Notes from the Edge

Why is saying “I don’t know” so uncomfortable? Australian osteopath, educator, and Uncomfortably Curious podcast host Aidan Mill joins Lisa Lacy to explore curiosity, cognitive bias, and why questioning what we believe might be one of the most powerful things we can do.

From the stories we tell ourselves to the labels we allow to define us, this conversation challenges certainty, explores how our experiences shape our perceptions, and examines what happens when we choose understanding over being right. Sometimes the most courageous thing we can do is admit we might not have all the answers.

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What if the anxiety, fear, or emotional patterns you’ve accepted as your personality are actually survival strategies from the past? Lisa Lacy sits down with Cedric Bertelli, founder of the Emotional Health Institute and co-developer of Emotional Resolution® (EmRes®), to explore why managing emotions and resolving recurring emotional patterns may be two very different things.

From Cedric’s experience masking anxiety while leading hundreds of employees to the ways our brains predict danger based on past experiences, this conversation explores trauma, emotional avoidance, and the body’s role in emotional processing. Lisa and Cedric discuss interoception, the emer...

What if the version of you that once kept you safe is now keeping you stuck? Lisa Lacy sits down with Carlene Marie, Master Mindpower Coach and author of Enough Already, to explore how self-doubt, perfectionism, people-pleasing, and overachievement become survival identities, even for people who appear confident and successful.

From childhood beliefs about not being enough to major life transitions that challenge our identity, this thought-provoking conversation explores self-worth, burnout, emotional resilience, and rebuilding self-trust. Carlene shares practical strategies for setting healthy boundaries, recognizing unconscious patterns, rediscovering personal purpose, and learning to live authentically without constantly...

What if the very intelligence that helped you succeed is now keeping you stuck? Lisa Lacy sits down with Brent Lupia, Performance and Clarity Coach and creator of Externalized Sensemaking™, to explore why intelligent, high-performing people struggle with overthinking, decision paralysis, and mental clarity. Drawing from 18 years in high-stakes security and intelligence operations, Brent shares what happens when a brain trained for urgency and immediate feedback encounters uncertainty, and why thinking harder isn’t always the answer.

From recognizing hidden patterns and challenging assumptions to accountability, neurodivergence, and breaking cycles of self-sacrifice, this conversation goes far beyond prod...

What happens when you achieve everything you thought you wanted, only to discover it isn’t the life you were meant to live? Lisa Lacy sits down with Steve Farrell, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, bestselling author, and co-founder of Humanity’s Team, to explore the journey from extraordinary financial success to spiritual awakening, conscious living, and discovering what truly makes life meaningful.

From releasing fear and quieting the constant noise of achievement to recognizing our interconnectedness, Steve shares the personal experiences that transformed his understanding of success. Through a powerful live exercise, reflections on his book The Inner Way...

What if being seen isn’t the same as being known? In a world obsessed with personal branding, social media visibility, artificial intelligence, and polished public images, authenticity may be our greatest competitive advantage. Lisa Lacy sits down with Drew Gerber, CEO and co-founder of Wasabi Publicity, to explore why meaningful visibility begins with knowing who you are, not performing who you think the world wants you to be.

From finding your purpose and building authentic relationships to breaking cycles of shame, control, and never feeling good enough, this conversation goes far beyond traditional public relations. Drew sh...

What happens when you voluntarily seek help for addiction, trauma, and mental health challenges, only to be told your anger is beyond a rehabilitation center’s ability to handle? In this brutally honest and sometimes hilarious solo episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy shares the story of getting kicked out of outpatient rehab at 40 years old after taking a therapeutic exercise called “The Bullshit Game” a little too seriously.

Through personal storytelling, humor, and hard-earned perspective, Lisa explores the importance of trauma-informed care, emotional safety, accountability, and finding recovery resources that meet your individual needs. From o...

You can look successful, productive, and completely put together while quietly falling apart behind the scenes. In this Saturday Edge Note of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with Dr. Lorea Martínez Pérez, emotional intelligence expert and author of Living with the HEART in Mind, to explore why high achievers often miss the warning signs of burnout until they’ve lost their joy, motivation, and connection to themselves.

Together, they examine why pushing harder isn’t always the answer, how emotional intelligence helps us understand what our emotions are trying to tell us, and wh...

What if the very thing you spent your life trying to hide was actually one of your greatest strengths?

Coach Willie Blake, entrepreneur, speaker, podcast host, and high-performance coach, joins Lisa Lacy for an honest conversation about growing up with dyslexia, feeling broken in a world designed for different minds, and discovering that self-acceptance can change everything.

From struggling with self-worth to embracing neurodivergence and building confidence through small, intentional actions, Willie shares the lessons that helped him stop merely surviving and start leading with his differences.

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What happens when you begin grieving someone you love long before they’re gone?

In this deeply personal episode of Notes From the Edge, host Lisa Lacy sits down with Suzanne Sherman, author, memoir editor, and writing coach, to explore childhood trauma, schizophrenia, suicide loss, complicated grief, and the healing power of storytelling.

Suzanne was just four years old when her mother developed schizophrenia. At eighteen, she lost her mother to suicide. Decades later, she found the courage to tell their story in her memoir, Living in the Long Shadow: Surviving a Legacy of Mental Il...

What if artificial intelligence could give us more time to be human?

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, host Lisa Lacy sits down with Jon Rossiter, entrepreneur and co-founder of Zoloto, to explore AI employees, business automation, leadership, and the future of work.

But the conversation goes beyond technology. Jon opens up about people-pleasing, authenticity, accountability, and why meaningful human connection matters more than ever in an increasingly automated world.

What happens when technology gives us back our time, but we still have to decide who we want to be?

What if your biggest financial obstacle isn’t your money, but the unconscious patterns controlling your decisions?

Financial advisor, former monk, and bestselling author Doug Lynam returns to Notes From the Edge for a live Enneagram case study with Lisa Lacy, exploring how personality, trauma, fear, and identity shape our relationship with money.

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What happens when the life you’ve worked so hard to build no longer feels like the life you’re meant to live?

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, host Lisa Lacy sits down with Luke Mickelson, founder of Sleep in Heavenly Peace, to explore purpose-driven leadership, community service, personal identity, vulnerability, and how one small act of kindness can grow into a movement that changes hundreds of thousands of lives.

Luke had everything he thought success was supposed to look like. A six-figure career, financial stability, a family, and a comfortable life. But...

In this Edge Note solo episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy gets personal about Bipolar I, trauma, uncertainty, and the exhausting need to control outcomes when your nervous system learned early that powerlessness could be dangerous.

This is not another “just let it go” conversation. Lisa explores what control actually looks like when you live with mental illness, why uncertainty can feel threatening even when you are clinically supported and properly medicated, and how to separate what requires action from what simply requires us to tolerate not knowing yet.

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You can understand your patterns. You can know where they came from. You can spend years learning the language of trauma and healing, and still find your body reacting as if the danger never ended.

In this Edge Note episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with registered somatic movement therapist and educator Katy Slany for a conversation about somatic therapy, nervous system regulation, embodied healing, and why insight alone does not always create lasting change.

Katy explains why trauma is a whole-body experience, what people actually mean when they talk about “re...

What happens when you achieve everything you thought you wanted and discover it still doesn’t feel like enough?

Dr. Jack Groppel is a pioneering sports scientist and co-founder of the Human Performance Institute whose work reveals a powerful truth: peak performance and a meaningful life are not necessarily the same thing.

In this conversation, Jack and Lisa explore how achievement can become addictive, why our need for approval can hide underneath ambition, and what decades of studying elite human performance taught him about energy, recovery, and fulfillment. Jack also shares how adopting his son an...

What happens when the thing that made you successful, your ability to push through, perform, achieve, and keep going, becomes the very thing your body can no longer sustain?

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with author, transformational coach, and founder of The Rebuild Collective, Kristen Renee Appleby, for a conversation about burnout, autoimmune illness, the mind-body connection, and what it really means to rebuild your life from the foundation up.

Kristen spent years searching for answers while navigating autoimmune illness, chronic inflammation, demanding work, financial stress, emotional suppression...

What happens when the strength everyone sees is actually survival mode?

Jenna Schutt, former cardiac registered nurse and stem cell transplant survivor, joins Lisa Lacy for a deeply human conversation about chronic illness, faith, fear, motherhood, and what happens when being incredibly capable convinces everyone around you that you must be okay.

Diagnosed with a rare, incurable disease at 30 while raising two children still in diapers, Jenna endured ten rounds of chemotherapy, serious medical complications, a stem cell transplant, and ongoing graft-versus-host disease. But this conversation goes beyond what happened medically. Jenna and Lisa explore...

What happens when your mind creates a reality so convincing that everyone else can tell you it isn’t real, and you still know what you saw, heard, felt, and lived?

In this Special Edition of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy opens up about living with Bipolar I Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Complex PTSD, including what psychosis actually felt like from inside of it.

“The Psychotic Trifecta” is Lisa’s personal description of the collision of these conditions, not a clinical term. Bipolar I can include psychosis, while BPD and CPTSD can involve dissocia...

What if sustainable success has less to do with talent, motivation, or doing more and more to do with self-worth, self-belief, and consistency?

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with Amy Lenius, personal development and success coach, professional speaker, and Director of Group Coaching at Next Level University, for a conversation about redefining success from the inside out.

After navigating chronic illness from childhood, Amy began rebuilding not only her physical health but also her identity, beliefs, and relationship with herself. She explains why self-belief is built through action...

What if the pain you feel and the damage seen on an MRI aren’t always the same thing?

Lisa Lacy sits down with neurologist Dr. Eric Anderson, MD, PhD, MBA, Chief Medical Officer at Lin Health, to explore chronic back pain, the nervous system, central sensitization, and what patients should understand before making major decisions about back surgery.

Dr. Anderson explains how chronic pain can become a highly sensitized alarm system, why imaging findings don’t always correspond with the intensity of someone’s pain, and how whole-person approaches may help some people retrain the ne...

We are told to look for the good, raise our vibration, practice gratitude, forgive, move on, and trust that everything happens for a reason. But what happens when positivity becomes another way to avoid reality?

In this Edge Note, Lisa Lacy explores spiritual bypassing, false positivity, trauma, emotional avoidance, and the difference between acceptance and resignation. Facing what is painful does not make you negative. Sometimes it simply means you are willing to tell yourself the truth.

Two people can experience what looks like the same event and carry completely different emotional consequences from it...

What if the answers you’ve spent your whole life searching for aren’t somewhere out there, but waiting for you to finally turn inward?

In this Edge Note of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, mentor, and author Rosanne Annoni for a deeply human conversation about spiritual awakening, grief, forgiveness, self-inquiry, and what happens when we stop looking outside ourselves for permission, validation, and truth.

After decades as a psychotherapist and years of her own searching, Rosanne shares how therapy, meditation, loss, motherhood, relationships, and the Diamond Approach grad...

What stories disappear when the people we love are no longer here to tell them?

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with entrepreneur, business coach, former United States Marine, and founder of The Story Project, Brad Koch, for a deeply human conversation about family stories, grief, memory, legacy, and the things we often wait too long to ask.

Brad shares how the loss of his father-in-law, and the realization that his wife wished she had more recordings of his voice, face, mannerisms, and stories, helped inspire The Story Project...

Why a special edition? Because every once in a while, a conversation happens at the Edge that feels too important to wait its turn on the calendar. This is one of those conversations.

At 18 years old, Liam Beville pushed a friend out of the path of a stolen car and took the impact himself. Both of his legs were shattered, his right knee was severely damaged, and he was told he might never walk again.

He did more than walk again.

Liam became an elite powerlifter, Guinness World Record holder, disability advocate, speaker...

What happens when the workplace you once worked so hard to succeed in becomes the place you no longer recognize yourself?

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with employment attorney, workplace strategist, author, and former corporate people and culture executive Natalie Holder for a powerful conversation about workplace trauma, exclusion, toxic work culture, self-advocacy, and career reinvention.

Natalie explains why workplace trauma does not always look dramatic. Sometimes it is being left out of the room, overlooked for opportunities, quietly bullied, or repeatedly questioning whether what you are experiencing...

What happens when the roles you learned to play in relationships start costing you yourself?

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with relationship and intimacy coaches Natalie Vartanian and Glenn Nielsen for an honest conversation about marriage, somatic healing, nervous system regulation, inherited relationship roles, and what happens when couples stop blaming each other long enough to look beneath the conflict.

Natalie and Glenn share how even after years of personal growth and entering their marriage intentionally, old conditioning began showing up. Natalie found herself becoming a muted version...

What happens when accepting a diagnosis stops feeling like surrender and becomes the beginning of recovery?

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with author and podcast host Reza Ghaemi for an honest, funny, and deeply human conversation about living with Bipolar I Disorder, surviving mania and hospitalization, resisting treatment, and eventually learning to work with his diagnosis instead of fighting against it.

Reza, author of Bipolar Is My Superpower: How Acceptance Changed My Life and host of The Rez Podcast, shares why acceptance became a turning point in his...

What happens inside your body in the seconds between a trigger, a craving, and a choice?

Dr. Deborah Rozman is a behavioral psychologist and President/Co-CEO of HeartMath. In this episode of Notes From the Edge, she joins Lisa Lacy to explore what happens physiologically when stress activates old patterns, why the familiar can feel safer even when it is destructive, and whether we can train the nervous system to create more space between an urge and our response.

They unpack heart-brain communication, heart rate variability, coherence, and real-time biofeedback, while Lisa shares how biofeedback...

What happens when telling the truth about your mental health could cost you your credibility, your career, or the way people see you forever?

In this solo episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy talks openly about living with Bipolar I, psychosis, borderline personality disorder, addiction, hospitalization, and recovery while simultaneously building businesses, leading teams, earning six figures, and appearing highly functional to the outside world.

This is a conversation about what happens when a psychiatric diagnosis becomes a verdict instead of information. Lisa explores the pressure to hide serious mental illness in professional...

Licensed marriage and family therapist and educator Renée Calhoun joins Lisa Lacy to unpack a deceptively simple question: when does “being strong” stop being resilience and start becoming survival mode?

In this conversation, Renée and Lisa explore why highly capable people can look successful on the outside while their nervous systems remain stuck on high alert. They talk about guilt-free rest, people pleasing, overfunctioning, emotional safety, family systems, toxic relationship patterns, and the ways trauma adaptations can become so familiar that we mistake them for personality. Renée also explains why intelligence alone can’t logic us...

What happens when being capable becomes the very thing that keeps people from seeing you’re struggling?

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with Nigerian-American physician, novelist, and storyteller Dr. Nneka Oluoha for a conversation about high-functioning depression, cultural expectations, motherhood, immigrant identity, and the roles we perform to survive.

Dr. Nneka explores why the person who appears strongest may be carrying the most, why “I’m fine” can become a practiced performance, and how competence, strength, and responsibility can eventually become a prison when we never allow ourselves to put t...

What happens when something that happened to you starts defining who you are?

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with author and survivor advocate Amy McKiernan for a raw conversation about sexual assault, trauma, identity, addiction, boundaries, consent, and rebuilding a life beyond survival.

Amy shares how being raped at fifteen shaped her identity, relationships, coping mechanisms, and sense of self-worth. She and Lisa explore numbing through drugs and alcohol, toxic relationships, motherhood, mental health labels, and the long process of reclaiming agency after choice has been taken away.<...

What if the person you became to survive is no longer the person you want to be?

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with speaker and leadership consultant Jon Symes to explore the unconscious stories we build around identity, masculinity, success, leadership, and survival.

Jon calls this work Narrative Liberation: recognizing the roles and beliefs we adopted to navigate life, then deciding which ones still belong to us.

They talk about the cost of being “the strong one,” the provider, the good guy, the high performer, or the...

What happens when a pastor trades the pulpit for a 24-year career inside the FBI?

Eric Robinson spent 12 years in Christian ministry before becoming an FBI Special Agent, eventually serving 15 years as a SWAT operator and working investigations involving counterterrorism, crimes against children, gangs, drugs, financial crime, civil rights violations, political corruption, and national security.

But this conversation isn’t really about badges, guns, or cases.

It’s about what happens to your understanding of human beings when you’ve spent decades sitting across from victims, informants, criminals, survivors, and people living through some o...

What if the behavior we’re trying to stop is actually trying to tell us something?

Bryan Post is a child behavior expert and creator of the Fear to Love Method whose work challenges parents to see difficult behavior not as defiance, but as communication from a nervous system experiencing stress, fear or unmet needs. 

In this conversation, Bryan and Lisa explore what changes when adults stop trying to control behavior and start looking underneath it. They unpack why a stressed parent cannot regulate a stressed child, how consistency creates safety, and why the feelings we...

Why can peace feel more uncomfortable than the crisis you spent years trying to escape?

Lisa Lacy, trauma educator and host of Notes From the Edge, explores one of trauma’s strangest contradictions: the nervous system can mistake what is familiar for what is safe.

In this solo episode, Lisa gets personal about becoming extraordinarily good at functioning inside chaos, from building a high-pressure career around competence and crisis management to constantly monitoring the emotional weather around her. She explores what happens when the emergency finally ends, but your body is still waiting for the ne...

What did we know at five years old that we somehow forgot along the way?

Tiffany Dennison is a kindergarten and first-grade educator with 22 years of experience whose work centers on play, belonging and social-emotional development. Her classroom offers a fascinating reminder that children may understand some of the fundamentals of being human long before adults complicate them.

In this conversation, Tiffany and I talk about what happens when children are given enough time to actually play, why belonging and emotional safety have to come before learning, and what five-year-olds can teach adults about repairing...

Writer and memoirist Daniel Sterling spent much of his life chasing achievement, recognition, and the next version of success until he discovered that some of the hardest work a man can do happens in the few inches between his head and his heart.

Daniel and Lisa talk about the childhood hunger to be seen that fueled his drive, from becoming a top U.S. alpine ski racer to television, filmmaking, and screenwriting, and what happened when that identity finally stopped sustaining him. They dig into male emotional isolation, the mentor who helped Daniel rebuild his life through...

What happens when everyone in your family knows the truth about your life except you?

Al Isaacs, author of Finding Mary Smith and longtime comedian and improv teacher, joins Lisa Lacy to talk about discovering at 52 that he had been adopted and what happens to identity when the foundation of your own story suddenly shifts.

Al takes us inside the ordinary phone call from his mother’s oncologist that accidentally exposed a secret his family had kept for more than five decades, and the search that followed through DNA, genealogy, Search Angels and the trail of...