered a different image. There is no wall around the heart. There is a guard who believes it is her job to keep you from getting hurt. Christine calls discernment one of the feminine superpowers that is not talked about enough, a clear bodily yes or no that is different from intuition. Once you have done the work, that wisdom is embodied, and the guard can take a break. Override it, and you simply get a do over, the chance to learn the same lesson again. You can trust below the neck over between the ears, she says, most of the time.

At her Women’s Retreat, Christine leads a grief release and then an anger burn, in that order, because women will give themselves permission to feel sadness but rarely go for their rage. She is clear this is intentional, trauma-informed work, not reactivity and not just catharsis. She thinks something that kills women, both literally and metaphorically, is holding rage inside until it becomes resentment, depression and disease. Our anger, she says, is our power and our passion.

Asked whether we should aim to live in our hearts all the time, Christine pushed back on the pressure. When a nationwide shortage of estrogen patches in America had her calling ten pharmacies, she was not in her heart, and she did not judge herself for it. Of course she was fired up. She forgave herself and moved on with her day. The pressure she sees women put on themselves never to be triggered is, in her words, ridiculous. Brains get hijacked. What matters is having tools to come back.

Christine was engaged three times, married twice and divorced once before meeting her husband Steph at around 40. Looking back, each relationship reflected something she was learning. She is firm that inner child work is not fixing. It is giving yourself the childhood you never had and becoming your own advocate. Her advice on where to start is to dig where you are. Find your biggest expectation hangover and ask, what does this remind me of?

Christine left us with three shiny golden nuggets. When you notice yourself reacting, put a hand on your heart and try the “Of Course” method: of course I feel this way, it makes sense, it is not a problem. When you feel dysregulated, gently knock on your bones, elbows and ribs especially, while you breathe, to give your nervous system parasympathetic input. And remember you are a spiritual being having a human experience. Take the pressure off, and have compassion for your humanity.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube

Find Out More About Christine Hassler

Website: https://christinehassler.com/catherine

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Tom Cronin will tell you that thinking is very overrated, and he has 26 years on a trading floor to explain why. He is an international keynote speaker, author of six books, leadership trainer and the producer of the feature-length documentary The Portal, and he has taught meditation to everyone from six-year-olds in classrooms to senior executives at Amazon, Oracle, Qantas and Coca-Cola. None of that was the plan. He spent a decade as one of Australia’s leading bond and swap brokers, starting in the late 80s in a world he describes as very Wolf of Wall Street, and by his late 20s it had cost him chronic panic attacks, anxiety, depression, addictions, insomnia and eventually agoraphobia. He was diagnosed as having a nervous breakdown. Psychiatrists, doctors and medication followed, and none of it felt quite right.

What changed things was a style of meditation known as Vedic or Transcendental Meditation, in which a qualified teacher allocates you a mantra, a resonance you repeat silently that shifts your brain out of its busy waking frequency and moves the body from the sympathetic nervous system, where we fight or flee, into the parasympathetic, where we rest and repair. Most people assume meditation is spiritual. Tom sees it as physiological. Most of our challenges, he argues, are not psychological at all. They are stresses held in the body, what the Vedic tradition calls samskara, and deep rest is what lets the body release them.

Catherine asked the obvious question: does it get worse before it gets better? Tom reframed it. Stress releasing is not the same as stress inputting. Think of the twitch you feel falling asleep after a frantic day, he says. That is the same process, and it is not a crisis, it is a healthy expenditure of energy. On retreats, where the work goes deeper, tears and frustration do surface, but they are held in a safe space and understood as a good sign rather than a bad one.

His favourite illustration is a broken bone. No doctor, no medicine and no therapist can mend it. All the cast does is create stillness, and the body’s own intelligence does the rest. Cut your arm on a rose bush and the bandage keeps your clothes clean while your body coagulates the blood, grows scab cells and then skin cells, with no instruction from anyone. Meditation, in his view, is simply the same principle applied to the nervous system. He is careful about what he claims. He will not say meditation cures disease. What he will say is that his own biological age was measured at 37 when he was 29, that stress is one of the biggest factors in ageing, and that he stayed in the same high-pressure job for another 13 years and the number went the other way.

This is where Tom departs most sharply from conventional therapy. We do not need to regurgitate the story, he says, because the story is not happening right now. What keeps the mind replaying it is the energy of it still sitting in the body. Clear that, and the memory loses its charge. He can retell his own history on a stage, in a book or on a podcast without being triggered by it, not because he has analysed it enough, but because the stress behind it has gone.

If you have ever said you cannot meditate because your mind will not stop, Tom has an analogy for that too. A fidgety four-year-old will not sit still if you tell him to, but give him something charming to hold and he will. The mantra charms the mind. And beyond the thinking there is a state he calls Samadhi, where the mind trades the charm of thought for the bliss of being. Imagine a lifetime of cloudy days, he says. You would assume the sky is grey. Then one day the clouds part and you realise the grey was never the sky at all.

Tom left us with three shiny golden nuggets. Start the day deliberately, with movement, hydration, meditation and clear intention rather than a scroll and a double shot. End it deliberately too, shutting down technology by around nine, stretching, reading and naming five things you are grateful for. And if you have no teacher and no mantra yet, close your eyes and rest your attention on the cool air at the rim of your nostrils. Three to five minutes is enough to begin slowing everything down.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube

Find Out More About Tom Cronin

Website: http://www.tomcronin.com/ | https://entertheportal.com/

Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/

Have you ever been called the strong one so often that being tired now feels like a betrayal? Do you use a slightly different voice for your mother than you do for everyone else? Is there a version of you that only exists in the car, in the ninety seconds before you walk into a room?

If any of that landed, I was not reading your mind. I was reading a door.

In this Moment of Awe, we explore the AstroPsychology of identity, why the first house is not who you are, what Jung, Winnicott and Higgins can tell us about the mask, and three ways to begin widening the entrance.

In AstroPsychology, the first house is the point of contact. It is the version of you the world meets first, before anybody has had time to look further in. Your rising sign, your ascendant, is the shape of that entrance.

And here is the line I most want you to carry: the first house is not who you are. It is the door you come through.

Most of us confuse the two. We spend years polishing the entrance and then wonder why nobody seems to know us.

Carl Jung called this door the persona, after the mask a Roman actor held in front of his face so the audience would know which character was speaking. Notice what the mask is for. It is not deception. It is contact. It lets the play happen.

The persona is not a lie or a flaw, and the danger was never in having one. The danger is identifying with it. It is the moment you forget you are holding the mask and start to believe the mask is holding you.

Donald Winnicott went further back, into the nursery. When a child learns that their real needs are inconvenient or unwelcome, they build a compliant self to protect the true self from harm. He called it the false self, and I want to be careful with that word. The false self is not your enemy. It was competent. It worked. Somewhere along the way it stopped being a strategy and became the whole house, and the true self is still in there, waiting to see if it is safe to come out.

In 1987, Tory Higgins mapped the three selves we carry: the actual self, the ideal self we aspire to be, and the ought self we feel obliged to be. The gap between actual and ideal gives you disappointment and deflation, the quiet sense of having missed something. The gap between actual and ought gives you anxiety and guilt, the sense of having failed someone. The texture of your discomfort tells you which gap you are standing in, and once you can name the gap, you are no longer inside it.

Laid over the chart, it looks like this. The rising sign is the door. The sun is what you are here to become. The moon is what you actually need in order to feel safe. Most of the tiredness I encounter in people’s lives lives in the gap between the door and the moon.

Map the three. Write down who the world meets first, who you are here to become, and what you actually need to feel safe. Do not edit. Just look at the three lines together and notice where the contradiction sits.

Name the quality of the ache. Is it deflation, or is it anxiety? Is it disappointment, or is it guilt? That answer alone tells you which gap you are standing in, and which one to close.

Bring one exiled part through the door. Pick something that never makes it into the room and let it in once, somewhere safe. Then watch what happens.

You will not find yourself, and that is not pessimism. You cannot find a thing that was never an object. Jennifer Campbell’s research on self-concept clarity shows that people do not become well when they uncover the truth of who they are. They become well when they build a self that is clear, coherent, and stable enough to stand on.

So you are not the mask, and you are not hiding behind it either. You are the one who chose it, in a room where it was the most sensible thing to wear. The first house is not a verdict on who you are. It is a description of the door, and the door can be widened.

The work was never to find yourself. It was to widen the entrance.

Because the more human we are with each other, the more we all rise.

You can watch the video of this episode on YouTube.

If you have been having the same conversation with yourself for weeks, meet Bridget, your AI coach. She asks rather than tells, and the thinking stays yours: https://bridget.riseandthriveglobal.com/

If you are a coach, psychologist or therapist and this framework felt like a language you already speak, explore the AstroPsychology Practitioner Programme: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/astropsychology-practitioner-programme/

Or book a 20-minute clarity call, no obligation, just a conversation: https://calendly.com/catherineplano/meet-greet

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