Unbehaved

Every once in a while you meet someone who is so unapologetically themselves that just being near them gives you permission to be your full self as well. Kirsten Ludwig is that person.
Co-founder of the brand agency In Good Co, veteran of Ralph Lauren, American Eagle, Anthropologie, Fred Siegel, and Stella & Dot, and co-creator of the 17,000-subscriber Substack Good Thinking — Kirsten's career reads like a masterclass. But that's not why Meghan invited her on the show.
She invited her because Kirsten is the kind of woman who, at a fancy CEO summit years ago, stood up and mama-beared Meghan (then five weeks pregnant and dying inside) out of a conversation after a man wouldn't stop talking. That story opens the episode — and it's the perfect setup for everything that follows.
This one is about the courage to stop shrinking. Kirsten's signature framework — lean into the cringe — is the idea that the uncomfortable, courageous move almost always pays off tenfold what you were avoiding. She and Meghan get into the two-week maternity leave she still carries shame about, the friendship-based business partnership with her co-founder Chris, the "one pizza can feed" team philosophy at In Good Co, and the permission slip that all of us need to hear. 
Quick heads up: Kirsten and Meghan 100% set a new Unbehaved record for cursing in this one. If that's your love language, buckle in. If it's not your vibe, no hard feelings — this one might not be your jam.
WHAT WE COVER
The CEO-summit cold-open story — Meghan five weeks pregnant, a man accusing her of looking bored, and Kirsten standing up to mama bear her out of the situation
Lean into the cringe — Kirsten's signature framework: the uncomfortable, courageous move almost always pays off tenfold what you were avoiding
Why "you can have it all and balance it all" is complete BS — and how to make the trade-off intentional instead
Kirsten's arc from fashion in-house (Ralph Lauren, American Eagle, Anthro, Fred Siegel) → Stella & Dot → building an experiential agency from 30 to 230 people → founding In Good Co
The Stella & Dot contrast: coming from a boys-club culture where meetings ran until 7 or 8 PM (because no one wanted to go home) into a company run by "badass women" who got the work done by 5:30 because they had families waiting
The two-week maternity leave shame — Kirsten as chief creative officer taking only two weeks with her daughter, and why the regret isn't about the bond but about the example she set for everyone watching
How In Good Co became a B Corp before Kirsten even knew what a B Corp was
"One pizza can feed" — In Good Co's team-size philosophy
The COVID pivot to a curated contractor model — and why it makes the work better
The business partnership with Chris — friendship-based first, "we do the work in it," and the "beautiful soup" of talking about everything without limits
How Good Thinking (the 17K-subscriber Substack) became a media platform without ever intending to
Working with brands like Sex with Emily — and why the real unlock is shame → okay → empowering
The Fordham "light too bright" moment — the student who told Meghan she was always afraid her light was too bright
Kirsten on turning 50 and giving zero fucks — and why that's actually about leaning into your truth, not not caring
The permission slip: "Ask for forgiveness, not permission. Don't even think about permission. Do the thing that lights you up."
About the Guest
Kirsten Ludwig is the co-founder of In Good Co, a B Corp brand agency, and the co-creator of Good Thinking, a 17K-subscriber Substack and podcast on brand, trends, and culture. A veteran of Ralph Lauren, American Eagle, Anthropologie, Fred Siegel, and Stella & Dot, she now works with brands like Sex with Emily on the conversations most people are too afraid to have.
PULL QUOTES
"The more that I lean into what I call the cringe — the uncomfortable moments — that is where I find the beauty. And on the other side is tenfold whatever I've experienced prior." — Kirsten Ludwig
"This idea that you can have it all and balance all the things is complete bullshit. Somebody's always gonna lose. So at least make that decision intentional." — Kirsten Ludwig
"The shame doesn't come from that I don't feel bonded with my daughter. The shame comes from being that example. The fact that I, as chief creative officer of this agency, was an example to all of these women and men to say, this is okay." — Kirsten Ludwig on taking two weeks of maternity leave
"You didn't have to be an asshole to make money. You could be a good fucking human and also make money. Two things can be true." — Kirsten Ludwig
"We always wanted to be the size of team that one pizza can feed." — Kirsten Ludwig, on In Good Co's team philosophy
"We do the work in the relationship. Something comes up, we don't let it fester. We bring it up. It's a beautiful soup of all the parts and pieces, and there isn't anything that's off limits." — Kirsten Ludwig on her partnership with co-founder Chris
"Let's remove the shame — and not only remove it and make it okay, but let's make it empowering. And how do we do that, and how do you create inspiration within all that? Those are the conversations. That's the unlock." — Kirsten Ludwig
"I just wanna have a conversation and talk heart to heart. I don't wanna have this bullshit exterior. It's gonna be one of those conversations that you can feel something — versus like, 'well, I've accomplished this and I've done this.' Great, but tell me about you." — Kirsten Ludwig
"I want people to live their best life. Have the most fun, have the most sense of freedom, do all the things. Whatever is your truth. And to show people — like, shine fucking bright, babe." — Kirsten Ludwig
"Ask for forgiveness, not permission. That's it. Don't even think about permission. Do the thing that lights you up. And if someone calls you on it, deal with it then." — Kirsten Ludwig's permission slip
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Cold open: "I want people to live their best life... shine f*cking bright, babe."
00:29 — Meghan's intro: who Kirsten is, why she invited her on, and a language heads-up
02:21 — The CEO-summit story: five weeks pregnant, a man droning on, and Kirsten's mama-bear rescue
03:40 — Lean into the cringe — Kirsten's signature framework
04:55 — Motherhood, intentionality, and why "you can have it all" is bullshit
06:01 — What keeps Kirsten clear on her intention: the ongoing self-evolution work
07:20 — The stories Kirsten has had to unlearn
07:38 — The Stella & Dot vs. boys-club contrast — and the two-week maternity leave shame
10:48 — How In Good Co started (and how her prior agency imploded after a successful sale)
12:41 — Finding the courage to leave the C-suite treadmill
16:25 — Reimagining success around autonomy and freedom
19:05 — Building the company: B Corp from inception, the "one pizza can feed" team, the COVID pivot
23:59 — The business partnership with Chris — friendship first, "we do the work in it"
26:43 — Fashion, body image, and refusing to shame yourself for wanting to look and feel your best
29:41 — Working with Sex with Emily and other counterculture brands: from shame → okay → empowering
32:22 — Leaning into the cringe + naming the shame both require vulnerability
34:18 — The Fordham "light too bright" moment
36:36 — The likability conversation: hitting 50 and giving zero fucks
38:19 — What Kirsten wishes we'd talked about: the personal and work journey are one
40:15 — Meghan's four-year-old daughter, sensitivity as a superpower, and reparenting yourself
41:56 — The permission slip: ask for forgiveness, not permission
42:28 — Where to find Kirsten (Substack, LinkedIn)
42:56 — Meghan's four Unbehaved Lessons of the Day
RESOURCES MENTIONED
People + companies referenced:
Kirsten Ludwig — co-founder of In Good Co, a B Corp brand agency
Stella & Dot — the "badass women" company that hired Kirsten at five months pregnant and gave her three months of maternity leave
Sex with Emily / Emily Morse — one of the brands Kirsten works with; a masterclass in shame → empowerment
B Corp — the certification In Good Co has held since inception
CONNECT WITH KIRSTEN
In Good Co
Substack: Good Thinking — 17,000+ subscribers on brand, trends, and culture
Podcast: Good Thinking (via the Substack)
LinkedIn: Kirsten Ludwig
CONNECT WITH MEGHAN & UNBEHAVED
Book: This Isn't Working — available wherever you buy books
Website: meghanfrenchdunbar.com
Substack: subscribe for weekly insights + tools for building a better relationship with work
Podcast: Unbehaved — new episodes weekly wherever you get podcasts
FULL TRANSCRIPT
[Editor's note: Lightly cleaned for readability. Preserves original voice + delivery.]
 
Kirsten Ludwig (00:00): I want people to live their best life. Have the most fun, have the most sense of freedom, do all the things. Whatever is your truth. Everybody's truth is different. The life I lead is too crazy or whatever for a lot of people — they don't want to lead that life. Cool. But whatever their version is, I want to give people permission or inspiration or whatever it might be to lead their best version of that. And I think that's exactly what you do. And to show people — like, shine fucking bright, babe.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (00:29): Hello, lovely human. My name is Meghan French Dunbar, and welcome to Unbehaved. You just heard from the force of nature that is Kirsten Ludwig. Kirsten's the co-founder of In Good Co — a B Corp certified brand agency — and her professional background is pretty much a laundry list of the who's who in the fashion world: Ralph Lauren, Anthropologie, Stella & Dot, and many more.
 
But her impressive career isn't why I invited her on the show today. I wanted to talk to Kirsten because she's someone I've always looked up to. She and I met a number of years ago through the B Corp and Conscious Capitalism communities, and we shared a mutual passion for using business as a force for good.
 
And I don't know if you've ever come across someone like this — but every time I saw Kirsten, she was just so unapologetically herself. She said what she wanted to say. She wore what she wanted to wear. She stood up for the things she believed in. And it was so inspiring — especially back then, when I was a young female founder who thought I had to shrink myself or mold myself into something I wasn't in order to succeed.
 
So that's what we're gonna talk about today: how to nurture your individual light so it shines at its very brightest, instead of constantly trying to dim yourself for others. How leaning into the cringe — the uncomfortable, courageous moves — often pay off ten times bigger than whatever you were avoiding. The single biggest regret Kirsten has from her career. And what it looks like to stop putting up with the corporate BS and build the company that you'd want to work for instead.
 
And just a quick heads up — Kirsten and I 100% set a new Unbehaved record for cursing in this particular episode. So if that's your love language, buckle in. If it's not your vibe, no hard feelings. This one just might not be your jam.
 
Let's get into it.
Meghan French Dunbar (02:21): So I'm going to start this with a story — which is actually the last time you and I saw each other. It was a moment of unbehaving. We were sitting at a super fancy schmancy CEO summit with all these mostly men. And you and I were sitting at a picnic table outside, and we were listening to a man talk to us. And he stopped mid-conversation, looked at me, and said something like, "I can tell by your face that I'm just totally boring you."
 
And I was like, "I'm sorry, I'm five weeks pregnant and I feel like I'm about to die."
 
And you just mama-beared. You stood up and you evacuated me out of the situation. You were like, "You need to go to bed. What are you doing?"
 
What was happening for me was — I was 34 at the time, and I was still really holding on to the people-pleasing. I'm at this conference. Even though I literally feel like I'm about to throw up, I need to listen to this man and try to pretend I'm engaged. And you were just like, "Fuck no. We are not doing that. We're not pretending." And you just got me out of there.
 
Kirsten Ludwig: Love it.
 
Meghan French Dunbar: This has been how I've always experienced you — as someone who is just a bit courageous in the ability to do things differently and to not care how it's making other people uncomfortable or the societal scripts. Where does this come from?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (03:40): Well, first of all, thank you. That compliment means the world to me. Honestly, Meghan, that is everything I aspire and hope to be. The honest answer is — I don't know. But what I do know is that was six or seven years ago, right? I was going through a pivotal time in my life then — a full awakening, divorce, all the things.
 
And I think one thing I know absolutely certain is that the more I lean into what I call the cringe — the uncomfortable moments — that is where I find the beauty. And on the other side is tenfold whatever I've experienced prior. When I really lean into the thing that is courageous, the thing that is uncomfortable — on the other side of that, there are great, great rewards.
 
And so for sure, I do that more and more. Not just to be an asshole or do things that make people uncomfortable — though that has its own — but really about what do we all need in this moment, listening more to our truth, and empowering myself and others to identify that and speak it.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (04:55): Do you have good examples of that? Good stories?
 
Kirsten Ludwig: I think motherhood, right? My kids are now 11 and 14. And motherhood kind of forces us — or that's when we come to realize — what decision are you making? Because it's very, very clear. And this idea that you can have it all and do all the things and balance all the things is complete bullshit. Somebody's always gonna lose. So at least make that decision intentional.
 
Sometimes it's a work trip. Sometimes it's, "Hey guys, I'm going and doing this — you're with your dad at this time and here's what's gonna happen." But there is then growth for them, and independence, and all the things on that end. And then I'll go and do work. And sometimes it's telling my business partner, "Hey, this has come up with my kids. Can you cover for me? I've got to focus on this." For me, it's just really about being intentional around that decision-making.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (06:01): Is there anything that helps you remain clear on what your intention is?
 
Kirsten Ludwig: I think self-evolution. I'm somebody who has realized — initially it was just self-help books, and then it became a lot of other things: plant medicine, therapy, divorce, all of it — that for me, becoming a better version of myself tomorrow than today is a great objective and goal. It's not to say I'm not comfortable with who I am today. It's just to say that's exciting to me — interesting to see and explore what that growth looks like.
 
My values are very much around freedom, empowerment, aspiration, being kind. Those things come from establishing work, establishing families, establishing my independence, establishing myself as a woman — all the parts and pieces have happened probably fairly organically through my life path. But not without fight, and not without intention.
 
The older I get, the more I really understand that leaning into the cringe, leaning into the discomfort, just greatly expands who I am, what I can do, how confident I feel, how empowered I am, and the magic I can do in the world.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (07:20): The evolution you talk about of getting older and expanding — are there certain stories or beliefs you used to have that you had to release or unlearn in the process?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (07:38): Oh man, so many, so many. I just talked to somebody this week who's pregnant and reached out to a group I'm in for advice. And I said, "Listen, let's chat. I'm always happy to give my experience." I feel like I've done it in both really great ways and really shitty ways, right?
 
One of the biggest shames that comes up for me work-wise is — with my son, I worked with this amazing company called Stella & Dot. They hired me at five months pregnant. I had three months maternity leave and it was pro-moms.
 
That was actually an interesting experience because I'd come from what was more of a boys' club — where you'd have meetings till like 7 and 8 at night. It was just a bunch of men sitting around and you'd realize, well, they probably didn't want to go home to their wives.
 
And then in contrast, I came to Stella & Dot, and it was a company really run by badass women. And these women were like, "We gotta get this shit done. We gotta get out by 5, 5:30, because we've got families to go home to." The contrast of that was like, wow. Fuck. That was a great learning.
 
Then I go, okay — what version do I wanna lean into when I create my company? And that to me was very clear. So that's kind of an example of how that evolution has happened.
 
So I had this great three months of proper maternity with my son. And then with my daughter, I was building up an agency as the chief creative officer — and I took two weeks.
 
And here's the thing — the shame doesn't come from that I don't feel bonded with my daughter. We're very, very close. There was nothing lost in that experience — she was tethered to me, I was flying around and doing meetings and she was tethered to me. But the shame, the negative experience, comes from being that example.
 
The fact that I, as chief creative officer of this agency, was an example to all of these women and men to say — this is okay. That's really where the shame is. That was a lesson learned. So many of my lessons — I think many people's are what not to do. Especially in career. And so I've learned it. And very much I tell that story so people understand — it's not something I would do again, but I learned from doing the shitty version of it.
 
The negativity was really telling people that that was okay, even though on the inside I was fighting for internal change within the company. People didn't necessarily know or see. But that didn't matter. What mattered was what I was representing.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (10:33): Was the pressure to only take two weeks coming mainly from yourself or from the group you were working with?
 
Kirsten Ludwig: Yeah — the group.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (10:45): [laughing] I'm gonna set my rage aside. So — your own agency. I wanna hear the story. This is a story I've actually never heard from you. How did In Good Co start? Tell us the journey.
 
Kirsten Ludwig (10:57): Sure. So my background's been mainly on the fashion and retail side. I worked in-house at Ralph Lauren, American Eagle Outfitters, Anthro, Fred Siegel — then moved to Stella & Dot, and then moved to the agency side.
 
That was my first foray into the agency world. I built up an experiential agency. We went through hyper-growth — in under three years, we started at about 30 people and when I left, we were 230. We went from one office to four, including London through an acquisition. Hyper, hyper growth.
 
My first foray into the agency world — it can be quite intense. I learned a lot of lessons, many of them good, many of them bad. And I came out of that leaning into my idealism and my optimism and saying, I only want to do it if I can do it this way. I want the culture to be the most important thing.
 
I wanted to give people the space, the creativity, and the inspiration to do their best work. That doesn't look like working in a cubicle. That looks like working in an office like The Wing when it was around, or Soho House. It looks like giving people not an hour to say "be creative and do this project," but giving people the space to be like, "Oh, you need to go to a park today to get inspired for this project? Great, go do that."
 
So it was really built around: what does the culture look like that I want to be working in, that the team wants to be working in, and how do we create that? Because knowing that's going to lead to the best work. That's the opposite of a business plan. If you do the thing where the creatives, the team, the strategists are in a space to create the best work — the clients, the money, all of that will come.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (12:41): So a lot of the women I talk to who are on the corporate treadmill have gotten to certain levels in the executive C-suite. They can say things like, "We've got four offices in London," all the fancy things. And there's a sense of self-worth tied up in that role — how large the entity is, how established they are. So they just stay there, even though there are so many things they wish they could change.
 
How did you find the courage to just not stay in the easy, comfortable space of the big agency — and set out on your own, and not just say you wanted to do it differently, but actually do it?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (13:24): Well — I don't know if I set off on my own. It was a bit by force. That relationship ended quite dramatically. We had positioned and sold the company — my now business partner at In Good Co and my right-hand — we'd led that process. And then it all imploded for me after we properly and successfully positioned and sold. That's another story.
 
Like anything in my life — maybe it's come about in extremes. It just becomes very, very obvious. That was the beginning of an awakening for me: what is happening? Is this the life you want? What do you want to be doing?
 
I came out of that and said, okay, what do I want to do? I took a minute — literally about a minute — and moved out of New York. We had been ready to go back to LA, where my family was, all my kids' dad's family was, ready to go back to California lifestyle.
 
Thought about what I wanted to do. Do I go back to an agency? Do I go back on the brand side? One thing I realized was — I love fashion because of the innovation behind it. At that time, innovation was really behind social. What Instagram was doing, what Facebook was doing. This was 12 years ago. So I went and started interviewing with those guys, and that kind of felt like meh.
 
Then it was like, well, do I start my own thing? So much of what I love doing is having a team, inspiring the team — but also being smart enough to get the fuck out of their way.
 
I started up, and very shortly thereafter connected with who my right-hand was at the agency — one of the smartest, coolest, most intentional people I've ever met. Our brains think very, very similarly. We've always had a shorthand.
 
She and I created In Good Co. with this very optimistic, we only want to do it if we can do it this way mentality. I think it's who I am in my soul. The things I've gone through have chipped away at the armor and led me more toward my truth — really leaning into optimism, doing the right thing, being empowered. Knowing there is a better path — and maybe not choosing this path or that path, but finding my own and forging my own. Everything I go through, from career to divorce to whatever — helped me see that.
 
The path isn't already there. But I can instinctually lead it. And then other people are going to come with me on my path. Rad, let's do this.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (16:25): So one thing you touched on is something that's been evolving for me over the last few years: reimagining my idea of success. One of the central pillars for me is autonomy. I get to choose how I work, who I work with, what I'm working on, when I'm working, how I feel while I'm working. I'm a solopreneur. I don't even have a team at this point. And yes, there's the financial stability part, which sometimes is more stressful. But the trade-off of extreme autonomy — to live in alignment with my values, do the things I want to do, say no to people I don't want to work with — completely changed my life. I'm hearing that in your story too. How has your definition of success changed?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (17:09): It's a great point. And it goes back to your question around the title, right? For me — I think it's age, but who knows, maybe slash experience. The time when I finally had the title, whether it was creative director, chief creative officer, whatever — it didn't matter anymore. Maybe it was because I had it, or maybe it was age or experience — but it just stopped mattering.
 
Similarly with success. Sure, there's a financial component. I transparently lean into that. Part of what I wanted to do with In Good Co is show that you didn't have to be an asshole to make money. And I know you have that with Conscious Magazine — you have the exact same — which is probably why we identified and connected so early on. You can be a good fucking human, but also make money. Two things can be true.
 
So success does have a financial component. But it's also — I travel whenever I want. My business partner is one of my best friends. I'm able to do and live in a way that leans into everything I want to do and be. There's not this sectioning of, "Oh shit, I got the Sunday scaries because I've got to go into the office." It's, "Oh great, I get to do this."
 
Autonomy, freedom, choosing my own hours. My calendar is a crazy person's calendar. I have business partners in Europe, so I'll work in the morning, then go for a workout, then come back and do some work, then depending on if I have my kids or not I'll be with them or go for another workout. It's a very me calendar of what I want to be doing with my time. Then of course however I show up, I'm a better version of myself because I really want to be there for whatever I'm doing.
 
For me, autonomy and freedom is at the top of what success looks like. Because it's time. What else is there really?
 
Meghan French Dunbar (19:05): I'm curious — the ways you wanted to build the company differently, what does it actually look like? And what are the ways you're running things that you're hoping other business owners could start paying attention to?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (19:22): So we are a B Corp, and we've been a B Corp since inception. Like anything I do, it was never really a business development ploy — not to say that's good or bad, I'm just not great at that. It's really about what do I think is the right thing to do, and what do I want to do?
 
We'd actually set up our ethos before we even found out what a B Corp was. My mom gave me an article — the CEO of Patagonia was on the cover of Fortune. She was like, "Look at this thing." I was like, B Corp, what's a B Corp? Found all about it. And then just to find that there was literally a certification that matched what I wanted to be — felt good and aligned.
 
How we work today is very different than how we were before. We had a mix of a curated team and an in-house team. Then in COVID, we played the whole dance of — do we get the loan? Do we not get the loan? — and that coincided with ultimately having to let go. We had a pretty small team and we never wanted to be large. We always wanted to be the size of team that one pizza can feed — that was our philosophy.
 
[Meghan laughs]
 
We had no interest in being a ginormous agency. We'd experienced that and determined it was not for us. So we played that dance through COVID, which was rough. It was quite a blow for me. And a blow for the team, because we'd built so much around culture. That was the inception and the belief.
 
Ego-wise — how I defined myself as, look, I've been able to be successful, create this company, have this team of people that's inspired, excited — part of our Monday call was a personal check-in of "how the fuck are you?" Because asking that question and really listening determines how you're going to show up at work, how I can support you, how you can support me. "All right, let's talk about that project that's due in an hour." — "Fuck that. Let's talk about how you are and who you are, and how you can show up, and how I can support that." It was built into everything.
 
So letting go of that, letting go of people — was really, really hard. That was a terrible moment. But like anything in my life — when you lean into the discomfort, on the other side of it, beautiful things happen. The team has gone on to do amazing things on their own and with other companies.
 
We have a model now that's a consultant base. These are people we've worked with for years. As I'm sure you know — the best people are not in-house anymore. They're all independent contractors. And now we get to do these great projects where we get to reach out individually and say, "Hey Diane, we have this rad pet company we're working on. You're in love with dogs and your dog has a great story. Do you want to come help us do copy and strategy?" And then they get to raise their hand and say, "Yeah, I want to work on that particular project" — versus, "Hey Joe, you're sitting around, can you jump on this Nike project that came in?" It feels much different — much more intentional, much more inspired.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (22:32): And it also gives people flexibility to say yes to the things they actually want to work on — or tone down the amount of work they're doing if they need caregiving or other things.
 
Kirsten Ludwig: Totally, totally. And it makes the work better because they're excited about what they're signing up for. That makes all the difference in the world.
 
And then about two years ago, my business partner Chris started writing a Substack. She was always reading everything trends-based, and we'd be sharing this with a particular client, and she'd be Slacking or texting me about it. She was always in the know. She finally was like, "I'm consuming too much." After a breakthrough with her therapist, she was told she had to figure out a medium to do this. So she created a newsletter on Substack — because she knew two years ago that was where things were moving.
 
That's become Good Thinking, which is really a media platform for us now. Certainly didn't start that way, but it's a Substack now with about 17,000 subscribers. It's around brand and trends and culture. Then we have a podcast off of that. We do talks. Happy hours. Dinners. We're hosting a CMO dinner at Cannes coming up. When we lean into where the flow is, and where the fun is, and what's really working — that's where the magic happens.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (23:59): With Chris — co-founder relationships are real tough. They're often one of the primary reasons companies go under. How have you built such a solid relationship with Chris? What have you done right? And what's one thing you did wrong?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (24:17): Great question. We talk about our partnership a lot, because it's one of the things people should just talk about more. The good and the bad, for sure.
 
But I've been really lucky. We've been really lucky in this. And I think, quite honestly — because it's friendship-based first. We met through work. She was the first person I hired at the agency. She was my right-hand. We instantly created a shorthand.
 
Quickly thereafter, her and her then-boyfriend, now-husband, were around in Brooklyn. We ran into each other, came and joined us — we just got drunk one day at a Mexican bar, and the rest is history.
 
That friendship base is everything. She has been through all of the things with me. She's literally one of my absolute best friends. I confide in her all the time. She's the person I probably talk to the most. She's my work wife.
 
And I think the most recent thing I've identified — we do the work in it. We have this great connection. There are lots of advantages in having a business partner — it scales it, it allows you to bounce ideas off of somebody. I don't know if we'd still be here if it was just one of us. Being an entrepreneur is rough. There's great parts, but there's also really challenging parts. So it's nice to have somebody you trust so much, who has your back in those moments.
 
But — we do the work in the relationship. Something comes up, we don't let it fester. We bring it up. "Hey, on our last trip, something was up for you, something was going on — let's talk about that." We're both people who want to talk about it and get it out. Sometimes it's like, "Oh shit — you felt that from me? I didn't realize I was doing that." That helps me to think about it for two days.
 
We're constantly like an ADD mess of talking about all the work things, all the personal things, all the issues coming up with kids or whatever it might be personally. It's a beautiful soup of all those parts and pieces, and there isn't anything that's off limits.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (26:43): What a gift. I want to go back to one thing — fashion. You mentioned the innovation that's inherent in that industry. How did it shape the way you think about your body image? The things fashion has influenced with how women tell ourselves certain stories?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (27:02): This is my perspective, and this is just how my brain is built — which leans toward more optimism. It's not something I try to be. It's just what comes into my head.
 
I'm a huge believer that fashion is creative expression. I dress based on my mood — so who knows how it's gonna show up. The more we lean into whatever we're trying to express creatively — through writing, through arts, through whatever — I think fashion for me is a huge part of that.
 
The challenges I've had in the fashion industry — I don't necessarily think they're particular to fashion — but they've been more about "this has been a boys' club" or "this is the way we've always done things, so this is the way we should always do things." And I've always been like, huh, that doesn't feel right to me. Maybe we should look at that.
 
I've been fortunate — anytime I've been in a corporate environment, I've had more of an entrepreneurial position. I've had an agency as my team, or something that gave me outside perspective. So I've been able to push and be in more forward-thinking positions. In Anthro, I was brought in to make the brand cooler, give it more of an edge. So I'd try to push that through.
 
To me, it's just — what is the best version of yourself? Fashion can be part of helping you tell that story. It can lead to confidence, self-expression, so many parts and pieces. The more I lean into that — and not into huh, what should I wear to the corporate office is a success — I mean, I'm 52, so I'm in it. And it's really leaning into: yeah, of course I wanna look the best version of myself. Of course I wanna work out. Of course I want to get facials and figure out the best hydrating skincare. I don't shame myself for wanting to do those things. I don't shame my 11-year-old daughter for wanting to learn more about skincare, as long as it's safe.
 
I always skew on all of those things to pull out just the things that are empowering me, that are inspiring me. I'm not shaming myself in any way for wanting to look the best version. If that's younger — my biological age is almost 10 years younger — great, I'm doing something right. I lean into those things with inspiration versus a "fuck, am I getting old? Am I getting past it?" mentality.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (29:41): I love that. So some of the brands you work with now, like Sex with Emily — there's this counterculture, "we don't talk about women's pleasure and women's power." What has working with those brands done, or helped you see, or changed your mindset in any way?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (30:01): So much. It's been so transformational. It's one of my favorite topics because it's about shame. We have so much fucking shame. And the brands that are leaning into those things, I think, are the most exciting for us right now — or the brands that are at the precipice of that. It's really unlocking something.
 
When you can lean in and give voice to the shadow conversations, the whisper conversations — the things nobody's saying but the shame everybody's feeling. And not just say, "Hey, it's okay, we're all doing it, everybody's thinking that." To say — not just it's okay, but also to actually empower people to do it. Yeah, you should feel good having sex. Whatever the empowerment is.
 
Emily's a rad human, and she is empowering men and women and anybody to feel good about how they're approaching sex and whatever that looks like for them. For us to be a part of those conversations, a part of a brand that can really connect with somebody — and not just say "it's okay," but actually move that okay into empowerment — I'm here for all of those conversations. Menopause, anything around sex, sexuality.
 
Chris is really into the aging conversation. Think about Silvers — how we thought about people at like, no, it's gotta go up now — 75. Think about how we thought about all these people. The Golden Girls comparison, the meme that we all see. Demi Moore's killing it, and she's not going anywhere.
 
Let's take all of those stories, let's remove the shame — and not only remove it and make it okay, but let's make it empowering. How do we do that, and how do we create inspiration within all that? Those are the conversations. That's the unlock. Because when somebody feels that from a brand, from a person, from anything — that does something, and you connect with that. Those are the brands, those are the stories, those are the things we want to be a part of.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (32:22): Leaning into the cringe, naming the shame — these feel very complementary, if not the same thing. They both very much require vulnerability. Go, go, go — say whatever's coming up with the big breath.
 
Kirsten Ludwig (32:38): Vulnerability is probably my favorite word. Chris will send me so many memes about it. I'm a Scorpio — all we want to do is have the really deep, vulnerable conversations. Which is true.
 
The more I've done my own work — all I wanna do is take off all the masks and get deeper and deeper into my truth. And that's all I wanna do with you, right? I just wanna have a conversation and talk heart to heart with you, Meghan. I don't wanna have this bullshit exterior. I'm not interested in those conversations, and I know you're not either. That's why, honestly, it's one of the reasons I was so excited this morning. I was like — I get to talk to Meghan, and we haven't caught up in forever, and it's gonna be so great. Because you know it's gonna be one of those conversations where you can feel something. Where we're really both present and excited to be in — versus like, "Well, I've accomplished this and I've done this." Great, but tell me about you.
 
The conversations I'm most interested in — the ones that really cut through, the only ones I want to have — are the heartfelt ones. I don't think it's something that requires a specific question to unlock. But I can tell you — I jump on a handful of calls almost every day, and it could be somebody I've never met before. You both end up cutting through the bullshit — but somebody does it first. Somebody leans in and exposes themselves first. Be that person.
 
For me, it's a constant evolution — of taking off the mask, getting closer to vulnerability, finding more of my truth. The more I do the work, the more interesting it is. That's how I want to show up with people. Those are the people I want to be around. How about you?
 
Meghan French Dunbar (34:18): What comes up for me is — the more you are leaning into your truth and living out loud as your highest and best self, the more you're modeling that as the way people can be. It's giving permission for people to not have to be cookie cutter and homogenous and playing by the same script. Giving people the permission to actually just be authentic. Live into what they want to be.
 
The more I do it, the more other people feel like they can do it as well. And that keeps helping me return back to it.
 
I gave a little talk in New York recently, and I came off the stage and this wonderful student at Fordham University where I was speaking came up and said, "I'm always afraid that my light is too bright. But then I just saw you shining so brightly on the stage that it encouraged me — like, you can be successful and be really different." And I was like — fuck yes. That was so awesome.
 
Kirsten Ludwig (35:18): That's fucking great. That's fucking great. Like — that's a life moment. God, are you afraid your light's... I mean, I hope nobody is. But of course, if —
 
Meghan French Dunbar: I think most of us are. I don't know. I have been my whole life. Like — yeah. Anyway. That's a whole other story.
 
Kirsten Ludwig (35:38): But it's a great point — especially if she's thinking it, people are thinking that. And especially as women, we have an onus. We need to do that more, because as people who have a platform and the ability to articulate it — I think we have an onus to share that. It's giving people permission to do the thing.
 
I want people to live their best life. Have the most fun, have the most sense of freedom, do all the things. Whatever is your truth. Everybody's truth is different. The life I lead is too crazy or whatever for a lot of people. Cool. But whatever their version is — I want to give people permission or inspiration or whatever it might be to lead their best version of that. And I think that's exactly what you do. To show people — like, shine fucking bright, babe.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (36:36): Yes. Ooh. Well — I guess the question I have there is the likability conversation. Of, am I too much? It feels to me — the story I tell myself about you is that ship has sailed. You are just not interested in being liked. You are very much who you are — take it or leave it. Does that feel true? And how long has that been true for you?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (37:05): Yes, yes, yes. That feels true for me. It's something I've leaned into more and more. And I do think it's true that once you hit 50, you give zero fucks. You really, really give — you're like, "I don't care." Not in an offensive way like "I'm just going to fucking offend everybody" — but more in a way of being able to lean into my truth more and more, and really know what that is.
 
There's a confidence and a commitment and an ability that comes with that. And then a lessening of caring what people think. It's really that balance for me — leaning more into my truth, being able to really identify it, really know it, and a confidence that comes with that. Giving shit less what people think. And then you hit 50 and you're like — I give zero fucks. Zero fucks. And it's really true.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (38:07): Aging is awesome. I'm really enjoying it.
 
Kirsten Ludwig: It really is. I'm in. I'm in. Cause also — the alternative's not great.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (38:19): Right. All right — is there anything that you wish I had asked you about that we didn't talk about?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (38:26): For me — the things that continue to blur the lines are my personal journey and my work journey. They're one and the same, because certainly one affects the other. I don't know how much people are still kind of coming up and believing that "well, this is separate from this, and you can still have it all and you do this and separate those things."
 
I think that's one of the things I like about LinkedIn — I like when people tell their personal stories. I like to know more about people versus "hey, I just won this award, I just got this." You get to know more about people when they share that. Weaving together and really understanding where somebody is today is really about that personal journey.
 
That's an hour-long conversation, ideally over a bottle or two of wine, that we need to do. But it's the journey of the becoming, the undoing. The idea of the unbehaving — we should be doing all of that more.
 
As somebody who has an 11-year-old daughter — what do I want her to do and think about? It's not to get permission from me. It's not, "Mom, do you think this is okay?" I want her to grow up with her own sense of self and know: this is what I want to do, and I'm going to go do it — respectfully, but whether people like it or not.
 
Those are the type of women that I think we need more of. Things are not even. We don't have enough of a voice. The more we can lean into raising and creating and supporting and mentoring those abilities — that's the world I want to live in.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (40:15): I have a four-year-old daughter, and she is a spicy little meatball. And I am so excited to nurture her wild flame instead of trying to crush it. The experience of getting to reparent her and just let her go be her wildest, most beautiful, spirited soul in this world — instead of telling her that it's wrong. That's some of the work that I'm here to do on this planet. That's one of the reasons I feel like I'm here. It's so fucking beautiful.
 
Kirsten Ludwig (40:44): Totally. But isn't that amazing — to go through and have a moment? I go through and have those moments and I identify them with her. But then I also go — what if I, instead of having to relearn that, just learned that that was okay? What if I just learned to lean into that? What if I learned that sensitivity is a superpower versus don't be so sensitive? What if you had a complete reframe on all of this?
 
We have the ability and onus to do that. With our daughters. And in the workforce — being people who are visible, sharing that. You're certainly doing that on your podcast, with your book, all the places. We need to be that platform. We need to mentor. We need to support. We need to empower. We need to inspire. That's the work we all collectively are doing.
 
Once you break down any kind of societal norm — they kind of all come crushing down. Menopause. Aging. Sexuality. Divorce. It's all of the things. Once you break down one, you're like — did they all really exist? Were any of these real? And it's like — fuck no. They weren't real.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (41:56): Permission slip. If you were giving listeners a permission slip — what is the permission you give people to start unbehaving in some certain way?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (42:07): I would tell them to ask for forgiveness, not permission. That's it. Don't even think about permission. It's more about — do the thing that lights you up. And then if you needed permission, you can ask for forgiveness if anybody calls you on it.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (42:28): How do people find you and support you and learn about all your work — besides Substack, Good Thinking, the podcast? Where are the places people find you?
 
Kirsten Ludwig (42:37): Yeah — sign up on our Substack, Good Thinking, for the podcast and the Substack. And hit me up on LinkedIn.
 
Meghan French Dunbar (42:43): Yay. Thank you, thank you. My heart feels so damn full. I'm just in awe of you, and I adore you, and I'm so grateful.
 
Kirsten Ludwig (42:53): Thank you, thank you for having me. It was so, so good to catch up with you.
Meghan French Dunbar (42:56): All right, my friend — before we wrap up completely, here are my key Unbehaved lessons of the day from Kirsten.
 
Lesson number one: Lean into the cringe. Kirsten highlighted the fact that it's often when we lean into those uncomfortable, courageous moves — instead of avoiding them — that there's something beautiful on the other side. She said the reward is often tenfold whatever it is you are avoiding. It made me wonder — what things am I avoiding right now that I might need to lean into instead? And I would ask the same question of you.
 
Lesson number two: "You can have it all and balance it all" — the whole thing is bullshit. Be intentional instead. I love how Kirsten reframed this for us — the unbehaving move isn't pretending you can do it all. It's being conscious and intentional about the trade-off that matters. How can you go on that work trip in a good way? What do you communicate to the people you love in those moments when you have to prioritize your work for a bit? That's the good stuff.
 
Lesson number three: Model the behavior you want other people to feel permission to do. Kirsten talked about the fact that the two-week maternity leave shame wasn't about the bond with her daughter. It was about modeling that only taking two weeks off is okay. I felt this one in my bones. Oftentimes setting healthy boundaries, prioritizing what matters, or even just taking care of yourself — isn't just benefiting you. It's giving other people permission, and sometimes even a blueprint, to do the same thing themselves.
 
Lesson number four — an oldie but a goodie: Ask for forgiveness, not permission. Kirsten's permission slip right at the end. Just don't overthink it. Unapologetically do the thing that lights you up. And if someone calls you on it, deal with it then — but stop waiting for approval before you just do the damn thing.
 
That's all for today, my friends. If you enjoyed the episode, maybe share it with a friend or leave a good review. Any support for the show means more to me than I can ever express.
 
Until next time.

There's a job you've thought about leaving. A sabbatical you'd take if you weren't worried about being judged for it. Something you want to write, or start, or say out loud — and the thing stopping you isn't whether you want to do it. It's what other people will think.
In this episode of Unbehaved, you’ll hear from Al and Leanne Elliott — the married couple behind the UK's #1 management podcast, Truth, Lies and Work — who’ve built one of the most enviable-looking lives you'll come across. Digital nomads for six years. Working together. Making a living doing what they love. All because they refuse to build a life based on what other people think. 
At 19, Al Elliott sat across from a deputy headmaster who told him that if he worked hard for twenty years, he could have that man's job and earn £28,000. Al's internal response: f*ck this. He walked out of teaching and never went back.
Leanne spent from 28 to 35 waiting for the maternal feeling everyone promised was coming. It never arrived. It took her mother saying "that's okay" for her to believe it might be.
Between them, Al and Leanne have refused nearly every script they were handed — about careers, children, where to live, and whether you should ever go into business with your spouse. 
In this conversation, they walk through exactly what it looks like to stop making decisions based on what other people think — and start listening to what YOU want instead.
Content note: this episode includes a story about a suicide-in-progress call, at around the six-minute mark. Resources at the bottom.
What We Cover:
The paper airplane that said "help" — how they met on an overnight Samaritans shift (03:53)
Working with your spouse without wrecking either one (15:03)
The story of success you were handed as a child (24:01)
Money is a river: unlearning the family rule that you don't discuss it (27:41)
Waiting for a feeling that never came (28:23)
Nothing is wasted — relational beats transactional (36:13)
What's genuinely different about work in 2026: AI fear, DEI backlash, and "pick a side" (41:30)
The hardest truth Al ever heard: "You're not that important." (48:15)
The permission slip — and how to work out whose voice is calling your idea stupid (51:29)
About The Guests:
Al & Leanne Elliott host Truth, Lies & Work, part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. Leanne is a business psychologist; Al is a serial entrepreneur. truthliesandwork.com — and find Leanne on LinkedIn, where she answers every single comment.
PULL QUOTES
"Stop behaving in the way you think other people expect. Stop trying to make decisions based on what you think other people think is right or is the norm. Make decisions based on what YOU want and what works for you and your values." — Leanne Elliott
"If you work as hard as you seem to be working right now, then in about 20 years time, you can be sitting in my seat and you can be earning upwards of 28,000 pounds a year. And I sat there and I went, fuck this." — Al Elliott
"The way we talk on microphone is the way we talk in real life. That's kind of what people say when they meet us — you're just exactly the same as you sound on the pod. Yeah. Because we enjoy doing it." — Al Elliott
"Nothing is wasted. Even when you find yourself in a situation doing work on something you're not really getting paid for or not very much for and it's taking more of your time. Our mantra is always nothing is wasted, because we're learning something. We're making a connection here." — Leanne Elliott
"The voice that tells you you're wrong and it's a stupid idea — try and identify whose voice that is. Because if that's your parents, that's your grandparents, that's a friend — that's probably the person who's holding you back the most." — Al Elliott
"The fact is you've got to fall in love with the medium. If you hate it, it's like writing blogs — you're not going to stick at it. You absolutely have to love it." — Al Elliott
"If they've got my phone number, then they should really be talking to me. If they've not — I don't know them, whatever. And I think that's kind of how when you're creating content and putting stuff out into the world, it needs to be about, I don't know you, whatever." — Al Elliott (on trolls)
"It's almost like a bank account. If I've paid into somebody's bank account with goodwill and helping them over the years, and they certainly need to make a withdrawal, they're much more likely to be there to help me. That's how the world should work." — Leanne Elliott
"Just because you're a manager doesn't mean you're that important. You're not that important. You're disposable if you don't do a good job. He was right. Brutal, but right." — Al Elliott (hardest truth he's had to accept)
CHAPTERS: 
00:00 Cold open: "Fuck this"
00:35 Welcome + episode setup
02:55 The interview begins: how did you build this life?
03:55 How they met on an overnight shift at the Samaritans
04:51 The suicide-in-progress call
07:20 The 6am callback that changed everything
08:44 Why they were volunteering in the first place
10:13 Fast-forward: marriage, moving to Spain, Brexit, becoming digital nomads
12:12 Expert host vs. unexpert host: how their paths converged
14:37 Working with your spouse: the boundaries + osmosis framework
17:34 The honest truth about building a podcast from nothing
22:00 The 1% better principle
23:10 Childhood stories of success: what you were handed
26:00 Al's "fuck this" £28K teaching moment
27:30 Stories they had to let go of (money for Al, having kids for Leanne)
30:50 Currently in Bosnia — permission to live wherever
33:00 A typical week + how the podcast provides livelihood
35:14 Transactional vs. relational: being of service
36:13 The "nothing is wasted" mantra + the Nico story
41:30 Patterns in 2026: AI fear, DEI pushback, polarization
45:20 How to deal with trolls
47:54 Rapid fire: hardest truth
48:53 Rapid fire: biggest lie
50:43 Most outdated work norm
51:14 The permission slip to unbehave
52:32 Where to find Al and Leanne
53:14 Meghan's Unbehaved Lessons of the Day
 
RESOURCES MENTIONED
Truth, Lies and Work — Al and Leanne's podcast: truthliesandwork.com
Oblong — Al and Leanne's consultancy: https://oblonghq.com
The Samaritans — UK crisis listening service where Al and Leanne met: samaritans.org
Content note referenced in the episode:
If you or someone you know is in crisis, please reach out to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US (call or text 988), or the Samaritans in the UK at 116 123.
CONNECT WITH AL & LEANNE:
Podcast: Truth, Lies and Work
Leanne on LinkedIn
Al on LinkedIn
 
CONNECT WITH MEGHAN + UNBEHAVED:
Website
Substack: Unbehaved
Book: This Isn't Working
LinkedIn: @meghanfrenchdunbar
Instagram: @meghanfrenchdunbar
 
FULL TRANSCRIPT (CLEANED)
Lightly edited for readability. Filler words, false starts, and transcription artifacts removed. Al's, Leanne's, and Meghan's voices preserved throughout.
[Cold Open — Al]
I remember distinctly, I was sitting in front of the deputy headmaster. I must have been what, 19, on my first teaching practice? And the deputy master says, "If you work as hard as you seem to be working right now, then in about 20 years time, you can be sitting in my seat and you can be earning upwards of 28,000 pounds a year." And I sat there and I went — fuck this.
 
Meghan: (laughing) Hard pass.
 
Al: There's gotta be a better life than that.
[Meghan — Welcome]
 
Hello there, lovely human, and welcome to Unbehaved. I'm Meghan French Dunbar, and that was Al Elliott — one half of the extraordinary duo I get to talk to today. The other half is his wife, Leanne.
 
One of the reasons I'm so excited about this episode is that Al and Leanne are going to walk us through what it actually looks like to stop making decisions based on what other people think.
 
And I don't know about you, but this is something that shows up in so many aspects of my life. That tension where you know you want to do something, but then you start questioning yourself because you're worried about what other people might think. Maybe it's the job you want to leave, but you don't quite know what your colleagues are gonna say. Maybe it's the sabbatical you'd like to take, but you're worried you'll be judged for taking time off. Or the Substack or the podcast or the content that you want to start putting out there, but you're worried about what other people are going to think about what you have to say.
 
Whatever it is, I hear this from so many people — they aren't living the life they actually want because of other people's opinions.
 
Today, Al and Leanne are gonna show us what it looks like to listen to what YOU want instead of what others want for you. And for them, it's resulted in the two of them leading a pretty epic life. Together, they co-host the UK's #1 management podcast, Truth, Lies, and Work, which they record and produce from wherever they want. In the last decade, they've lived in different European countries pretty much every few months.
 
So today I got to turn the tables on them and ask them the questions. And our conversation surfaced one of the most touching meet-cute stories I've ever heard that I totally wasn't expecting. It also brought up refreshingly honest wisdom for anyone who's trying to build something from the ground up — whether it's a small business, an art studio, anything in between. We also talk about one potentially overlooked practice they lean on (and I do as well) that has become foundational to their success.
 
One quick heads up before we dive in: this episode opens with a story about a suicide-in-progress call from Al and Leanne's early days as volunteers at the Samaritans, a crisis listening service in the UK. If that's not something you're up for today, feel free to skip ahead — it's at about the six-minute mark in the interview. Resources are also in the show notes.
 
Otherwise, let's get into it.
The interview begins
Meghan: From where I'm sitting here in Boulder, Colorado, it seems as though you two have nailed life. You get to live wherever you want, you work together, you've got this free-flowing, gorgeous number one show in the UK — all the things. What the fuck? How did you do this? I want the unedited version of how you built the number one management show in the UK as a couple. Go.
 
Al: Pure dumb luck after one too many whiskeys.
 
Meghan: Same answer as all entrepreneurs. Okay, cool.
 
Al: Well, Leanne, tell the story. There's a whole story before Truth, Lies and Work happened…
 
Meghan: Let's start there. Do it. I want it all.
 
Al: Where's a logical place to start?
 
Meghan: How did you two meet? And then how did the show become a thing? Let's do that.
How they met at the Samaritans
Leanne: This is a good story. Go, Lee. So I met Al when we were both volunteering for a charity called the Samaritans in the UK. We worked at the Manchester and Salford branch — it's a listening service for people who are in distress or despair and maybe feeling suicidal. I went in for an overnight shift, 11pm to 7am.
 
I met in the corridor a guy called Rob, who was the chairman of our branch. He was like, "You're all right — oh, you're on with Elliott tonight. I think you'll like him." I went, "Oh yeah? Is he all right?" "Yeah, yeah, he's into property, he's really sound, quite funny. I think you'll really like him." I said, "Oh, nice — it's always good to do an overnight shift with someone you get on with, isn't it?" He went, "No, but I think you two will really get on. I think you'll really like him." I was like, "All right, Rob. This isn't blind date."
 
Meghan: No pressure.
 
Leanne: So I walked into the room and I laid eyes on him — and I know they sound so cheesy — but I looked, and I was like, huh. Okay. Yeah. All right. There's something here. Okay.
 
We sat down at separate phones doing our calls. And then Al got a call about 4am.
 
Al: Leanne was my boss, basically. I'm nearly 50 now, Leanne's just turned 40, so there's a big age difference. Leanne was my supervisor for the night, looking out for me, training me. I get a call. It's the most serious kind of call — you only get maybe one a week across a thousand calls or so. It's a suicide-in-progress.
 
By the way, you may have to put some triggers on this. The woman said, "I don't want to live anymore." I won't go into too much detail, but basically it was a long — an hour-long call — where she was in the process of ending her life.
 
I was like, oh my God, what do I do? So I threw a paper airplane to Leanne — I opened it up on her side and it said "help." And Leanne came across. She's able to listen in but not speak. So she was giving me notes on what to say and stuff.
 
Without going too much into the gory details, the line went dead. After about five minutes of silence, I put the phone down and I was like, wow. It was one of the most impactful moments of my life.
 
We went to the kitchen, we got a cup of tea. Leanne's like, "How do you feel?" I said, "I don't know — this has never happened to me before." Leanne was great. She was talking me down, asking me questions. The idea of the Samaritans is that if you take a difficult call, then another Samaritan will ask you about it and almost take some of the pressure off you.
 
Leanne: So that all happened. About an hour later, I got a phone call. The Samaritans is a national organization, but they typically try and route calls to the local branch. On an overnight shift, that's hard, because only maybe 30% of branches in the country are open 24 hours. So it's really rare that you hear any outcome to a suicide-in-progress call — either way, whatever happened. And it's very rare that you'll get a call back into the same branch on an overnight shift.
 
The phone rings at about 6am. I answer. It's the same woman that Al had been speaking to. And she said, "I don't know if it's possible, but if you can find the man I was chatting to, can you please tell him thank you? I've woken up, I've been sick, and I feel hope. I've called an ambulance and I'm going to try and live."
 
Every goosebump on me just popped out of my body. Al was on another call, so I couldn't even grab him over to listen. So I probably only talked to her for a couple of minutes. The ambulance arrived and took her away.
 
Afterward, we'd shared not only this first incredibly intense moment — and it sounds so weird to people who maybe aren't ingrained in the Samaritans philosophy, but we're trained that it's a privilege to share that vulnerable moment with somebody. So to have shared that moment — and then to have shared an outcome that we rarely, rarely hear about, and for it to be such a positive outcome — it was very much a bonding experience.
 
That was the beginning. There you go. That's probably not the story you expected, was it?
 
Meghan: That's the best meeting story I've ever heard. I'm so glad we went there. Also — how old were you two when you met?
 
Al: I was 22. So I was 29.
 
Meghan: What type of humans are you that at 22 and 29 you're volunteering to stay up all night and help people in crisis? I mean, I know you're wonderful human beings — but this is deepening my love for you.
 
Leanne: I need to hold my hand up, Meghan. My reason was not selfless. I was doing my undergrad in psychology at the time — I thought I wanted to go into clinical counseling, and I was advised by someone at university to join a listening service. So I joined the Samaritans. I quickly realized I didn't want to go into that area of psychology because the emotional labor is so high — but I loved the work and stayed with the Samaritans for five years, long after I graduated. So my initial reason for joining wasn't that altruistic. Whereas yours was.
 
Al: No, she's being British. It was probably 70% altruistic and 30% — what's the opposite of altruistic? Whatever that is. Edit that back in. Put a fancy word in there, Meg.
 
But really briefly — it was the Year of the Volunteer 2007, I think it was, in the UK. And they were like, you should go and volunteer. It was like tithing of your money — 10% of your income going to the church. They were like, well, what if 10% of your working week went to volunteering? So I did a couple of volunteering things.
 
But anyway, being British — let's move on. Because that's a cool story, and we're very proud of the way we met, and we don't often tell it. In fact, this might be the first time, Meghan, we've told that story on somebody else's podcast.
 
Meghan: So honored. So how did we get from there to where we are now? Because this is now almost 20 years later?
 
Al: Yeah. Thank you for that, Meghan. We feel great.
 
Meghan: My husband and I just had the 17th anniversary of our first date. We can be — I'm not even gonna say middle-aged, I love this age, this is the fabulous age. We can be fabulous age together.
 
Al: You beautiful women are very far from middle-aged. I'm knocking on the door of 50, so I'm definitely middle-aged. I can't get out of bed without making noises. Real quick — please don't click that and take it out of context. Fast-forward.
 
So — 2007 to about 2012, ish. We were dating, living together, got married in Gibraltar, which is a tiny little enclave in the corner of Spain. Had a reception in Spain. Then a year later decided to basically put our life into the huge blender of random and say, right — we're going to go live in Europe. So we went to Spain and lived there for five years. And then Brexit happened.
 
Now, in case anyone's not sure — Brexit essentially meant that we, as Brits, couldn't live in Europe long-term. We still live in the UK. That'd be weird if we couldn't live in the UK.
 
Meghan: Right, that wasn't my understanding.
 
Al: Maybe I'm not qualified to explain what Brexit is. Basically, it would be much harder for us to stay in Europe long-term. So I had this idea: what if — because Brexit was going to take a couple of years to go through — what if we tried to visit every country in Europe before it becomes really hard for us to do that?
 
So we became what the kids call digital nomads. It was meant to be a six-to-twelve-month thing. We did it for six years, which is awesome. We traveled around Europe, went to Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand. It was wonderful. We were working remotely, but working remotely separately. And then around COVID time, we started working together. We set up Oblong, our consultancy — and then Truth, Lies and Work came from that.
The expert host and the unexpert host
Meghan: On the website it says Leanne, you're the expert host, and Al, you're the unexpert host. There's a bit of research and data on one side and the real-world experience on the other. How did the paths deviate and then come back together in terms of what you both were doing at that time?
 
Leanne: I was mainly working freelance for an Australian company doing recruitment management training for a fully remote team. Around COVID, unsurprisingly, I was getting asked more about remote work and how to manage teams that way. That's when I kind of started freelance.
 
Al and I would always talk about work, as any couple does over a glass of wine in the evening. And we realized that a lot of what we do is the same thing, but coming from a different perspective. Al was very much into sales and marketing as a serial entrepreneur — how do we sell a dream to people, how do we engage people in a product or an organization we want to sell, how do we create an experience they love and thrive from?
 
So it became clear that we were talking about the same thing, but from different perspectives. My concern with organizational psychology is that sometimes the lack of commercial focus makes it less relevant to smaller organizations. So we saw this as an opportunity to bring our skills together and make a way of working that traditionally lived in very large corporate or public sector available to entrepreneur-led businesses that are agile and enjoy change and experimenting with new things.
 
Al: Just to add to that — the books I read, Leanne thinks are boring and ridiculous, because they're all about how you can make a million dollars in an hour. And the books Leanne reads are boring to me because they use words and statistics I don't understand, and the people who write them have more names after their name than are in my name.
 
So we were like, hang on a minute. I translate what Leanne does, but Leanne keeps me on track to ensure it's rooted in science. That's been a really good partnership. It seems to have done us quite well, I think.
Working with your spouse
Meghan: So as you're thinking about building a consultancy together AND doing the show, every human around you is probably saying some version of, "What are you guys thinking? Don't work with your spouse. It's a terrible idea." How was it imagining, "I'm going to do this with you"? Did you have any agreements at the beginning about how the relationship would continue and how you would cultivate it while also working together?
 
Leanne: That's a good question. From a starting point, Al and I are in a slightly different position than maybe the majority of couples that might go into business together — because as I mentioned, we're digital nomads. So we were traveling together, living together, without much of a social network around us for big chunks of time. We were very used to spending every hour together and, when not working with each other, literally working next to each other. So we were already kind of used to that level of intensity.
 
When we started working together, it was pretty soon after that Al was like, "I think we might need to talk about boundaries" — which was impressive as a psychologist. I know, I know.
 
Al: I didn't really understand what the word meant. But we kind of said, well, I'm in charge of this bit and I have a budget for this bit, and Leanne's in charge of this bit and that's her realm.
 
However, what's been interesting over the last five years — and I'm going to use another word I'm not sure I know the meaning of — osmosis. Leanne will start saying stuff and I'm like, "How the hell do you know that?" I'm like, "Because I've sat opposite you for 310 episodes and you've talked amazing stuff." And then she'll go, "I've got a great idea for a potential product." And I'm like, "How do you know how to create a product?" She's like, "Well, because I've been with you for 17, 18 years."
 
The key thing is: define your boundaries, allow osmosis, and then don't hold on. Don't make your entire ego around "I'm the sales and marketing guy" or "I'm the product management guy." Because then if your partner comes in and says, "I've got a great idea," your instincts go, "No, no, no — stick to your lane." But if you've got a great relationship and a great working relationship, you're like, "Cool. Tell me." And you're a bit like, "I wish I'd thought of that, but God, I'm glad one of us did."
 
One of the best things we did in terms of trying to separate work and life — we're not always very good at it — but one thing we've consistently done for the last five years is every evening, if we're just sat chilling out, Al will say (or I will say), "Are you okay to talk about work?" And it's absolutely fine for the other person to go, "No, can we talk about it tomorrow?" Yep, no worries. If it's out of hours, you need to ask permission — and if permission isn't granted, that's okay.
Building a podcast from nothing
Meghan: So you're like, "We're gonna do a podcast." And at the moment I came on your show, it was the #1 management show in the UK. I'm sure that just happened overnight — just super easy success, like it was just luck. How did you actually do that? Especially for baby podcasters such as myself who are dreaming of one day having a full-time podcast and getting paid to do this thing that we love — I'm asking for all the other podcasters, not myself. I'm totally asking for myself.
 
How do you stick with it at the beginning, in the building stages, when you have a story of how much momentum you "should" have and all the things you "should" be doing — and actually get to a place where you have significant numbers and are making a serious impact?
 
Al: Can I take this for a second? First of all, if you ask us how we grew from zero to where we are now — six figures — we have no fricking idea. We've got guesses. But there's a famous quote: "I know that 10 of my advertising dollars out of a hundred work very well. I just don't know which 10." I think it's kind of that. So we just threw a lot of the proverbial at the wall. Some of it stuck.
 
Leanne is phenomenal on LinkedIn — that's one thing that really helped. There's lots more we can do. We should be clipping more. We should be posting more.
 
What I can say categorically is that the majority of baby podcasters (using your words — I'm not being provocative) get to episode 30 and go, "It's not working, let's not do it." Our first podcast, we got to episode 120 and nobody was listening. We got like 20,000 listeners in total over three years. But we LOVED having our podcast. We loved doing it. I'll be honest, probably a full 60 of those episodes, we were quite drunk. But we really enjoyed the medium and we built and honed our craft.
 
Just to be clear, our first podcast was about travel when we were nomading. It wasn't that we were talking about serious business stuff — a couple of bottles of wine, talking about travel.
 
Leanne: One bottle of wine. Let's tone that down.
 
Al: With the second one, one of the things that kept us going was that very early on, I applied for the HubSpot podcast network. It's kind of like VC where you get like a seed round, a Series A, and so on. I was exuberant and cocky, and I jumped on the website and applied. To my surprise, they replied — and it wasn't the reply I was expecting, which was going to have profanity. They said, "Yeah, we'd like to talk to you more about this." We chatted more and more. We went on maybe about episode nine.
 
That's what kept us going. We had to do it, because we were contracted to. We probably would have kept doing it — but I can't imagine we would have tried to make it better every single episode. Whereas genuinely from episode 20, we've looked at every single facet of it. We want every episode to be 1% better than the previous one. That's what drives us.
 
Also — the way we talk on microphone is the way we talk in real life. That's what people say when they meet us: "You're just exactly the same as you sound on the pod." We're like, "Yeah — because we enjoy doing it." This is not, "Oh my God, I'm going to sit down, record a pod, I hate my own voice, editing is so much work." The fact is: you've got to fall in love with the medium.
 
If you hate it, it's like writing blogs. People who don't like writing blogs, you're not going to stick at it. You absolutely have to love it. You need the consistency. You need the momentum.
 
Not everyone is going to be able to just apply to a network and get on to get the initial funding, accountability, support, and mentoring. We were very fortunate to get that so early. But what you CAN replicate is accountability. Partner up with other podcasters trying to build a show and commit to the schedule.
 
Network is so important. Just talk to anyone who loves podcasting or wants to be on podcasting — they'll share your podcast with everybody. One thing that worked really well for us was in-person events. We did three in-person events over 12 months where we literally turned up with a pod and recorded from there. I'm not exaggerating when I say each event doubled our numbers — because so many eyes in our audience. It was wellbeing shows, people and culture shows. They were our audience, watching our people do what we do in real life. That made a huge difference.
 
Leanne: But the reality is we love it. We have so much fun doing it. And it's really, really fricking hard. There are as many days we don't want to do it as we do. When you're 310 episodes in, it gets a little relentless. But you've got to find that joy, and you've got to find the conversation you're excited about.
The old playbook and childhood stories of success
Meghan: The thing about your show is: there's research and real-world experience. There's business acumen where you're getting insights, and there's humor and warmth and quirkiness and playfulness. I feel like it speaks to the broader theme I see from both of you, which is simply letting the old playbook go — this idea that business has to be serious. And there's the old paradigm story that you need to have a stable job and live in the same place, blah blah blah. And you all haven't done that either.
 
So this goes all the way back to your childhood. What was the story of success you were handed as a child? How has it evolved to present day, and why?
 
Leanne: Oh man. I think I have clear ones actually. Two things: I was the youngest of three girls. My dad was born in Liverpool in England to Irish Catholic parents who got divorced. He came from a very poor upbringing, with a lot of judgment at the time — solo parent family, Catholic Irish, there's a lot in there. So he worked really hard to get an apprenticeship, get himself to university, become an electrical engineer.
 
I always say my dad is the first feminist I ever met. He was like, "I've got three girls, and you can do whatever you want. You don't need to rely on a man. You don't need to rely on anybody. You pick your profession, you work hard, you make sure you can stand on your own two feet." And his belief was that education was behind that. So education was important. We were expected to go to school, to university, to pick a profession. And we all did. My eldest sister is a head teacher, my middle sister is a chartered accountant, I'm a psychologist. Education was baked in as a lever of success.
 
The second thing: there's a bit of an age gap between me and my sisters. Before I was born, my family spent five years living in Saudi Arabia, where my dad worked as an electrical engineer. The stories I heard from that and the adventures they had living abroad — that was something I always wanted to do. That was another pillar of success for me: being able to work abroad and take your life somewhere else while building your career.
 
Those are the two things from my childhood I took with me. What were yours?
 
Al: Similar kind of thing with education — my parents were pushing me. Well, I say pushing — encouraging me to become a teacher. This was the early 90s. I did my GCSEs (which is like year 11, kind of like freshman year in the US — about 16 years old). I did all right in them. And they said, "Right, you're going to be a teacher." I was like, "Okay." They said, "Go and do these A-levels."
 
So I did four A-levels and I failed three of them and got an E in maths. So I was going to be a maths teacher, because that's the only level I passed. I scraped into university in the North, and they were like, "Okay, yeah, I suppose you can come in."
 
And I remember distinctly — I was sitting in front of the deputy headmaster. I must have been 19 on my first teaching practice. We were in a school, doing eight weeks teaching practice. And the deputy master says, "If you work as hard as you seem to be working right now, then in about 20 years time you can be sitting in my seat and you can be earning upwards of 28,000 pounds a year."
 
And I sat there and I went — fuck this.
 
Meghan: (laughing) Hard pass.
 
Al: There's got to be a better life than that. And I hate kids as well. So I was like, yeah, let's not do that. I blew it all up, left university, went into sales for like three years — door-to-door, phone sales, all that kind of stuff. Started a business, went well, didn't go well, went bankrupt. That story is on the episode you referenced when we first chatted. But basically I was like, "No — I'm not having that kind of life. Thank you very much."
Stories they had to let go of
Meghan: Were there any stories that you were handed as children, adolescents, that you had to let go of — or that held you back from actually living into the life you have right now?
 
Al: Yes. I want to be really careful when I say this — I'm not blaming anyone in my family. But we came from a family where it was forbidden to talk about money, particularly at the dining table. It was rude to ask how much someone earned. Money was something nobody ever talked about. And I have to be honest — that's something I rebelled so hard against, and went way too far the other way. Because that story of "money is dirty" — I had to work with, like…
 
I read something — I'm sure it was Norman Vincent Peale or Jim Rohn or Tony Robbins — where they said, look at how the people around you describe money. They say, "He or she is filthy rich." They say, "Money is the root of all evil," when the quote is actually "the love of money is the root of all evil." There's resentment, all that — and you have to let it all go.
 
Deepak Chopra, I think, said that money is like a river. As soon as you try to keep it, it stagnates and damages the entire cash fund. But if it's like a river where you can dip in anytime you want, take as much as you want, then it's cool. So that's why: when you get money, spend money, give it away. Don't feel like it's something you're never going to get again.
 
That was really freaking tough. Took me 10 years of reading all these wanky self-help books to understand and change my language and thoughts around it. I don't blame my parents — that's just the way stories are handed down. But that was mine.
 
Leanne: I was pretty fortunate, actually, as the youngest. By the time it got to me, my parents were like, whatever — as long as you go to university, you're cool. So probably the only thing was around having a family. I guess I — I'm an old millennial, I'm 41 — I always assumed I was gonna have kids. Go to school, to uni, get a job, have children, maybe go back to work part-time, or try to figure out that dynamic. And as I got older, I was waiting for that desire to kick in — "I'm ready to have kids, I want to have kids now."
 
And it never really did.
 
I felt really uncomfortable, probably from age 28 to 35, when it's like — this is the time — and it never kicked in. I remember driving to see my friend, and my mom was with me, and my friend had just had a baby. My mom just said to me, "Do you ever think you'll have children?" And at that point, I was probably about 35. I said, "I've been waiting for that feeling to kick in — that maternal feeling — and it just hasn't happened." And she said, "That's okay."
 
I think that was a moment where I said, "Okay, maybe it IS okay. All right then." Since then, it's just been something that isn't going to be a part of my life. At this point, I don't think it was ever meant to be. But when I was younger, I guess I assumed — or felt pressured — that it should be.
Permission to live wherever you want
Meghan: Sometimes it's the stories where we need someone else to just say "that's okay." And sometimes it's ourselves who need to say that's okay for you to just do the thing that you want to do. Where do you live currently?
 
Leanne: Bosnia and Herzegovina, near Croatia.
 
Meghan: Every time I talk to you, you're in a different place. Do you feel like you've had to give yourselves permission to do this? Or has it ever been something you've worried about?
 
Al: I'm not sure I've ever worried about that. Have you? What I've worried about is that a lot of our friends will describe our life as, "It sounds amazing. I mean, it's not for me." And that is a very odd thing to hear — someone go, "Well, it clearly sounds cool. Not for me." It took me a long while to realize that they were essentially closing that door so they didn't feel like they were missing out. That's my interpretation.
 
This is typical white male privilege, isn't it? Deciding how other people are thinking. But this is what I was thinking — that potentially that's what they're doing. Just like I've probably done the same with children. I've gone, "It's not for me," because then I don't need to worry about it anymore, don't need to regret it. I'd rather regret not having children than regret having them. So — okay, cool.
 
I suppose the bit that did bother me at first was — I was one of those ex-pat idiots who'd come back and be like, "I forgot the name for this. What is it? I knew the Spanish word for it." I was trying to make it work too hard. So I was a bit unbearable.
 
Leanne: I think during that time — maybe it was my context — I was working for Fleur, and the MD and her husband were in business together and working remotely and traveled. Members of the team traveled and lived in different places. So I was in an environment where lots of people were doing it. It didn't feel like I was very unique in that. Within our friendship group, yes — but not in terms of people in my work world.
A typical week + livelihood
Meghan: How is your livelihood made up right now? Are you working full-time? What does a typical day or week look like?
 
Al: When we first started doing the pod, we were doing 30 hours each a week on the podcast. I had Final Cut Pro up with side chains, adding effects, cutting everything. We've realized there's an 80-20 to that, and we've managed to get it down to probably 10 to 15 hours each week. Typically Monday and Tuesday are podcast days — we record, we do two episodes a week, so we record those, prep whatever we need for the coming week. We'll maybe do two to three interviews a week. So it's part-time, the podcast.
 
Leanne: Consultancy rolls in and rolls out as the nature of any consultancy or freelancer will know. Sometimes it's busy, sometimes it's not. The key thing for us in that downtime is constantly thinking about three things:
 
One — how do we improve the podcast? How do we continue to innovate it and make it interesting so people still listen? What formats are getting tired? How do we appeal to a broader audience? Do we go back to video? All these big questions. We probably spend as much time talking about podcasts as we do creating it, in terms of how we can make it better, who we want on as guests, what we want to be talking about. That includes a lot of research and reading what's happening in the news and the world of work.
 
The second thing is products for our consultancy clients. We have our own employee engagement product that we've had for a while. We're currently developing a management training product, which has been taking up some of our time.
 
The third thing, if I'm being honest, is around life planning. How and where do we want to live is a fair conversation we have most weeks — especially when you live abroad and you're battling with visas and the Foreign Office doesn't know and you have to leave the country for three months and go to Bulgaria. Some of our choices and our working week is filled up with, "How do we stay in this country we're currently in?"
 
That's how our time is split. And being completely transparent financially — right now, the majority comes from the podcast.
Transactional vs. relational
Meghan: That's a dream. One thing you mentioned on the podcast I listened to — I'll put it in the show notes — was that you see the show as a vehicle for highlighting other people and celebrating them and making them look good. I feel like this is a common thread throughout a lot of what I've heard both of you talking about, all the way from the Samaritans through where we are today — which is helping other people.
 
It's part of a transition I advocate for — moving from transactional to relational, being of service to people and not trying to squeeze the most out of everyone you meet. For the humans out there who want to push back and say, "Well, you could get more out of those relationships" — how do we help people understand the profound beauty and value of being relational instead of transactional?
 
Al: First of all — read your book, because your story around the magazine you built, everything you've done — it just seems so relational.
 
I think a lot of people are self-centered — because that's the nature of being human. You have to look out for yourself. But if you can start to expand away from that and go, "Right — I'm going to be okay if I can help as many other people be okay as possible," magical things happen. That quote I keep saying and cringing every time — something like, "The quickest way to get what you want is to help other people get what they want."
 
Think about sales. Demonstrate you can help someone by actually helping them. If I went to you and you said, "I want to grow my pod," and I said, "Tell you what — have a look at your analytics next week," and suddenly you had an extra 5,000 listeners and I said, "I did that. Do you want to give me five grand a month and I'll get you another 10,000?" — you may or may not say yes, but you're certainly not going to tell me to go away. You're going to consider it. Because I've helped you. I've demonstrated I can help you BY actually helping you.
 
I feel like I've gone a little bit 70s hippie here — we should be passing around a wet cigarette. Lee, can you put a little skin on those bones?
 
Leanne: A mantra Al and I have is: nothing is wasted. Even when you find yourself doing work on something you're not really getting paid for — or not very much for — and it's taking more of your time, our mantra is: nothing is wasted. Because we're learning something. We're making a connection.
 
There have been so many examples where later down the line, by nurturing that relationship, by giving that time to somebody, it has come back — in terms of either a paid job, or a connection to somebody else who becomes a client, or just the opportunity to have conversations with people who feed you, especially in times like this. Even in the bad times, nothing is wasted.
 
I'm a big fan of positive psychology, and I can get a little bit woo with it. I don't get woo often — but I do with this. Because you have to train yourself to be positive. You have to train yourself to be grateful. And you have to train yourself, through that, to be resilient.
 
Like I joked before about getting kicked out of Bosnia and having to move to Bulgaria for three months — we did that last summer, and we had two days notice to uproot our entire life in a house we'd rented for nine months and wouldn't get the money back for. We had to find somewhere.
 
Three years before that, when we were nomading, we were in Bulgaria with a guy called Nico — lovely, a bit chaotic, a bit crazy. I loved him. Describe him as a toddler with wine — and a helicopter. Crazy guy. We put our time in with him. We really enjoyed spending time with him — though I think he enjoyed spending time with us more than we did with him at times. But we welcomed him in and kept that relationship going.
 
So when this happened to us — and we hadn't seen him for three or four years — we messaged him: "Nico, bit of a pickle, we need to leave the country. Any chance we can stay in that house you rented to us six years ago?" He's like, "Yeah, of course you can. See you in a week."
 
There are always things you're going to come back to when you need help. If you've helped somebody, if you're paying it forward — it sounds so cheesy — but it's just the way humanity works. It's almost like a bank account. If I've paid into somebody's bank account with goodwill and helping them over the years, when they need to make a withdrawal, they're much more likely to be there to help me. And that's how the world should work.
 
Al: I like that. So you're saying: pay into your bank account before you try to make a withdrawal, or they should be overdrawn on goodwill. That should be a book.
 
Leanne: I think it probably is. I think I stole it from somebody else.
 
Al: Also, just a really quick practical thing for your listeners: if anyone's considering creating a podcast, or already has a nascent one — stop making it about you and getting your name out there. Make it about getting other people. The number of people who — you can email them and they're like your Level 4 and they're Level 100, and you go, "Would you like to come on the podcast?" And they go, "Sure." And you're like, "How the hell am I speaking to this person I've been worshipping my entire life?" You're obviously nodding. You know exactly what I'm talking about.
 
Meghan: I mean — I was 29 years old and I sent a cold email to John Mackey, the co-founder of Whole Foods, and said, "Do you want to be on the cover of my business magazine? PS, it doesn't even exist yet. I'm gonna crowdfund it this summer." And he was like, "Sure." And I was like, "Okay. Cool cool cool cool." And then I had to do it. And then he was on the cover of the damn magazine — and that's how we got into every Whole Foods in the country.
Patterns in 2026
Meghan: Speaking of helping people — you all take lots of people's questions in your workplace surgery segment. What are some of the patterns or trends you're seeing in 2026 that feel different than the last couple of years?
 
Leanne: Fear around AI. And I mean fear — it's not stress, it's not insecurity, it's fear. The livelihoods, the professions, the identities people have built over decades being taken away by something we don't quite know. I think that's been a big shift.
 
More nuanced — a couple of years ago, talking about wellbeing and DEI was a very positive space to be. Now, wellbeing has become a bit of a buzzword. DEI — the pushback is brutal. People are feeling that. We had one recently about somebody whose DEI programs were being rolled back and values being changed on the website and how do they respond?
 
A lot around identity. Before, work was part of our identity — with things wrapped up in that, especially around burnout, which could be very difficult for entrepreneurs to deal with. But in terms of threats to identity, a depth I've not seen in my career.
 
Al: I'd add to that — the polarization that's happened. It happened on social media. Now it's happening at work, where people ask, "I'm now working for a boomer. How am I supposed to deal with a boomer, because I'm a Gen Z?" And it's like — you probably have grandparents. How do you deal with them? You have to go over and reset their router, replace the batteries in the remote control. But otherwise, you know how to talk to them.
 
Why are we making it all about "them and us"? That's one of the things that's so sad about the DEI stuff — DEI was meant to bring us together. Now it seems like, "They're the kind of company that does DEI, but we're not, because we are smart." And then you see it all like — you know, that man, are you against that man? Are you this? Are you that? Boomers versus this? Pick a side.
 
People say, "Stop being sheep." It's like — hold on a minute. Sheep is lovely. Sheep is how we existed for 10,000 years — as an entire herd of people, of organizations. That's how we protected ourselves. Now we're going, "Well, Europe's crap because they do this," and then Europe's going, "Yeah, but if we break our leg, it doesn't cost us anything, does it?" Wait — aren't we all just nice people trying to get along in the world and do the best with what we've got?
 
That's where we get most of our — we don't get trolled very often, unless we mention certain words. The T word. Every time — trolled. Even if it's just been passing.
 
Leanne: For engagement, though.
 
Al: Yeah, it's good for engagement.
 
Leanne: But we get trolled on things we more recently — anything around diversity, inclusion, belonging. We did an episode on transgender rights. My goodness — the comments we had on that episode. Between 2022 and 2024, we would talk about these things openly and people would be supportive, would comment, share. Now all of those topics have become — you're absolutely right — points of divide. People just want to stamp where they stand. And it's a bit frightening.
Dealing with trolls
Meghan: How do you deal with the trolls?
 
Al: First of all — when we start getting trolls, it means we're getting attention. It means we've probably made it. Yeah, no — we don't mean like "made it," but you know what I mean. The opposite of love isn't hate — it's ambivalence. So we're still on the spectrum of love and hate. We're on that side. People care enough to sit there and go, "I'm going to write to these very strange English people and tell them the man has got a face like a melted candle."
 
Leanne: The only trolls I ever rise to are the ones who question the evidence. If it's a point of opinion — that's fine. Unless it's discrimination or hatred. Then you're not welcome here. I think I've only ever deleted a handful of comments, and most of those were on the transgender episode — because they just don't need to be in the world and our guests don't need to see that. But it's around the evidence.
 
So I get into arguments with people who — like, I'll talk about diverse teams and how diverse thinking and demographic diversity can also be good for team performance. And someone was like, "Cite your source." And I was like — fair. I didn't mention my source. Here you go. Hold my beer.
 
Meghan: Yep. Receipt, receipt, receipt.
 
Leanne: Exactly. So that's how I push back — with evidence. Otherwise, it's people's opinions. Unless it's discrimination or hatred, which we just delete and remove. As Al said — let them go. It's engagement. They tend to tie themselves in knots more than we do. They don't need our intervention most of the time.
 
Also, Meghan — you probably notice this yourself. I know you're nowhere near as old as us, but when you get a little older, you're sort of like, "I don't really care what you think, if the truth be told." If I know you, I still probably don't care much about what you think about me. But if I don't know you? I couldn't give a shiny shite.
 
Al: I saw Tom Holland — I'm not a big fan, but I don't dislike the guy, I don't know him — he was on Instagram and somebody asked him about handling criticism. He said, "If somebody says something bad about me, my only concern is: have they got my phone number? If they've got my phone number, then they should really be talking to me and saying, 'That's my face.' If they've not — I don't know them, whatever." I think that's kind of how, when you're creating content and putting stuff out into the world, it needs to be about — I don't know you, whatever.
 
Meghan: Also, Leanne and I are exactly the same age. So I just got into the "genuinely couldn't give two shits" stage. And it is glorious and wonderful.
Rapid fire round
Meghan: All right, we have our rapid-fire round. Truth, lies, work. Hardest truth you've ever had to come to terms with.
 
Al: You're not that important. When I got my first management job, my HR director sat me down and went, "Just because you're a manager doesn't mean you're that important. You're not that important. You're disposable if you don't do a good job." He was right. Brutal, but right.
 
Leanne: Wow. That is so much better than mine. Mine's really cheesy — money doesn't make you happy. The lack of money doesn't make you happy. Yeah. I'm going to leave it there. There's so many tones on that I don't need to go into.
 
Meghan: Okay. The biggest lie you've ever been told. Or the best lie you've ever told. We both look at Al.
 
Al: Okay — biggest lie I ever told, Meghan, was that I was running a legal off-license that delivered alcohol. When in actual fact, what I'd done is basically ordered everything for every single person in the world and printed out an order sheet. I had literally hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper. So if the police came in and said, "Why did Meghan order three bottles of wine?" I'd go, "Give me a minute, I'll go find it." And I proved it. That's probably the biggest lie I've ever told.
 
Meghan: This was to get around licensing restrictions.
 
Al: Sorry — yes, I should have given that context. That's also very niche because that's English licensing law from like 2001. Who cares about that? The point is, the licensing man said no. And I went, "Hold my beer. I will print out every possible order should I ever get audited." If you can imagine me as a much more British, not as good-looking, slightly less cool Mike Ross from Suits — that was my role in that business.
 
Leanne: I'm not sure anyone told me this, but I think it's a lie that I believed to be a thing — that psychologists have to be very professional and put-together and speak well and not swear and remember the big words and present themselves to the world in an Oxford, Cambridge, Ivy League way. I've learned very recently that that's a lie. People want authenticity — how it is. And I don't use the big words, because I can't remember them. And I'm from the north of England, so I don't sound posh and fancy. But hopefully I can talk about psychology in a way that makes sense to people who aren't psychologists.
 
Meghan: Most outdated work norm or practice that you wish people would change.
 
Leanne: Myers-Briggs. Myers-Briggs. Please, for the love of everything in the world — can we put Myers-Briggs in the bin already, please?
 
Al: Yes, I think you know what Leanne feels about that. I would probably say the whole return-to-office thing — where offices in certain cases do make a big difference, if you're in a very creative environment where you need to be around people. Mad Men, for example, wouldn't have worked if they all worked at home.
The permission slip
Meghan: If you were to give people a permission slip to unbehave around anything — a societal script, a workplace script, whatever — what is the permission slip you wish you could give people to stop behaving in one certain way?
 
Leanne: Stop behaving in the way you think other people expect. Whether it's in your life, your career, where you live, how you work, what you do. Stop trying to make decisions based on what you think other people think is right or is the norm. So — you have my permission slip: make decisions based on what YOU want and what works for you and your values and the way you want to live. Do that.
 
Al: Wow. I cannot beat that. So I'm just going to add the tiny thing of — if you say, "I'm going to go and live in [not Bali, but] Lombok, or something. I'm going to go for nine months to Germany," and the voice that tells you you're wrong and it's a stupid idea — try and identify whose voice that is. Because if that's your parents, that's your grandparents, that's a friend — that's probably the person who's holding you back the most.
 
Permission to pursue the stupid ideas.
 
Meghan: Look at that mic drop.
Where to find them
Meghan: We've mentioned the podcast many times. Where do people find you? How do people best support you?
 
Al: Basically just search online — Truth, Lies and Work. We come up any way you look. The website's truthliesandwork.com. Spotify or wherever you get your podcast, search for Truth, Lies and Work. And more importantly — go search for Leanne Elliott on LinkedIn, because she is the LinkedIn queen. She responds to every single comment, good or bad. Don't search for me. Eventually, it sometimes takes me a little while — but that's where you should go.
 
Meghan: Thank you, thank you, thank you.
 
Al & Leanne: Thank you so much for having me. Amazing questions. We love you so much. We do love you so much.
 
Meghan: I love you guys.
[Meghan — Outro / Unbehaved Lessons of the Day]
 
Alright, my friend — before I sign off for the day, here are my key Unbehaved Lessons that I took away from today's episode.
 
Number one: sometimes that "fuck this" moment is the most important career decision you're ever gonna make. Al's moment sitting in front of the deputy headmaster at age 19, hearing about his £28,000 future and firmly saying "nope," is pretty much the seed of what he and Leanne have built — the ability to listen to that voice inside of you that pushes back and tells you something is wrong or not for you, no matter what you feel like you should be doing.
 
Number two: authenticity is the name of the game. Al put it best: "The way we talk on the microphone is the way we talk in real life." That's what draws people to their show. Every attempt to manufacture a more professional version of yourself is a barrier between you and the people who would actually resonate with you. This is how they built the UK's #1 management podcast — by refusing to sound like every other management podcast out there. Leanne's closing line speaks to this as well: "Stop behaving in the way you think other people expect. Make decisions based on what YOU want, what works for you, and your values." That IS authenticity. It's the whole shift. Every big decision that changed their lives came from letting go of seeking external approval.
 
Number three: true success is built on being relational instead of transactional. Leanne talking about how nothing is wasted, especially when it's in service of other people or helping someone else — you never know when it's gonna come back around. Think of it as paying into that bank account with goodwill. Every relationship you nurture without expectation of return compounds and creates a better future for you AND the other person you're helping.
 
Number four: when you're in the trenches building something new and it starts to feel hard — the key steps they brought up were: fall in love with what you're doing, make sure you're having fun, strive for continual improvement (just getting 1% better each time), and do it your own way.
 
That's all for today. If you liked the episode, maybe share it with someone who needs it. And check out Truth, Lies and Work and Unbehaved on any major podcast platform. And maybe even subscribe or write something nice. It would make my entire damn day.
 
Until next time.
 

Deb Liu — former CEO of Ancestry, creator of Facebook Marketplace, and a household name in the tech industry — spent decades being underestimated in every room she walked into.
In this episode of Unbehaved, she shares exactly how she unlearned the "play small, stay safe" survival strategy that shaped her early career, and the deliberate practices she used to become a leader who now owns the room.
If you've ever been talked over in a meeting, struggled to speak up for yourself, or watched someone else get credit for your idea, this episode is for you.
WHAT WE COVER:
Why "playing small" starts as a survival strategy but stops working at a certain point
How anyone can learn to own a room, regardless of their personality
What happened when a room of women in tech decided to "make it awkward" and stop being ignored 
The Secret Bias no one talks about — and how it silences the smartest people in the room
Why self-advocacy is actually an act of generosity (not self-promotion)
The Supreme Court research on female justices being interrupted — and how they fixed it
Why Deb went public about her breast cancer diagnosis (and the 100K-reaction LinkedIn post that followed)
The origin of "The Blank Name Tag Club" and Deb's Reset / Reflect / Reimagine framework for career transitions
The permission slip: rewriting the story before it rewrites you
ABOUT THE GUEST
Deb Liu is the author of Take Back Your Power and is currently writing her next book about navigating career and life transitions. Her companion Substack piece for this episode dropped today at debliu.substack.com.

A few weeks ago, I laid down on a futon in Denver, drank orange juice with three grams of psilocybin in it, and spent eight hours next to a licensed therapist named Mikki Vogt. I recently told you what happened for me during that session. This week, you get to meet the woman who held the container.
Mikki Vogt is a licensed counselor, co-founder of one of Colorado's first licensed psilocybin healing centers, and one of the people who co-wrote the safety screening protocols for psilocybin-assisted therapy now used across Colorado and Oregon. Before she was any of that, she spent years working in prisons and community mental health before deciding to start facilitating psilocybin sessions as a harm reduction provider. Before it was legal. When it could have cost her everything.
This is Mikki's first podcast interview. She's spent years training other facilitators and building the regulatory framework other states are now adopting. But this is the first time she's sat down for a long-form public conversation about how psilocybin therapy actually works, why it seems to break through what traditional therapy can't, and what it really takes to make this field safe.
In this conversation, we get into why she made the call to do this work before it was legal, why traditional talk therapy hits a ceiling that psychedelic-assisted therapy seems to break through, the story of a young man who'd had daily seizures for 17 years and what happened during his psilocybin session with her, what a bad trip actually is versus a challenging one, and why the model of legal psilocybin therapy that we're building in this country — the model Mikki helped write — needs public support to survive. 
If you listened to Part 1 and wondered how any of this is actually possible, this is the episode that answers that question. And if you haven't heard Part 1 and are just curious about the current landscape and real benefits of psilocybin-assisted therapy, you'll walk away with everything you need to understand what's happening in this field right now.
 
WHAT YOU'LL WALK AWAY WITH
Why Mikki risked her professional license to facilitate psilocybin sessions before it was legal
Why traditional talk therapy hits a ceiling that psychedelic-assisted therapy seems to break through — the rational vs. felt-sense framework
The story of a young man who'd had daily seizures for 17 years and what happened during his psilocybin session with Mikki
What a bad trip actually is versus a challenging experience
The three tiers of adverse events every legitimate facilitator should be trained on
How Colorado built the first regulated psilocybin therapy framework — and what New Mexico and Oregon are doing differently
The specific questions to ask a potential facilitator before you commit
Who psilocybin therapy is NOT for
Why the model needs public support to survive — and how you can help
ABOUT THE GUEST
Mikki Vogt is a licensed professional counselor, licensed addictions counselor, and natural medicine facilitator with a master's degree in forensic psychology. She's the co-founder and clinical director of one of Colorado's first licensed psilocybin healing centers, has facilitated 300-500 psilocybin sessions over the last five years, and co-authored the standardized safety screening protocols now used across Colorado and adopted in Oregon. She trains other facilitators in psilocybin-assisted therapy through her work with the Psychedelic Public Policy Partnership. She lives in Colorado with her husband and two children. You can find more about her and her work at neuroalchemycenter.com.
PULL QUOTES
"I called my mom and I said, Mom, I just had the most professionally and personally affirming experience of my entire life. I feel like I have finally found where I'm supposed to be, what I was born to do, what my life's purpose and calling is."
"If regulatory agencies don't like the way that I'm doing it, then maybe I don't need the regulatory agency. And that was kind of — I don't know if that was stupid or courageous, or maybe a little bit of both."
"I know I'm smart. I know I'm likable. I know I'm worthy of taking up space. People tell them to me every day. And there is a part of me that knows that rationally to be true. But the belief system that I have developed in experiential, repetitive, time-based learning throughout my life is I'm not worthy, I'm not lovable, everybody will abandon me, and I will never be somebody's first pick."
"Psychedelics are unique in that they seem to be this bridge between what I rationally know insightfully up in my brain and what I at a gut instinct, gut level, feel to be true."
"You can't take the medicine out of the ecosystem and expect it to do the same thing. We need to remember that what we're trying to do is rejoin the ecosystem — we're shifting, not the medicine."
"It's as if I can see an entity or a form trying to push the seizure toward my body." (from the seizure patient during his psilocybin session) 
"Any time I go to journey, I'm nervous as fuck. Like, my gosh. And that's great — because that's our nervous system doing its job. It's a reminder that I am functioning the way I'm supposed to function."
"We are self-healing systems — biologically, physiologically, emotionally, soulfully, spiritually. That's how we were created. And we live in a self-healing ecosystem, our world." 
"If we want this to be safe, we need to make it familiar. What makes things unsafe is a lack of familiarity."
"It's the mushrooms. Like, you find the person you're connected with who you can trust to keep you safe. But the awareness gained, the insight, the self-love and acceptance — that's your inner healer and the mushrooms. That has nothing to do with me."
 
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Cold open: "the most professionally and personally affirming experience of my life"
00:28 — Welcome + episode setup
02:13 — Mikki's origin story: her first facilitated session
03:59 — From forensic psychology to prisons and community mental health
08:30 — Discovering psychedelic research and starting private practice
10:12 — Facilitating psilocybin sessions before it was legal
13:12 — Why she risked her practice to do this work
15:21 — Why traditional therapy hits a ceiling: rational vs. felt-sense
19:16 — What the research is showing
22:00 — Why we need to rejoin the ecosystem
23:57 — The seizure story: 17 years of daily seizures
28:52 — The second session and integration
31:00 — Bridging the sacred and the clinical
33:38 — Meghan's fear of vulnerability
35:00 — Mikki's response: "I'm nervous as fuck"
38:04 — Prep and integration protocol
40:58 — Adverse events and the three tiers of safety
43:00 — Bad trip vs. challenging experience
44:43 — How Colorado built the psilocybin program
49:15 — Mikki's role in co-writing the safety protocols
49:34 — Why psilocybin isn't more accessible
53:17 — Business leaders and the mental health thesis
54:44 — How to help others step into this work
57:00 — The funding critique
59:37 — How people can support the work
 
RESOURCES MENTIONED
Colorado Proposition 122 (2022) — the framework that made regulated psilocybin therapy legal in Colorado
Oregon Measure 109 (2020) — the first state to launch a legal psilocybin program
Senate Bill 290 (Colorado Natural Medicine Health Act) — the legislation Mikki helped shape
Healing Advocacy Fund — the primary organization advocating for psilocybin therapy access
Psychedelic Public Policy Partnership (PPPP) — the volunteer coalition Mikki works with
Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics — psychedelics.berkeley.edu/law
David Anka — referenced for his framing of psilocybin as reconnection with the soul
Companion episode:
Part 1 — Why I'm a Mom Who Does Drugs: My Legal Psilocybin Therapy Journey — Meghan's solo episode telling her own story from the inside
Written versions on Meghan's Substack:
Part 1 — To Shroom or Not to Shroom?
Part 2 — Why I'm a Mom Who Does Drugs
 
CONNECT WITH MEGHAN + UNBEHAVED
Subscribe to the Unbehaved Substack: meghanfrenchdunbar.substack.com
Meghan on LinkedIn: Meghan French Dunbar
Meghan on Instagram: @meghanfrenchdunbar
The Book — This Isn't Working: meghanfrenchdunbar.com/book
 
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Lightly cleaned for readability. Filler words, false starts, and transcription artifacts removed. Mikki's and Meghan's voices preserved throughout.
[Cold Open — Mikki]
The first time I ever did a facilitated session for somebody — at the end of the session, when she was gone, I'm packing my stuff. I get in the car, and tears just started streaming down my face. And I called my mom and I said, Mom, I just had the most professionally and personally affirming experience of my entire life. I feel like I have finally found where I'm supposed to be, what I was born to do, what my life's purpose and calling is.
 
[Meghan — Welcome]
Welcome to Unbehaved. I'm Meghan French Dunbar, and you just heard from the incredible Mikki Vogt. And if you listened to Part 1 of the series last week — yes, this is that Mikki. If you haven't had a chance to listen to the previous episode yet, Mikki is the facilitator who did my psilocybin-assisted therapy session that I detail in Part 1. But Mikki's story is so much bigger than my experience with her. 
Mikki is a licensed counselor and entrepreneur, co-founder of one of Colorado's first licensed psilocybin healing centers, and one of the people who literally co-wrote the safety screening protocols used in Colorado for psilocybin-assisted therapy that have now been adopted in Oregon as well. Before she was any of that, she spent years working in prisons, then in community mental health, before deciding to start facilitating psilocybin sessions as a harm reduction provider. But that was before it was even legal — when it could have cost her everything. 
In this conversation, we get into why she made that call. Why traditional therapy hits a ceiling that psychedelic-assisted therapy seems to break through. The story of a young man who'd had daily seizures for 17 years and what happened during his psilocybin session with her. What a bad trip actually is versus a challenging one. And why the model of legal psilocybin therapy that we're building in this country — the model Mikki helped write — needs public support to survive.
If you've been listening to Part 1 and wondering how any of this is actually possible, this is the episode that answers that question. And even if you haven't listened to Part 1 and are just curious about the current landscape and benefits of psilocybin-assisted therapy, you'll learn everything you want to know and more in this episode.
Let's get into it. 
The origin story — Mikki's first facilitated session
Meghan: Mikki, Mikki, Mikki. My experience with you is that you are doing the thing that you are lit up about. You're passionate about it, you're excellent at it, and you care about it. How did you come to be in this very unique profession? 
Mikki: That is a great question.
I am lit up about it. I'm super passionate about it. It feels like for the last five or six years, I've been living, breathing, sleeping, eating this. And I remember the first time I ever did a facilitated session for somebody. It had been a client of mine who knew it was the first time for me and trusted me to hold that container for her — which was in and of itself just beautiful. And I remember at the end of the session, when she was gone, I'm packing my stuff. I get in the car, and tears just started streaming down my face. And I called my mom and I said, Mom, I just had the most professionally and personally affirming experience of my entire life. I feel like I have finally found where I'm supposed to be, what I was born to do, what my life's purpose and calling is.
That was probably about six years ago now. And I had told myself, not everyone you do is going to be like this. Over time, it's not going to be as exciting, it's not going to feel the same way. And I was so wrong. Every single one of these I do is beautiful and profound. The connection I have with the journeyer is probably one of the greatest gifts I'll ever experience. And getting to witness such a sacred experience for them is just such an honor. 
Every single one, it fills me up. I'm super jazzed. I'm rejuvenated. I come home on a total high. And I haven't even touched the medicine myself.
So I absolutely love what I do. I would have never thought that I would be here.
From forensic psychology to prisons
My master's degree is in forensic psychology. And so when I first started working in the field, I was primarily working in prisons, jails, correctional facilities, community re-entry programs — working with really severe pervasive mental illness, dual diagnosis, co-occurring substance abuse disorders, incarceration, all of that kind of stuff. High rates of recidivism, high rates of homelessness, high rates of emergency system use. 
So I got to work with the real nitty-gritty. And in doing so, I got to create these amazing relationships with populations that are so typically unseen and disregarded and stigmatized. In getting to work with these individuals, it really was a reminder that we are all just human — trying to survive, trying to make our way through this planet and the life that we're dealt. 
These people are just like you and me. They have learned a set of coping responses. They have learned how to survive in a way that keeps them moving forward. And while the behaviors they've chosen might be maladaptive and cause a lot of consequences, the need is relevant. If we can see them as humans with relevant needs that are the same as yours and mine, all of a sudden they're not this bad, terrible person. They're somebody who has been wounded by society and needs repair. Needs support. Needs to be seen. Needs love and affection and attention.
When they start to receive that, it's a completely different version of them that you get to work with. That was just a totally amazing experience for me, and really confirmed why I do this work.
At some point, I did get really tired of going to prison every day for work. I am a colorful person. I'm very bubbly. And it really started to wear on me — going through the whole check-in process, hearing the gates and the bars closing behind me, being in this drab, poorly lit place. It got to be a bit overwhelming, and I started to burn out. Which wasn't fair to the people I was working with.
Transitioning to community mental health
So I decided to transition into community mental health — high-intensity treatment settings and community-based services. Very similar populations, still did a lot of the community re-entry stuff. Where I was getting to work with people I had worked in corrections with as they were coming out. Supporting them in stabilization, mental health treatment, housing, vocational support. 
That was where I really got to see the power of interdisciplinary wraparound services and how important community is, in general, for health and wellness. 
During this period, I started tracking all of the research going on with MDMA and veterans and PTSD. I was blown away by some of the outcomes we were seeing. I was facing a reality that I really wanted to work in that psychedelic realm, but was not going to be able to do so within community mental health — that's all state government funding and evidence-based practices, and that's not where psychedelics were at the time.
So I started to develop my own private practice on the side. Not working with psychedelics yet — just building a practice, learning how to manage it, figuring out the ins and outs of being a business owner. Because as a clinician, I'm not inherently an entrepreneur — which people find very surprising when they meet me and are like, wow, you own three businesses. That's definitely been the hard way. Which seems to be my forte: doing things the hard way.
Right before COVID, I fully transitioned to private practice. Never looked back. Got myself credentialed with insurance and Medicaid because I still wanted to promote accessibility. And then really dove into research on psychedelics — experimenting with my own relationship.
The underground practitioner experience
I got to have a really beautiful experience with an underground practitioner who held space for me. Such a transformative experience. I'd used mushrooms, MDMA, psychedelics before, and already knew there was something significant there. But then having that specific container being held in such an intentional way — I got to see what the outcomes can be when you bring intention and mindfulness into it, have the safe space to have the experience, and then really focus on integration afterwards. 
It's also an experience that taught me some of the risks of doing this in an unregulated setting. Coming to that as a clinician, I'm familiar with best practices and ethics, and wasn't seeing all of those being championed in that space. I felt like — okay, yes, I really want this for my clients, but I want to do this in a way that is ethical and safe.
So at that point I started hammering out my own safety screening protocols in alignment with what I'd been taught as a therapist and addictions counselor. Looking at the research about drug interactions, doing my best to screen out anybody that wasn't relevant for this. And at this time I only started to offer this to clients in my private practice who I'd been working with for quite some time. 
Meghan: Is it still technically illegal at this point?
Mikki: Technically, this was not yet decriminalized. And so I was doing this as a harm reduction provider as an addictions counselor. I would go into details with my clients about what that meant, what kind of services I was providing, clarity that I'm not the one giving them the medicine — the medicine is being sourced from somewhere else by them, and they're just asking me to sit with them for harm reduction purposes. All of those things to try to keep it as up-and-up as possible.
Why I risked my practice
When people were asking me, well, what if you get grieved? What if you get reported? I said, that's a risk I'm willing to take. Because at that point I was taking significant safety precautions, had consulted with other people to really understand the risks I was taking on when it came to health and wellness for the clients I was working with. 
At any point, the client being considered was only pursued if I felt very strongly that the potential benefits outweighed any obvious risks after doing all the screening and assessments. In the idea of taking an oath to do no harm, my thought was: if I've been working with a client for so long and they've tried treatment with me and treatment with others and different modalities and haven't gotten to where they want to be — and I've now screened them and shown that the risk of doing this is significantly low and the potential benefit is there — then would withholding something I know would work and wouldn't be harmful itself be doing harm? 
In my head, it felt like it would be. 
If I know something works, and I know they're eligible for it, and it's not going to put them in danger — why wouldn't we try it? Especially given psilocybin has such a high safety profile. It's one of the safest molecules we have. It's even safer than Benadryl. It doesn't have any risk of dependence. There's no risk of overdose. It's not going to give you stomach ulcers or ruin your kidneys like Tylenol. If we're so willing to put all these other things into our bodies without a second thought — why wouldn't we use a natural medicine, plant medicine that is shown to have one of the highest safety profiles? 
It just didn't make a lot of sense to me. So that's where I decided: I came here to do a job. I came here to help people and support people and see them as a person, not just a file or a client number. And I'm going to continue doing that. And if regulatory agencies don't like the way I'm doing it, then maybe I don't need the regulatory agency. 
And that was kind of — I don't know if that was stupid or courageous. Or maybe a little bit of both.
Meghan: Those are the best decisions, in my opinion. And this is the first time I'm hearing this story. I feel in awe of what you did, because you were so convinced of the efficacy of this and you understood the risks and you understood the literature — but you were putting your own private practice on the line to do this.
Mikki: It took — yeah, it took... I mean, there were definitely moments where I was questioning why am I doing this? And what kept coming back to me was: because I really believe in this.
I didn't start doing it with people until after I'd already received training. At that point we didn't have DORA-approved training programs, but there were absolutely training providers out there for harm reduction purposes providing courses in psilocybin and harm reduction services. So I did a lot of training from various different providers. A lot of apprenticing, shadowing, seeing how other people were doing it. A lot of understanding of the indigenous roots of the medicine — what does ceremony mean, who am I and who am I not, what is my own lineage with natural medicine.
I really explored all of those things before ever feeling like I was in a position where I could confidently do this with somebody else. So by the time I did start doing it, I felt pretty convinced: if I'm going to get reported or grieved, I have a good argument. And if they decide they're not on the bandwagon with this, then I'll find a different way to make a living. 
I don't know. I say that out loud and I'm like — and I'm a mom and a wife, and they probably were not very appreciative that I was willing to risk everything.
Why traditional therapy hits a ceiling
Meghan: That also speaks to how powerful this is. You talked about your first time facilitating and calling your mom and crying. What did you experience in those first few sessions in terms of the healing that people were able to do that felt so different than all the work you'd done before? 
Mikki: What I was getting to see is — in traditional therapy, even when we start using somatic experiencing therapies like EMDR, where we're really trying to approach the whole system, not just the cognitive approach — it seemed like you would get to this point where we have the insight. 
I know I'm smart. I know I'm likable. I know I'm worthy of taking up space. I know I can be successful. I know I'm competent. I know I'm significant. I know these things up here. People tell them to me every day. And there is a part of me that knows that rationally to be true. 
But the belief system that I have developed in experiential, repetitive, time-based learning throughout my life is not the insight. The belief system is: I'm not worthy. I'm not lovable. Everybody will abandon me. I will always have to try again. I will never be somebody's first pick. 
Right? That's the felt-sense belief. Which is ultimately what ends up guiding the way we experience ourselves, others, and the world around us. We see everything through this colored lens of the belief system — not of rational insight. There's this disconnect. 
EMDR seems to get us a little bit closer to bridging those two things, but I was still finding that clients were falling short. Maybe I'm just not doing the EMDR effectively — I don't want to blame any modality for not working. There are so many great modalities out there. But I think psychedelics specifically are unique in that they seem to be this bridge between what I rationally know insightfully up in my brain and what I at a gut instinct, gut level, feel to be true. In my nervous system, in my body, in my heart, in my soul.
When we can bridge those two things, all of a sudden I'm able to experience myself, others, and the world around me in a completely different light. I'm able to engage with information that has always been up there, but see it in so many different ways. My consciousness now has become so expanded that I can consider so many different things and choose what I want for myself. Not feel like I've got these blinders on that only allow me to see one path forward.
That's what I think is so profound about psychedelics. And what I love is that the research is showing this. It's going in and creating this high level of entropy or chaos in the brain, which is allowing us to break free of all these rigid belief patterns, neural pathways, and connections that dictate how we organize information about the world and ourselves. We ascend above that. We get to see everything as fluid and say — how would I like to organize information moving forward? Not this is the way, I have to believe this. 
Sometimes that's small things. Sometimes that's huge things — the philosophical meaning of life versus the routine I want to engage with every morning. 
Acknowledging these other modalities, I really think that psychedelics is one more tool in our tool belt that should be used in conjunction with other approaches to transformation, healing, expanded consciousness. If you're going to get trained in something like IFS or somatic experiencing, why not also get trained in this? It's not for everybody, in the same way that those modalities are not for everybody. It's just one more tool.
What the research is showing
Meghan: All right, I want to keep going on the research part. Is there anything research-wise that blew you away at the start that you were like, I have to engage with this? What is the research telling us? 
Mikki: I was really lucky in that I got to work as a therapist on the CU Anschutz clinical trials focusing on using psilocybin to address depression and existential distress related to end-of-life and cancer diagnoses. That's where I really got to see how this addresses more existential experiencing — the things that contribute to some of the distress we walk through life with. 
What is the meaning of life? What does it mean to live a full life? What does it mean to die? What is a legacy? What do I believe happens next? What do I believe makes this life worth it? Who do I want to be in this world? How do I want to be remembered? 
All of those things come up in these sessions when that's the intention. And in that clinical setting, it was profound. I got to witness people going from this place of severe depression and just devastation and defeat to feeling like they could go through the active stage of dying — because that's just one stage of our cyclical life — with agency, with hope, with optimism about what that process was going to look like, how it was going to feel, what values they were championing during that process. 
They weren't just focused on the end. They were focused on processing time left. That really changes a lot of things for people. 
The other thing with the research: these individuals are coming in with a significant sense of hope, and in these double-blind, random control trials, they may or may not be getting the medicine. There's a fifty percent chance they're going to end up in the placebo group. So it was also a reminder of how hopeful other people are — that even at that point in life, they're willing to engage with this, not knowing what outcome will be for them, just because they're hopeful enough. 
That's a big chunk of the research — end-of-life palliative care. But we're also seeing research in PTSD, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, traumatic brain injury. Dementia and Alzheimer's. Chronic pain management like fibromyalgia and chronic pain from injury. Regaining movement after paralysis from West Nile virus. Seizure disorders. 
There's research coming out about so many different areas that when people say, what can you use this for?, I'm starting to find the list is shorter to acknowledge what we probably couldn't use this for. Which is exciting. 
I say that with a caveat: these medicines have been stewarded by peoples for thousands and thousands of years. It's an ancient wisdom and an ancient practice. And the molecule is not doing this alone.
Rejoining the ecosystem
In all of these settings, but specifically in the original — the OG, where did this come from — what makes this profound is the community. It's the preparation, the container, the integration happening afterward. It's the connection with self and others. It's experiencing that you matter in a greater system, that people see you, and that your transformation is worthy of being witnessed. 
When you look at indigenous cultures who have been doing this — we talk about prep and integration. It's not talked about there, not because it's absent, but because that's the lived experience. They do this in a communal setting with family members, with community members. Their living preparation, then their living integration. It's built in. They wouldn't consider doing this outside of that. They wouldn't consider just going into the doctor, taking it, and then going home and not talking to anybody about it. 
We use this language — prep, integration — as a way to streamline this into the system we're familiar with. But we have to understand that we can't use natural medicines, which work in an ecosystem we are a part of, and expect to take the medicine out of the ecosystem and have it do the same thing. We need to remember that what we're trying to do is rejoin the ecosystem. We're shifting — not the medicine.
The seizure story
Meghan: You mentioned epilepsy. And at the end of our session together, you were telling my husband and me a story about a gentleman you worked with with epilepsy. I would love to help bring the research to life a little bit. Can you help us understand what happened? 
Mikki: Yes — and I want to put out there, this is anecdotal. And it's profound. 
This gentleman contracted an infection — an illness that turned into a brain infection at the age of 10 or 11. With that, he started experiencing severe seizures. Five, six seizures a day. Full seizures. Totally disruptive to his life.
His family took him to doctors and treatment teams. He went through all this imaging. Different medical teams were in disagreement about the origin site of the seizures. You'd think they would have approached this with conservatism since the boy was so young and they didn't really know what was going on. Unfortunately, what we think should happen is not always what happens. This poor gentleman went through three brain resections and five depth probes — all before he was 13 years old. 
It did not make anything better. It only made things worse. It severely slowed down his cognitive processing. It made it so he couldn't get through a whole day of school. It really disrupted life. 
Now he's in his late 20s. He's been dealing with this for 15 to 17 years — daily seizures.
He tried different medications. He finally got on a medication that reduced the seizures down to two or three a day. Significant improvement, but still not great. And then his neurologist had been reading about psilocybin and the potential of what it's doing. His neurologist and his parents reached out to me and said, how do you feel about working with him? We know you can't guarantee anything, but per what the neurologist was reading, it might be interesting to try to do this once every three months and see what might happen. 
So I started working with this individual. We did a lot of prep. For this individual, it wasn't like two prep sessions and then we're in. We did a lot of prep. I got to know him, his family, his story, his background — what his dreams and aspirations were, what supports were already available, what he wanted life to look like moving forward. Truly amazing individual. 
We got to his first administration session, December 2025. I had gone over the safety plan and emergency response plan for if a seizure starts during the session. His mom stayed on site. I had direct contact with his neurologist. We had all the safety things in place. 
We get an hour in, and he is smiling and relaxed in ways I've never gotten to witness him in the last several months. It was beautiful. 
Because of that, we're like, let's go ahead and do the booster. So we give him a small booster dose. And within about 15 minutes of giving him the booster, I witness his body seize and just lock up. He does this quick inhale. And I'm thinking in my head, oh God, here we go. I'm getting really nervous. 
Per our safety plan, his mom had said, don't administer the emergency medicine until the seizure has lasted longer than five minutes. So I see him lock up. I see the breath. I see his eyes glaze. And I start the timer. 
Here's what's interesting. Up to this point he had been talking to me with his eyes closed. And he said: "It's as if I can see an entity or a form trying to push the seizure toward my body." And then he seized. He locked up. He starts to seize and twitch. 
Eight seconds go by.
And it stops. He breathes out. And he says: "And I'm able to just push the form away from my body, and it pushes the seizure out." 
And then he dropped back into his journey. 
Which had nothing to do with his seizures. He journeyed for the next six hours with no seizure at all. Completely calm. His body completely relaxed. His hands — he had one hand that was really tight and painful. By the end, it was completely loose and he was using it, saying my gosh, my hand.
Between that session and March, which is when we did his second session, he had one seizure. One. 
We did his second administration in March. Almost the exact same thing happened. First hour in, everything's great. I give him a booster. About seven minutes after the booster, we see the seizure onset. I start the timer. Eleven seconds in, it's finished. And he drops back into his journey.
I've been doing ongoing integration with him, working with his neurologist. It's an ongoing care plan. He's got a lot of wraparound support. He's in vocational stuff, art, a coding program. Part of that integration is that while he's in that state of neuroplasticity, we're really putting in all the other supports that are going to benefit him in learning new skills and starting new behaviors. And it's just been profound. The outcome — he's now in a coding program. He's teaching art classes. It's really amazing. Truly amazing.
Meghan: With the seizure he had between the first and second sessions, even though he wasn't using the medicine — was it still the same experience for him where he could see the entity and push it away? 
Mikki: Yes. Yes. In integration I had him draw out the entity — the form he had seen. It was like this metal sphere thing. He drew it out, and we started doing imagery exercises. When he starts to feel the aura or the tremors — because there's always some kind of sign — he starts imagining the form he saw in the journey bringing the seizure to his body. And he immediately starts this imagery of pushing back toward it, both physically and energetically.
The seizure he had between sessions, we think was actually brought on by significant heat. He was at the gym, sitting in the sauna. But that one lasted for maybe two minutes, and then he was fine.
Bridging the sacred and the clinical
So this is where I like to acknowledge — we need to bridge the sacred with the clinical. 
I think that's a really good example. We can say we're going to be able to see a lot through science. Through imaging, blood work, pre- and post-measurements, assessments, evaluations. That's amazing. And ultimately, there is something at work here that is ancient and profound and sacred that I truly believe will never be caught in an image, will not be caught in a random control trial. There is something greater that happens when you reconnect with Earth and the ecosystem you're a very natural part of.
When we're in right relationship with the system we originated from, that in and of itself is going to change how we're experiencing self and the world and our health and wellness. 
We know that mindset is profound. We look at a lot of research where cancer patients who have a really hopeful mindset and do a lot of visualization during chemo — their prognosis is better, they have better outcomes. Whereas those who go into it with a really poor mindset and have succumbed to defeat don't get the same results.
There is this piece of how connected do I feel with this? How much do I believe in it? And also realizing again — it's not just the molecule. It is our relationship with it and what we're willing to do. Are we willing to be a contributing party to our self-healing?
Are we willing to acknowledge and return to the reality that we are self-healing systems? Biologically, physiologically, emotionally, soulfully, spiritually — we are self-healing systems. That's how we were created. We live in a self-healing ecosystem, our world.
It's only been in recent hundreds of years that we've started to externalize this source of expertise — on how many letters are at the end of somebody's name, so they can tell me about me instead of my body and my mind and my soul telling me about me. Now I need somebody who's gone through eight years of medical school and who doesn't know me, but they're going to tell me about me. 
Instead of saying, no. You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna work with this natural medicine that is of the earth, that has really low risk to it, and I'm going to unlock communication with that medicine with my inner healing wisdom. And the medicine and my inner healer are going to do for me what needs to be done. And they're gonna show me what I need to do to use insight and awareness gained and turn it into embodied lasting change. 
That's the work that I will do.
Meghan's fear of vulnerability
Meghan: So I did a journey with you, and I've talked to quite a few people about it because for me it was profound. When I talk to people about this, a lot of people say — I want to contribute to my self-healing, but I'm afraid of letting go of control.
I understand that. Especially if you've never even experimented with these things recreationally. Which I had beforehand — so I had some level of comfort. And I was like — so Mikki, you're saying you're going to give me the largest dose of mushrooms I've ever had in my entire life, and then I'm going to sit with you in a room for six to eight hours while you are stone cold sober, and be just tripping balls and like the most vulnerable version of myself. And you're just going to sit there and watch me?
I was like, I am not comfortable with that level of vulnerability. And you were like, this is what I do. You helped me work through it. So for the folks who are on the I don't want to let go of control, I'm terrified of being that vulnerable in front of another human train — what do we say to them?
Mikki: I would say — that checks out. You're human. 
If you're not nervous at all about this experience, I kind of ask you — are you familiar with what we will be doing? 
Even in my shoes, when I think about being the journeyer, no matter how many times I've done this — facilitated or journeyed myself — any time I go to journey, I'm nervous as fuck. Like, my gosh. 
Even in my head, there's that rational part, the insightful part that says, Mikki, you've done this, you're familiar with it, you know what it is, you're gonna come out on the other side. But then there's the felt sense that's like — but I'm giving up control, and I don't know where I'm going to go, and I don't know what I'm going to see, and I don't know if I feel equipped for that. 
And I don't. It's all the uncertainty that inherently breeds anxiety. And that's great, because that's our nervous system — from an IFS perspective, our protectors doing their job to protect us. It's a reminder that I am functioning the way I'm supposed to function. 
In that place, I say — it's good that you're nervous. It means that you're invested in this. You care about your wellness and well-being. You want to be careful that you're not doing something in which the risk outweighs any benefit.
That's why I'm here. My role is to promise that I'm going to do everything I can — screening-wise, preparation-wise, day-of and follow-up — to ensure that you're having the safest experience possible. That we're minimizing as much harm and discomfort as possible. Giving you a safe container in which you can shift your relationship with distress. So that that idea of not always being in control is not as scary moving forward.
Not being in total control in and of itself is not a life threat. Is it anxiety-provoking? For sure. There are a lot of variables I need to be prepared for that I don't control, but I need to be able to respond to. But when we can change our relationship to distress and say — distress in and of itself is not a bad thing. When I respond to distress effectively, the way I'm supposed to, distress is helpful — I don't need to get distressed that I'm distressed. 
That's the importance of prep.
What I'm hearing you say is — you don't trust me enough yet to be that vulnerable in front of me. That's fine. Let's do a few more sessions. What do you need to know about me? Would you like to meet here in the space where we're going to journey? What do you want to know about my background, my relationship with medicine? 
Let me walk you through the approach and what's going to happen the day of. What do you need to feel ready? What do your parts need to feel ready? What are your protectors saying they're concerned is going to happen? Let's address that directly, so that the whole system of you is coming on this journey — and that we are, for the first time in your life, not steamrolling any part of you and making them suck it.
Prep and integration protocol
Meghan: Such a way of putting things in a way that my brain is like — thank you. So my experience: we did three prep calls on Zoom where I literally came with notes. Here's all the intellectual insights I've done in six years of therapy. I have them in chronological order. Here's all my garbage. Then we did a full day of the plant medicine. I arrived at nine. I left around 3:30 when my husband picked me up. And then we did three integration Zoom calls afterwards. Is that pretty standard? 
Mikki: My bare minimum that I insist upon is two prep, two integration. The container, I think, is the most crucial part of this experience. How well are you prepping them for the experience so they can be equipped to navigate any uncertainty, any destabilization or dysregulation that happens. And then the integration — they know they have support, they can talk about the awareness gained, the confusion of anything that came up. They can create meaning. 
You work together to create a tangible plan for movement forward. How do I want to apply this awareness? What am I changing in a day-to-day that will help me embody greater change, a higher quality of life, a more fulfilling experience?
Minimum of two on each side. Ideally, I believe that three to four integrations is absolutely wonderful. And it's about having community. Even if you're not doing more than two to three integrations with me, we've got you set up in a community that supports you — where you have places and other people you can talk to about it and process through it. Whether that's another therapist, a coach, a yogi, a best friend, a community integration circle that meets once a month.
A community activity where you've got individuals who are like-minded, and as you're transforming and becoming what you want to be, a community that's going to support you in that — and not question why you need to change, but just cheerlead the change. 
Okay, I'm seen. I'm heard. There's a place for me to go, and I'm a part of something greater.
The integration is huge. The community piece — having a psychedelic family — I think is one of the most important parts. I've said this before: we're going to treat an individual over and over and over again. We're going to continue to do the same thing over and over until we treat the community that continues to wound the individual. If we're not approaching this in a community way, we're not learning anything from the medicine.
Adverse events and bad trip vs. challenging experience
Meghan: So how many journeys have you facilitated, and through all of those, have you ever had a negative response — health issues, calling the hospital, something very bad? 
Mikki: Over the last five years, I've probably facilitated somewhere between three to five hundred sessions. Some have been repeat journeys where we've done multiple sessions; some are people who only do it once or twice.
When it comes to adverse events, what I teach my learners is that there are three tiers you want to consider.
The first is acute expected effects of psilocybin. Things like transient high blood pressure, feelings of queasiness, feelings of anxiety, distress, crying, sadness, grief. Yes — in fact, I'm hoping some of these things happen for you so we can change your relationship with distress. I don't want you to have a terrible time. I want you to have a meaningful time. So I'm hoping for some of those things.
Then it's when you take a lot of those acute expected effects and they become very severe, or you've got a combination of them — sweating, higher blood pressure, flushing in the skin — where then I'm like, ooh, do we have a cardiovascular event risk right now? This is where you need to use clinical judgment, listen to your intuition, know their medical background and history, have done all the consulting and safety clearances. So you can determine when an acute effect combined with other things or heightened in severity becomes an adverse event where there needs to be some type of intervention. 
Then what takes that from an adverse event you're dealing with in the session to a reportable adverse event — calling DORA, calling EMS, getting outside emergency medical services involved. That would be a full-on adverse event. I've never — knock on wood — had to do that. 
If you're diligently following best practices and ethical standards, screening, considering background, asking about medications, asking the hard questions, and not facilitating through a scarcity mindset — meaning you're willing to say no to people — that's not going to happen. You've screened out the possibility for it to happen. So I've never had to deal with that. 
I think there's a difference between a bad trip and a challenging experience. And again — set and setting and prep and integration are the biggest factors that delineate between those two things. 
You're likely going to have a challenging experience with me. I hope you do. That's really what I want you to have.
What we do with that challenging experience is what makes it not a bad trip. The way I respond to you in your challenging experience and support you in that moment. What we do in integration with that experience — finding the meaning in it, how we're using the awareness gained. That's what makes it not a bad trip. 
A bad trip happens when we're not in a safe container. We don't have somebody who's holding space for our safety. We have mixed it with other substances. We haven't set an intention. We haven't gone through informed consent. We don't know what the risks are. We don't know how much we're taking. We don't know if the medicine is pure or what its potency is. We don't have mental health support. We have nobody to talk to afterwards.
That is the recipe for a bad trip. That's not what we work on in the regulated space.
How Colorado built the psilocybin program
Meghan: Speaking of the regulated space — I believe Colorado, Oregon, and New Mexico are the only places where we can do this at this point. How did this come to be? How are we so lucky to be in Colorado? And what was your role? 
Mikki: We passed Senate Bill 290 back in 2022. That established the Natural Medicine Health Act, which decriminalized psilocybin among four other natural plant medicines and set up an advisory board to create the regulated program. 
What sets us apart from New Mexico is that we don't do this in just a medical or clinical setting. You don't have to have a diagnosis to do this. There doesn't need to be a referral from a treatment provider. You can come for spirituality purposes, consciousness expansion, personal transformation. You don't need to be pathologized in order to be relevant.
I love that about how we've set that up. Psilocybin is not supposed to be a mental health medicine. It never was. It's not here to treat mental health. It's here to reconnect us with the soul that we are, and the light that we're here to shine — quoting David Anka. That's what psilocybin is supposed to do. It's not about resolving a diagnostic pathology. 
We started with that bill. Created the advisory board. Set up the regulations. Got the program started. It went live January 1st, 2025, when people were able to apply to be licensed facilitators. They could apply as natural medicine businesses to get licensed as healing centers, cultivators, manufacturers. You can get a licensed natural medicine handler license to provide support services in a healing center.
There are all these different roles you can play within the system. DORA oversees licensing for facilitators and training programs. The Natural Medicine Division at DOR oversees licensing for natural medicine businesses — healing centers, cultivators, manufacturers. So DOR is the business side. DORA is the individual side and the education side. Those two agencies have come together and are overseeing. 
We've also brought in Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. They do the data collection for the program and oversee licensing for testing labs. All regulated medicine goes through testing, so we understand the purity and potency of each thing and know exactly to the milligram how much medicine we're giving an individual, and how much of the other alkaloids are present.
Mikki's role in the safety protocols
I came into this having been working on the research at CU Anschutz. I became a part of an organization called the Psychedelic Public Policy Partnership — PPPP, lots of Ps. All volunteers, passionate about this, believing in it, volunteering our time. We started doing white papers and research to help advise and inform the advisory board on the regulatory rules and requirements. 
Then I took the safety screening I had already created in my private practice, and with two other volunteers — Erica Messenger and Kristen Speer, two women I have a lot of admiration for — we co-authored the standardized safety screening now used throughout Colorado and adopted by Oregon. Erica is in medicine and Kristen is in pharmacy, so they built out the pharmacological and medical areas while I continued to build out the mental health area. 
We really promoted that being something that was always going to be free and available — not a for-cost thing. We wanted to reduce anything that was going to increase barriers to access.
Now there's a board overseeing the updates and maintenance of that screening form. Because psychedelic research is moving quickly and we're learning new things every day. That form at the minimum is going to need to be updated on an annual basis. We've got this board committed to doing that.
Meghan: You volunteered to do this. You have your own business. You have kids. You are just like everyone else — very busy. And you believe in this so much that you decided, yeah, I'm going to volunteer my time to make sure this is as safe as possible. Thank you. Period. Thank you.
Why psilocybin isn't more accessible
Meghan: Why isn't this more accessible in the United States? Why are we one of the only states that has this? 
Mikki: There are a lot of reasons.
From a policy legal standpoint — we had the war on drugs and all these substances got put on the FDA's Schedule One. I could go into the politics and theories behind why psilocybin ended up on that list, but that's a completely different podcast episode. Psilocybin is considered a Schedule One substance by the FDA and so is federally illegal, and has not yet been rescheduled. So it's on a state-by-state basis that we're creating these acts and regulatory programs — that the state is approving under the awareness that federally, it's still illegal.
For doctors who hold DEA licenses, there's a level of liability and risk that some people are just not willing to take on. Which I completely understand. 
I also think there's a huge stigma against psychedelics because of the war on drugs era. The propaganda that was put out — ice cream scoops out of your brain, your brain melting into your spinal cord, this is your brain on drugs, the scrambled egg. That's not true. But we were so inundated with that. Previous generations were so inundated with those images and beliefs, that's what was taught to us: this is a drug, drugs are bad, this is going to kill you. 
Part of what we're having to do is this whole education initiative. Overcoming the false stigma, the false narratives about what this is, what we're doing, why it's useful, and the context in which it's relevant. 
You'll never hear me say this is not relevant in a fun social recreational setting. Psilocybin at a musical venue, listening to some soulful thing, is going to be extremely powerful and profound all on its own. Be with people you trust. Be in a safe setting. Know what you're doing beforehand. Get it from a trusted source. Test your medicine. All the things.
That is still a relevant experience. But it's acknowledging — you're not coming to your therapist's office or facilitator's office to party. That's not what's happening. Your facilitator is not engaging in the medicine with you. We're not raving. There are no light shows. You've prepped. We've come to intention. You've created a really deep connection with your facilitator, who is holding this safe container for you. And you're journeying inward.  
It's not about your external environment. You've got the eyemask on. You've got the headphones on. There's no wrong way to journey — you can take those off, it's fine, but it helps you drop in. You're journeying internally. You're going to places within you've never been before. You're peeling back the veil so you can see beyond the rigidity of what has been propagated unto you.
I think there are groups out there who do believe in some of the old information, and so they are afraid — afraid for their kids, for their animals, for their communities. I get it. We're afraid of the unknown. Understandable.
We just need to educate. And no — it's not for everybody. This medicine, like anything else, is not for everybody. There are some people who won't respond well to this and shouldn't be messing with it. They will find that out in the regulated setting. Whereas in the unregulated setting, there's a high risk they won't — until it's too late.
Business leaders and the mental health thesis
Meghan: The thing that comes over me when I bring this back to my work of business leaders and making work better is this statistic: 70% of people say that their manager or leader at work has as much or more of an impact on their mental health as their spouse does. And we have a lot of people heading into the workplace, in charge of other people, who have not done any healing work themselves. So they're bringing their own shit into the office. And that disproportionately impacts the people around them.
I've had people be like — my God, are you going to talk about this on the podcast? I'm like — absolutely. Because for me, when you talk about reconnecting with the soul — there were lingering pockets of deep insecurity that I have held, that I've been aware of, that I have not been able to extricate myself from through six years of therapy and EMDR and all these things. No matter what I do, I am still bringing those into professional spaces. How I respond to people. The way I'm showing up in the world.
If I can't heal those parts of myself, it is going to impact the people around me. We know it's effective. We're watching how much this is healing people. There's tons of data and research and anecdotal evidence. How do we convince other people? And I'm not being like — how do we browbeat people into doing this? But for someone listening who's like I don't know what people are going to think of me, but I'd like to try it — how do we help them step into this and do their own work in this way?
Mikki: It's things like what we're doing right now — talking about it openly and calmly and without fear. Having the recent legislation and policy and programs that have been created is a major help. It legitimizes and gives credibility to what we're doing here. It makes professionals more willing to speak freely about what they are and have been doing for a while.
We need to talk about this just like we talk about any other medication or substance — with ourselves, with our kids, with our coworkers, with teachers. 
If we want this to be safe, we need to make it familiar. What makes things unsafe is a lack of familiarity. Do I want my 16-year-old tripping on shrooms right now? Absolutely not. But do I want her to think that they're a drug to be partied with? No. I need her to be aware of what those things are before she goes to college. I want her to understand the sacred roots of this. I want her to understand this isn't a toy to play with. I want her to understand this is for profound self-transformation and expansion — and that when she's at a point in her life where she'd like to do that, this is available to her with no judgment, with support.
But I don't want her partying with it with her 16-year-old friends in the backyard. No.
The more we can talk about this like anything else we talk about and normalize it in that way, the more we reduce the stigma by increasing familiarity with what this is — and acknowledging what it isn't.
The more people we can get at the table, the more collaboration and community partnerships we have. That's how to steward this in a really safe way.
The funding critique
Which brings me back to your access question — why is this not more accessible? 
Because of the fear. Because of the legal setting. Right now there's no coverage for it, there's no funding for it. People are really scared. It's hard to even get insurance as a facilitator to do this work. Everything is really pricey because everybody sees this huge sense of liability and risk — because they're not understanding that when done effectively, prep is amazing. You just really need to make sure that your providers are doing prep and integration, and then you don't have to worry about what happens during the administration session. 
Because there is no funding, all of this is personally funded by those of us in the industry. If I want to go home and feed my family and be able to continue to sustain doing this, I have to charge out of pocket for it. And I have to charge for an entire day of my time, plus all the hours for prep, all the hours for integration. 
I have to pay for regulated medicine. Are mushrooms inexpensive to grow? They absolutely are. Can anybody grow their own mushrooms? They absolutely can, and I encourage you to do so. But to get them tested, cultivators are having to take huge portions of their flushes — a flush is what you gather from one harvest — to homogenize and send to the lab and have it all tested. They're paying for that. Then it gets sent back to them, and they have to pay for compliant packaging, driving it everywhere. All of that cost gets added to the medicine.
Then I have to pay for the medicine. I have to pay for my training. I have to pay for my licensing. 
Because this program is not funded — how are we paying the regulators overseeing the program? Through our licensing fees. As a healing center, I have to pay for a license. As an owner, I have to pay for a license. As a clinical facilitator, I have to pay for a license. As a training program, I have to pay for a license. And all of those licenses have to be renewed every single year.
On top of that, I have to pay for insurance, which right now is not less than $6,000 a year. For the majority of us, we're used to paying about $600 a year. 
When you look at all of these as annual expenses — and then I need the space to do this in — when we talk about why are the costs so high? People keep complaining that the costs are so high, it's inaccessible. Right now, until we get funding, until people understand what this is and get on this bandwagon, it's going to be hard to streamline and reduce costs. Because the people in the program are the people funding the program.
How to support the work
Meghan: All right. That'll bring us to our last question. Someone's listening — they don't live in Colorado or Oregon, and they're like I want to do the thing. Can they come to Colorado and do this? What's the future of the space? And how can people help make it so that you're not funding the whole damn thing yourself? 
Mikki: Yes, they can absolutely come to Colorado and do this. 
For supporting the work — I'd suggest going to the Healing Advocacy Fund website. There's a lot of information there on what this is, how to get involved, how to support the programs, what different states are doing. Great resource.
Inform yourselves. Inform your colleagues. If you run a group practice, invite a trained facilitator or a natural medicine educator to come in and inform your group practice on what it is and what type of clients they'd be referring to it.
Contribute to research if you're willing to be a research participant. All of the data from research is what we're giving to the FDA for rescheduling. The more likely we are to get it rescheduled, the more likely it is to get this covered by insurance, to demonstrate cost effectiveness.
For those of us who are already doing this — demonstrating how this has reduced expenditure on other high-level services that come from taxpayer money and other funding sources. So those funding sources say — hey, we're already spending this money, we're going to spend it on this because it's more efficient.
All those ways — we can start to gather and contribute to the evidence that this is more effective, more efficient, and less dangerous than almost anything else we have available to us. That's how we can get this in. And we need to understand the languages we're speaking depending on which audience is in front of us.
Closing
Meghan: Lovely humans — Mikki Vogt. I will just underscore how profound this was for me. For my husband. For our relationship. For our relationship with our children. For my entire life. And to hear just a smidge of what you have done to bring this to the world.
The individual experience I had with you was immense. I literally saw you in person last night and ran up to you and hugged you like I was embracing my long-lost friend. It deepened the connection I have with you. It deepened the connection I have with myself. It is profound. I have a deep and unending well of gratitude for all that you have done to bring this to space and to help people. It is incredible. 
So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Mikki: I am so glad. I'm so glad. That makes my heart sing. It was so beautiful to see last night. That connection is so real. And imagine that being so much greater amongst so many more people — what our world would be like.
So yeah. I just thank you. I'm glad the experience was so amazing for you.
And it's the mushrooms, right? Like — you find the person you're connected with who you can trust to keep you safe. But the awareness gained, the insight, the self-love and acceptance — that's your inner healer and the mushrooms. That has nothing to do with me.
 

A few months ago, I laid down on a futon in Denver, drank a glass of orange juice with three grams of psilocybin in it, and spent the entire day tripping balls next to a licensed therapist who took notes for eight hours.
I did it legally. In Colorado. With medical supervision. And it did more for my mental health in one day than six years of therapy, antidepressants, ADHD medication, and every self-help book I've ever read had done combined.
This is the episode I've been quietly wanting to make for months.
In this solo episode of Unbehaved, I share my full experience with psilocybin-assisted therapy — what led me there, the current legal landscape, the research on its effectiveness, and what genuinely shifted for me and my husband afterward. We cover why psilocybin became illegal in the first place (spoiler: it wasn't the science), how Colorado and Oregon are running ahead of federal law, who this is NOT for, the specific insecurity I couldn't therapy my way out of, the car manual analogy that changed how I think about myself, and why healing yourself is leadership work.
The old playbook of mental health goes like this: talk therapy for years, add an SSRI, hope something moves. That playbook has helped a lot of people — and I'm not knocking it. But I'm a case study for what happens when the old playbook is all you have and it stops being enough. The new playbook says the mind isn't the whole system, your body carries what your mind can't process, and root-cause healing is possible on a timeline that isn't decades. Psilocybin is one tool in that new playbook. Not the only one — but it's the one that finally worked for me.
Part 2 of this series will be a full conversation with Mikki Vogt, my psilocybin therapist and one of the people who co-wrote Colorado's safety protocols. Coming next week.
WHAT WE COVER
A clear-eyed understanding of the current legal landscape for psilocybin therapy in the U.S. — Colorado, Oregon, New Mexico, the trigger law states, and what's likely to happen at the federal level
The real history of why psilocybin became illegal in the first place (Nixon, John Ehrlichman, and the fact that the science was actually promising when it got shut down)
The research showing psilocybin's effectiveness for depression, addiction, PTSD, and end-of-life anxiety — including data from Johns Hopkins, NYU, and Compass Pathways
A responsible-messenger breakdown of who psilocybin therapy is NOT for and how to vet a legitimate facilitator
The specific insecurity Meghan couldn't therapy her way out of — and the moment during her session that finally broke it
The car manual analogy that reframes how you think about yourself and your ADHD or neurodivergence
What her husband's psilocybin session did for his anxiety (still gone, five months later)
Why the old playbook of mental health (therapy + SSRIs + hope) isn't enough for millions of people — and what the new playbook is starting to look like
Why healing yourself is leadership work, parenting work, and community work — all at once 
PULL QUOTES
"I laid down on a futon, drank a cup of orange juice filled with a bunch of magic mushrooms, and then spent the entire day just tripping balls with a licensed therapist named Mikki sitting right next to me taking notes the entire time."
"It wasn't because scientists had discovered that these substances were dangerous. Actually, the exact opposite was happening. Research effectively shut down for 40 years as a result of this — not because the science was bad, but because the politics were."
"The mind isn't actually the whole system. Our bodies carry things that the mind can't process. Our nervous system is running the show oftentimes more than our conscious brain is."
"I always have this little voice that says, is this okay? … And at some point it transitioned from is this okay to say? to you are okay."
 "We are given a user manual that is not the one that works for our fucking car."
"For the first time in my life, I experienced what it felt like to just feel happy as I am. And I don't know if any of the people that I have in my life ever have. I don't know if any of us do."
"Healing yourself in this way. It is leadership work. It is parenting work. It is community work. It is friend work. It helps us be better in relationships — which is really what so much of life is built on." 
"I find that unbehaving — that pushing back on that status quo narrative about what we, quote, should do — that is where the real magic actually happens. It's where the transformation happens. It's where the healing happens."
 
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Cold open: the futon, the orange juice, the mushrooms
01:15 — Why this episode exists
03:40 — Meeting my neighbor Avi + Colorado's Prop 122
05:20 — The current legal landscape across states
07:15 — Why psilocybin became illegal (Nixon, Ehrlichman, and the war on drugs)
09:40 — How research restarted: FDA breakthrough designation, state laws, bipartisan support 12:00 — Watching Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind 
14:20 — What the research actually shows (Johns Hopkins, NYU, Compass Pathways)
17:00 — Responsible messenger: who psilocybin therapy is NOT for 20:15 — Root cause healing vs. changing your mind
22:00 — The social judgment I had to work through
25:30 — My husband Scott's psilocybin session
30:00 — Deciding to do it myself + prep with Mikki
34:00 — Day of: the healing center, the orange juice, the ayahuasca callback
38:00 — The journey: "Is this okay?" → "You are okay"
43:00 — The anger release + "Fuck you, Mikki"
46:00 — The car manual analogy
49:30 — Integration: parenting, marriage, and the birthday reframe
55:00 — The Glastonbury retreat and authentic leadership
58:00 — Why unbehaving is where the good stuff happens
 
RESOURCES MENTIONED
Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind — book + Netflix docuseries
Colorado Proposition 122 (2022) — the framework that made Meghan's session legal
Oregon Measure 109 (2020) — the first state to legalize supervised psilocybin therapy
Compass Pathways Phase 3 psilocybin trial (COMP360) — the trial that could lead to FDA approval as early as 2027
Roland Griffiths / Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research — the researcher most responsible for the modern psilocybin research renaissance
John Ehrlichman's admission about the war on drugs — Dan Baum, Harper's Magazine, April 2016 ("Legalize It All")
Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics — psychedelics.berkeley.edu/law
The healing center — founded by Mikki Vogt, Vince, and Cindi in Denver
Part 2 of this podcast series — a full conversation with Mikki, coming soon
Written companions:
Substack Part 1 — To Shroom or Not to Shroom?
Substack Part 2 — Why I'm a Mom Who Does Drugs
 
CONNECT WITH MEGHAN + UNBEHAVED
Subscribe to the Unbehaved Substack: meghanfrenchdunbar.substack.com
Meghan on LinkedIn: Meghan French Dunbar
Meghan on Instagram: @meghanfrenchdunbar
The Book — This Isn't Working: meghanfrenchdunbar.com/book
 
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Lightly cleaned for readability. Filler words, false starts, and transcription artifacts removed. Meghan's voice and phrasing preserved throughout.
Alright, my friends. A couple of months ago, I did something absolutely wild. I laid down on a futon, drank a cup of orange juice filled with a bunch of magic mushrooms, and then spent the entire day just tripping balls with a licensed therapist named Mikki sitting right next to me taking notes the entire time.
I laughed. I cried. At one point, I may or may not have lost the ability to use my legs and stand up to get to the bathroom. And I had one of the most transformational experiences of my entire life.
I was doing an entirely legal psilocybin-assisted therapy session. And that's what we're going to talk about today: the emerging world of psilocybin-assisted therapy, including the legal landscape, the history, the research on its profound benefits. And I'm going to talk about why I did it personally and what some of the impacts were for both me and my husband, who also did a session. 
Welcome to Unbehaved. My name is Meghan French Dunbar, and I am so thrilled that you are here — especially for this episode, because this one feels really important to me.
Why? Well, the more that we heal ourselves and do the inner work that's necessary to let go of some of those harmful stories that we carry around every single day, the better we can show up in the world. For ourselves, and also for others. For our friends and family, for our workplaces, as leaders in our communities. The way that we show up matters — and the way that we feel about ourselves, and our ability to let go of these rampant insecurities that drive so much of our behavior, is actually really important to the way that we show up every day.
And at least in my experience, and based on loads of contemporary research, psilocybin just might be one of the best tools we have right now to help people truly heal — to get over those internal barriers that are holding people back from being the best version of themselves. 
I mean, on my end: I have been in therapy for six years. I'm on antidepressants. I was diagnosed with ADHD, and I'm on medication for that. I've read every single book on the inner journey. I've interviewed mental health experts. And I wrote an entire damn book, This Isn't Working, all about how high achievers can actually thrive.
And yet, there was still something missing for me. I had plateaued in my own healing journey, and I was still carrying around deeply held insecurities that no matter how much work I did, I just couldn't let go of — until I did the psilocybin-assisted therapy. 
So if you're listening and searching for something new that might help you get to the next level when it comes to your own inner work, or are interested in healing work in general, or have been curious about psilocybin-assisted therapy — this episode is for you. Let's get into it.
How I got here — my neighbor Avi and Colorado's Prop 122
So a few years ago, we had new neighbors move into our community. We have a little public park behind our house, so all of us hang out in the park a lot as neighbors and hang out with the kids in the playground. It's a whole vibe. Our new neighbors, Avi and Jenna, we became really close with them.
And one night I was out on the playground hanging out with Avi. We were watching our kids play, and he mentioned that he had been at a training to learn how to use psilocybin — or magic mushrooms — in his therapy.
At this point, he's a licensed therapist. I knew he had a private practice. He was a professional at what he did. And I was a little concerned. I was like, Avi, aren't mushrooms illegal? What are you doing? You're gonna risk your professional reputation and potentially your entire business by doing something that you're not allowed to do as a therapist.
And Avi, as he does, just very casually looked at me and said, no, I'm not worried.  
I was like — what's the deal?
Well, it turns out in 2022, Colorado voters approved Proposition 122, becoming the second US state behind Oregon to legalize supervised psilocybin use. There are two parts of this. One, it decriminalized certain psychedelics, including psilocybin, for personal use by adults 21 and older. Great. Two, it established a regulated framework for adults to access psilocybin-assisted therapy at licensed healing centers under the supervision of trained and licensed facilitators. So that's why Avi was getting trained. He wanted to be a licensed facilitator.
The current legal landscape
The current landscape as of right now: Oregon has done the same thing as Colorado. New Mexico is on its way to follow suit. Eighteen other states have active legislation pending, and five states have trigger laws that mean it will automatically become legal if psilocybin is legalized at the federal level — which may be happening far sooner than many of us think.
Compass Pathways is actually in Phase 3 of a trial, the final large-scale clinical trial required for FDA approval on psilocybin-assisted therapy. This trial demonstrates that the drug works, and this is the first time in history that a classical psychedelic has cleared that bar. It's paving the way for potential federal legalization as early as 2027.
The dam is finally starting to break on psychedelics becoming legalized. And it's important to understand why the dam was there in the first place — because mushrooms have gotten a really bad rap. They've been something that's been illegal and very taboo and counterculture, something that only hippies and ravers do. And there's a reason they're illegal.
Why psilocybin became illegal in 1970
In the United States, psilocybin became illegal in 1970 when Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act. And it wasn't because scientists had discovered that these substances were dangerous. Actually, the exact opposite was happening. Researchers in the 50s and 60s were doing promising research showing the benefit of not just psilocybin, but LSD and mescaline as well. This was real science, real results.
But by the late 60s, psychedelics had become associated with the anti-war movement and counterculture ideas. And Nixon's own domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman, later admitted that the war on drugs that they waged was designed to disrupt these communities — the anti-war counterculture communities. Not because the science said the substances were dangerous. Because the politics said the movement was dangerous. That's why they became illegal.
So psilocybin gets classified as a Schedule I substance — the same category as heroin — meaning it's deemed as highly addictive with no accepted medical use. And this is despite all of the research that was already showing that it actually had promising benefits in many categories. And if you know anything about psilocybin, you know that it being addictive is objectively wrong.
Research effectively shut down for 40 years as a result of this — not because the science was bad, but because the politics were.
How research restarted
Which raises the question: if psilocybin has been a Schedule I for fifty-five frickin' years, how the hell did I just do this legally? And how are places like Johns Hopkins and NYU actually running clinical trials on this right now?
Well, it turns out the science was too good to ignore. Starting in the early 2000s, a handful of researchers — most notably the late Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins — got special DEA licenses to study Schedule I substances again. And the results were stunning. Depression, addiction, end-of-life anxiety — outcomes that traditional pharmaceutical companies had been chasing for decades were showing up in one or two guided psilocybin sessions.
The FDA responded by granting psilocybin therapy something called Breakthrough Therapy Designation. This actually happened twice — in 2018 and again in 2019. That's pretty much the FDA saying: this is important enough that we're going to help fast-track it toward approval.
At the same time, this is when statewide voters were starting to get ahead of the federal government. Oregon passed Measure 109 in 2020. Colorado passed Prop 122 in 2022. Which is how what I did was legal, even though psilocybin on the federal level is still classified as a Schedule I.
The crazy thing about this is that it's actually bipartisan. Rick Perry — yeah, that Rick Perry, former governor of Texas, presidential nominee Rick Perry — is one of the most vocal advocates for psilocybin-assisted therapy and other psychedelics, especially for addressing PTSD for veterans, because it is so effective.
So this is not a fringe movement anymore. It's real, it's well-funded. The medical community is in agreement that this works. It is legitimate. And it's happening at the state level, and hopefully at the federal level soon.
Michael Pollan and my dad's cancer
Because it's been so taboo, a lot of people haven't been talking about this — which is why I wanted to talk about it today. So let's dive into just a little of the research to understand how this is benefiting people before we go into how my experience transformed me.
Within about a year of that conversation with Avi, my husband and I sat down and watched Michael Pollan's docuseries on Netflix, How to Change Your Mind. This was based on his book of the same title.
Each episode profiled the history and therapeutic benefits of certain hallucinogenics, including MDMA, LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin — aka magic mushrooms. This was the first time that I'd actually seen this in a research-based context. Seeing someone like Michael Pollan, who's a professional writer and researcher (and I've read many of his books), I was thinking — okay, this is particularly interesting.
On the episode where they were talking about the impacts of psilocybin, they were using it in the context of people who had terminal cancer diagnoses and were at the end of life, dealing with profound depression and anxiety and feelings of hopelessness. And it turns out that using psilocybin in a therapeutic context was making tremendous impacts in addressing their depression, and making them feel like they could face the end of life with dignity and grace and acceptance rather than hopelessness.
And at the time, this was very salient for me — because my dad was in the midst of cancer treatment. I had seen not just the physical toll that all the chemo and surgeries had taken on his body, but the mental toll of the fear and anxiety of dealing with looking at your own mortality. 
So seeing the positive impact that psilocybin was having on these cancer patients — it felt personal, and it felt inspiring, and I felt really excited about it. All of a sudden, I started seeing what Avi was doing in a very different way.
What the research actually shows
And then I started paying attention to some of the research that had been coming out. Psilocybin is not just something that helps terminally ill cancer patients. It treats a vast spectrum of conditions.
Research is now showing that it has a positive impact on depression, treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, alcohol use disorder, nicotine addiction, possibly anorexia — and there are active trials right now on opioid use disorder. There are anecdotal signals that it's working on things like seizures, fibromyalgia, and dementia.
It's just a staggering list.
And not only is it a wide spectrum, it has long-lasting, permanent impacts — which is the thing that blows my mind. Some of the research: two doses of psilocybin produced sustained remission in 58% of patients with major depression at the 12-month mark in a Johns Hopkins study. A single high-dose session reduced cancer patients' depression and anxiety at rates near 80%, and those effects were still present four and a half years later, based on research done at NYU.
The reason it's having such long-lasting impacts is that psilocybin actually impacts how the brain organizes itself. It's been shown to flatten the default mode network, reduce our sense of ego, and increase neuroplasticity. This is why it's so effective — especially with things like therapy — because it's helping us examine our beliefs and stories without all of the judgment and emotions. And when you do that, it also can reshape the circuits in your brain.
This is why it's impactful in therapy, but also why it's having such profound and long-lasting impacts with these other conditions. It's changing the very chemistry of our brains.
Responsible messenger — who this is NOT for
So you can tell I'm a little excited about the topic. The research is there. And I had my own experience.
Before we go any further, I feel obligated to be a responsible messenger here — because I don't want people hearing my story and then running out to do this, especially if it's not right for them. Psilocybin-assisted therapy is not for everyone. 
If you or anyone in your immediate family has a history of psychosis, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder — this is probably not for you. If you're currently on SSRIs (which I am), you need to have a careful conversation about tapering down before your session and what it means to be on those drugs when you do the therapy. Also, if you have certain heart conditions, you shouldn't be doing this. 
These aren't soft consult your doctor disclaimers. These are real screens that legitimate facilitators are — or should be — using.
And this gets to the second part: it's not just about screening yourself. You need to be working with a medical professional. There are absolutely unqualified facilitators out there doing actual harm because they don't know the safety protocols. And there are extraordinary people out there who are doing the deep work, who understand this in a deep way, who can guide you safely. 
If you plan on exploring this at all, with a potential facilitator, you need to be asking them: where did you do your training? Who did you train with? How many sessions have you facilitated historically? What's your screening process? What are your safety protocols? What does your integration support look like after the session?
If they can't easily answer questions like these, that should not be a person you're working with. Do your research, take your time. This is not something to be casual about.
Root cause healing
For me, I found that it was right for me because it was the first time in my life that I actually experienced what I would call root-cause healing.
Everything I'd been doing up until this point was really focused on getting me to think about things in a different way. Therapy, SSRIs, reading books, talking to mental health experts — it was all trying to change my mind.
But the mind isn't actually the whole system. Our bodies carry things that the mind can't process. Our nervous system is running the show oftentimes more than our conscious brain is. And doing something that goes beyond the mind is often necessary for pushing us past that place where the mind has completely stalled out.
And that's where I was. I felt like I'd plateaued.
All that said, I also know that doing something new can be scary — especially when it comes to the context of doing a lot of drugs, especially if you've never done them before. Most of the conversations I have go one of two ways. People often say that sounds great, but I would be worried about giving up control. Other people say I have never even really done drugs, so starting with a macro dose of psilocybin seems like a crazy thing to do.
I hear those concerns. If those are concerns, you can feel them. I'm not shaming anyone in any way here. Both my husband and I were very nervous. It's very legitimate. If you're trying something new and doing something for the first time, it'd be weird if you weren't nervous.
Oftentimes I have found that it's those points that make us nervous where we push past our comfort zone that growth actually happens. And that was my experience with this. So there's no part of me that's like, you should 100% do this if you have extreme reservations. And there's also a bit of an invitation: maybe you need to lose control for a bit, in a controlled environment, so that you can break through and actually experience true growth.
The social judgment I had to work through
Beyond all these concerns, there's also just a lot of concern about social judgment. And I was experiencing this in a pretty serious way when I was just thinking about doing the psilocybin-assisted therapy.
My friend Nathan and I used to take CEOs to different companies for a day — companies who had best-in-class practices from sustainability to people management — and we'd do a full deep dive the next day to help them implement these practices at their company. We were on one of these retreats at the airport, all of us heading out, and we had about twelve CEOs with us. 
One of the CEOs at the airport over lunch, we're all just chit-chatting, and she said: I just heard the most interesting story on NPR. It was about moms who do drugs. And I think it was probably about something like psilocybin-based therapy. But her knee-jerk reaction — and she was a mom herself — was: Can you imagine a parent who does drugs? How irresponsible is that?
It was one of those little societal stories: yeah, it's very inappropriate for a mom to do drugs.
There were also things like — I mentioned to a colleague I was considering doing psilocybin-based therapy, and they literally said: just don't let them take any pictures of you. If that were to get out in a public way, you might have clients that never want to work with you again. That might risk your professional reputation. 
So there was the professional side. There was the mom shame. And then even just in my family — my dad literally still brags to this day, as someone who went to college in the 70s, that he's never "tooked the dope." We grew up in a very traditional, strict, no-drugs-allowed household. Drugs have always been something taboo.
There were all of these competing levels of shame about how I needed to behave as a professional, a mom, a family member, and a community member. We don't do drugs. And we definitely don't do drugs and then talk about it. 
I let all of these competing stories really hold me back from taking the leap myself.
Scott's session — and what happened after
That actually all changed at the beginning of this year. 
I noticed that my husband was really struggling in some of those really hard, crunchy moments when — if you have kids, especially young kids (we have a four-year-old and a seven-year-old), they occasionally struggle with emotional regulation and have these moments that are incredibly frustrating when you're a parent. 
I was noticing in some of these moments that I felt like my husband wasn't quite living up to the father that I knew he wanted to be. He wasn't snapping at them or anything. He was just getting really frustrated, and I felt like he wasn't giving himself or the kids the grace and compassion and patience that I know he wants to be able to give.
It was the straw that broke the camel's back of me being like, I need to talk to you about this. I'm noticing this frustration and anger that you're holding. And I've also seen some anxiety that you're holding around some certain stuff in our life. And I've talked to you about these things many times and I don't think I'm equipped to be able to help you. Maybe it's worth considering going and doing the psilocybin-based therapy with Avi — with one of the therapists at their center.
He was just like, yeah, I think I'm going to.
The next day he called Avi. Avi got him set up with the perfect therapist for him — his business partner, Vince. Because in the interim between the time I had talked to Avi, watched the docuseries — all the things — Avi had actually set up one of Colorado's first healing centers with his business partners, Vince, Mikki, and Cindi. They're all trained facilitators. They're in this incredible group.
So Avi said, I've got the guy for you: Vince. I watched my husband go through the entire process of talking to Vince in advance on Zoom to get his family history and understand his concerns. And then the day of — it's a full-day journey. You're given a macro dose of psilocybin, you sit with the therapist for the entire day, and you just process your shit. All sorts of stuff comes up. Which also means you need someone who can pick you up. So I was the one who went and picked Scott up. 
Even before I got into the session, as part of his prep, Vince asked to have a phone call with me. Which felt very different, but I loved it. He talked to me about what concerns I had with Scott, the behaviors I was seeing, and what my hopes and dreams would be for Scott. As we were getting off that call, and Vince was giving me instructions on how to pick him up, he said: when you pick up your husband, he's going to be an entirely new man.
And I was like — seems like potentially over-promising and setting me up to be disappointed, but I'm just going to go with it. 
So this is the context in which I pick Scott up. I show up at like 3:30 or 4 down to the healing center in Denver. Vince greets me at the door and does a 30-minute debrief with me, talking about all the things that came up for Scott (which he had gotten Scott's permission to talk to me about). And then he leads me back to the room where I find my husband in quite a state.
I would say he was wrecked. He'd been crying for most of the day. You could see his eyes were all puffy. He was like this big mushy marshmallow. He just kept talking to me about how much he loved me and the kids and — I would have to say, this wasn't exactly the "new man" I was expecting or hoping for.
Turned out that wasn't the state he stayed in. But he was in that state for about the next 24 hours. Vince warned me about it, told me that he needed to take the weekend to really just be quiet and process and journal. So that weekend I took the kids a lot and let Scott do his thing.
After they did the integration sessions — Scott talked with Vince on Zoom once a week for the next three weeks to really unearth and process all the stuff that had come up during the full-day session — I really started to see a transformation in my husband. 
One of the things he talked to me about was anxiety. He is a very anxious person. We've been together for 17 years — it's not like this was new to me. I also didn't understand the depths that his anxiety had gotten to. There was so much stuff going on in the back of his head that he often wasn't even talking to me about. And there was stuff he would talk to me about. 
All of that anxiety — it was just gone.
He was calm and grounded — that perfect higher version of himself that I knew he wanted to be with our kids. That was how he was able to show up: patient, emotionally regulated, calm and grounded. It was like I owed Vince a bit of an apology. It was like seeing him as a new version of himself — not different, just upleveled. All of the ways I knew that he really wanted to show up, he was able to really step into those. 
Based on watching that, I was like — I think that I need to do this myself.
My own journey to the decision
In my own personal journey, I mentioned at the top: I've been in therapy for six years. That all started during COVID.
I had postpartum depression. I had just left my own organization that I co-founded in February of 2020. So I'd lost my sense of purpose and my sense of self-worth. I had become a full-time mom unexpectedly because we lost our childcare. We were socially isolated. There was just so much going on. It was a really awful time. 
I started finally working with my therapist, Lynn. First session, she was like: you are a textbook clinically depressed. I would highly recommend we get on antidepressants. So I started getting on those, felt instantly better. In the first couple years of us working together, we just unpacked so much stuff — just through talk therapy. I also did a couple of EMDR sessions, and it was transformational. I was feeling myself healing. 
I was diagnosed in I think 2023 with ADHD after meeting with a psychiatrist, so I got medicated for that. That felt like it really brought me to this next level. And I'd still have significant moments of insecurity. Like I couldn't get to the next level. 
After seeing all of this research coming out, I was like — well, maybe this is the thing. That could break through and finally help me release some of these stories that I've been carrying around with me for decades. Stories that are really holding me back from being the leader or the mom or the partner or the friend, or even just how I feel about myself on a daily basis. That seemed to be preventing me from really loving myself unconditionally.
What would it look like, or what would it feel like, to just love myself today? That like — I had never ever experienced that state. 
So I decided to jump right on in.
Prep with Mikki
I texted Avi and was like, I want to do it too. He said, I've got the perfect person for you. I want you to work with Mikki. I was like, why Mikki? And he just said, you'll see.
I was like, okay — that's an incredibly vague statement, but I'm intrigued, and I trust you, Avi. 
I had my first call with Mikki and I 100% vibed with her in the first call. She walked me through the process, which was the same as my husband: you do three to four preparation sessions virtually. So we talk for about an hour. We walk through family history, past experiences, beliefs. You talk about your intentions, what you want to do. Then you have the full-day session, and then you have three to four integration sessions on the back end.
I just watched my husband do it — I was familiar. We got this. Scheduled everything on that first phone call. She was like, you're gonna go May 1st, that's gonna be your full-day session.
I literally showed up to my first prep appointment with notes in chronological order. Like: here's all my trauma. Here's the source of this insecurity. And here's this. And here's this. I just dumped all of that on her. She took rigorous notes, asked lots of questions.
We talked about my intentions, which were: to maybe understand true self-acceptance without any of the external judgment, and to be able to move forward in the world from a place that felt more intentional and more at peace than the day-to-day stuff I was dealing with.
We literally talked about the different strains of psilocybin, which had names — and I shit you not, she was reading me a list. She was like, we're going to talk about Shakti, Albino Bluey Vuitton, Wormhole, and Golden Teacher.
Apparently each of the different strains of psilocybin has a very specific way that it interacts with people psychologically and physically. One of the ones she was talking about, she said: this one is like a bitchy goddess. She's gonna take you to some really challenging places. You're gonna unearth some stuff that you don't want to look at, but it's what you need to look at, and it's gonna be a hard experience.
I was like — hmmmm.
And then she was talking about Albino Bluey Vuitton, and I believe she said, she's like a drunk sorority girl. I was like, say more. She said, she's gonna bring up all sorts of stuff, kind of in a chaotic way. But she's gonna be encouraging — but also saying some stuff that maybe you don't really want to hear, but in a fun, light way.
I was like, yeah, let's go with that.
So we chose Albino Bluey Vuitton for the journey.
She also told me in advance to make a playlist — to go through and think of all of the relevant, really meaningful songs from my life and put them on a playlist. Even just take a minute and think about this for your own journey. What would that look like? Music can just bring you back, even without the psilocybin. Going back and listening to songs from your life — I have explicit core memories that are tied to certain songs. Jimmy Buffett's Cheeseburger in Paradise — I am 100% eight years old sitting in my dad's Suzuki Sidekick singing that at the top of my lungs with my dad. 
So I made my playlist — had some bangers on there, some Van Morrison, Jimmy Buffett, all sorts of good stuff. I sent it off to her in advance of the full-day journey.
Day of — the healing center
She told me to pack a little backpack with maybe my pillow if I wanted to be comfy, and changes of clothes because she said everyone has different physical reactions — from getting really hot to getting really cold, to maybe both. She said to expect to cry a lot, that lots of people have lots of snot — like your body is flushing stuff out. So bring clothes that can support that experience, and maybe a cute little talisman.
I brought this bracelet I had gotten in the Amazon, and a couple of my kids' little snuggly stuffies. I don't even know what else was in there. The day of, I literally had my little backpack, my pillow. I look like a kid going to summer camp.
Avi texted me the day of, like, how are you feeling? I sent him a picture like, here I am. And to be honest, I felt terrified, nervous, scared — terrified. But also a little excited. I call this a state of being anxited. I knew it was going to be something that was going to be good. And it's also really scary to just hand over control like this.
For reference, I have done magic mushrooms outside of a therapeutic context before. I've had great experiences on them. For those previous experiences, I'd taken about one gram of mushrooms. For the therapy, you do a macro dose. So I was going to be doing just over three grams. 
Part of this is you're just handing over control of the situation. I was like — I'm going to be taking the most amount of drugs I've ever taken in my life and then sitting in a room with a sober person for an entire day. Who knows what happens both mentally and physically to me. I lose control of my mental faculties and spew all of my trauma and process all of my garbage in front of a person who I've just met one month ago. We're just gonna do that and feel great about it.
That is not how I was feeling.
I mentioned all this to Mikki when I arrived at the healing center, and she said, if you didn't feel like that, I would be concerned. It is 100% natural to feel all of those feelings. And I was like, okay, good. 
So feeling all those feelings, I arrived at the healing center — which is quite literally in Denver, in a nondescript office building on top of a Wells Fargo across the street from an old mall. I was like — this is not the environment I was expecting. But I trust them.
I went in. Met Mikki at the lobby. She takes me back, and she's completely transformed her office space. It's a very long, large room. She has these gorgeous sheets of fabric all over the ceiling. These gorgeous moving lamps putting purple and yellow lights out. Comfy futon with little blankets and pillows. There's a couch that has a healing light mat on it. Little tables and chairs. All sorts of stuff. It just felt so magical and comfortable and delightful. 
So I was like, okay, this feels much better.
Safety protocols and setting the container
We sit down. Mikki reviews the safety protocols. Mikki is quite literally one of the people who co-wrote the safety protocols for psilocybin-assisted therapy for the state of Colorado — which have now been adopted in Oregon as well. She knows her shit. 
There are safety protocols in case anything happens from a medical standpoint. She walks me through what's gonna happen in case I have an adverse reaction. She also told me that after doing more than 500 of these sessions, she has never had an adverse reaction that required EMTs or any sort of medical professionals to have to step in. So I felt safe. 
We talked back through the intentions. She also gave me some guidance which was really helpful. She said that a lot of people say they have this internal dialogue going on. All sorts of thoughts are coming up, and they end up holding back on telling Mikki about them because they're worried about how it'll be perceived. Then at the end, they typically say they wish they had said more of the stuff that was happening in their brains out loud, so Mikki could record it and they could process it later. 
Because you don't get to a place where you're unconscious. You're not blacking out. It's not like drinking so much alcohol that you're incapacitated. You are conscious. You remember every single thing that happens. And at least in my experience, there's so much that happens that having someone there to record as much as humanly possible is extraordinarily helpful.
She gives me these instructions. Her wonderful business partner Cindi brings in a little tray. It's got a glass of orange juice, exactly three grams of the Shakti Bluey Vuitton ground up. Putting the mushrooms in the orange juice actually makes it so they integrate faster into your system — and often you don't feel the kind of queasiness that's sometimes associated with taking psilocybin.
I take a big breath. I'm like, I think I'm ready for this. And I'm still feeling very nervous.
The ayahuasca callback
At this moment, I had a little bit of a flashback.
I got the incredible experience of once flying on a float plane into the middle of the Amazon rainforest to stay with the Achuar tribe for over a week. It's an indigenous tribe at the head of the Amazon River in the middle of the rainforest. One of the parts of that was doing plant medicine. We did ayahuasca with the shaman. And I was also terrified of losing control of my body and my brain and all the things.
The shaman told us that this medicine is of the earth. It has the earth's wisdom in it. And part of that is that it knows exactly what you need. Your role here is just to trust the medicine — that whatever comes up is exactly what you need to heal right now.
That was incredibly helpful. It was the thing that got me to take the ayahuasca, which was a transformational experience in itself.
I took that in mind: this is a medicine of the earth. It knows what I need.
Mikki talked me through the psychology and the reverence that she has for this incredible medicine, and then she spoke to it. She told the medicine our intentions — and I was like, what is even happening here? Then she asked me if I wanted to talk to the medicine, and I felt ridiculous talking to a bowl of mushrooms. But I was also like, you know what? When in Rome. I am just going to get over myself. I'm going to go ahead and talk to them. Give them my thanks, my gratitude, my love. And tell them what I'm looking for. 
So I spoke my intentions straight to them. Put them in the orange juice. Bottoms up.
Immediately, Mikki was like, I would advise that you might want to lay down. So I laid down on my back. I would imagine within 20 minutes, I was seeing gorgeous fractal patterns starting to show up in the fabric on the ceiling. And I was like, okay, here we go.
The journey — "Is this okay?" → "You are okay"
For the next few hours, I was transported to a mystical place. And I will say here — to try to explain what this feels like to someone who has not done this before — it is like trying to tell someone who cannot smell what the smell of mint smells like. It is impossible. 
So I'll try to walk you through a little of what happened and go into some of the insights, because that's really some of the important stuff. With the caveat that this is a really hard thing to try to explain — I'm not even going to get most of the experience in here. But we'll just go with what we've got. 
I'm laying down, and within — I'm imagining it's the first 45 minutes or so — things are starting to float into my brain. Deep truths that are in my subconscious that need to be spoken out loud, or that I haven't ever given voice to. I'm going through past stories in my head and seeing them from different ways. And they're cycling through, one after the other after the other. 
I'm noticing right away that I'm having this feeling Mikki had mentioned, of not wanting to say stuff out loud. Part of it was, I don't know if my mouth is going to work right now. And part of it was — I still had a little bit of that, what is she gonna think of me when I say this. 
And that moment right there — what is she gonna think of me — made me realize that I had this little voice in my head. Before I spoke a word — and this wasn't just in this room with Mikki. This was in every relationship in my life, with maybe the exception of like two. I always have this little voice that says: is this okay?
The is this okay question speaks multitudes. It's: is this gonna make the person angry? Are they gonna judge me? Are they gonna think less of me? Am I stupid? Does this sound stupid? There's so much judgment wrapped up in there. 
And if something around this sounds kind of similar — I'm imagining you might have a similar voice as well. It comes as no surprise, because so many of us are conditioned to put other people's comfort over our own, to doubt our contributions, to worry about the way in which we're perceived. Are we doing things that are societally acceptable?
We create these coping mechanisms — things that help us stay within the parameters of what's socially acceptable. This little voice is there. She's just trying to protect us, trying to make sure that we are accepted and don't get kicked out of the tribe.
And the more that I started thinking about this little voice and why it was there, the easier it felt to just kind of let the voice go.
At some point, it transitioned from saying is this okay? Is this okay to say? to: you are okay.
You are okay.
Your thoughts, your needs — they are just thoughts and needs. They are not wrong. They are okay. They have a right to exist. They have a right to be expressed. You are okay.
Like — mind completely blown. Honestly, y'all. I had never experienced this feeling of just sitting in a place of feeling like I was okay. And that something I was doing wasn't wrong or wasn't gonna piss someone off. I knew that little voice had been born from trying to manage immense emotional volatility and manage other people's emotions when I was young.
And all of a sudden, I was able to just let that voice go. It was the most profound experience, honestly.
Once the voice was like you are okay, it gave me the ability to just keep talking. Everything that needed to come out started coming out. Oftentimes, Mikki would just sit there and write down notes and capture things. All the while, my playlist is going on in the background. So oftentimes I'd be in the middle of one thing and then the playlist would come on and it would transport me back to some other part of my life. And I'd start processing that and start tying them in together — and just — this is coming out.
I'm sobbing through most of this. A lot of snot is coming out. I'm a hot mess. 
Mikki would occasionally lob in some little questions to help me go further, which I would say were met with a wide spectrum of reactions on my side. Sometimes I would answer her.
And sometimes — like in the case when she said, Meghan, what do you think the anger is trying to tell you? — I literally turned my head, looked her dead in the eye, and just said, fuck you, Mikki. And then we both broke down into complete hysterical laughter. Just stomach-clutching laughter where I couldn't even breathe, I was laughing so hard.
So it was ups and downs. I said I laughed and I cried at the beginning — I was not joking.
The bathroom moment
We just went through this cycle for hours, of just getting all this stuff out — until I had to relieve myself. And I'd been laying on my back for hours at this point. It seemed impossible.
I knew that my body had needs, but my body was offline. I felt like my bones had been replaced with gummy worms. And my muscles were made of pudding. I couldn't move. I told Mikki, I need to go to the bathroom. She was like, okay. This was not her first rodeo. She knew this was coming.
And this was the hardest thing that I did the entire day. Honestly. I didn't really have a conception of time, but I'm imagining it was more than half an hour of me flubbering on the ground like a beached whale, trying to just get my muscles to fire — or anything to happen that wasn't just jiggling.
Mikki just patiently standing by the door, waiting for me to stand up. She'd very gently keep giving me encouragement, letting me know that this happens to everyone. And she'd also help keep me on track. I'd be laying there, trying my best to get my body to move online — and then all of a sudden I'd be like, I can see my intellect energy and my humor energy, and I feel like I need to braid them together more. And she'd just be like, I hear you, sweetie. And the bathroom — we need to do the bathroom thing.
At some point, I finally remembered my pregnancy training and was like — aha! From the back to the side, then push it up. And then I stood up. 
I bambied my way down the hall. Her incredible business partner Cindi came in, and they were escorting me. I was worried I was gonna crush them both because they were these teeny little women and I am not that. But I was able to use my legs. It was all right. 
I made it to the bathroom. But right before I got to the bathroom, both of them were like — whatever you do, do NOT look in the mirror.
And I'm like — is something wrong with my face? Is this like a Beetlejuice situation? I'm unclear about what is happening. But I do not want to risk it.
So I put my horse blinders on and walked into the bathroom. Went to the bathroom. Washed my hands. Didn't look in the mirror. Made it out. Made it back.
Probably my biggest accomplishment of my life — making it to the bathroom while on mushrooms in that office.
The anger and the objective view
From there, it just continues. I go back, lay back down, and the insights keep coming. I'm still in the space.
As I mentioned at the top, they've shown that psilocybin is able to suppress our ego. And for me, this was an incredible experience because it was helping me see some of my past experiences from a more objective place — without the ego and without the emotions.
One of the things that happened for me — which apparently I needed — was that I realized when I looked at these old stories with a new lens, I'd been often giving other people who, in past situations, had caused me a tremendous amount of harm from their actions and behaviors — I'd given them the benefit of the doubt. I'd extended compassion. There was always this part of me that was like, well, I can understand kind of why they did it. Because I understood maybe why they had been traumatized over here, and so that's why they acted out in this way.
But I wouldn't extend that same thing to myself. And because I understood maybe why they did it, it made it so I didn't allow myself to ever feel angry about it on behalf of my younger self. 
So much of my experience was regressing back and feeling like I was almost living the stories again — but with deep compassion for myself. I started feeling very protective of my younger self and started seeing her as someone to protect and not someone to blame.
And I got enraged. Like so mad. There was so much anger coming out, and it was anger that I had been repressing apparently for like decades.
Mikki was saying things like, I feel like you're pulling down the dam with all the anger stored behind it. I need you to keep pulling down the dam. This is when she asked me about what the anger was trying to tell me. And I told her to go fuck herself. But I needed to experience the anger.
It was the thing that, in many cases, was like the missing element I had been waiting for — for the six years of trying to process some of this stuff in therapy. Just experiencing the anger for myself was the thing that helped me actually let the story go. And not for it to have so much hold on me.
No clue why. But it was incredible.
The car manual analogy
So that was one other major insight. And the last one — at one point, I was talking to Mikki a lot about the ways in which some of my ADHD behaviors — I often feel like I am wrong because of the way that I am built. My brain works in a different way, and a lot of times it's a source of shame, or it makes me feel like I should be built differently, I should work differently. 
And Mikki dropped an analogy on me that completely changed my entire freaking life.
She said: Meghan, you are a high-performance race car. You are built with different components. You are built to go as fast as humanly possible, to be at the highest echelon of performance. You have very specific maintenance needs. You have different parts. You have an entire different operating system. And with that, you have your own user manual on how you need to be maintained and taken care of in order for you to operate in the way that you're supposed to.
She's like, are you following? I'm like, I have no clue what you're talking about, really. But I'm here for it. I love your vibe. Let's keep going with the race car thing.
She's like, okay. So all of us are different cars. We're all built with different components. We all have different user manuals. The problem is we often try to push our user manual onto someone else. 
Someone who's like a 1990 Ford comes over and is like, I'm gonna try to take Meghan out for the day. And imposes their user manual on you. And gives you the wrong oil. Puts on tires that are too big for your wheel wells. Gives you the wrong parts in your engine. And then expects you to go out on the track and perform at your best. And you don't. Is that your fault?
I was like — no.
 No, I don't think it is, right? I'm seeing clouds in the sky. The shades are still rippling in and out. I'm having crazy visuals. But I don't think it's my fault, right, Mikki? 
She's like, you're right. It is not your fault. If you are trying, or if someone else is trying to impose a user manual on you that is not yours, and you do not work properly — that does not mean you are wrong. 
My brain just couldn't even handle this information. 
As I started thinking about this, I was like — my God, so many of us are handed a user manual that doesn't work for our fucking car. And this is especially true for women. We're handed a user manual on how to look, how to behave, how to perform, what success is — all of these things we're supposed to do.
And the kicker is: that is a manual that was made up by men under patriarchy. For a non-existent car that doesn't even work. And that is the instruction manual that all of us are trying to use — and wondering why we feel like we're wrong every day of our lives. Why we're deficient. Why we're broken.
It's because we are given a user manual that is not the one that works for our fucking car.
The bigger picture — feeling whole
So between the car manual situation and realizing I had this little voice in my head who had now transformed from is this okay? to you are okay — and being so angry on behalf of my younger self and seeing these stories in a more objective way — I felt like by the end of the session, I was sitting in a place of self-acceptance.
Of knowing that I was not broken or wrong. That I was okay. That I am built the exact way that I am, and there's nothing wrong with it, and that I love how I'm built.
I had never in my life experienced what it felt like to just feel happy as I am. And I don't know if any of the people I have in my life ever have. I don't know if any of us do.
The more they talk about this publicly, the more I'm realizing that most of us are walking around driven by these deep insecurities and concerns about ourselves. About being wrong. About being broken. About things we need to change. Things we need to fix. And very few of us actually have this experience of knowing what it feels like to just purely accept ourselves as we are. To revel. To marvel. To be in awe of the person that we are. Full stop.
I still can't really explain how profound this was for me to experience this. And then I found myself being like — I just want everyone to feel like this. 
So many of us are walking around every day letting our insecurities drive our behavior, drive the way that we think about ourselves, drive the way that we treat other people. It's impacting our leadership, our parenting, the way we show up as friends and family members and community. And the more of us that could feel this way — of just feeling whole and loving ourselves as we are — it would change the way that we show up. The way that our communities are built.
It's like my deepest wish that this is something other people could experience more often. And I remember at the top when I talked about how this felt like something that was so important to share — this is why. Because of unlocking something as profound as this. Of healing these core wounds and feeling whole. What a gift that could be. And how this is what the psilocybin unlocked for me.
The immediate aftermath
So that was a bit of my journey of the day.
Scott, my husband, picked me up around 3:30. Similar to how I found him — I was a wreck. I don't think I spoke a word the entire ride home. I just went straight to bed when I walked in. I was so excited to see my kids and gave them kisses because I loved them so much and just wanted to smush their little faces. And then I went right to bed at like 5 o'clock at night.
That weekend, I followed Mikki's instructions. I took a lot of alone time and journaling, just trying to get some of the stuff to process and integrate. Mikki and I did our first virtual integration session that Monday — so three days later. We had two more the following two weeks.
Integration — parenting, marriage, and the birthday reframe
There were a few specific areas that I was able to see it right away. One being my parenting. I was just more present and patient with my children. I could see them for the gorgeous little squishy awesome beings that they were, and I was able to regulate my emotions a lot easier. The little things — like doing bedtime stories or taking them to school — instead of being something I had to get through, it became something I got to do. Something I enjoyed. I just savored every time they'd ask me to watch their dance or listen to the thing they learned. All those things that sometimes I just feel so busy that I don't fully pay attention to — I was just there with them, enjoying them, soaking them in. And it has been the way that I felt pretty much this entire time since.
My relationship with my husband — I took the car manual and I ran with it. Over the three weeks that I was really integrating all this, I quite literally wrote down my own user manual. My husband and I had a date night, and I took him out and walked him through my user manual, step by step. I wrote down things that are benefits of this way that I operate and how I'm built, and things that might be really challenging. Here's the ways in which I see how I am built on this particular issue, where I see that you are different, and where I see that that might cause tension between us.
It helped me get to this point of understanding how much you can deepen a relationship when: one, you understand your own user manual and help your partner understand it. And when you understand theirs. Instead of seeing those areas where you're different as areas of contention, or times where you're trying to change each other to fit each other's user manual, you can just respect and honor and appreciate that this is how the other person's built.
By the end of the dinner, my husband was like, I feel like I have such a better understanding of you. This is so helpful for me to know. And I felt the same thing about him. It was a way to deepen our relationship and feel more connected, and help us navigate things that oftentimes used to be issues where we'd get in little spats. It's incredible.
The third thing that had a really lasting impact for me was a bit of insecurity around my birthday.
My very first memory of my birthday is my mom sitting me down to tell me that pretty much everyone I'd invited to my birthday party couldn't come. My birthday is on June 27th, and most families are traveling for summer vacation and around the July 4th holiday — it's always the worst. And this became a pattern for my entire life, of just people never being able to come to my birthday. Which I of course then associated with — people don't actually like me. I don't have friends because nobody shows up for my birthday party. I'd share my little puppy cake with two other kids from my school that I barely even knew, or try to beat down a piñata with one other person.
They were sad birthday parties. They weren't great. And I attached a story to them — a story that I carried pretty much for the rest of my life. That people don't actually like me. So my birthdays became this thing that I not only didn't look forward to, but actively just hated.
A few weeks ago, it was my birthday. Early June. My husband sent out some feeler texts to some of our close friends to see if anyone would be available for my birthday dinner. And, surprising absolutely nobody, no one was in town. Not a single human. 
And instead of this becoming a thing — for the first time in my life, I just received it as information. Not an indictment of my character or proof that nobody loves me. Just like — damn, that sucks. People are out of town. Okay. Like — move on.
What? What? It rewired my brain to stop giving a shit about people not being able to come to my birthday party.
Thank you, psilocybin. Check.
The Glastonbury retreat and authentic leadership
Moving on from the birthday. One of the other impacts — the last one that I'll talk about — is I talked about my little internal voice who had switched from is this okay? to you are okay. That has just stayed with me.
It showed up at the end of May. I flew to the UK to go on a leadership retreat in Glastonbury with 12 other leaders from around the world in this little community that I'm a part of. And I did not know a soul — not a single soul — heading into the trip. We were doing 72 hours of deep work with this incredible philosopher, Tim Freke.
Normally, this would have been the type of situation that made me feel incredibly insecure. Where I would very much hold myself back and wait on the outside of the group to see what the dynamics were before I really let anyone see who I actually am. Read people first.
And I just didn't care. I was so grounded. So joyful. So delighted in myself. Trusting myself. Whatever was coming up, whatever I wanted to do. And it was incredible. 
Not only did it feel wonderful to just check the insecurity at the door — but it drew people to me. I was just showing up as my full, authentic, genuine, grounded self from moment one. And people were here for it. Gorgeous connections. Deep friendships. I felt so much happier, so much healthier, so much more whole being there as this authentic version of myself.
And as someone who quite literally wrote an entire chapter in my book about authentic leadership, I was like — we really can't step into full authentic leadership until we have really navigated and put our deep insecurities to bed.
To any of you who are listening who are managers or leaders in your organizations, or parents, or partners — if you have that little voice that holds you back in certain circumstances, that makes you act differently in a room based on who's in the room with you — it's holding you back. People around you? They feel it. 
Healing yourself in this way. It is leadership work. It is parenting work. It is community work. It is friend work. It helps us be better in relationships — which is really what so much of life is built on.
Unbehaving is where the good stuff happens
So. That's the whole thing.  
I guess you can say doing an absolute boatload of drugs was one of the best things I've ever done in my life. Yeah. I'll stand behind that statement.
And throughout the whole process, I have thought about how much I would have missed out on if I had let that little story that told me to, quote, behave — to be a good mom and a good wife and a good professional. If I had let that voice win. If I'd feared. If I'd shied away from this for fear of judgment or fear of shame or fear of this being too taboo.
What I would have missed out on. But yet again, I find that unbehaving — that pushing back on that status quo narrative about what we, quote, should do — that is where the real magic actually happens. It's where the transformation happens. It's where the healing happens. It's where the good stuff happens.
At least for me. That's the place I want to be. I want you to be there with me too. And that's why I talked about this today.
Part 2, we're gonna talk to Mikki, my extraordinary therapist, about the legalization process, about some of the research, about all sorts of incredible stuff that she has unearthed in the years she has been in this space.
So that's all we have for today. If you want the full written version of all this, it's on the Substack. Part 1 is called To Shroom or Not to Shroom? and Part 2 is called Why I'm a Mom Who Does Drugs. Those are there for you under Unbehaved.
If this resonated — obviously, please leave a comment, reach out, LinkedIn, email, whatever it is. I love hearing from you. I love hearing your questions.
 
Until next time.
 

Most people think the cure for "not feeling enough" is to achieve more. To work harder, climb higher, and one day arrive at the version of success that finally proves you belong.
Shirin Eskandani spent her whole life chasing that version. She trained at one of the most competitive music programs in North America. She built the career most opera singers spend their entire lives hoping for. And then she got the call she'd been dreaming of since she was eight years old — the Metropolitan Opera. Carmen. Her dream role, her dream opera house, exactly the contract she'd imagined.
The moment she hung up the phone, the only thought in her mind was: you're not good enough for this. You don't deserve this.
That moment cracked open everything. In this episode, Shirin shares the year-and-a-half of inner work that followed — the therapy, the coaching, the realization that nothing external was ever going to heal the wound she'd been outsourcing. And how, after she finally sang at the Met and enjoyed every moment of it, she realized she didn't want to be a singer anymore.
Today she's a coach who built one of the few decolonized coaching certifications in the field. We talk about perfectionism as a coping mechanism (not a virtue), the two-year test that's saved Meghan from at least three career decisions she would have regretted, what real courage actually looks like (hint: it's the email, not the leap), joy as a discipline rather than a feeling, and the line that may be the headline of the entire episode — our dreams are colonized.
This is a conversation for anyone who's ever achieved something they worked their whole life for and then quietly wondered why it didn't fix the thing they thought it would fix.
What You'll Walk Away With
Why perfectionism is a coping mechanism, not a virtue — and how to start naming it
The two-year test: the single question Shirin asks clients (and herself) that surfaces clarity faster than any other tool
The "courage iceberg" reframe — why the courage that actually changes your life almost never looks like the big leap
How "sitting with a question" literally changes your brain chemistry, and why you don't need the answer to begin
Why joy is a discipline (and the magnolia-bloom story that will stay with you)
What "decolonized coaching" actually means — and why your dreams may be more colonized than you realize
A permission slip you can carry with you for the rest of your life 
About The Guest
Shirin Eskandani is a coach, former opera singer, and the founder of Wholehearted Coaching and the Wholehearted Certification — a decolonized life coaching certification program now in its fifth cohort. She trained at the Manhattan School of Music, performed at the Metropolitan Opera, and walked away from her singing career to build a coaching practice rooted in mindfulness, somatics, and the work of dismantling oppressive systems within and around us. She lives and works at the intersection of inner work and structural awareness.
Pull Quotes
"I'd always imagined that if I ever got to work at the Met, I would finally realize I was good enough. And the only thought in my mind was: you're not good enough for this. You don't deserve this."
"Nothing outside of me was ever going to heal that wound."
"My greatest achievement isn't singing at the Met. It was singing at the Met and enjoying every part of the process."
"Courage isn't the big monumental shift — it's emailing the person, looking at the website, journaling the idea. The tip of the courage iceberg is the public moment. Everything underneath is what actually got you there."
"Just sitting with a question starts to change the neuroplasticity of your brain. You don't need the answer. The question itself is doing the work."
"Our dreams are colonized. We're dreaming within a box of possibility shaped by what people have told us is possible for people like us."
"Joy is what we need to sustain ourselves through times like these. And we are the exact folks who tend not to prioritize joy — because we're too busy writing our congressperson to look at the magnolia bloom. Yes, AND look at the bloom. Because that is what's going to sustain you to keep writing."
"The permission to not care what people think. That's it. This is your life."
Chapters
00:31 — Welcome + Shirin's story 01:22 — Immigrating from Iran, belonging, and the perfectionism trap
04:31 — First opera, the dream of singing at the Met
05:51 — Manhattan School of Music and doubling down 07:30 — The Met phone call ("you're not good enough for this")
09:30 — A year and a half of inner work
11:00 — Singing at the Met and enjoying every moment of it
11:31 — Realizing she didn't want to be a singer anymore
13:51 — Where the perfectionism stories actually come from
17:21 — Mindset work, somatics, and the books that shifted everything
21:15 — The two-year test and the courage iceberg
26:54 — Micro-courage and the power of sitting with a question
28:14 — Joy as a discipline (and the magnolia bloom)
31:22 — Building a decolonized coaching certification
36:41 — How to bring this work to clients who aren't ready for the language
39:37 — Our dreams are colonized
41:59 — The permission slip
42:48 — Where to find Shirin
 
Connect With Shirin
Wholehearted Coaching (Shirin's personal practice): wholehearted-coaching.com
Wholehearted Certification (the decolonized coaching certification): wholeheartedcertification.com
Shirin on Instagram: @wholeheartedcoaching
Connect With Meghan & Unbehaved
Subscribe to the Unbehaved Substack: meghanfrenchdunbar.substack.com
Meghan on LinkedIn: Meghan French Dunbar
Meghan on Instagram: @meghanfrenchdunbar
The Book — This Isn't Working: meghanfrenchdunbar.com/book
TEDx — Why Success Isn't Making You Happy & How to Fix It: Watch on YouTube
 
FULL TRANSCRIPT 
Lightly edited for readability — verbal tics, false starts, and cross-talk artifacts removed. Substance preserved.
Meghan French Dunbar: We had the chance to meet at a dinner and I heard the briefest bit of your story and was immediately like, my gosh, I want to know more. Now is my moment. Can we hear a little about your journey? How did you get to where you are today — perhaps with the lens of the ways you've been told to behave throughout your life, and the stories that's brought up for you?
Shirin Eskandani: My goodness. First, thank you so much for having me. I'm so thrilled to be having this conversation with you and to meet your community. Yeah — there's been a lot of unruly behavior when I look at my history, and I foresee a lot more of it in the future.
Let's start at the beginning. My family immigrated from Iran to Canada when I was four years old. We moved to Vancouver, to a part of the city that was predominantly white. For me, being one of a handful of children of color in my neighborhood was a really formative experience — and I know we usually use "formative" in a positive way, but it really did form a lot of the ideas and beliefs I had about myself. I think a lot of folks can identify with what I'm about to share. I felt like I didn't have a sense of belonging. I couldn't see myself in a lot of spaces.
What I discovered as a young girl was that when I was well-behaved, when I was excellent at what I did, when I was as perfect as I could possibly be — that was when I was seen. So this narrative shaped so much of my early life: as long as I am the best, as long as I am trying my hardest, as long as I am being perfect, I will belong, I will have value, I am worthy. Which sounds like a nightmare. But at the time, it was working.
What's really tough about perfectionism, about being a hard worker, about being your quote-unquote "best" — these are coping mechanisms. But what we generally call them is values. They're incredibly celebrated in our society. So it's a negative cycle.
One of the spaces in which I actually did feel like I belonged when I was young — without having to be perfect, without having to work super hard — was when I was on stage, singing. In first grade I was singing with other kids and a teacher said, wait, this girl's got some pipes on her, and told my mom. I come from a really musical family — my grandmother and great-grandmother were famous singers in Iran who were very unbehaved in what they were doing. So when this teacher told my parents, they put me in choirs. They allowed me to express myself this way. It really was where I felt most me.
I don't remember exactly when, but I saw my first opera and I was like, that is what I'm going to do. I am going to be an opera singer. I am going to move to New York. I am going to sing at the Met. I put that into the universe at the age of eight.
As I got older, I kept getting better as a singer. But at the same time, those qualities of perfectionism and overworking were creeping into my singing. I got accepted into a really great school in Canada for my undergrad and was a big fish in a little pond. For my masters, I decided I was going to apply to the top five music schools in the US and Canada. I got accepted to the Manhattan School of Music. I thought, this is it. It's happening. I'm moving to New York. I'm going to be singing at the Met in no time.
And I arrived in New York and realized there was nothing special about me. Everyone at my school was talented. Everyone was hardworking. Some of them weren't even hardworking and they were still amazing at what they did. The whole identity I'd built started to crumble underneath me. I didn't have the wisdom to say hey, do some internal work and unpack some of this. This was 20 years ago. I was young. The answer, in my mind, was to double down on the hustle — double down on working hard, double down on being perfect, double down on being the best.
And that did work for a while. I graduated and was one of the few in my class working right away. I was singing at different opera houses, apprenticing, working in Europe. If you'd written my career on a piece of paper, this was exactly it. Everyone from the outside was like, wow, look at Shirin. She's living the dream. And Meghan, it was anything but.
The way I was doing it was unkind and unforgiving. I was getting work, but all I could focus on was the work I wasn't getting. I was singing really well, but all I could focus on was what I wasn't doing well vocally. The how was making me miserable and exhausted in a field that's already demanding. I reached a point where I was like, I don't know if I can do this anymore. Which was terrifying — I had poured so much of myself into this. It had been my whole identity since I was a girl. I couldn't imagine not doing it. And I also couldn't imagine continuing the way I was doing it. I didn't know how else to do it.
At that very low point, I got the call I had quite literally been waiting for my entire life. A year earlier I'd had an audition at the Metropolitan Opera that I thought I'd totally botched. My agent called and said, Shirin, the Metropolitan Opera wants you to sing in Carmen next season. My dream role. Dream opera house. Dream opera. Really good pay. I, of course, said yes.
But I'll never forget — I hung up the phone, and I had imagined and dreamed of this moment for so long, and I had always imagined that if I ever got to work at the Met, I would finally realize I was good enough. I would finally realize I'd made it. I'd finally feel confident. And I will never forget hanging up that phone and realizing I felt none of those things. The only thought in my mind was: you're not good enough for this. You don't deserve this.
In that moment, I woke up. I realized nothing outside of me was ever going to heal that wound. Nothing was ever going to convince me I was good enough, that I belonged, that I was worthy. Here I was with the perfect external thing — I couldn't have changed a single thing to make it more perfect — and even that couldn't fill the hole. I told myself: you need help.
I had a year and a half to prepare for the role. Of course I worked on my voice. But what I had never worked on before, and really started working on, was myself. I went to therapy. I started working with a coach. That shifted everything.
I always say my greatest achievement in life isn't singing at the Met — it was singing at the Met and enjoying every part of the process. When I stood on that stage to take a bow every night, I knew in my bones that I belonged there. When a performance wasn't as optimal, it didn't matter. I had the inner resilience and the tools to ground myself and stay present. It was an enjoyable, amazing experience — in a very high-pressure environment. Imagine going to the Olympics. I was able to be in the joy of it.
In that process, I rediscovered my love of singing. I rediscovered myself. And I discovered that I no longer wanted to be a singer. Which is like — wait, that's not where the story is supposed to go.
I work with a lot of clients who are in career transition. I deeply believe that if we can get back to what we used to love about a thing and why we cared about it so much, we can make a really clear decision about whether to stay or go — a decision we don't regret. Even when you're ready to leave something, it's hard. We know this from relationships. Even when you're so done, it's still challenging.
I was able to see the career with clear eyes — not through a narrative of I'm leaving because I'm not good enough or I can't handle it. None of that. I saw it for what it was. And it wasn't a career that aligned with what I wanted anymore. The values I had as a 30-year-old woman, the things I wanted in life — I couldn't create those there.
It sounds silly because most people would say opera singing is unconventional. But it wasn't to me. I had my master's. I had poured so much of myself into it, with so much diligence and work ethic, so much money and time and tears. I was like — no, this isn't it anymore. That realization was terrifying.
Through working with my coach, I realized I wanted to be a coach. At the time, I felt like a total millennial stereotype. Am I going to go to the circus and be a juggler next? Take up papier-mâché? It felt so out of left field. But it was real. So I looked into certifications, found what I liked, got certified, and yada yada — became a coach. Not linear. Lots of ups and downs. But yeah. That's a little bit of my story.
Meghan: Such a cool story. Who do you think was writing those early narratives — the ones about perfection, achievement, needing to outsource your self-worth? Where were the stories coming from?
Shirin: Everywhere. And inside the house, too. When you look at young kids who have the privilege of being raised in a household with emotional safety and present, loving parents, most have a really high regard for themselves. They think greatly of themselves — as we all should. But things chip away at it.
For me a lot of that came from not belonging — in the way I looked, in the way my culture was, in the way my family was. And then noticing: in society, it seems like when you do these things, you're accepted. You're not on the outliers. We all just want belonging.
Another big piece, for me and for a lot of my clients who are immigrants or people of color, is the deep guilt. My family left Iran because of the revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. We were lucky we could immigrate — we weren't refugees. But there's a deep sense that your family uprooted themselves for you. It was never voiced explicitly in my family, but I felt it: you better make the best of this. They quite literally left for you. So you want to give them the ROI. Prove them right. Look at what we're doing with our lives.
For me that came through doing all of those perfect things — and also through wanting to be ease. The less of a problem I could be to my parents, the easier this would be for all of us. Kids are perceptive. You realize this isn't easy.
And then there's society, of course — patriarchy, white supremacy, all the things that uphold perfectionism and overworking, that say your value is in how much you produce. And we as humans all have a part that questions our worth. So you internalize all of that and conclude: I guess the answer is being perfect. Easy peasy. Let's go.
Meghan: Between getting the call from the Met and singing at the Met, there's a year and a half. You get a therapist, a coach, and a significant transformation happens. What were the specifics for people in the early part of that story? It probably isn't as easy as just go grab a therapist. What were the actual things that moved you toward self-acceptance?
Shirin: So many things. One of the big ones for me was that I was never conscious of my inner narrative. It was there. It was happening. It was having a huge effect. But I had never actually sat down to think: how am I thinking? I had certainly never questioned how I was thinking. I just thought my thoughts were my thoughts.
Mindset work gets a bad rap because of how it's often explained in the coaching world — it sounds like it's supposed to be positive thinking. It's not. It's very deep work. It's about awareness of what is my mind making me think about myself, and then sitting with that realization — which is sometimes not a nice place to be — before we even get to changing it.
And then beyond the mind, there's the body. Your mind may be on board with something but your body may not feel safe about it. Suddenly you realize: there are all these parts of me that need to be part of this conversation.
I was working with a therapist — a lot of talking, unpacking my past, understanding why these behaviors weren't virtues but coping mechanisms. There's a lot of grief in that. But so much freedom on the other side. I always say I'm a recovering perfectionist, because once you've been one, there's always a part of you that wants to know if you can do this better. It's always there.
Then somatics — meditation, breath work, tapping (emotional freedom technique, which I love). And I was reading every book you can think of. Some of them in retrospect had stuff that was a little toxic. But there was also some really great material. This was 20 years ago — the rise of the modern self-help world. I'd have epiphanies that I had to be very silent about.
I want to say too: this process of healing doesn't have to involve a lot of money. I can't tell you how many podcasts I listened to, how many books I read that shifted something within me. It doesn't have to be expensive.
Meghan: I'm thinking about the move from I'm an opera singer at the Met to I'm going to be a coach. These seem very different. I talk to a lot of people who stay in a role or at a company because of the sunk-cost fallacy — I've invested so much, I've moved up. Or it's too late to change, or what are people going to think? What did that transition actually look like? Where was the courage coming from?
Shirin: Great question. First — it's messy. It's not linear. But there's something I did then and still do, and I give it to all my clients: my two-year test. You ask yourself: if nothing changes in my life two years from now — if I'm quite literally living the same life I'm living today — how does my body, spirit, and mind feel about that?
The answer is usually instantaneous. There has to be a version of you that's courageous enough to ease the load for future versions of you. Maybe this is the version today.
I also think we have a misconception about courage. We see courage as these big acts — somebody quit their job, somebody moved across the country, somebody divorced their partner. That is courage. But it's just the tip of the courage iceberg. Underneath that big monumental shift were all these tiny, even more courageous decisions — emailing the person, looking at the website, thinking about the thing, journaling the idea. Those are pivotal moments.
Related: I was listening to a podcast recently where they said in science, they've shown that just sitting with a question starts to change the neuroplasticity of your brain. Not answering it. People come to me because they want the answer. The magic is in sitting with the question. What would life maybe look like? What could possibly happen? Where could I go? You don't need to know the answer. The question itself is shifting things.
For me, looking back at that time, it was a lot of that. A lot of sitting with questions. Small but very large, courageous inquiries and moves.
I had Amina on your podcast in mind — she talks about purpose. I'd fallen into the belief that your job is your purpose. So if I leave opera, what's my purpose now? Through my coach, I realized: when I was singing, that wasn't my purpose. It was one way I expressed my purpose. And now that vehicle is coaching. That realization — this isn't a huge jump, this is me following the North Star — meant my purpose was transforming people through joy. I used to do it on stage; now I get to do it coaching.
That eased the part of me worried about the time and money. Every skill, every ability still applies. The stories I'm most inspired by are people who change their lives up — either things crumble or they decide it's got to change. Those are the stories I want to listen to. I was like — wait. That gets to be my story too. Mine doesn't have to be I just did this for 50 years. Mine gets to be as compelling and exciting as those stories.
That was a big leap, though. A big leap.
Meghan: What comes up for me is the moments of micro-courage that really are the courage. When I had the insane idea to launch a print magazine, it was those little things — buying the domain, setting up the email address, sending the email to John Mackey to see if he wanted to be on the cover. I have a mentee who wanted to launch a side hustle, and I told her: just post one thing on your website. Just one step. It doesn't have to feel so gigantic.
You also mentioned joy. What an exceptional purpose — helping people transform through joy. Six years ago I realized I was very disconnected from my joy. I find a lot of times that ambitious, high-performing people put joy on the sidelines — we'll do that in God knows how many years after we get through this busy season. Which has turned into an entire busy life. How are you seeing people experience joy right now, and how do you tap into your own?
Shirin: Especially with everything going on in the world — which I feel like I've been saying for a while now — joy is something we have to be very consciously creating. It's something we can easily lose touch with.
I always say happiness happens to you. Happiness is seeing your favorite friend. Happiness is getting to eat a cupcake when you didn't think you would. Joy is something more intrinsic. Joy has a lot to do with being able to accept your life exactly as it is — with all of its beauty and all of its mess. To not be judging, pushing against, or ignoring it. Especially not ignoring the beauty. Joy is about being in awe, being in gratitude.
For instance — as I'm talking, in front of my desk there's a magnolia tree. All the flowers have fallen because magnolia trees only really bloom for one week. But there's one little bloom still there. And I'm like — that's joy. Being able to see that one bloom amidst all of this.
Joy is something we have to be diligent about. It's also incredibly necessary, because joy is what propels us. Joy is what we need to sustain ourselves through times like these. If we're compassionate beings, if we want to make an impact, if we want to be engaged and present and changing things — we need joy. And we are the exact folks who tend not to prioritize it. Because we're like, I don't have time to look at that magnolia bloom, Shirin, because I need to write my congressperson. Yes — AND look at the bloom. Because that is what's going to sustain you to keep writing.
So for me it's a constant practice. I call it stop, pause, savor. Stop what you're doing. Pause in the moment. Savor whatever is around you. The more mundane the environment, the better — there really is something to savor about that moment. As people doing big, brave, courageous things, we can overlook those things because we're trying to get to the next thing, solve the next thing, create the next thing. It's like — wait a second. Right here, there's something to be appreciated.
Meghan: One of the things I heard you talk about earlier was looking for decolonized approaches to coaching — and saying, I cannot find it, so I will build it. Tell us about this. For someone asking, what does this even mean?
Shirin: This is part of my unbehaved journey, too. When I was first trying to find coaching certifications 10 years ago, it was so hard for me to find something that really reflected my values. I wanted a certification that would offer me skills to work with diverse folks from diverse backgrounds. I found something that ticked off most of the boxes but knew I'd need to do more education to really serve the communities I wanted to work with in a way I thought was helpful and in integrity.
A couple years ago I was looking at certifications again because so many people were asking me where I'd been trained. And I realized: not a lot has changed since I started 10 years ago. I thought to myself, somebody should create a decolonized coaching certification. And I was like — somebody, hello. Oh. That person is me.
It was wild at the time. I had a thriving one-on-one and group coaching business. I didn't have time to build and run a certification. But it was my purpose — that North Star. I created the certification about four years ago. We're starting our fifth cohort now.
I know "decolonized approach to life coaching" sounds like what does that actually look like? Coaching is an incredibly transformational modality. It can absolutely change people's lives. It's also an industry full of toxicity and harm. It's hard for folks to figure out what's safe — especially when the more harmful spaces use marketing techniques that prey on your vulnerabilities and your scarcity. Even me, knowing so much, has signed up for things over the years that I later realized were not safe spaces.
Decolonizing coaching is about how we really understand all the parts of who we are as a coach, accept that, and allow it to be part of our practice — and also do that for our clients. We can't help people transform if we can't be with who we are and who is in front of us.
The folks I know who want to be coaches want to work with diverse folks with diverse backgrounds and needs. That means we need a toolbox to do that. We need trauma-informed care. We need to know how to work with neurodivergent communities, with the entire LGBTQIA spectrum. It doesn't mean that's always who we're serving — but we need to be able to hold space for it. We also need to understand that so much of how we think and move in the world upholds oppressive systems. Not because we want to. But the perfectionism, the over-working — those things affect our coaching practice and how we run our coaching businesses.
So the last two months of our certification focuses on building a sustainable, successful coaching practice that allows you to thrive. People leave their jobs because they're burnt out, then start their own thing — and perpetuate the same damn patterns. No boundaries, not paying themselves well. We need to dismantle this in all the different ways.
I feel like I'm the little black sheep of the coaching community. The work is so needed. The coaches who've graduated are doing amazing work. But sometimes I feel a little on the periphery. I'm okay being there now. Really okay.
Meghan: I'm so happy you're there. The language of oppressive systems has been relegated to "woke land." When people can take a step back and approach things with curiosity and actually wanting to understand, these concepts can be revelatory. How are you getting around the resistance to the language — to help people understand that understanding these systems makes us better leaders, better family members, better community members?
Shirin: We have this conversation often in the certification. Coaches will ask, how do I explain to people that I'm a decolonized coach? And often I tell them: you don't need to. The way you're going to hold space is going to be transformational for them. We meet our clients where they're at. If I'm working with a corporate client and I say we're going to be doing decolonized coaching, they're going to say, no thank you. But if I say we're going to work toward your goals, and in order to get there we also need to understand what's going on inside — because in order to sustain anything without me telling you what to do, we need to figure out what's in the way internally and externally — that lands.
Everything I believe in will come into play as we do the work together. When people hear "decolonize," "white supremacy," "capitalism" — they assume we're sticking it to the man all day. But these things are quite literally the air we breathe. So as we coach, it's part of the work intrinsically and at the heart of it.
Same with words like mindfulness. A lot of my practice is rooted in mindfulness, but if I tell a client that, they think we're going to meditate for 45 minutes. So it's about how you talk about things in a way clients can actually understand: this is of benefit to me. Certain terms — trauma-informed — people are increasingly understanding. Others, we're still working on.
Meghan: Has anything been particularly surprising for you as the certification has developed?
Shirin: What's surprised me — and not surprised me — is that the curriculum has been transformational for myself and for everyone who's gone through it. Coaches finish saying I am a completely different human. Because we're not just looking at healing from the useful angles like mindset and somatics. We're also looking at how the world we live in shapes how we think, how we dream.
One of my favorite modules — and the coaches' too — is on goal setting. When I first started coaching, I realized so many of my clients had very similar goals. I can't tell you how many people came to me wanting to get an MBA. Which is fine, totally fine. But I was like — what is going on here? And I realized: we are dreaming within a box of possibility. Our dreams are colonized. They're shaped by what people have told us is possible for people like us. By what we've seen is possible for people like us.
If a client says MBA, cool — let's go with it. But in the process, how can we go deeper? How can we expand their imagination? Maybe at the end we're still at the MBA but with a deeper why. Or maybe it's somewhere we could have never imagined. To me, that is incredible coaching — where you can go somewhere with a client that in session one, in that discovery call, you could have never realized.
So much of how we perceive ourselves and dream and think is rooted in oppressive systems. But it's okay. We can dismantle it. And we don't have to do it aggressively. It can be loving. It can be compassionate. It can be deeply healing.
Meghan: Last question. If there was a permission slip you could give everyone today, what would it be?
Shirin: The first thing that came to mind is the permission to not care what other people think. That's it. I'm not even going to add to it. The things we think other people are thinking — they're not. But if they are, this isn't their life. This is your life.
Meghan: Where do people find you? What are you working on?
Shirin: Instagram: @wholeheartedcoaching. My personal site is wholehearted-coaching.com and the certification is wholeheartedcertification.com. We just opened applications for the September cohort of the certification — open until the end of June. And — knock on wood — we just submitted our application to the ICF to become ICF accredited. We should hear about that in early summer.
Meghan: Go sign up! Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm so excited to know you and to hear more about your work. It's extraordinary.
Shirin: Thank you, Meghan. I think the same of you. Thank you for letting me have this beautiful conversation with you.