The Liberated Life - When Did You Last Feel Free?

There is a version of you that got very good at living inside the rules. The career, the calendar, the careful performance of having it together. And somewhere underneath all of that, something else entirely has been waiting. In this episode, Lucy sits down with Camille Akass, a woman who went from burnout coach navigating the corporate world to dancing twelve hours a day at festivals and crying on the floor on the way home, and found that both were part of the same thing. You will understand why creativity is a life force and why so many high-achieving women have spent years treating it like a threat. You will hear about desire as a navigation system, what it actually means to live from turn-on, and why the gray flat-line of control and safety is its own kind of suffering. And you will leave with something you probably needed permission to hear. That you are allowed to do things purely because they feel good. That play is serious work. That the weird, feral, slightly chaotic version of you is the one who knows the way. This is one of those conversations that is hard to describe and easy to feel. Find out more at www.lucymaeve.com.

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You know the version of you that finds magic in small things, that feels possibility rather than dread, that wakes up and actually wants to be alive in her life. And you know the other one. The one that turns up when you are depleted, when you have been pushing too long without a real break, when the normal human challenges that you usually carry with ease start to feel enormous. The one that whispers you're going to be alone forever, that nothing is going to work, that everyone would be fine without you. In this episode, you will find out why that voice gets so loud sometimes, and why it has almost nothing to do with what is actually happening in your life. You will understand the difference between being in a genuine season of difficulty and feeding a pattern that is running on empty, and why that distinction matters enormously for what you actually need to do next. And you will leave with a specific, practical way to interrupt the spiral before it takes up permanent residence in your head. This is a rare unplanned episode, just Lucy, her coffee, and the day before a flight to Uganda, talking honestly about the last few weeks. Those are often the best ones. Find out more at www.lucymaeve.com.

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There is a version of self-development that takes you further from yourself with every step. More frameworks. More identities to perform. More evidence that the answer is somewhere out there, in the next programme, the next coach, the next approach. And there is another kind entirely. The kind that brings you back. In this episode, Lucy joins Louise on the Your Way podcast for a conversation about what real healing actually requires, and why so much of the coaching industry is quietly doing the opposite. You will understand why getting the result you said you wanted, the promotion, the relationship, the business, can still leave the inner ache completely untouched. You will hear why the most important thing in any healing container is not the framework being used, but the quality of presence of the person holding it, and what that actually takes to develop. And you will leave with a completely different lens for evaluating the support you choose and what you genuinely need from it. This is also an honest conversation about retreat, about what it means to be witnessed by other women, about why that work is some of the most quietly radical a woman can do. And about what it looks like when healing is not a product but a return. Find out more at www.lucymaeve.com.

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At some point, probably more than once, you have asked yourself what you actually want from your life. And if you are honest, the answer has been some version of I don't really know. Not because you are not intelligent enough to figure it out. Not because you haven't tried. But because for most of your life, you have been so well trained in reading what everyone else wants that your own signal has gone very quiet. In this episode, you will find out why not knowing what you want is not a character flaw, it is the entirely predictable result of years of conditioning. You will understand the real reason so many high-achieving women can crush a work brief, read a room in seconds, and anticipate everyone else's needs, and yet draw a blank when someone asks what they actually want for themselves. You will hear about the two core human needs that pull against each other, and how prioritising one for long enough will eventually drown out the other completely. And you will leave with a way into that question that doesn't require you to have the answer, just the curiosity to start looking. This is the episode for the woman who has buried this question for long enough. Find out more at www.lucymaeve.com.

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You have been to the weddings. All of them. You have stood in the wings of what feels like everyone else's life, smiling genuinely and also, privately, wondering when yours actually starts. You have told yourself you are fine with being single, and sometimes that has been true. You have also told yourself that the reason you are single must be something fundamentally wrong with you, and that has probably not been true either. In this episode, you will find out how to hold both of those things at once without collapsing into shame or false positivity. You will hear an honest conversation about the identities we build around being single, how those identities can quietly block the very thing we say we want, and why desire and availability are not the same thing. You will also hear about what happens after the fairy tale arrives, the part nobody warns you about, the grief of leaving your single self behind, the whiplash of suddenly sharing your life, the followers lost the day the bump was announced. And you will leave with something more useful than a framework. A sense of being seen in the place you actually are. Lucy is joined by Emma Healey, life coach, founder of The Turning Community, and someone who has lived every chapter of this conversation from the inside. Find out more at www.lucymaeve.com.

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You are not broken. You are not ungrateful. But there is a good chance that somewhere along the way, in the pursuit of the next level, the next salary, the next thing to get right, you quietly lost access to delight. Not in a dramatic way. Just a slow, almost imperceptible compression of your experience of life until you can stand somewhere genuinely beautiful and feel almost nothing. In this episode, Lucy explores why this happens so specifically to high achievers, what it actually means to live from the shadow of seriousness, and why the answer is not a bigger holiday or a more radical life change. You will hear about a client session that cracked something open, about a poem that will stop you in your tracks, and about the Gene Keys concept that describes seriousness as the most widespread disease on the planet. You will hear what it looks like when someone reconnects with their own sense of presence through a painting on a wall and a memory of drawing on a beach in Greece with a stranger. And you will be reminded that the path from numbness to aliveness is not paved with grand gestures. It is paved with breakfast. With the weight of a mug in your hand. With the moment you actually taste something instead of moving straight on to the next thing. This episode is an invitation back to your own life. Find out more at www.lucymaeve.com.

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You might have started small. A question you weren't ready to ask a friend. Something you needed to process at 11pm when calling someone felt like too much. A thought you were a little embarrassed about and needed to say somewhere without consequence. It felt fine. Maybe even helpful. But there is something happening underneath that that is worth paying attention to before it quietly costs you more than you realise. In this episode, Lucy talks about why so many of us have started turning to AI for emotional support, why it feels safer than turning to the people in our lives, and what we are actually losing in making that swap. This is not an episode about AI being bad or about the man on Esther Perel's podcast who fell in love with a chatbot, though that is in here too. It is an episode about what real intimacy actually requires and why the thing that makes AI feel so relieving, the total absence of risk, is precisely the thing that makes it useless for the kind of healing that will actually change your life. You will hear why real connection is built not in the absence of fear but in the presence of it. Why the moment you say the scary thing to a real person and are not rejected is the moment something genuinely shifts. And why for high-achieving women in particular, having a place to quietly offload the parts of yourself you are not performing, without ever having to let a real person see them, might be keeping you more stuck and more lonely than you know. Find out more at www.lucymaeve.com.

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You have done everything right. The impressive job, the serious career, the identity built around being the person who gets things done. And somewhere along the way, the parts of you that were creative, curious, maybe even a little bit magic, got quietly filed away under things other people get to do. In this episode, you'll get to hear from someone who was global head of strategy at an advertising agency, deeply embedded in the grind, and who has spent the last five years methodically, sometimes terrifyingly, stepping off what she calls the game of life path. Brand strategist, coach, hiking nonprofit founder, podcaster and self-described baby witch Alaina Crystal talks with Lucy about what it actually costs to build your entire identity around productivity, what opens up when you stop, and why the creative wellspring so many high-achieving women have buried doesn't disappear, it just waits. You'll hear about the relationship between spirituality and creativity, and why feeding your soul work first tends to make everything else better. You'll hear an honest conversation about what it means to want to work less hard, why that is one of the most radical and difficult things a woman in a big career can allow herself to say, and what has to shift inside you before it becomes possible to mean it. And at the end of the episode, Alaina pulls tarot for Lucy live on the podcast, which is exactly as electric as it sounds. Find out more at www.lucymaeve.com.

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You know how to hold it together in a room full of strangers. You know how to come across well, how to say the right things, how to make sure people see the version of you that has it sorted. You've probably been doing it so long you don't even notice it anymore. It just feels like personality. In this episode, you'll hear what it actually costs to live like that, and what becomes possible the moment you stop. Lucy shares the story of arriving at a retreat in Italy convinced she was a loser for going alone, spending the first few days performing impressiveness at people she'd never met before, and then something unexpected happening anyway. Slowly, without a five-step plan or a breakthrough moment, the armor started to come off. And in its place came something she hadn't felt in years: the experience of being genuinely seen. Not the polished version. The actual version. This episode explores what it means to let a room of people meet you as you actually are, why that is so terrifying for high-achieving women in particular, and why it tends to unlock the clarity that no amount of journaling or strategizing has been able to produce. You'll hear why a good retreat doesn't give you answers, and what it does instead. And you'll understand why the decisions that had felt impossible for years can suddenly feel completely obvious once you've had enough ground under your feet to trust what you already know. If you've been wondering whether something like this is for you, or whether you're the kind of person who does this sort of thing, this episode is probably the most honest answer you'll get. Find out more at www.lucymaeve.com.

In this week’s episode of The Liberated Life, we explore the quiet fantasy so many of us carry that if we could just change the right external thing, life would finally feel better - a different job, a different partner, a different city, a different version of ourselves.

This episode unpacks why changing the outside rarely creates the fulfilment we hope it will, and why the same sense of “meh” can follow us even when life looks objectively good. We explore emotional numbness, the way high-achieving women often learn to override their feelings in order to succeed, and how that disconnection from the body slowly dulls not only the difficult emotions but also our capacity for joy, awe and aliveness.

Through personal stories and reflections, this conversation looks at the difference between chasing extraordinary experiences and learning to feel deeply present in ordinary moments, and why the real shift comes from rebuilding the internal ecosystem that allows life to land again. If you’ve ever looked at your life and quietly wondered why something still feels a little flat despite everything being “good”, this is an invitation to reconnect with your own sense of aliveness rather than continuing to chase it outside yourself.